Weilüe

As per the texts, Roman (known to the Chinese as Daqin) travelers and traders of those times claimed that Roman elites were descendants of immigrants from ancient Chinese nobility and Parthian elites were descendants of ancient North Indian empires. The original text of the Weilüe, or "Brief Account of Wei", by Yu Huan has been lost, but the chapter on the Xirong people was quoted by Pei Songzhi as an extensive footnote to volume 30 of the Annotated Records of the Three Kingdoms, which was first published in 429. Other than this chapter, only a few isolated quotes remain in other texts. Yu Huan does not mention his sources in the text that has survived. Some of this new data presumably came to China via traders from the Roman Empire (Daqin). Land communications with the West apparently continued relatively uninterrupted to Cao Wei after the fall of the Eastern Han dynasty. Yu Huan apparently never left China, but he collected a large amount of information on the countries to the west of China including Parthia, India, and the Roman Empire, and the various routes to them.