It feels like most accounts of history has the western world making a mad dash towards China, until the age of exploration at least.

You may be interested in the Indo-Roman trade which lasted for over 6 centuries, until Egypt was conquered by Islamic armies.

In Strabo's time (around the birth of Jesus), he mentions that the Indian trade amounted to about 120 ships a year, or 10 ships a month. We have manifests from some of these ships, which describe cargoes of spices, ivory, mahogany, indigo, and a lot of other luxury items that were imported from the Malabar coast of India.

A few decades later, Pliny the Elder mentions that the Indian trade amounted to about 100 million sesterces a year. This trade was so huge, he says there were complaints in the Senate that it was draining the treasury of gold and silver because Roman matrons were greedy for Indian goods.

There were lots of Indian traders in Rome, and many Romans in India for the purpose of trade. Roman coins are found in great numbers from that period in India.

The trade was in two stages - ships from India making their way across the Arabian Sea, past Yemen into the Red Sea, to Egyptian ports. And the second stage on Roman and Greek ships from Egypt to various Roman ports across the Mediterranean. Since there was no Suez Canal at the time, the goods had to be transported across land in Egypt from the Red Sea side to the Mediterranean side - a distance of about 40 miles.

This came to an end with the Islamic conquest of Egypt in the 7th century by the Rashidun Caliphate. From this time on, the Arabs became the middlemen in this trade, and direct contact between India and Rome was lost. It was to avoid paying the middlemen that the Voyages of Exploration began, to find a sea route to India that avoided Muslim lands.

During this entire period, western contact with China was a relatively tiny trickle of trade along the silk road. It went through many, many different hands on the long trip from China to Europe, so there was never any direct contact with China.