It has not exactly been disproved - the theory is still enthusiastically cited in numerous books by non-specialists in Han history, and a village in northwest China has started claiming to be descended from Roman soldiers.

What has happened is more that historians examining the evidence raised by Homer Dubs (the originator of the theory) found it to be so inconclusive and ambiguous that the theory can only be presented as hypothesis or conjecture, and not as proven fact. In other words, it could have happened, but there is at present no good evidence that it did.

For background reading on the theory and its detractors see http://semperegoauditor.typepad.com/ccc/20...s_in_china.html

Also Ethan Gruber's recent article at http://people.virginia.edu/~ewg4x/roman_li-chien.pdf



The author of that book is not a professional scholar, but is a competent researcher. However the focus of his book is not on firearms. If you really want someone to disagree with, you'd have to start with Joseph Needham's 'Gunpowder Epic' volume in the series Science and Civilization in China , which was Leong Kit Meng's main source on early Chinese firearms. Needham was the one who dated a depiction of a 'hand cannon' in a Chinese sculpture to the 1120s, and thereby made a claim to the invention of the cannon by the Chinese. A more recent book (in Chinese) by the Chinese historian Liu Xu disputes Needham's theory, arguing that the hand cannon in question is actually a bellows held by the wind god. But Liu Xu then proposes another theory that also traces the invention of the cannon to China in the early 1130s: namely, he argues that the 'fire-lances' (huoqiang) mentioned in the Shoucheng Lu were bamboo tubes containing gunpowder, which was ignited to propel a projectile. See my earlier post in this thread: http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php...t&p=4743788

There is also a Chinese record of pellet-propelling handguns known as Tuhuoqiang being used in 1259, and (as mentioned earlier) a similar record of Mamluk handguns at Ain Jalut in 1260, but it is not possible at present to establish a line of development from such hand cannons to the large cannons that appeared in China, Europe, and the Middle East in the early 1300s. The 'missing link' has not yet been found.

Well, the earliest known specimens of bronze-tube hand cannons were found in a Yuan Dynasty excavated site in Heilongjiang, dated roughly to 1288 AD. This is the same year that a Christian Mongol prince Nayan led a rebellion against Kublai, but was put down by a Jurchen officer named Li Ting, who was employed by the Yuan court.

Eric (En Rui)

Do you have a reference that contains pictures? Are you aware of early handguns made of iron?

Books by either Joseph Needham or Robert Temple I believe. I've read and seen pictures of this a while back. Maybe I could hunt it down for you. I'm sure if you do a little searching online you can find something on your own as well.

Um yes, I am aware of handguns made of iron. I was merely pointing to the fact that the oldest hand cannons found were made of bronze.

I don't mean "are you aware" as in "Gotcha" I mean that conventional wisdom in some circles is that early Chinese handguns were only made of bronze. I personally have my doubts and was looking for confirmatory evidence.