There is a very curious mural from the Dahuting Tomb in Zhengzhou, Henan province, China, dated to the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 AD). It may in fact show a woman (court attendant?) holding a Roman glassware from the Mediterranean world.
According to An Jiaoyou ("When Glass Was Treasured in China," in Annette L. Juliano and Judith A. Lerner (eds), Silk Road Studies VII: Nomads, Traders, and Holy Men Along China's Silk Road, 2002), Roman glasswares have been found in China dating as far back as the early 1st century BC, during the Western Han period. The earliest known item was a Greco-Roman glass bowl discovered in a tomb of Guangzhou in Southern China, suggestive of coming via the maritime route through the South China Sea. We know from both the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, Pliny the Elder's work, and Ptolemy's Geography that Roman merchants were active in India, sailing there from the Red Sea ports of Egypt. From Ptolemy we also have remarkable knowledge about a Greek sailor named Alexandros who reached the Gulf of Thailand and Southeast Asia after crossing the Malay Peninsula (as contemporary merchants from India regularly did), with the site "Cattigara" most likely being the archaeological site of Oc Eo, Vietnam (where Antonine period Roman artefacts have been discovered). Moreover, Chinese histories (Weilue and Book of Later Han) assert that Roman embassies arrived multiple times via this southern maritime route, landing in Jiaozhi (in modern-day northern Vietnam). According to Warwick Ball (2016), Roman coins going back to the reign of Tiberius have also been found in Xi'an (site of the ancient capital city Chang'an).
Without further ado, here is the mural in question:
Here's the mural in question, from Dahuting Tomb in Henan, China, late 2nd or early 3rd century AD.
Here's a fuller version of the two ladies in the tomb mural: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dahuting_Tomb_mural_of_two_women_dressed_in_Hanfu,_displaying_domestic_wares,Eastern_Han_Dynasty(cropped).jpg
You can see the other murals from Dahuting Tomb here.
Look at the way it seems to shine with a transluscent quality. It could perhaps be a miniature, glossy "hu" funerary celadon ceramic jar (which possess a somewhat similar shape), yet she seems to be holding this object with the tip of her fingers. That would suggest a very lightweight object, no? Celadon wares were kind of heavy, certainly not something you could just precariously hold at the tip of your fingers. The object in the mural also lacks a few things that celadon bottles/jars would have had, such as looped handles on the sides that were imitative of Zhou-dynasty era bronzewares.
It could also be jade, or even silver, yet jade, like celadon ceramics, isn't exactly lightweight either. From what I can tell, jade drinking vessels from the Han period don't look like this at all; they usually have relief decorations, ribbed decorations, handles, lids, gilt bronze trappings, etc. I've also never seen a silver cup/pitcher/bottle/miniature vase like this one from the Han period.
The size of the object, the seeming lightweight property of it, the coloring and translucent quality, and the shape of it lead me to suspect it is a Roman glassware. The artist also seems to be making a point about it, featuring it prominently as a luxury item (other ladies in the same tomb can be seen holding lacquerware dishes and other items). What do you guys think? For an extensive amount of examples for comparison, follow the links here and you'll find a variety of glasswares that fit the description:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Ancient_Roman_glassware
There is no reason to think it couldn't be, but it's also not automatically true that it is Roman glassware, either.
First and foremost, any notions of portrayed translucence on the part of the artist should be put aside. White paint used across the fresco has been smeared/dripped, meaning that the white looks particularly translucent throughout: the tint and texture of the cup is not remarkable. I'm by no means well-versed in Chinese art history so I'm not sure if this thinness/smearing was intentional or the result of millennia of damage, but it does say to me as an archaeologist that the vessel's opacity was approximately the same as that of the woman's skin, the collar of her zhongyi, and the ornamentation in her coiffure.
The mode of portrayal (a fresco) also inhibits the amount of detail that the artist could put on the cup itself. I'm not sure if you've held a really finely-made jade cup, but they can be eggshell thin and the patterns become more and less evident as you rotate the cup under light. The artist may have originally portrayed these subtle patterns in a way so delicate that they have been lost over time, or they may have chosen to eschew the patterns entirely.
As far as form is concerned, seriation is dictated by material finds. We don't have that exact cup, but that doesn't mean it didn't exist. To be honest, it looks less like a Roman form I'm familiar with and more like whatever this thing is. Jade is also fitting for the funerary context because-- from what I've gathered in my relatively limited research-- liquids that were collected in jade vessels could be ingested to grant immortality (see: The Search for Immortality: Tomb Treasures of Han China, J.C.S. Lin, pp. 288).
All this is not to say that Roman glassware was not present in China at that time. Approximately contemporaneous with this tomb was the purported arrival of an emissary sent by "Andun" (one of the later Nerva-Antonine emperors) in Luoyang. Long before that, Pliny the Elder was bemoaning the enormous amount of silk that the Roman people indulged in.
At any rate, this does not mean that the Romans really knew the source of their luxury goods, and vice versa. The Silk Route was vast and complex and represented a relay of sorts: glassware probably moved from a coastal area of the empire east to Ctesiphon, where it was reloaded onto a series of Bactrian caravans manned by local traders until it eventually reached Xi'an.
