Dayuan

Dayuan (or Tayuan; Chinese: 大宛; pinyin: Dàyuān; lit. 'Great Ionians'; Middle Chinese dâi^C-jwɐn < LHC: dɑh-ʔyɑn^[1]) is the Chinese exonym for a country that existed in Ferghana valley in Central Asia, described in the Chinese historical works of Records of the Grand Historian and the Book of Han. It is mentioned in the accounts of the Chinese explorer Zhang Qian in 130 BCE and the numerous embassies that followed him into Central Asia. The country of Dayuan is generally accepted as relating to the Ferghana Valley, controlled by the Hellenistic polis Alexandria Eschate (modern Khujand, Tajikistan), which can probably be understood as "Greco-Fergana city-state" in English language.

These Chinese accounts describe the "Dayuan" as urbanized dwellers with Caucasian features, living in walled cities and having "customs identical to those of the Daxia" or Greco-Bactrians, a Hellenistic kingdom that was ruling Bactria at that time in today's northern Afghanistan. The Dayuan are also described as manufacturers and great lovers of wine.^[2]

The Dayuan were the descendants of Greeks forcibly resettled in the area by the Persian Empire, as well as the subsequent Greek colonists that were settled by Alexander the Great in Ferghana in 329 BCE (see Alexandria Eschate), and had prospered within the Hellenistic realm of the Seleucids and Greco-Bactrians, until they were isolated by the migrations of the Yuezhi around 160 BCE and the Scythians in 140. It appears that the name "Yuan" was simply a transliteration of Sanskrit Yavana or Pali Yona, used throughout antiquity in Asia to designate Greeks ("Ionians"), so that Dayuan would mean "Great Ionians" or "Great Greeks".^{[3][better source needed]}

By 100 BC, the Dayuan were attacked and then defeated by the Han dynasty in the Han-Dayuan war. The interaction between the Dayuan and the Chinese is historically crucial, since it represents one of the first major contacts between an urbanized civilization in Central Asia and the Chinese civilization, opening the way to the formation of the Silk Road that was to link the East and the West in material and cultural exchange from the 1st century BCE to the 15th century.^{[citation needed]}