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China and Europe have connections that go back further than you’d think. So what *does* a “Chinese” person look like anyway?
National Geographic brings news of a fellow named Yu Hong found in a 1,400-year-old Chinese tomb.
He was buried there with “a woman of East Asian descent” (my guess, and theirs, would be his wife), but his DNA is different. Despite being buried in Taiyuan, which is farther east than Xian or Chengdu, and nearly as far north as Beijing, he’s got the DNA of a European.
And paintings on the walls of the tomb also seem to depict Europeans – people with “deep-set eyes” and big noses.
Yu Hong also seems to have been something of a dude, too. Carvings appear to show his dad and granddad migrating through Xinjian (the big deserty province north of Tibet), and him rising to rule a clan of settlers in the Sui dynasty. This means he’s older than Muhammad, and alive at about the same time another gang of immigrants, the Ango-Saxons, started moving onto that big island off the coast of France, much to the chagrin of the Celts and Gaels and, oh yeah, the Britons.
Of course, he’s not nearly as old as the oldest dude in Taiyuan, but that’s a whole other story.
(And let’s just leave aside the theories that the Chinese were some of the first Americans who stayed for a while, then came home with peanuts. And visited from time to time, before and after Columbus. Or, for that matter, Yu Hong.)
And if you’re tired of reading about the past, Taiyuan is also home to a whole other kind of emigration – it’s the home of the Sino-European satellite launch facility, which only seems appropriate, now, doesn’t it?
