High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! That people from the Western hemisphere have been visiting China from before the Christian era is beyond doubt. The first known name of a westerner is that of Alopen and he came from Syria in about 635. He may have been a Nestorian priest and his visit is recorded on the Nestorian Stone tablet, now in Xi'an. But before that it is recorded that an unnamed ambassador from the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius arrived in Beijing in 166. The scarcity of records of Western visitations means little, since it is known for example that the upper classes in the Tang dynasty favored the employment of westerners as servants. When Alopen arrived in Chang An (Xi’an) it is very unlikely that he would find himself the sole representative of a foreign land as did many later arrivals in the last couple of centuries. Данное издание представляет собой компиляцию сведений, находящихся в свободном доступе в среде Интернет в целом, и в информационном сетевом ресурсе...