Gan Ying (around 100 A.D.) was a Chinese diplomat and explorer. Little is known about his life. In A.D. 97, he set out to reach Da Qin, the Chinese name for the Roman Empire. Gan Ying traveled farther west than any Chinese person before him.
Before Gan Ying set out, the Han Empire already had conquered the Taklimakan Desert and surrounding regions. They called this territory the Western Regions. For the first time in history, trade caravans could travel safely through the Western Regions to the rest of China. However, Parthia, farther west in what is now eastern Iran, controlled trade through its territory. The Chinese general Ban Chao, who had conquered the Western Regions, sent Gan Ying on a diplomatic mission to the Roman Empire. He hoped Gan could establish direct contact and find a way to avoid the high surcharges of Parthian merchants.
Gan Ying traveled west from the Western Regions across what are now Tajikistan and Afghanistan, and into Parthia. He reached a large body of water that most historians think was the Persian Gulf. From there, Gan tried to charter a vessel to sail to the Roman Empire. But Persian sailors told him that it was a dangerous voyage that could take as long as two years. The sailors might have misunderstood Gan and thought he was trying to reach the city of Rome, which required sailing around Africa. They might have exaggerated the difficulty to try to exact a higher fee from Gan. Or they might have lied to protect their stake in the trade between the two empires.
Gan Ying turned back. However, he collected all the information that he could, probably from sailors and traders gathered in Parthia. When Gan returned to China, he accurately reported that the Romans controlled the largest empire west of that country.
