Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎510r] (144/238)

China, the Avars, and the Franks. 357
torian, Mazdean, Manichean, and possibly other forms of
Western religion with “unorthodox” forms of Buddhism
and how, in this as in other matters, Persia and Syria were
but vaguely differentiated. The fact is, the Chinese them
selves never once got beyond the continent of Asia into
Europe, of which place they had only hearsay notions; or, if
an occasional adventurer ever did so, he never succeeded
in acquiring or recording in Chinese distinct conceptions of
where the mysterious Ta-ts‘in was. The boundaries of the
Roman and Persian Empires had been, and were, perpetually
shifting, and the eastern people of Ta-ts‘in (or first the Roman
and then the Eastern Roman Empire) would alone picture
to the Chinese imagination the magnificence described to
them by Persian and Turkish reports as existing farther
west ; and it must be remembered the Turks had actually
been in Constantinople on a hunt for Avars the year after
the Avars had taken prisoner the Frank King Sigibert in
Bavaria, whence the Franks subsequently drove the Avars
back into Pannonia. Clearly, at about the date a.d. 610, the
Chinese must have obtained overland information concerning
Fuh-lin, for, as we have seen, a ruler from some eastern
part of that ill-defined State actually sent a mission in 643,
and China’s most adventurous Emperor had left it on record
that one generation earlier he had wished to know more of
the place.
I take it that Fuh-lin is simply the word Fer-reng, or
some such form of the Arab word Afrangh, and I suggest
that the first knowledge of the Europeans, subsequent to the
vague first-century rumours about Ta-ts‘in, was derived by
the Chinese through the Avars and Turks. As the French
historian Duruy remarks: “ Les Francs avaient en effet
apporte de la Germanic une idee qu’on ne connaissait plus
dans 1 ’Empire, celle de la souverainete de la nation. . . .
Dagobert (628-638) apparait-il comme chef de tous les
barbares dtablis dans les provinces de I’ancien empire
d’Occident. II etait I’allie des Empereurs de Constanti
nople, et on le voit intervenir dans les affaires des