What irks me it that the article makes its comparison by picking the best aspects of non-Roman civilizations spread all over Asia and from there draws the concl

What irks me it that the article makes its comparison by picking the best aspects of non-Roman civilizations spread all over Asia and from there draws the conclusion that those "born into the light" Chinese who ended up in Britannia must have felt like being in wilderness. It actively ignored the aspects that people outside the Roman empire would most likely considered impressive compared to other Asian empires. For one, the civilizations around Mediterranean were sea-faring types, and even more so for the Roman Empire which relied on sea transport for much of its normal functioning. That is not something one could see in any of the Asian empires, not nowhere near that scale. Law. Rome had a law system that was so good that it was willingly adopted by most of the civilizations coming after, regardless of the fact that the said civilizations might have had their own distinct cultural heritage that included law. The individual liberties and the personal property rights seem to be timeless attractions, going back since the Roman era. (By the way, the Chinese really appreciate that to this day, Vancouver real estate prices speak for themselves.) Constructions. Although concrete was older than Romans, they were the ones to take it seriously and made extensive research on it. That allowed them to build things that were simply impossible without concrete. There's only so much complexity you can get just by piling up blocks of stone, or there can be only so much heightened weight using just softer binders. Don't get me started on jewelry and complex works like ones that involved developing glass with layers of metal inside it, or other such things that weren't developed nowhere else. Yeah, that must have been underwhelming, that is how darkness must have been perceived like!