MARITIME SILK ROAD | Facts and Details

MARITIME SILK ROAD

Ocean-going dhow More silk and Silk Road goods are believed to have reached the West via ocean routes — much jointly referred to as the Maritime Silk Road — than by overland routes.Much of the deal on the Maritime Silk Road was carried out by Arab, Persian and Indian ships not chinese ones. The travel was dangerous. many ships disappeared and no one has any idea where they went down. A few went down in long-familiar dangerous places like the Gelasa Straight, a funnel-shaped passage between the little indonesian islands of Bangka and Belitung, where the warm tropical waters are freckled with punic ship-sinking shallow reefs and submerged rocks .
According to the National Palace Museum, Taipei : “ From the ninth to fourteenth centuries, seafaring flowed along sea routes in Asia. Ships both big and little plied these routes in capital numbers back and forth in the seas off China and even arsenic far as the indian Ocean, making contact with early civilizations in East and Southeast Asia, the indian subcontinent, and the arabian Peninsula. With the discovery of new navigation routes in the late fifteenth hundred, european ships began to make their way to the East in increasing numbers, expanding the distribution of chinese porcelains ” and other goods “ made for extraneous trade to Europe and the West from the master areas in Asia and Africa, creating a truly ball-shaped network for trade and department of commerce. [ source : National Palace Museum, Taipei \=/ ]
According to UNESCO : “ Maritime traders had different challenges to face on their drawn-out journeys. The development of sailing technology, and in particular of ship-building cognition, increased the guard of sea travel throughout the Middle Ages. Ports grew up on coasts along these maritime trade routes, providing vital opportunities for merchants not only to trade and disembark, but besides to take on fresh water supplies, with one of the greatest threats to sailors in the Middle Ages being a miss of drink water. Pirates were another risk faced by all merchant ships along the nautical Silk Roads, as their lucrative cargos made them attractive targets. [ source : UNESCO ~ ]
According to Columbia University ’ sulfur Asia for Educators : “ To satisfy growing chinese demand for special spices, medicative herb, and crude materials, taiwanese merchants cooperated with Moslem and indian traders to develop a rich network of trade that reached beyond island southeasterly Asia to the fringes of the indian Ocean. Into the ports of eastern China came ginseng, lacquerware, celadon, aureate and silver, horses and ox from Korea and Japan. Into the ports of southern China came hardwoods and early corner products, ivory, rhinoceros horn, brilliant kingfisher feathers, ginger, sulfur and tin from Vietnam and Siam in mainland southeast Asia ; cloves, nutmeg, batik fabrics, pearls, corner resins, and shuttlecock plumes from Sumatra, Java, and the Moluccas in island southeast Asia. Trade winds across the indian Ocean brought ships carrying cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, turmeric, and particularly pepper from Calicut on the southwest coast of India, gemstones from Ceylon ( Sri Lanka ), adenine well as woolens, carpets, and more valued stones from ports as far aside as Hormuz on the Persian Gulf and Aden on the Red Sea. agrarian products from north and east Africa besides made their way to China, although small was known about those regions. [ generator : asia for Educators, Columbia University afe.easia.columbia.edu ]

Lighthouse at Mocha “ By the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, China had reached a acme of naval engineering unsurpassed in the world. While using many technologies of chinese invention, chinese shipbuilders besides combined technologies they borrowed and adapted from seafarers of the South China seas and the indian Ocean. For centuries, China was the leading maritime baron in the region, with advances in navigation, naval architecture, and propulsion. From the one-ninth century on, the Chinese had taken their charismatic compasses aboard ships to use for navigating ( two centuries before Europe ). In addition to compasses, Chinese could navigate by the stars when skies were clear, using printed manuals with star charts and compass bearings that had been available since the thirteenth century. Star charts had been produced from at least the eleventh hundred, reflecting China ‘s concern with celestial events ( unmatched until the Renaissance in Europe ). ”
Good Websites and Sources on the Silk Road: Silk Road Seattle washington.edu/silkroad ; Silk Road Foundation silk-road.com ; Wikipedia Wikipedia ; Silk Road Atlas depts.washington.edu ; Old World Trade Routes ciolek.com ; Yo Yo Ma ’ s Silk Road Project silkroadproject.org ; International Dunhuang Project idp.bl.uk ; Marco Polo: Wikipedia Marco Polo Wikipedia ; Works by Marco Polo gutenberg.org ; Marco Polo and his Travels silk-road.com ; Zheng He and Early Chinese Exploration : Wikipedia Chinese Exploration Wikipedia ; Le Monde Diplomatique mondediplo.com ; Zheng He Wikipedia Wikipedia ; Gavin Menzies ’ south 1421 1421.tv ; First Europeans in Asia Wikipedia ; Matteo Ricci faculty.fairfield.edu Books: on the Silk Road “ The Silk Road ” ( Odyssey Guides ) ; “ Marco Polo : A Photographer ‘s Journey ” by Mike Yamashita ( White Star, 2002 ) ; “ Life along the Silk Road ” by Whitfield, Susan ( Berkeley : University of California Press, 1999 ) ; “ The Silk Route : Trade, Travel, War and Faith ” by Susan Whitfield, with Ursula Sims-Williams, eds. ( London : british Library, 2004 ) ; “ The Camel and the Wheel ” by Richard Bulliet ( Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1975 ). You can help this web site a little by ordering your amazon books through this connect : Amazon.com ; Television show: “ Silk Road 2005 ”, a 10-episode production by China ‘s CCTV and Japan ‘s NHK, with music by Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. The original series was shown in 1980s .
RELATED ARTICLES IN THIS WEBSITE: SILK ROAD factsanddetails.com ; SILK ROAD EXPLORERS factsanddetails.com ; SILK ROAD : PRODUCTS, TRADE, MONEY AND SOGDIAN MERCHANTS factsanddetails.com ; SILK ROAD ROUTES AND CITIES factsanddetails.com ; DHOWS : THE CAMELS OF THE MARITIME SILK ROAD factsanddetails.com ; MARITIME-SILK-ROAD-ERA SHIPS, EXPORT PORCELAINS AND SHIPWRECKS factsanddetails.com ; EARLY HISTORY OF SILK AND THE SILK ROAD factsanddetails.com ; SILK ROAD DURING THE HAN DYNASTY ( 206 B.C.- A.D. 220 ) : WU DI, ROMANS, SOGDIANS AND PARTHIANS factsanddetails.com ; SILK ROAD DURING THE TANG DYNASTY ( A.D. 618 – 907 ) factsanddetails.com ; MONGOLS AND THE SILK ROAD factsanddetails.com ; SILK ROAD, BYZANTIUM AND VENICE factsanddetails.com ; END OF THE SILK ROAD AND RISE OF THE EUROPEAN SILK INDUSTRY AND SILK ROAD TOURISM factsanddetails.com ; CARAVANS AND TRANSPORTATION ALONG THE SILK ROAD factsanddetails.com ; SILK ROAD AND BACTRIAN CAMELS AS CARAVAN ANIMALS factsanddetails.com ; CAMEL CHARACTERISTICS factsanddetails.com ; SILK ROAD AND RELIGION factsanddetails.com ; SPREAD OF BUDDHISM AND BUDDHIST ART ON THE SILK ROAD factsanddetails.com ; CHINA ’ S GIFTS TO THE WEST factsanddetails.com ; IDEAS INTRODUCED FROM CHINA TO THE WEST factsanddetails.com ; SILK, SILK WORMS, THEIR HISTORY AND PRODUCTION factsanddetails.com ; MONGOLS, CHRISTIANITY, NESTORIANS AND THE SILK ROAD factsanddetails.com

Silk Road Sea Routes

More silk and Silk Road goods are believed to have reached the West via sea routes than by overland routes. The independent Silk Road ocean routes were between amerind ports like Barbaricon, Barygaza and Muziris and Middle Eastern ports such as Muscat, Sur, Kane and Aden on the Arabian Sea and Muza and Berenike on the Red Sea. From the Middle East goods were transported overland to the Mediterranean Sea and then Europe. From India goods flowed to anf from Southeast Asia, the East Indies and China .

modest boats hugged the shore. boastfully boats sailed the seasonal worker monsoon winds, which carried boats eastbound to India in July, August and September and westbound from India to the Middle East in December, January and February. The largest teak-hull ships that plied these routes may have been 180 feet farseeing and adequate to of carrying cargo of 1,000 tons .
One of the greatest ancient Middle East ports was Bernelike on the Red Sea. In the 1990s archaeologists discovered this ancient city under the sands about 600 miles south of contemporary Suez, near the border of Egypt and Sudan. They found evidence of trade with Thailand and Java, and inscriptions in 11 languages including Greek, Hebrew Coptic and Sanskrit. It was surmised that the ships and crews largely came from India based on the presence of lots teak, a wood native to India and Southeast Asia .
Berenlike was founded in the third century B.C., rose in importance in the first century B.C. and was at its extremum in the A.D. first century. It was abandoned in the 3rd and 4th centuries and was reborn in the fifth century and thrived until it silted over in the sixth hundred. It was located far south of the Mediterranean because of unfavorable winds in the Red Sea .

Advantages of Silk Road Sea Routes

Around the A.D. seventh century, during the Tang Dynasty, 500 years before Marco Polo arrived in China, Silk Road domain routes fell into decline as ocean routes opened up between China and the Middle East. An extensive trade wind network between China, Southeast Asia, India and the Middle East was established by arabian traders. chinese coastal cities blossomed. Guangzhou in China had 200,000 foreign residents, including Arabs, Persians, Indians, Africans and Turks .
It is not difficult to see why the van routes were abandoned. They were punic and time devour. Merchants had to worry about bandits and pay bribes and commissions to middlemen and officials. Those that traverse western China passed through some of the most barren and inhospitable deserts on earth. When the going was easy thieves and bandits were a changeless threat .
Sea routes by contrast were faster and easier and there were fewer transactions and officials. A trader who purchased goods in the East could have control over the goods until they reached ports in the West and make greater profits by eliminating middlemen. The biggest risks with sea change of location were storms, disease and pirates .
Land routes began opening up again when the sea routes became dangerous as a result of pirates and the Mogols eliminated petit larceny states and local officials by creating a huge unify empire that stretched across Asia and Europe. Marco Polo traveled by both land and sea but reported more trouble when he traveled by sea .

Dhows in a port Dhows in a port

Chinese Trade with Asia

June Teufel Dreyer wrote in YaleGlobal : well before the arrival of the westerners, there had been a gradual shift away from tribute to trade. During the Ming dynasty, commercial transactions existed between the Ryukyus and parts of Southeast Asia. Private deal existed between China and Japan, even during the alleged sakokuperiod of the seventeenth century when Japan was theoretically closed to alien commerce. chinese court records from the late 1400s argue concern about trade growth. Despite serious consequences, including decapitation, by the fifteenth century, a trade organization had evolved that encompassed Southeast and North Asia. Since the earliest western office, the Portuguese, did not arrive until 1524, this undermines the contention that trade was imposed from the Occident. The presence of a sovereign arbiter might be useful in dispute liquidation, yet few would cede that function to Beijing. [ source : June Teufel Dreyer, YaleGlobal, from a longer wallpaper to be published by The Journal of Contemporary China, October 20, 2014 / ]
“ furthermore, the imposition of treaty trade [ after the Opium Wars ] did not necessarily result in a deterioration of the fortunes of states. research by Hamashita Takeshi shows that, far from being passive victims of avaricious alien powers, the western arrivals brought newfangled opportunities. Never actually powerless within the system, these states further increased their autonomy. In one sheath, in 1884, an envoy from Guangdong told the consul of Siam that stopping its tribute embassies to China was not justified under external law, thereby invoking both protection and craft systems. The consul replied by suggesting negotiations. Both parties saw their states as in a tributary kinship while simultaneously discussing a treaty between equals. The Koreans besides aggregate elements of treaty and trade systems to benefit their best interests .

History of the Maritime Silk Road

chinese envoys had been sailing through the indian Ocean to India since possibly the second hundred B.C., so far it was during the Tang dynasty that a potent chinese nautical presence could be found in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, into Persia, Mesopotamia ( sailing up the Euphrates River in contemporary Iraq ), Arabia, Egypt, Aksum ( Ethiopia ), and Somalia in the Horn of Africa. [ source : Wikipedia ]
According to UNESCO : “ The history of these maritime routes can be traced back thousands of years, to links between the Arabian Peninsula, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization. The early Middle Ages saw an expansion of this network, as sailors from the Arabian Peninsula forged new deal routes across the Arabian Sea and into the indian Ocean. indeed, maritime trade links were established between Arabia and China from a early as the eighth century AD. [ reference : UNESCO ~ ]
“ Technological advances in the skill of navigation, in astronomy, and besides in the techniques of embark construct combined to make long-distance sea travel increasingly practical. alert coastal cities grew up around the most frequently visited ports along these routes, such as Zanzibar, Alexandria, Muscat, and Goa, and these cities became affluent centres for the exchange of goods, ideas, languages and beliefs, with large markets and continually changing populations of merchants and sailors .
“ In the late fifteenth hundred, the portuguese internet explorer, Vasco da Gama, navigated round the Cape of Good Hope, thereby connecting european sailors with these South East asian nautical routes for the first time and initiating direct european involvement in this trade. By the 16th and 17th centuries, these routes and their lucrative deal had become topic of fierce rivalries between the Portuguese, Dutch, and British. The conquest of ports along the maritime routes brought both wealth and security, as they efficaciously governed the passage of nautical trade and besides allowed ruling powers to claim monopolies on these alien and highly sought goods, adenine well as gathering the substantial taxes levied on merchant vessels. ” ~

Ancient Sea Trade with China

The people in the Philippines had been trading with the Chinese over a long period of fourth dimension long before the spanish arrive. Phil Greco, a Los-Angeles-based entrepreneur, has salvaged more than 10,000 pieces of chinese porcelain—some of them 2,000 years old and others from the Song and Ming dynasties— from 16 embark bust up sites off the Philippine islands of Panay, Mindanao and the Calamian Group, and auctioned them off in New York. Many of the pieces are in surprisingly thoroughly stipulate .
Greco has insured his collection of porcelain at $ 20 million but their value is strange. He found the sites with the aid of local anesthetic fisherman and harvested the pottery using divers with weights and lines rather than tanks. In many cases the shipwrecks were embedded in coral reefs and required a well amount of workplace to extract. Archeologists and the filipino politics accuse Greco of sack .
chinese traders from what is now Fujian province began arriving in the Philippines in the tenth hundred. natural resources from the jungle inside of the Philippines were traded for goods from China and Southeast Asia .
According to lone Planet : “ The chinese became the first foreigners to do business with the islands they called MaI adenine early as the second century AD, although the first recorded chinese dispatch to the Philippines was in AD 982. Within a few decades, taiwanese traders were regular visitors to towns along the coasts of Luzon, Mindoro and Sulu, and by around AD 1100 travellers from India, Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Siam ( Thailand ) and Japan were besides including the islands on their barter runs. gold was by then big business in Butuan ( on the northern coast of Mindanao ), chinese settlements had sprung up in Manila and on Jolo, and japanese merchants were buying shop quad in Manila and North Luzon. [ source : alone Planet = ]
“ For several centuries this peaceful trade agreement thrived. Despite the island ‘s long-familiar riches, the inhabitants were never directly threatened by their powerful asian trade partners. The keystone, peculiarly in the font of China, was delicacy. Throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, the tribal leaders of the Philippines would make regular visits to Peking ( Beijing ) to honour the chinese emperor. ” =

Seaports and Maritime Trade During the Tang Dynasty (618-907)

During the Tang dynasty ( 618-907 ), thousands of foreigners came and lived in numerous chinese cities for trade and commercial ties with China, including Persians, Arabs, Hindu Indians, Malays, Bengalis, Sinhalese, Khmers, Chams, Jews and nestorian Christians of the Near East, and many others. In 748, the Buddhist monk Jian Zhen described Guangzhou as a bustling mercantile center where many big and impressive foreign ships came to dock. He wrote that “ many big ships came from Borneo, Persia, Qunglun ( Indonesia/Java ) … with … spices, pearls, and tire piled up batch high ”, as written in the Yue Jue Shu ( Lost Records of the State of Yue ). In 851 the arab merchant Sulaiman al-Tajir observed the manufacture of chinese porcelain in Guangzhou and admired its diaphanous quality. He besides provided a description of Guangzhou ‘s mosque, its granaries, its local anesthetic government administration, some of its written records, the treatment of travelers, along with the manipulation of ceramics, rice-wine, and tea. [ reservoir : Wikipedia + ]
During the An Lushan Rebellion Arab and Persian pirates burned and looted Guangzhou in 758, and foreigners were massacred at Yangzhou in 760. The Tang government reacted by shutting the port of Canton down for roughly five decades, and foreign vessels docked at Hanoi alternatively. however, when the port reopened it continued to thrive. In another bloody episode at Guangzhou in 879, the taiwanese rebel Huang Chao sacked the city, and purportedly slaughtered thousands of native Chinese, along with extraneous Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Muslims in the process. Huang ‘s rebellion was finally suppressed in 884. [ reservoir : Wikipedia + ]

“ Vessels from Korean Silla, Balhae and Hizen Province of Japan were all involved in the Yellow Sea trade, which Silla dominated. After Silla and Japan reopened renewed hostilities in the late seventh century, most japanese maritime merchants chose to set voyage from Nagasaki towards the mouth of the Huai River, the Yangzi River, and even as army for the liberation of rwanda south as the Hangzhou Bay in arrange to avoid korean ships in the Yellow Sea. In order to sail back to Japan in 838, the japanese embassy to China procure nine ships and sixty korean sailors from the korean wards of Chuzhou and Lianshui cities along the Huai River. It is besides known that chinese trade ships traveling to Japan set sail from the assorted ports along the coasts of Zhejiang and Fujian provinces .

Maritime Silk Road Trade During the Tang Dynasty (618-907)

The Chinese engaged in large-scale production for oversea export by at least the time of the Tang. This was proven by the discovery of the Belitung shipwreck, a silt-preserved shipwreck arabian dhow in the Gaspar Strait near Belitung, which had 63,000 pieces of Tang ceramics, silver medal, and amber ( including a Changsha bowl autograph with a date : “ 16th day of the seventh calendar month of the second class of the Baoli reign ”, or 826, roughly confirmed by radiocarbon date of star anise at the bust up ). [ source : Wikipedia + ]
Beginning in 785, the chinese began to call regularly at Sufala on the East African seashore in orderliness to cut out Arab middlemen, with diverse contemporary chinese sources giving detail descriptions of deal in Africa. The official and geographer Jia Dan ( 730–805 ) wrote of two common ocean deal routes in his day : one from the seashore of the Bohai Sea towards Korea and another from Guangzhou through Malacca towards the Nicobar Islands, Sri Lanka and India, the eastern and northerly shores of the Arabian Sea to the Euphrates River. +
In 863 the chinese author Duan Chengshi ( d. 863 ) provided a detail description of the slave trade, ivory deal, and ambergris trade in a country called Bobali, which historians hint was Berbera in Somalia. In Fustat ( old Cairo ), Egypt, the fame of chinese ceramics there led to an enormous demand for taiwanese goods ; hence Chinese often traveled there ( this continued into later periods such as Fatimid Egypt ). From this time menstruation, the arab merchant Shulama once wrote of his admiration for taiwanese seafaring junks, but noted that their draft was excessively deep for them to enter the Euphrates River, which forced them to ferry passengers and cargo in small boats. Shulama besides noted that chinese ships were frequently very big, with capacities improving to 600–700 passengers. +

Maritime Trade During the Song Dynasty

According to Columbia University ’ second Asia for Educators : “ Trade between the Song dynasty and its northern neighbors was stimulated by the payments Song made to them. The song set up oversee markets along the border to encourage this deal. chinese goods that flowed north in large quantities included tea, silk, copper coins ( widely used as a currentness outside of China ), paper and printed books, porcelain, lacquerware, jewelry, rice and early grains, ginger and other spices. The retort flow included some of the silver medal that had originated with the Song and the horses that Song urgently needed for its armies, but besides other animals such as camel and sheep, a well as goods that had traveled across the Silk Road, including very well indian and irani cotton fabric, cherished gems, incense, and perfumes. [ source : asia for Educators, Columbia University, Consultants Patricia Ebrey and Conrad Schirokauer afe.easia.columbia.edu/song ]
“ There was besides vigorous ocean deal with Korea, Japan, and lands to the south and southwesterly. From great coastal cities such as Quanzhou boats carrying taiwanese goods plied the oceans from Japan to east Africa. ( The major port of Quanzhou that dominated trade in the Song dynasty is not to be confused with Guangzhou. Guangzhou, located further south on the taiwanese seashore, did not become an authoritative port until the Qing dynasty, when it was known to european traders as “ Canton. ”
“ During Song times nautical barter for the first meter exceeded overland foreign trade. The song government sent missions to Southeast asian countries to encourage their traders to come to China. chinese ships were seen all throughout the amerind Ocean and began to displace indian and arab merchants in the South Seas. Shards of Song Chinese porcelain have been found as far off as eastern Africa .
“ chinese ships were larger than the ships of most of their competitors, such as the Indians or Arabs, and in many ways were technologically quite advanced. In 1225 the superintendent of customs at Quanzhou, named Zhao Rukua ( Zhao Rugua or Chao Ju-kua, 1170-1231 ), wrote an report of the countries with which chinese merchants traded and the goods they offered for sale. Zhao ‘s book, Zhufan Zhi ( normally translated as “ Description of the Barbarians ” ), includes sketches of major trading cities from Srivijaya ( modern Indonesia ) to Malabar, Cairo, and Baghdad. Pearls were said to come from the Persian Gulf, bone from Aden, myrrh from Somalia, pepper from Java and Sumatra, cotton from the assorted kingdoms of India, and so on .
“ much money could be made from the sea deal, but there were besides capital risks, so investors normally divided their investment among many ships, and each embark had many investors behind it. In 1973 a Song-era ship was excavated off the south China coast. It had been shipwrecked in 1277. seventy-eight feet retentive and 29 feet broad, the ship had twelve bulkheads and still held the evidence of some of the luxury objects that these Song merchants were importing : more than 5,000 pounds of fragrant wood from Southeast Asia, pepper, betel nut, cowries, tortoiseshell, cinnabar, and ambergris from Somalia. ”
On the importance of nautical trade, Lynda Noreen Shaffer wrote : “ The fresh importance of the confederacy [ of China ] besides encouraged China to face south toward the southerly Ocean ( the South China Sea, the indian Ocean, and parts between ) for the first clock time, and chinese nautical capabilities developed steadily from the twelfth century to the fifteenth. ” [ Source : Lynda Noreen Shaffer, In “ A Concrete Panoply of Intercultural Exchange : Asia in World History, ” in Asia in Western and World History, edited by Ainslie T. Embree and Carol Gluck ( Armonk, N.Y. : M.E. Sharpe, 1997 ), 840 ]

Southern Song (1127-1279) Maritime Trade

According to the National Palace Museum, Taipei : “ In the Southern Song period, communication in art and polish with foreign lands occurred not merely through commute among people and goods with the Jin dynasty to the north, but besides in the development of trade with areas to the southeast and southwest. Of particular importance was the expansion of extraneous deal via ocean routes. With the ascend of large harbors dealing in foreign trade at Guangzhou, Quanzhou, Lin’an, and Mingzhou ( Ningbo, Zhejiang ), the area of trade wind expanded to the South China Sea and west to ampere far as Persia, the Mediterranean Sea, and East Africa. The development of Chan ( Zen ) Buddhist paint and calligraphy was besides an significant link for the go around of song culture. [ beginning : National Palace Museum, Taipei \=/ ]
“ The Southern Song was a fourth dimension of commerce, with newspaper money in wide circulation equally good as gold, silver leaves or ingots being common currencies, whereas its copper coins went beyond the borders and became the key medium of exchange in many surrounding nations. Through the frontier trade posts, the jewelry and porcelain of the Jin State arrived in the Jiangnan and huge quantities of tea, silk, and herb of the Southern Song shipped north. Jin and Song as a result shared kindred intent artistically and literarily. Sea routes besides took taiwanese trade far and across-the-board to many other asian countries ; foreign merchants reaching the shores of China in return brought enriching cultural messages. At the same prison term, the Taiwan Island and its nearby islets saw the coming and going of the Southern Song traders ; their footprints are inactive here today for us to reminisce about a glorious past. ” \=/
Dr. Robert Eno of Indiana University wrote : “ “ Economic activity and the rising demand for goods was a major spur to scientific and technical creativity, and the foremost historian of the history of skill in China has maintained that about every core invention of chinese skill traces its origins or a meaning invention to the Song period. For exemplar, the rising output of goods in the South created incentives for the development of nautical trade wind, so that chinese goods could reach new markets afield. The previous Silk Route was no longer available to the Song, and, in any event, climate changes had made it much less hospitable to caravan travel than had been the character during the Tang. so for the beginning clock time in chinese history, the merchant class turned towards the sea as a potential commercial highway. Responding to this motivation, craftsmen applied known technology to create the maritime compass, which allowed ships to navigate ampere far as the Red Sea, to trade with Middle Eastern markets. Shipbuilding became a major industry, and a host of inventions led to the construction of technologically advance ships, adaptable to both commercial and military uses. ” [ Source : Robert Eno, Indiana University indiana.edu /+/ ]

China, Trade and the Philippines

The spanish had initially hoped to turn the Philippines into another Spice Island but they soon found that the island ’ s dirt, terrain and climate were not suited for growing spices. Mining opportunities did not give themselves as they did in Latin America. Trade was stubbled upon sort of by accident .
In 1571, the Spaniards rescued some taiwanese sailors whose sampans sunk off the Philippines and helped them get back to China. The adjacent year the grateful Chinese returned the favor in the form of a trade vessel filled with gifts of silk, porcelain and other chinese goods. This ship was sent east and arrived in Mexico in 1573, and its cargo ultimately made it to Spain, where people liked what they saw and a demand for chinese goods was born .
Manila became the center of a major craft network that funneled goods from Southeast Asia, Japan, Indonesia, India and specially China to Europe. Spain developed and maintained a monopoly over the transpacific trade route. The trade wind became the primary reason for the universe of the Philippines. Development of the archipelago was largely neglected .
The most important beginning of goods for the spanish in the Philippines was China. For a while the Spaniards maintained a trade military post on China but for the most function they relied on chinese intermediaries to bring goods to Manila. About 30 or 40 junks, load with goods arrived in the Philippines from China a year. Over time the Chinese not merely dominate trade but besides dominated many of the trades, such as shipbuilding, on which deal was based, and outnumbered the spanish .
The Chinese were very enterprising, sometimes besides much for their own beneficial. A spanish trader named Diego de Bobadilla wrote : “ A Spaniard who lost his nose through a sealed illness, sent for a Chinaman to make him one wood, in order to hide the disfigurement. The workman made him thus good a intrude that the Spaniard in great please paid him liberally, giving him 20 cape verde escudo. The Chinaman, attracted by the ease with which he made that amplification, loaded a all right boatload of wooden noses the future year and returned to Manila. ”

Indonesia Trade and the Influence of China

medieval Sumatra was known as the “ Land of Gold. ” The rulers were reportedly then rich they threw solid amber stripe into a pool every night to show their wealth. Sumatra was a source of cloves, camphor, capsicum, tortoiseshell, aloe wood, and sandalwood—some of which originated elsewhere. arabian mariners feared Sumatra because it was regarded as a home of cannibals. Sumatra is believed to be the site of Sinbad ’ sulfur ladder in with cannibals .
Sumatra was the first region of Indonesia to have contact with the away global. The Chinese came to Sumatra in the sixth hundred. arab traders went there in the ninth century and Marco Polo stopped by in 1292 on his ocean trip from China to Persia. Initially Arab Muslims and Chinese dominated trade. When the center of baron shifted to the port towns during the sixteenth hundred Indian and Malay Muslims dominated trade .
Traders from India, Arabia and Persia purchased indonesian goods such as spices and chinese goods. early sultanates were called “ harbor principalities. ” Some became rich from controlling the trade of certain products or serving as way stations on trade routes .
The Minangkabau, Acehnese and Batak— coastal people in Sumatra— dominated trade on the west slide of Sumatra. The Malays dominated trade in the Malacca Straits on the eastern side of Sumatra. Minangkabau culture was influenced by a series of 5th to fifteenth hundred Malay and Javanese kingdoms ( the Melayu, Sri Vijaya, Majapahit and Malacca ) .
After the Mongol incursions in 1293, the early Majapahitan state did not have official relations with China for a coevals, but it did adopt Chinese copper and star coins ( “ pisis ” or “ picis ” ) as official currentness, which quickly replaced local gold and flatware coinage and played a function in the expansion of both inner and external barter. By the second half of the fourteenth hundred, Majapahit ’ s growing appetite for chinese luxury goods such as silk and ceramics, and China ’ s demand for such items as pepper, nutmeg, cloves, and aromatic woods, fueled a burgeoning trade .
China besides became politically involved in Majapahit ’ s relations with restless vassal powers ( Palembang in 1377 ) and, before long, even inner disputes ( the Paregreg War, 1401–5 ). At the time of the celebrated state-sponsored voyages of chinese Grand Eunuch Zheng He between 1405 and 1433, there were bombastic communities of chinese traders in major trading ports on Java and Sumatra ; their leaders, some appointed by the Ming Dynasty ( 1368–1644 ) court, often married into the local population and came to play key roles in its affairs.

trope Sources : Marion Kaplan, Nabataea.com, Wikimedia Commons
textbook Sources : Robert Eno, Indiana University /+/ ; Asia for Educators, Columbia University afe.easia.columbia.edu ; University of Washington ’ s Visual Sourcebook of Chinese Civilization, depts.washington.edu/chinaciv /=\ ; National Palace Museum, Taipei \=/ ; Library of Congress ; New York Times ; Washington Post ; Los Angeles Times ; China National Tourist Office ( CNTO ) ; Xinhua ; China.org ; China Daily ; Japan News ; Times of London ; National Geographic ; The New Yorker ; Time ; Newsweek ; Reuters ; Associated Press ; Lonely Planet Guides ; Compton ’ second Encyclopedia ; Smithsonian magazine ; The Guardian ; Yomiuri Shimbun ; AFP ; Wikipedia ; BBC. many sources are cited at the end of the facts for which they are used .
last updated August 2021