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Quote:
... the Sea of India and China, in whose depths are pearls and ambergris, in whose rocky isles are gems and mines of gold, in the mouths of whose beasts is ivory, in whose forests grow ebony, sapan wood, rattans, and trees that bear aloewood, camphor, nutmeg, cloves, and all manner of fragrant and aromatic spices, whose birds are [parrots] and peacocks, and the creeping things of whose earth are civet cats and musk gazelles, and all the rest that no one could enumerate, so numerous are its blessings.
End quote.
In 1998, just off the coast of Belitung Island in the Java Sea, local sea cucumber divers made an unexpected discovery: a shipwreck wonderfully preserved in the seabed sediment about 3 km from shore. After a somewhat controversial recovery process, the fishermen’s find would turn out to be a 9th-century dhow. Measuring 58 feet in length, its planks lashed together with coconut fibres, it was just the kind of boat that Marco Polo would describe with some alarm centuries later, and that our source today would mention in a much calmer tone. It was just the kind of boat that would sail to Guangzhou, China, and return packed with trading goods. And indeed this particular boat would not disappoint.
The dhow, which appears to have been blown off course while making its return journey from Tang China, would very helpfully hold a mirror inscribed with the Chinese date equivalent to 759, coins of a style that were minted from 758 to 845, and a bowl on which, in translation, could still be read the words, “the sixteenth day of the seventh month in the second year of the Baoli era,” a reference to the reign of Emperor Jingzong and within it the year 826.
On board were items one might expect a merchant vessel to have such as scales, measuring spoons, and sewing needles to see to the sails, but the dhow still held some 60,000 artifacts that speak to a rich exchange of goods across the sea. The dhow was carrying ceramics, gold, and silver. There were bronze mirrors, a few of them antiques even at the time of sailing. There were thousands of glazed stoneware items from the Changsha kilns, 55 thousand bowls alone. There were green splashed ceramics from Gongxian, including a spectacular ewer with a dragon head stopper. There were celadon wares to be used in the preparation and serving of tea, and silver boxes for storing medicine, incense, and cosmetics. There were blue and white porcelain pieces produced in China and featuring Persian designs. All in all, it was a glimpse of the healthy ocean trade along a maritime leg of the silk roads. It’s also an example of the kind of commerce to be found in our source today.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that covers medieval history via the travellers that wound their way through it. And I’ll just take this moment at the outset to thank you for listening and to point you in the direction of my Patreon. Putting this podcast together requires really a grotesque amount of time and effort, and I enjoy all of it, the audio editing aside, but it’s also nice to get paid for that work. So if you are enjoying the podcast and it is an option for you - and I do fully appreciate that sometimes it just isn’t - then please do have a look at patreon.com/humancircus or find it through my website which is humancircuspodcast.com. I’d also like to take this time to thank my newest Patreon supporter. Thank you, David, very much!
That aside, let’s get back to the story, a new story, and it will be a single episode story today, not the start of a new series.
I’ll start with a beginning. I’ll start with a 10th-century writer’s beginning in which he declares his purpose and his opinion.
Quote:
I have examined this foregoing book having been commanded to look carefully through it, and to verify the information I find in it about the affairs of the sea and about its kings and their various circumstances, and to compare this information with other reports passed down about these kings, known to myself but not appearing in the book. I found the date of the book to be the year [852-853]— a time when maritime business still ran on an even keel on account of all the toing and froing overseas by merchants from Iraq. I also found that everything recounted in the First Book follows a truthful and veracious line.
The writer of the quoted passage was one Abu Zayd al-Hasan al-Sirafi, the occasion, a 10th-century response to a 9th century account of India, China, and travel to those lands, the 9th-century piece being that “foregoing book” we just heard about. Taken together, Abu Zayd’s addition along with the 9th-century writing formed a useful source for many later texts; taken together, they’ll be the source and topic of today’s episode. Let’s look at we’re working with.
What we have is a piece of 9th and 10th century Arabic travel writing, published together in English as Accounts of China and India and translated by Tim Mackintosh-Smith. And it is really two pieces, two books, two parts, two authors, but the issue of who those authors are is not a settled one.
Book two is clear enough. As mentioned a moment ago, that was a man named Abu Zayd al-Hasan al-Sirafi. But book one though, that’s a little less easy to be sure of. To start with, when we look at the initial pages of the only known surviving manuscript, that part where we might expect to find this kind of information, we find them missing and any name with them. Abu Zayd himself may not have known who wrote that first book. Maybe it was Sulayman the Merchant. He is certainly a source for some of book one and he’d later be credited as its author by the 10th-century Ibn al-Faqih, but as to whether he actually was the author, that’s still an open question.
But what of the part we do know? What of this Abu Zayd, the man who examined the earlier work and wrote a kind of response and addition to it? To start with, we know that the “Al-Sirafi” part of his name would indicate his connection to the port-city of Siraf. That situates him on the Iranian coast of the Gulf and, in his time, at the vital gateway to the Indian Ocean. Siraf may be only a minor village now, but to quote Mackintosh-Smith, that “village crouches on the ruins of the palaces of rich ship owners and traders, merchant princes of the monsoon who dined off the finest Chinese porcelain and whose wealth grew even greater through that climactic ninth century.”
Of Abu Zayd, we also know that the historian al-Mas’udi, sometimes rather unnecessarily called “the Herodotus of the Arabs,” met him in Basra. He said Abu Zayd had moved there around 915 and was an educated person, “a man of discrimination and discernment.” He might have thought him discriminating enough to borrow material from him for his own work, his book Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems, or maybe the borrowing went the other way, and it was al-Mas’udi who fed Abu Zayd with tales of far away lands rather than the other way around.
In any case, neither Abu Zayd nor that 9th-century predecessor who may or may not have been named Suleyman were first-hand observers of all they recorded. We do see a little of that, a little “I saw and it was so,” but they were, more generally, aggregators of information, collectors of eyewitness accounts gleaned from a “circle of informants.” They took in the reports of merchants who travelled to China, India, and elsewhere, accepting some stories, rejecting others.
In that quote I read a moment ago from Abu Zayd, on the accuracy of the earlier work, he ends by saying he’s found it to be all true, but I cut him off a little there. The passage continues to note the only exception, the report in the first book about the Chinese offering food to their dead and then believing the person has eaten it when it’s missing in the morning. Of this he says, quote, “This tale had already reached our ears, but we did not know if it was true until someone we trusted as an informant arrived from those parts. When we asked him about the story, he dismissed it as untrue and added, “The allegation is just as baseless as that of the idolaters who claim that their idols spoke to them.”
The odd moments of writer as personal witness aside, the whole thing is dependent on the word of such trusted informants.
Together, these merchants and their compilers from the 9th and 10th centuries provide a picture of a world, one in which al-Mansur the caliphal builder of Baghdad could have looked out at the river and proclaimed, “Here is the Tigris, and nothing bars the way between it and China!” One in which the Tang dynasty scholar and geographer Jia Dan had already described the waterways all the way up and into the Gulf before dying in 805. It was a profoundly interconnected world in which all kinds of goods were carried across the oceans from Tibetan musk to elephant tusks. It was, in short, a world in which people moved, the 9th and 10th centuries being no more a time that they were fixed to their place of birth than the 12th or 13th.
That “picture of the world” this text provides is not a neat one, what with its two compilers, its multitude of sources and storytellers. Indeed, t’s not so much one “picture” as it is two, the one, as Mackintosh-Smith puts it, “haunted by the knowledge that the good old days [were] over,” but we’ll get to that in a little bit. For now, let’s look at what these pictures show us.
The books show us oceans where whirlwinds sometimes whip up, swallowing entire ships and spitting out boulders, boats, and giant fish. They show us snippets of eastern Africa, of what are called the Zanj in sources such as this, a people with warriors known as the Pierced Ones, their tireless preachers in animal skins, their excellent leopards for export. They show us cockfighting, cloves, and cannibals, and much, much more.
Let’s start with the seas themselves.
We don’t, as I said, know how the first book begins, but as the surviving pages pick up, we’re into the waters. We’re hearing about whales, how they rise up like a sail, how their spouts are like lighthouses, and how sailors on the Arabian Sea “bang wooden clappers … for fear that one of them will blunder into their ship and capsize it.” There are, in addition, fish that will sometimes enter through the ear of an especially greedy whale and kill it. There are fish with the faces of men that go flying over the water. And into these waters, go the merchants’ vessels.
Boats leave from Basra at the north of the Persian Gulf. They take their goods down south to Siraf, the city indicated in Abu Zayd’s name. There, the larger ships needed for the China trade are able to enter the port and receive the transferred cargo. Those ships proceed on, taking on freshwater at Muscat, along with sheep and goats, taking some risk in traversing the rocks of Oman. With a good wind, they reach the southern tip of India in a month, and there again they take on water from the wells, may offload goods such as coral or Egyptian emeralds, and they pay customs duties. They pay up to a thousand dirhams for ships carrying on to China, the concept of paying to move goods and people through a place being rather an older one than many might think.
From India, the ships enter the Sea of Harkand, otherwise known as the Bay of Bengal. In that sea, they pass islands, as many as 1900 of them it is said, largely ruled by women and populated by skilled workers of cloth and wood, builders of ships and houses, people who use cowries as currency and who gather coconuts and collect ambergris in great quantities, ambergris which is wrongly reported to grow on the seabed and then float up in bad weather.
One particular island is picked out in the text, one that goes by the name of Sarandib, the root word of the English “serendipity.” Sri Lanka, as the place is known to us, was rich in aloewood, gold, and gems, the waters beneath it in pearls; the mountaintop above it crowned with the footprint of Adam, his first step having been there, his second into the sea.
On another island, a group of sailors are said to have gone ashore, to have lit fires there and to have found, much to their delight, that molten silver began to bleed from the ground. They carried off as much as they could, thinking themselves immediately wealthy, but in stormy seas they were soon forced to throw all of it overboard. The writer notes that despite several expeditions going out to relocate that particular island, it has, strangely enough, never been found. The sea, he says, is full of such stories, of forbidden islands that are forever sought and without much success. Throughout the text, there is an effort to separate it from these fanciful tales of sailors.
The ships’ next destination is Kalah Bar on the Malay peninsula, one month journey if all goes well, and then for ten days each on to Tiyumah and then Kanduranj. Both are noted for the sweet water of their wells and the latter also for the fugitive thieves and formerly enslaved escapees that take refuge on its mountain. Another ten days, and Sanf is reached, on what is now the coast of Vietnam. And from there, the destination is near, an island stop or two before reaching Zhujiang, the Pearl River, and on it the city Abu Zayd knew as Khanfu, the one you more likely know as Guangzhou, a 9th century hub of traffic and trade with some difficulties in its past and in its future. But again, we’ll get to that later.
Regarding the seas, Abu Zayd notes one of the discoveries of his age, the, quote, “previously unsuspected fact that the ocean onto which the Sea of China and India opens is connected to the Mediterranean Sea.” News has been heard in his time of sewn planks from ships used in the Indian Ocean trade being found in the Mediterranean. The ships had broken up, their crew lost, and then, he suggests, those planks must have been driven north around China and “around the back of the lands of the Turks and the Khazars,” into the Caspian Sea, and from there through the Bosporus and into the Mediterranean.
It’s worth noting that Abu Zayd’s contemporary, al-Mas’udi, knew very well that this was incorrect, that the sewn planks must have taken another route, and that the Caspian Sea was not one of the connecting pieces. But it’s also worth noting that as late as the 13th century, Friar William on his journey to see the Mongol khan, would remark that contrary to what was passed down from Isidore of Seville, the Caspian Sea nowhere touched the ocean and was entirely landlocked. So Abu-Zayd, raising an interesting point about the ocean’s interconnectivity, was hardly alone in his misconception as to the details.
And there were other uncertainties too. In one passage of the first book that includes an island of rulerless cannibals, fish that climb into trees to drink coconut palm sap before returning to the water, and “the Mount of Fire, near which it is impossible to sail,” there is a report of a crablike creature that turns to stone upon being removed from the sea and which provides an ointment useful for eye afflictions. “They have reported,” the text will sometimes reads here, or “a certain informant said.. .” Not everything is given the unequivocal stamp of authenticity. And not everything is concerned with sailing the seas or the islands on it.
The books report on India in everything from the method of slaughtering animals, that is, bashing them on the head, to the penalty for theft which is, unfortunately, “impalement … backside first,” unless of course the accused chooses to endure a trial such as plunging their hand into a cauldron of boiling water and retrieving the ring at the bottom. But it’s not all slaughter and pain. There’s also everything from average beard length - three cubits apparently - to bathing before the morning meal and the use of tooth sticks in cleaning.
Readers would have learned of the varieties of sex workers, of the belief in transmigration of the soul, of funeral practices, of pyres of sandalwood, camphor, and saffron. They would read of ascetics who wandered the jungles and hills, rarely mixing with others. The second book’s writer mentioned those who never cut their nails and roamed about asking food from those they visited, food which they took in a human-skull-made-bowl, and which their providers thought a blessing to themselves to give them. The first’s reported having seen one, a man who went naked but for a scrap of lion or tiger skin and who stood all day facing the sun; he claimed to have returned to the very same spot sixteen years later and found the same man, still standing, still facing the sun. He expressed amazement that the ascetic’s eyes had not been burned out by its heat.
Then, at the end of the first book, the compiler reaches the end of their knowledge. “The inland regions beyond China,” they write, “...include those of the Tghazghuz, and those of the khaqan of Tubbat; these regions adjoin the land of the Turks. In the other direction, that of the ocean, are the islands of al-Sila. They are a pale-skinned people who exchange gifts with the ruler of China; they maintain that if they [do] not keep up this exchange, rain will cease to fall on their land. None of our circle of informants has ever made it there and brought back a reliable report. In the land of al-Sila there are white hawks.”
The “islands” written of here, that home of white hawks and gift giving people, that was actually Korea, but that was beyond the reach of the writer and his contemporaries. And it’s beyond the reach of this episode too. After this break, we’ll turn to focus more on China, and on the story there that’s revealed within these two books and in their differences.
…
In book one, China features foods from peaches, pomegranates, and pistachios, to apricots, quinces, and figs. There are serpent melons, sugarcanes, serviceberries. There are cucumbers, coconuts, and almonds. The land features silk as a staple garment and rice as a staple diet, further used in producing wine, vinegar, jellies, and more. Book one shows us quote, “a more salubrious and finer land than India. … everywhere you go in China they have a great walled city. Also, China is a healthier country, with fewer diseases and better air.” It has, and again I am quoting from the text here, “better-looking” people.
There’s a large stone tablet set up into which is carved a list of illnesses and next to each its appropriate remedy. If a sick person can’t afford that remedy, then it’s paid for from the public treasury. And there are other forms of social support too. Children of the poor are fed and taught to write at public expense, and citizens who reach the age of 80 go from paying a poll tax to receiving a pension.
China, it seems, is a pretty bountiful place, but between the first and second book, between around 850 and the early 10th century, a shadow had fallen over part of those lands and the ability of the Arab merchants to trade in them. Something had happened in China. Let’s start with that well organized land of the first book.
Ninth century China, or that part of it we’re concerned with in and around Guangzhou, is also, in book one, a kind of merchant’s paradise with all considerations and conveniences accounted for. There’s enough trade by Muslims to warrant an official appointee of the ruler to see to their business and disputes. There are freshwater rivers and valleys. There are everywhere guard posts and markets. There is systematization and a record of movements and of transactions.
If you want to travel within China you need two documents, one from the ruler, the other from the eunuch chief of finance. The first paper is a record of the traveller, their companions, their family and forerunners; the second is a statement of their goods and money. As they move about the countryside, their possessions and wealth are tracked, and where they are left, are spent, or go missing, there is a record. Where debts are incurred, they are documented, and the manner in which such things are to be handled is understood by all, as are their consequences.
The author asserts that “the Chinese act fairly where financial dealings or debts are concerned.” There are clearly comprehensible rules and openly available avenues to pursue grievances, with substantial, well understood punishments in place for those who break the rules. And there’s even an example of all this. There’s an account of how, quote, “the Chinese used to monitor their own system - in the old days … with a rigour unheard of elsewhere.”
They used to.
There is a story of a merchant bringing goods to Guangzhou, and as the story goes, he was not what you would call an admirable man. He was avaricious in nature, and in his dealings with an imperial eunuch, pressed for a higher price, one beyond reason really, on the sale of certain ivory and other goods. But the merchant’s greed wasn’t the point. The point was that after the eunuch lost his patience and simply took what he wanted, our misbehaving merchant travelled to the Tang dynasty’s imperial capital at Chang’an, or as he called it Khamdan, and there, he was able to lodge his official complaint and set into motion the procedure for resolving such matters.
As policy dictated, the merchant was removed to a place of detention for two months, and at the end of that period he was challenged. If your appeal is found to be groundless, he was informed, then the penalty will be death; after all, they couldn’t have people just trotting forward empty grievances. However, having heard that, he could back out then and there, admit he had nothing to complain about, with no hard feelings. He’d suffer only banishment … and fifty blows of the stave. Or he could proceed.
The merchant, who was, if disagreeable, also determined and quite certain of himself, pressed on with his case. He was given an imperial audience and then food and lodging until the matter could be resolved. And then he waited, while the inquiry was carried out in Guangzhou, and while three separate military officers carried out their own independent investigation before presenting their findings. It was all a lot of trouble to go to, and you start to see why they’d first show you the possibility of death and then offer you a beating and a quick exit rather than go through with it. But our merchant did go through with it, and when the evidence came back it supported his claims. The eunuch was promptly deprived of his property and station, and all was set right. All was part of a larger depiction of reliable order, of laws administered in predictable fashion, of a place a trader from the Persian Gulf could do business with some peace of mind.
But that was China in what Abu Zayd called “the old days, that is, before its deterioration in the present time …” That is, some 60-90 years earlier, “a time when maritime business still ran on an even keel.” Things had not remained so smoothly functional.
Since that time, the second book tells us, “the trading voyages to China were abandoned and the country itself was ruined, leaving all traces of its graces gone and everything in utter disarray.” But what could have gone wrong? What had led to such total “deterioration of law and order” and the end of those trading voyages from Siraf?”
What had gone wrong was the Huang Chao rebellion, and “utter disarray” was not entirely an exaggeration. Let’s look at what Abu Zayd had to say about it.
From the reports he had gathered, it had all begun with an outlaw, a smuggler, a “rebel from outside the ruling dynasty.” This Huang Chao had been “involved in armed banditry and hooliganism, causing general mayhem and attracting a rabble of witless followers.” In time, there were enough of those “witless followers” to make him truly strong, and his ambition even stronger.
On one great city after another he marched, taking first one then the next. He’d even drive the emperor from the capital at Chang’an, causing him to flee for Tibet. The emperor would send envoys for aid from a Turkic king, and only with his help would the Tang emperor find his way back to the throne and put an end to Huang Chao and his uprising. And when he regained that throne, he found he had not regained all he had lost..
From Abu Zayd’s sources, we see the military leadership largely dead, the provinces overrun by warlords, the cities sacked, the capital itself in ruins, and most importantly from Abu Zayd’s perspective, Guangzhou, the merchants’ destination on the river near the sea, violently taken, its mulberry trees -so important for feeding silkworms- cut down, and its people killed.
He tells us of a lengthy siege and then a massacre, the Guangzhou Massacre, with Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians slaughtered to the number of 120,000. He tells us that the countryside after that was like the lands of the Persians after Alexander had killed Darius the Great and caused them to be divided among so many warlords, that after the rebellion these warlords now conquered and consumed one another, sometimes literally eating one another’s people. And as for merchants coming from far-away lands, they found, unsurprisingly, that the reception was not so friendly as it had once been. Where well organized dependability had once ruled the day, now injustice awaited. Traders and captains were harmed or slain, their goods taken by force, and God, Abu Zayd said, withdrew his blessings from the country, so that “the sea itself became uncooperative,” and the ocean trade, once so fruitful, fell away.
The trading port of Guangzhou had already had something of a checkered past. A corrupt governor would in turn be murdered by a Malayan captain. A variety of court appointees would take advantage of their geographical distance from that court to squeeze what they might from their foreign visitors. There was looting by corrupt officials, from senior eunuchs accumulating wealth and power on down to lesser functionaries lining their pockets. Even so, the in 748, it was described by the Buddhist monk Jian Zhen as a busy host to many large ships from far afield and brimming with “spices, pearls, and jade piled up mountain high.” Even so, the importance of the city for Arab and Persian merchants held; from a reported, though more recently questioned, caliphal embassy that was said to bring about the building of the Huaisheng Mosque in the early 7th-century, through to our text’s period, it held. But it did not do so continuously.
In 758, a raid carried out by some of those large ships saw the governor turned out, its warehouses looted, its and dwellings burned. That last part not a completely uncommon occurrence - there’s mention of fires in our text today - but after that 758 assault, the port was closed to commercial traffic from abroad and only opened again in the early 800s. By the time for the writing of our first book, round the mid-9th-century, it was doing a great trade, welcoming Arabs, Persians, Sinhalese, Chams, and Malays. Then, as Abu Zayd told us, came the rebellion.
Even if Abu Zayd’s number of 120,000 slaughtered foreigners is exaggerated, Huang Chao’s uprising clearly devastated Guangzhou, but the city would recover; trade between the Persian Gulf and China, would recover; the Tang Dynasty, not so much.
There had been other rebellions and other disasters before that of course, notably the An Lushan rebellion of the 8th-century, but a weakened Tang, having responded poorly to flood, famine, and the rising power of competing warlords, would not regain its grasp after the defeat of Huang Chao. An earlier ally of Huang Chao named Zhu Wen would change allegiances and aid the emperor, only to later depose first him and then his son. That Zhu Wen would take for himself the name of Emperor Taizu. He would bring an end to the Tang period and a beginning to that known now as that of Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. For his part, Abu Zayd would only write of this that “China ha[d] remained in chaos down to [his] own times.”
This is what was meant by the idea that the second book was “haunted by the knowledge that the good old days [were] over.” That highly profitable trade between the Gulf and the cities of China would return, but as Abu Zayd wrote his commentary on the earlier work, as he made the additions of his age, it had not done so yet, and there was no way of knowing that it ever would.
I’ll end today’s episode with Abu Zayd’s own ending.
This Second Book, then, is the best part of what my memory has been able to recollect at the time given the wide range of accounts of the sea. I have avoided relating any of the sort of accounts in which sailors exercise their powers of invention but whose credibility would not stand up to scrutiny in other men’s minds. I have also restricted myself to relating only the true contents of each account - and the shorter the better. And God it is who guides us to what is correct.
Thanks for listening everyone. As always, if you’re on the Patreon feed with bonus endings, you’ll be hearing that bonus in just a moment.
Sources:
Accounts of China and India, translated by Tim Mackintosh-Smith. New York University Press, 2017.
Howard, Michael C. Transnationalism in Ancient and Medieval Societies: The Role of Cross-Border Trade and Travel. McFarland, 2014.
Krahl, Regina. Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds. Smithsonian Institution, 2010.
Park, Hyunhee. Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds: Cross-Cultural Exchange in Pre-Modern Asia. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Schafer, Edward H. The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T'ang Exotics. Pickle Partners Publishing, 2016.