Assassins' Creed Valhalla, which is set in 873, features a merchant named "Yanli", who was from Zhongzhou, a Chinese City. Would something like this have been possible in real life?

by SincerePuppet16

Just the title. If I were a Chinese peasant in the 9th century, and I wanted to make a name for myself in England, was it possible for me to travel there? And if so, how long would doing such a thing even take? Were there any real life examples of Asian traders living in Europe back then or vice versa?

mikedash

Straightforwardly: if you're asking about a "Chinese peasant" of this period then no, not remotely. If you're asking about a Chinese merchant, a Chinese artisan, or a Chinese diplomat, the answer is still no, but with some provisos.

What the game appears to be referencing is the existence of significant trade routes that did in fact link China with the west during the Tang period, both via the so called Silk Roads and via a maritime route that ran from the Persian Gulf to Guangzhou (Canton). The actual trade routes were, however, largely in non-Chinese hands, and they terminated well short of western Europe; I wrote about the maritime one in some detail in an earlier response that you can read here. And while the trade was important enough to the Tang for them to have sent quite a large number of embassies to the Abbasids during this period, these diplomatic groups seem to have restricted themselves to making the journey to what's now Iraq and back again. We have no records that any members of these groups stayed in the west.

With regard to Chinese people who actually did find their way west in this period, the only named person that we're aware of was Du Huan, a well-connected Chinese soldier who was captured (along with numerous others) by Abbasid forces at the Battle of Talas (751) and taken as a prisoner-of-war to Iraq. Du Huan was apparently allowed considerable freedom, however, and by the time he made it back to China a decade later he had probably managed to visit Jerusalem, Egypt and some areas in what's now the Sudan. I investigated his travels, with considerable help from u/EnclavedMicrostate and u/lcnielsen, in another earlier thread that you can access here.

There apparently were other Chinese who ventured as far as the Abbasid caliphate in this period however – Du Huan mentions that he stumbled across Tang craftsmen in Baghdad, and there are some rather vague mentions that have been interpreted as suggesting that Cairo had a community of Chinese merchants, who would probably have dealt in ceramics, for part of this period. But Du Huan does not seem to have made it so far as Europe, much less England, and we know of no one else who did. The reality is that while what we now think of as the "Middle East" was part of a trading world that spanned the Indian Ocean and its littoral and stretched as far as Korea and even the Philippines during this period, "England" (which of course did not even exist as a political entity at this early date) and northern Europe as a whole was well outside this world, and produced nothing that would have made the hazards of journeying there seem worthwhile to a contemporary Chinese, even if they had actually been aware of such places. Which they weren't – while the Chinese certainly were aware of the Roman empire and later, as we've heard, of Byzantium, the Abbasids, and even Zanzibar, we've no evidence they knew anything whatsoever of the island of Britain.