Far from Rome

The villagers giggle in embarrassment and glance down at their black cloth shoes. Like everything else on this parched plain they call home, they are covered in biscuit-coloured dust. 'There are a couple of guys in the village who look like foreigners. Up that road and on the right,' says one finally, waving a hand vaguely in front of his face.

We turn and drive up a street made of dirt and lined with square, earth-built houses, which give the impression the village of Liqian grew out of the ground. Here, where the flatlands of the Hexi Corridor sweep the length of Gansu province, in China's northwest, seared beige earth stretches to the horizon. To the south, bordering Qinghai province, rise the Qilian mountains, a long line of dark brown hills indented with something steely grey that looks like snow. At zero degrees Celsius, it could well be snow.

We knock on the metal door of a farmhouse. A man who could be 60, but later turns out to be 38, answers the door and looks us straight in the eye. This time, it is our turn to gape - 24 hours after leaving Beijing for the heart of one of China's remotest provinces, we are looking into a pair of cerulean eyes set in a squarish, ruddy face. Minutes later, crowded around a stove in the dark room that serves as his bedroom, farmer Cai Junnian says, 'I believe I am a Roman.'

For 2,000 years, a legend that a group of Roman legionnaires settled in the village of Liqian has persisted. They came, so it is said, before the birth of Christ and more than two centuries before the first officially recorded contact between Rome and China, in AD166, when a delegation sent by Emperor Marcus Aurelius arrived in the ancient capital of Luoyang. Scholars from successive Chinese dynasties have made tantalising references in official and unofficial histories to 145 Roman soldiers, possibly captured in 36BC by a Han dynasty (206BC-AD220) army during a battle with the fierce Huns, the ancestors of today's Mongolians.

In 1955, Oxford University professor Homer Dubs pulled the historical threads together and proposed an alternative, captivating theory: the foreigners were the remnants of a group who survived the defeat of Roman general Crassus by the Parthians - warriors based in what is now Iran - at the Battle of Carrhae, in 56BC. Carrhae, now a site of archaeological interest in southeastern Turkey, marked the end of Rome's eastern expansion. Rattled by the animal-skin wearing, silk-banner waving Parthians, who howled like animals when attacking, the Romans crumbled. Tens of thousands of soldiers were killed and several thousand were taken prisoner.

According to Roman author Pliny the Elder, Parthians posted their prisoners on frontier duty in the east of their empire, on the central Asian border with the Huns and the Chinese. Pliny writes that

the Parthians and the Han had commercial and diplomatic contact. From there, a group could have escaped, Dubs theorised, and joined the Huns as mercenaries. After Hun leader Jzh Jzh's defeat in 36BC by Han general Chen Tang, Chen was magnanimous towards the foreign soldiers and offered them sanctuary in the parched, sandy plain around Liqian, Dubs speculated.