page_title: Europeans in Medieval China
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Europeans in Medieval China / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Relief carving of the Deva King of the South (Virūḍhaka 增長天王) on the east interior wall of the Cloud Platform at Juyongguan. 14th century art of the Yuan Dynasty. 中文（繁體）‎: 居庸關雲台東壁的增長天王雕刻
context_page_description: Given textual and archaeological evidence, it is thought that thousands of Europeans lived in Imperial China during the period of Mongol rule. These were people from countries traditionally belonging to the lands of Christendom during the High to Late Middle Ages who visited, traded, performed Christian missionary work, or lived in China. This occurred primarily during the second half of the 13th century and the first half of the 14th century, coinciding with the rule of the Mongol Empire, which ruled over a large part of Eurasia and connected Europe with their Chinese dominion of the Yuan dynasty. Whereas the Byzantine Empire centered in Greece and Anatolia maintained rare incidences of correspondence with the Tang, Song and Ming dynasties of China, the Roman papacy sent several missionaries and embassies to the early Mongol Empire as well as to Khanbaliq, the capital of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. These contacts with the West were only preceded by rare interactions between the Han-period Chinese and Hellenistic Greeks and Romans.
caption: The Deva King of the South, a stone-carved relief on the interior of the Cloud Platform at Juyong Pass, built between 1342 and 1345 in what was then the Mongol Yuan-dynasty capital Khanbaliq (modern Beijing); the monument contains inscriptions in six different scripts: Lanydza script (used to write Sanskrit), Tibetan script (used to write the Tibetan language), 'Phags-pa script (created at the command of Kublai Khan, and used to write Chinese, Mongolian and Uyghur), Old Uyghur script (used to write the Old Uyghur language), Chinese characters (used to write Chinese), and the Tangut script (used to write the Tangut language)[4][5]
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