Official modern relations between China and Iran date to the early 20th century, but Chinese and Iranian civilizations have enjoyed a long history of exchanges from the second century BCE.

Between 2022 to 2024, the EU-funded SINOIRAN project explored Sino-Iranian relations throughout the first millennium CE, examining political, religious, and material exchanges between China and Iran. By building a bridge between modern Sinology and Iranology, the project worked on the history of Sino-Iranian relations in close coordination with Iranologists in Italy and Europe.

The primary result of the project was a monograph, Sino-Iranian and Sino-Arabian Relations in Late Antiquity: China and the Parthians, Sasanians, and Arabs in the First Millennium (Brill, 2024).

The lead researcher of the SINOIRAN project was Dr. Jeffrey Kotyk, a Canadian who completed his doctorate at Leiden University (2017) in the Netherlands. Earlier, he completed a MA degree at Komazawa University 駒沢大学 (2011). His past research has involved East Asian history, religion, science (astronomy, astrology, and calendars), and material cultures of antiquity. Prof. Antonio Panaino, the academic supervisor of the project, is a senior scholar of Iranology, who has written more than three-hundred articles and twenty-two monographs.