Persians, Arabs and Muslims
China ’ s nautical contact with western Asia – the western Regions ( xiyu 西域 ), as they are often referred to in chinese sources – hanker predated the coming of the Muslim merchants. Textual and archaeological tell points to the universe of nautical trade ties connecting China with southeast Asia, southerly India and Rome in the west angstrom early as the first gear century C.E., a department of commerce in which chinese silks, Roman looking glass, wine and coinage, and pearls, ivory and peppers from diverse parts of maritime Asia were actively traded. In the period following the early third-century descend of the Han empire, and particularly during the fourth through sixth centuries when China was divided into northerly and southerly dynasties, taiwanese ports hosted merchants from Kunlun 崑崙 ( in Malaya ) and southerly India ampere well as Buddhist monks who had made their way from India. Trade with the distant west, however, was the domain of irani traders from the Sassanid empire, which ruled a huge swathe of western Asia from 224 to 651, and over the course of that period they extended their activities from the indian Ocean east into China ( Figure 1.1 ).
( from Hariri ’ s Maqamat. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris Ms. Arabe 5847 )It is impossible to date the arrival of Persian merchants in China with any precision. The dynastic histories describe In the begin of fall [ of 671, in Chang ’ an ] I met unexpectedly an imperial envoy, Feng Xiaoquan of Kongzho ; by the aid of him I came to the town of Guangdong, where I fixed the date of meet with the owner of a iranian transport to embark for the south… At last I embarked from the seashore of Guangzhou ( Canton ), in the eleventh calendar month in the second year of the Xianfeng period ( 671 A.D. ) and sailed for the Southern Sea. It is impossible to date the arrival of irani merchants in China with any preciseness. The dynastic histories describe tribute envoys arriving from Persia in 455, 530, 533 and 535, but they about surely traveled by land. only in 671, half a hundred into the Tang, do we have authoritative testify of persian seafarers in China, in the form of a travel account by the taiwanese Buddhist pilgrim Yijing 義淨 : From a half-century late ( 717 ), we learn of an indian buddhist who sailed in a convoy of 35 irani ships from Ceylon to Palembang ( Srivijaya ), finally arriving in Guangzhou in 720, quite possibly being met my merchants such as those in Figure 1.2. A chinese explanation by a chinese monk from 727 of irani commercial activities asserts that they … are accustomed to sail into the western Sea, and they enter the Southern Sea making for Ceylon to obtain all kinds of precious objects. furthermore they head for the K ’ un-lun [ Kunlun ] Country ( Malaya ) to get amber. furthermore, they set sail for the Land of Han, going directly to Canton, where they obtain respective kinds of silk gauze and jam. The chinese monk Ganjin ( Jian Zhen 鋻真 ) describes in his travel diary being shipwrecked in southern Hainan in 748, where he encountered a local warlord who reportedly captured “ two or three iranian ships ” each year and enslaved their crews, a subject to which we will return .
( Macao Museum ) These references to iranian nautical betrothal in the China market are in full consonant with Edward Schafer ’ s portrayal of irani merchants in Tang dynasty tales, in which he argues that the persian merchant had become a common cultural figure in Tang China, stereotypically regarded as affluent, generous and at times something of a sorcerer, though Schafer besides makes the point that many of these merchants are described as support in the union and presumably came to China by land. Less clear, however, is how the persian presence in Tang China relates to the Muslim Umayyad ’ s conquest of the Sassanid empire in 651 and the subsequent arrival in China of Arabs and Islam. One can not overstate the transformative impact that the establish of Islam by Muhammad ( traditionally dated 622 ) and the subsequent rise of the Umayyad Caliphate ( 661–750 ) had upon westerly Asia, indeed upon the Eurasian and north african world. Their reverberations were surely felt in China. In the 660s the Tang court entertained two embassies from Firuz ( Pilusi 卑路斯 ), the son of the last Sasanian ruler Yezdegerd III, who had fled to Tokharestan ( Tuhuoluo 土火羅 ) and was soliciting taiwanese help in reviving the Sasanian cause. In the early 670s Firuz came to Chang ’ an himself and sought Chinese help in restoring his empire, and in reaction Emperor Gaozong sent him ( or his son Narses ; the sources differ on this ) with a chinese violence that was already being sent to the west, but in fact the Chinese impel never went beyond the Tarim Basin. More important than this concern sideshow was the brace stream of Umayyad envoys who came to Chang ’ an, beginning in 651 and continuing to 750. Although many of these were traditional tribute missions, respective in the early one-eighth century came demanding Tang submission, for the Muslim armies were engaged at this meter in their dramatic expansion through central Asia. Subsequent Umayyad helplessness together with the expansive extraneous policy of Emperor Xuanzong ( r. 712–756 ) allowed for a return of Tang baron in cardinal Asia, but that ended abruptly in 751 when a Tang army under the Korean general Gao Xianzhi 高仙芝 was defeated at the Battle of Talas ( near modern Tashkent ) by an arabian united states army of the newly established Abbasid caliphate ( 750–1258 ). The Abbasid caliph sent no fewer than twenty embassies to the Tang between 751 and 798, while a recently discovered grave stele indicates that the Tang sent at least one mission to the Abbasids. We besides have the reveal account by one Du Huan 杜環, a penis of Gao Xianzhi ’ s army who was captured by the Arabs at Talas and returned to China on a merchant ship to Guangzhou in 761. In his history of Kufa ( the initial capital of the Abbasids ) and Abbasid club he describes chinese painters, silk weavers and gold and silver craftsmen living and working there. The presence of arab merchants and Muslims in Tang China is more unmanageable to document, even though there is no doubt that both were there. If one excludes Arabs in non-Chinese armies and, of course, those associated with the Abbasids, Tang references to Arabs are scarce. There are a couple of mentions of arab merchants from Tang stories, such as one where a young man sells a fabulous pearl to an arab in the irani Bazaar of Guangzhou, and another in which “ A party of lord Arabs buy a purportedly valueless gem from a chinese temple. Their king had offered an emirate to its finder, for it had once belonged to the Arabs, who used it to bring forth urine in the desert. ” The Tang histories have only two sets of references ( in each case, from both the New and Old Tang Histories ), albeit very crucial ones, to Arabs in southeast China. The first documents the 758 raid and brief capture of the city of Guangzhou by Arabs and Persians that was described at the begin of this chapter. The second recounts the massacre of “ respective thousand ” Arab and persian merchants in Yangzhou in 760 by rampaging politics troops that had occupied and looted the city. We will revisit these significant incidents below ; here, I would note the coupling of Persians and Arabs by the taiwanese authors. This may reflect some apprehensible confusion by chinese writers as to who these foreigners were, for “ bosi ” and “ dashi ” were first and foremost the names that were given to distant countries and not the terms that they normally applied to the foreigners living among them. In fact, the most coarse terms used to describe foreign merchants in Tang China were “ hu ” 胡, a term most normally applied to Persians but besides to Tibetans, Turks and other pastoral nomads, and “ sports fan ” 番 ( alternately, 蕃 or 藩 ), typically used for foreigners or aliens and much found in port cities, and combinations such as “ fan-guests ” ( fanke 番客 ) and “ hu-merchants ” ( hushang 胡商 ). Without a doubt these terms or ethnonyms all necessitate degrees of cultural pigeonhole, a subject to which we will return, but the point to be made hera is that these were the terms used for most of the evidence relating to the west asian merchants in the ports of China. There is besides argue to believe that Persians and Arabs made common cause in China. During the century following the Abbasid get the better of of the Sasanians, a march of conversion was afoot that resulted in the huge majority of Persians converting to Islam by the in-between of the one-ninth hundred. We besides know that the Muslim Persian Samanid empire ( 819–999 ), a vassal state of the Abbasids in eastern Iran, was actively engaged in nautical department of commerce. evening at the beginning of the Abbasid period, we have evidence from Du Huan about the commingle of Arabs and Persians. He writes that, in Dashi ( the Abbasid caliphate ), “ Arabs and Persians are assorted and live together ” ( dashi bosi canza juzhi 大食波斯參雜居止 ). So it is reasonable to assume that as they began making their way to China by sea, arab merchants accompanied their persian counterparts and traveled on irani ships. thereafter, the number of Arabs undoubtedly increased, but, given the commingle of Persian and Arab merchants, it might be best to consider their presence in China as that of an Arab-Persian residential district .If Tang references to Arabsearly. The first Chinese description of Islam The gentlemen and women of this topographic point are tall and well-built. They wear fine and clean garments, and their manners are ennoble and elegant. When women go outdoors, they must cover up their faces with veils. Five times a day all the people, whether base or baronial, beg to Heaven. They eat kernel as a religious ceremony, and they consider the killing of animals merit-worthy. They wear silver belts decorated with silver knives. They prohibit wine and music. When they quarrel, they do not come to blows. There is besides a entreaty hallway which holds tens of thousands. Every seven days the king attends the prayers, mounts a high gear seat and expounds the religious jurisprudence to the people, saying : “ Men ’ sulfur liveliness is very hard ; this is a means of Heaven that would not change. If you commit one of the keep up crimes – obscenity, kidnap, looting, intend actions, defame, self-gratification at the expense of others, cheating the inadequate and oppressing the humble – your sins are among the most flagitious. Those who are killed in struggle by the enemy will be reborn in Heaven ; those who kill the enemy will enjoy unlimited good luck ( on land ). ” If Tang references to Arabs are rare, those for Muslims are about nonexistent, tied though there is no doubt about their having been introduce in Tang China. We must first dismiss the intrigue but legendary accounts of Sa ’ d ibn Abi Waqqas ( Sahaba Saadi Gangesi 撒哈八撒阿的乾葛思 ), who, according to Ming and Qing accounts, made three trips to China, the first as an envoy from the Prophet in 629, and ultimately to Guangzhou where he built two mosques and was finally buried. Although an crucial part of chinese Muslim lore, there is no support for this floor from Tang sources, and it is furthermore highly farfetched that an companion of Muhammad would have made his way to China thatearly. The foremost chinese description of Islam of which I am aware comes from Du Huan, though it not named as a religion but rather presented as the religious practices of the Arabs : There are besides claims, chiefly in stele dating from the fourteenth century and beyond, of Tang origins for China ’ s most ancient mosques, namely those in Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Yangzhou, Quanzhou and Xi ’ an ( Tang Chang ’ an ), and besides for the Lingshan Holy Tomb ( Lingshan sheng mu 靈山聖墓 ) in Quanzhou. In none of these cases is there Tang attest for these early dates, and the scholarly consensus is that none of them predates the Song. There are, ultimately, Persian and Arabic sources claiming a Muslim presence in Tang China, and here we are more fortunate. The arabian doctor and geographer Sharaf al-Zaman al-Marzawi ( d. 1120 ) described a group of Shi ’ a Muslims fleeing Sunni persecution in Khurasan during the late Umayyad ( c. 740s ) who came to China and settled on an island in a river across from a large port ( a port that, Schafer speculates, was Guangzhou ) and continued in being there for some clock. While plausible – the Shi ’ ites in Khurasan suffered persecution by the Umayyads and could well have fled to China – the lack of any documentation from taiwanese sources leaves the floor ’ second veracity in doubt .Very different is the account of Sulayman the merchant reported that, in Khānfū, the meet locate of the merchants, there was a Muslim man appointed by the rule of China to settle cases arising between the Muslims who go to that region and that the chinese King would not have it otherwise. At the clock time of the ‘ Īds, this homo would lead the Muslims in prayer, deliver the sermon, and beg for the Sultan of the Muslims. The Iraki merchants, Sulayman added, never dispute any of the judgments issued by the holder of this function, and they all agree that he acts justly, in accordance with the Book of God, mighty and glorious is He, and with the laws of Islam. identical different is the report of Muslim merchants in Khanfu ( Guangzhou ) from the Akhbar al-Sin wa- ‘ l-Hind ( Account of on China and India ). This work is actually a collection of three documents with separate authors that was compiled by Abu Zayd al-Sirafi in 916. The account comes from a section written in 851 by an anonymous merchant who had been to India and quotes a merchant named Sulayman about China : This quotation, which is found in a collection of observations about China, is very like descriptions of Muslim merchant communities elsewhere in Asia, and is wide accepted as authentic. It is, to my cognition, the foremost reliable description of the practice of Islam in China, but describes it as a drill limited to the alien merchant community. As we shall see, that insulation of religious practice characterized Islam in the interface cities of China throughout the period covered by the bible. Abu Zayd al-Sirafi is besides responsible for our only explanation of an arabian in Tang China. Ibn Wahb al-Qurashi was a native of Basra and a member of the family of Muhammad who, after the sack of Basra by the Zanj in 871, went to Siraf. There he came across a embark departing for China, and on a caprice embarked. On arrival in Guangzhou or Khanfu, as it was known to the Arabs, he far decided to proceed to the capital in hope of an imperial hearing. Arriving after a travel of two months, he submitted petitions announcing himself as a descendant of the “ prophet of the Arabs. ” The emperor, in reception to his petitions, ordered the governor of Khanfu “ to make investigations and inquiries among the arab merchants about Ibn Wahb ’ s alleged kinship with the prophet of the Arabs. ” After receiving a plus composition, the emperor granted an consultation – described in detail and involving back-and-forth exchanges via the interpreter – which dealt with Islam and its prophets, the states of western Asia, the senesce of the world and Ibn Wahb ’ s reasons for coming to China. The emperor then plied him with gifts, ordered the use of post horses for his restitution to Khanfu, and instructed the governor there to treat him with honor until his deviation. Ibn Wahb farther gave Abu Zayd a description of Chang ’ an that included such realistic details as the east/west class between official households and merchants and commoners. This is a curious report. That an aged man – described as being of advanced years but with his senses integral – who was neither an emissary nor a merchant, but an individual whose claim to fame was his religious ancestry, would travel to China and then succeed spectacularly is implausible, and there are elements of the report that particularly defy impression. notably, it is unthinkable that the Tang emperor would say, as Ibn Wahb reports, that he esteems merely five kings : first base and foremost the king of Iraq, who is “ at the center of the world, ” with “ the other kings … ranged about him. ” however, other parts of the account have the resound of veracity, such as a signally accurate description of Chang ’ an, which Ibn Wahb provides to Sulayman. I would accept the basic delineate of the fib, but with the sympathize that it was creatively shaped for its Arab hearing. But in terms of our business about Arabs living in China, it is noteworthy that the merchants of Khanfu are represented as an established group who, when consulted about Ibn Wahb, are able to vouch for his identity .
The Way to China and Its Trade
It is noteworthy that the Tang–Abbasid trade existed at all. The sea path from Basra to Guangzhou was over 6000 miles in distance, complex and punic ( see Map 1 ). That a aim associate not lone existed but flourished during the Abbasid period is attributable to three factors. The first was the universe of a transport that was capable of making the ocean trip on a regular footing, namely the Arab dhow – known in southeast Asia as the Kunlun transport – characterized by sew rather than nailed planking and, until the eleventh hundred, the merely sea ship adequate to of such journeys. That such ships actually made their way to China has been demonstrated by two discoveries of shipwreck dhows of probably west-Asian lineage. The Belitung shipwreck, whose remarkable cargo of ceramics was described earlier, was discovered in 1998 off the coast of the island of Belitung, which lies between Sumatra and Borneo ( see Map 2 ). It has been dated to after 826 and, given its overwhelmingly chinese cargo, had distinctly come from China. then, in 2013, a signally well-preserved dhow was discovered in the Thai province of Samut Sakhon at the northern edge of the Gulf of Thailand. Known as the Phanom Surin shipwreck and preserved in a mangrove swamp that preserved timbers, ropes and wadding materials, it has been dated to the belated one-eighth hundred, and its cargo – while not large – was revealing. It included ceramics from Guangdong, the Mon-speaking areas of Thailand, and the Persian Gulf, and, most signally, an inscription on a irani clash in the irani Pahlavi script. The dedication, which reads “ Yazd-bozed ” – a proper name, presumably for the merchant aboard the ship or possibly the producer of the jars – is the earliest pahlavi dedication to be found in south, southeast or east Asia, and points to the function of irani merchants in the trade between western Asia and China. The two heads of west Asians – one incised onto a brick and the other terracotta – both discovered in Thailand and dating to the eighth century ( Figures 1.3 and 1.4 ), provide yet further evidence for a iranian presence in southeast Asia .
( courtesy of Fine Arts Department and John Guy )
( courtesy of Fine Arts Department and John Guy ) The second factor was the asian monsoon, an annual weather pattern that both facilitated and conditioned long-distance locomotion in asian waters. specifically, the preponderance of southwest-to-northeast winds in the summer months and northeast-to-southwest winds in the winter months did not merely facilitate west-to-east and east-to-west travel, respectively, but besides made possible the traversal of huge stretches of sea in the indian Ocean by significantly shortening travel times. Third was the craft itself, which was based upon the demands by the rulers and ruling classes of two great and comfortable empires for precious goods from the other goal of Asia. We shall return to this trade, which constituted the lifeblood of the maritime merchants. Suffice it to say that both textual and archaeological evidence hold witness to a critical and boom department of commerce. It should be stressed that west asian merchants were not alone in their commercial endeavors. From the Han into the early Tang, China ’ s most authoritative sea trade was with the states of southeasterly Asia, and in the port cities the Kunlun merchants of that region predominated. According to Wang Gungwu, by the mid-eighth century a transition was afoot in which the Kunlun merchants were giving way to Persians and Arabs with their long-distance trade wind, a change that became amply apparent in the one-ninth century. It should be stressed, however, that there was always an active trade with southeast Asia, most particularly with Srivijaya, the maritime exponent centered in easterly Sumatra, either in the course of travel between China and west Asia, as in the lawsuit of the two shipwrecks, or entirely between China and southeast Asia. By the ninth hundred, the cognition of how to accomplish this drawn-out ocean trip was sufficiently widespread to result in descriptions of the route in both Chinese and Arabic. In his “ Route to Foreign Countries across the Sea from Guangzhou ” ( Guangzhou tong haiyi dao 廣州通海夷道 ) from 801, the statesman and geographer Jia Dan 賈耽 ( 729–805 ) provided a highly accurate sailing travel guidebook from Guangzhou to Baghdad, not only with the chief route past Sumatra and Ceylon and on to the Persian Gulf, Basra and Baghdad, but besides providing alternate routes through southeast asian waters, and a far route skirting the arabian Peninsula and going devour to the northeastern coast of Africa. This path, which was excerpted from his now-lost 40-chapter geography of the world, was intelligibly based on the reports of mariners who had come to China, who had made their way to the capital, for Jia himself was not a traveler and had not even served in Guangzhou. american samoa valuable as Jia Dan ’ randomness travel guidebook is, the arabian accounts are more useful for our purposes, drawing immediately as they do on the roll up cognition of the west asian mariners. Both the anonymous traveler writing in 851 ( in An account of China and India ), whose description of the Muslims in Guangzhou was cited above, and the slightly later Book of Routes and Realms ( Kitab al-Masalik wa-l-mamalik ) of Ibn Khurradadbih ( d. 885 ) offer detail descriptions of the route from the Persian Gulf to Khanfu ( Guangzhou ). The geographic information offered by the two is similar, and while The Book of Routes and Realms is more scholarly and authoritative, we will use the Account of India and China, since, as an model of rihla or travelogue literature, it is more probably to reflect the information actually used by Arab and persian mariners. After describing the primary western destination Siraf ( where goods from al-Basra and al-Ubullah were transshipped ) and the sometimes-dangerous travel ( owing to pirates and reefs ) through the Persian Gulf, the ships cut across the ocean to the larboard of Kollam Malay on the southwestern coast of India, where large China-bound ships were assessed a bell of 1000 dirhams ( in contrast to other ships, which were assessed only 10 or 20 dirhams ) ( see Map 1 ). From there, the China-bound ship skirted the southerly slide of Ceylon, made for the Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal to replenish food and water, stopped at Kalah Bar in Malaya, passed through the Malacca Straits, made extra stops at the island of Tiyumah, Sanf in Champa and the nearby island of Sanf Fulau, and ultimately headed to Khanfu. The explanation farther notes that the confederacy China coast had a reputation for dangerous reefs and storms. The writer provided a general timetable for the wholly stumble : approximately a lunar month ( 29–30 days ) for each of the four leg of the trip, marked by Kollam Malay, Kalah Bar, Sanf and Khanfu. With stops, the solid trip would take around six months. The most fall feature of this report is how everyday it is. The path it describes was drawn-out and building complex but besides well known and frequently traveled. Khanfu was not the end of the road for many of the Arab and irani merchants who made their way to China. In its account of the road to China, The Book of Routes and Realms has merchants stopping first base at Luqin ( Annan or Hanoi ), then at Khanfu, then Khanju ( Quanzhou ), and then Qantu ( Yangzhou ) at the beginning of the Grand Canal. Yangzhou was a major department store for inter-Asian trade, with substantial populations of Arabs and Persians, which will be discussed late. There is evidence, furthermore, that persian merchants were active not alone in the ports but in many Tang cities, this in score contrast to the Song time period, when extraneous merchants were restricted to designated port cities .It was, of course, the wealth of exotic and much As for what can be exported from the Eastern Sea, from China we obtain white silk ( harīr ), coloured silk ( firand ) and damasked silk ( kīmkhāw ), musk, aloes-wood, saddles, marten fur ( sammūr ), porcelain, sīlbanj [ a narcotic drug ], cinnamon and galingale [ khūlanjān, a spiciness and medicine ]. From Wāqwāq we get gold and ebony ; from India, respective kinds of aloes-wood, sandalwood, camphor and camphor-water, nutmeg, cloves, cardamom, cubeb, coconuts, cloth made with pot, fabric made with cotton velvet, elephants. From Sarandīb all sorts of rubies and like stones, diamonds, pearls, crystal and emery used in polishing metals ; from Malay and Sindān, pepper ; from Killah, the can called qala ’ y ; from the Southern regions, sappan-wood for tanning and dye, and dādhī [ hypericum, used for making wine stronger and more aromatic ] ; from Sind, qust [ an aromatic plant ], rotang and bamboo. It was, of course, the wealth of exotic and much sought goods that caused this travel. Consider Ibn Khurradadbih ’ s catalogue of the goods to be had from across nautical Asia in The Book of Routes and Realms Among this overplus of goods, two stand out. always since Roman times, silks from China had been highly sought after throughout the eurasian universe, and the fact that Ibn Khurradadbih begins his number with three varieties of taiwanese silk bears witness to the demand for it in Abbasid society. Second is porcelain, which was described by the writer of Account on India and China : “ They have excellent cohesive green clay, out of which they manufacture goblets angstrom thin as flasks, through which sparkle one sees the foam of water system can be seen. ” however, if the Belitung shipwreck is any scout, porcelain constituted only a modest assign of the ceramic goods that made their room west. Among the 60,000 artifacts excavated from this shipwreck, 400 were porcelain, which Regina Krahl identifies as referring to the translucent Xing ware from Hebei, but there were besides green-splashed wares from Henan, celadon from Zhejiang, and, most importantly, stoneware from Changsha in Hunan, of which there were 57,500 objects, many of these clearly intended for west asian pulmonary tuberculosis. These include white consume cups and saucers of a expressive style widely imitated in west Asia ; blue-and-white wares from the Gongxian kiln in Henan, whose cobalt-blue was produced using cobalt presumably imported by Arab or irani merchants ; and Guangdong jars ( Dusun jars ) – large vessels in which were stored smaller ceramic pieces, leave ingots and fruit star anise – which have been found across maritime Asia, including one excavated from the floor of the Friday Mosque in Siraf and dating to 841 CE. Some of the bowl from Changsha besides have what appears to be approximately copied Arabic handwriting. According to Chen Dasheng 陳達生, Tang kiln in the Hunanese city of Changsha were using imported Muslim ceramics as prototypes for the bulk production of ceramics, including some with Arabic inscriptions, “ expressly for export to foreign Muslim markets through the port of Yangzhou. ” As for imports into China, Han Yu 韓愈 ( 768–824 ) is evocative : “ The commodities of the out nations arrive casual : pearl and aromatics, rhinoceros and elephant [ horn and bone ], tortoise shells and curious objects – these flood in the Middle Kingdom beyond the possibility of use. ” We must note that while demand was great for sealed commodities such as frankincense and myrrh, which came entirely from western Asia, the majority of those luxury goods for which the demand was apparently insatiate had a variety of sources across the Southern Seas and occasionally in China a well. These included rhinoceros horn, bone, kingfisher feathers and, in fact, many of the goods that Ibn Khurradadbih attributes to India and southeast Asia. Yet increasingly during the Tang it was the Arab and persian merchants who arrived with them at chinese ports. special note should be made of pearls, for which there was a ready market in both east and west. Since pearl beds were to found throughout asian waters, no region had a monopoly on them. however, given the great respect in which pearls – particularly big and lustrous pearls – had across Asia, and their portability, it is not storm that they played a meaning role in international commerce. indeed, as Edward Schafer has shown, irani merchants in Tang China were typically regarded as very affluent and bearers of ( or seekers after ) valuable pearls, not infrequently pearls with charming qualities ascribed to them. We have no manner of even estimating the measure or value of the deal that flowed between taiwanese ports and the Persian Gulf during the Tang. During his tenure as prefect of Guangzhou, which began in 769, the refusal by Li Mian 李勉 ( 715–786 ) to extort bribes was credited with increasing the issue of ships arriving from the western Regions from four to five per class to over forty. This development occurred when Guangzhou was calm suffering from the aftereffects of the Arab-Persia raid of 758. But the corruption to which it alludes was ongoing ; Jitsuzō Kuwabara has amply documented the repute of a posting in Guangzhou for allowing the accumulation of fabulous wealth, and that might be seen as another measure of the capital value of the trade. From the west asian english, we can besides cite the Kitab ‘ Aja ’ ib al-Hind ( “ Book of the Wonders of India, ” c. 950 ), a travel script by the sea captain ( nakhuda ) Buzurg ibn Shariyar ( c. 952 ) that tells of Ishaq bin Yahuda, a jewish merchant from Siraf ( Oman ) who visited China between 882 and 912, and who upon his recurrence had transformed his initial capital of 200 dinars into “ a boatload of musk, silk, porcelain, jewels and other precious-stones and other fantastic taiwanese merchandise. The musk, silk and porcelain alone were reported to have been worth 3 million dinars. ” Buzurg besides relates an report of an consultation that Ishaq had with the rule of Lubin ( a Chinese province ), at which the rule asked him if he had seen such wealth as was apparent in his court and besides addressed Ishaq as ya ‘ arabi ( Arab ). apart from the attest that Ishaq ’ s history offers for the involvement of jewish merchants in the China trade – something confirmed by accounts of a massacre in 879 that will be discussed late – a narrative like this, with its air of wealth in both China and Siraf, surely helped establish the promise of the China grocery store as a station where fabulous profits could be gained .
Tang Supervision of Maritime Trade
Throughout the chivalric nautical world, local rulers and governments had a natural interest in the merchant ships that arrived on their shores, and their policies included clientele of the traders, tax, forced buy and spare deal. In many cases the foreign communities themselves acted on behalf of the local rulers. Although he is writing about a later period, André Wink ’ randomness psychoanalysis is apposite : “ More much than not distinctive diaspora communities like the Badija Naidus, the Sayyids of Golconda or the Mappillas of Malabar appear to have been rooted in the gross collection and even to have been able to obtain access to court politics. ” even in westerly Asia, with its highly developed political institutions, governmental interest in maritime deal was confined chiefly to a concern for tax income and the necessitate for specific goods, and was little necessitate in the encouragement of trade wind. In Tang China, by line, the function of the politics was far more central. According to Wang Zhenping, the Tang cardinal politics was theoretically not involved in foreign barter. Rather, barter was oversee by the governors of Guangzhou ( for the south sea deal ; trade with Korea and Japan was largely channeled through Yangzhou ), and on a more ad hoc basis by “ commissioners for deal with alien ships ” ( shibo shi 市舶使 ), who were typically eunuch. The latter represented the compel interests of the imperial palace and imperial kin in the luxuries provided by the maritime barter, and, as Edward Schafer has noted, these eunuch officials were ill-famed for their exactions and corruption. indeed, therefore outstanding was the function that they played that the generator of the Account of India and China, writing in 851, described eunuchs governing Guangzhou alongside the civil governors .That said, to foreign eyes the Chinese approach to imports seemed highly organized and even generous, as can be seen in the description of the Chinese procedures in Account of India and China:
angstrom soon as the ocean merchants put in to harbor, the taiwanese take charge of their goods and transport them to warehouses, guaranteeing indemnity for up to six months, that is, until the final of the sea merchants arrives. then three-tenths of the goods are taken in kind, as duty, and the remainder is returned to the merchants. Any goods that the ruler needs he besides takes, but he gives the very highest price for them and pays immediately, so he does no harm to the merchants. Among the goods he buys is camphor, paying fifty fakkūjs for a maund, the fakkūj being a thousand bull coins. The same camphor, if the rule had not bought it, would be worth only half that price on the open market. That said, to foreign eyes the taiwanese approach to imports seemed highly organized and evening generous, as can be seen in the description of the chinese procedures in Account of India and China : contemporaneous chinese accounts are well more critical, with an emphasis on the abuses of local anesthetic officials and eunuchs. To quote an imperial decree from 834, unusual in addressing the emergence of nautical deal : The extraneous ships from the Southern Seas are come from distant countries, expecting the merciful treatment of our Kingdom. Therefore, the foreigners should of course be treated with kindness, so as to excite their gratitude. We hear, on the contrary, that of late years the local anesthetic officers are apt to over-tax them, and the articulation of resentment is said to have reached to the alien countries. It is needle to say, we are striving to lead a life of frugality and abstinence. How should we desire the curious alien things ? We deeply feel good-for-nothing that those foreign peoples should be so restless, and even feel that the present mode of taxation is besides heavy for them. We should allow them indulgence, so as to invite the good-will of those peoples. To the foreigners living at Lingnan, Fujian, and Yangzhou, the viceroys of these provinces should offer consolations, and except for the already fixed anchorage-duties, the court-purchase and the regular presents, no extra taxes should be inflicted on them, allowing them to engage freely in their deal. Whether such imperial attitudes had much shock is questionable, for taiwanese sources suggest that the actions of the early on ninth-century prefect and Lingnan military governor Wang E 王鍔 were more representative : On arrival of trade-ships from the western and southern seas, Wang E bought up all goods that were profitable, by means of which his class property exceeded that of the public treasury. He sent out every day more than ten boatfuls of horns, tusks, pearls and shells, which he had bought, under the appoint of common goods through all seasons without break.
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however different their perspectives, Arab and chinese authors are agreed on the major role played by officials in the discussion of maritime trade, and that was a fact that stood in sharp contrast to early ports of Asia and informed the lives of the merchant communities residing in the ports of China .
Merchant Life in China
As the decree of 834 clearly demonstrates, a total of cities served as the terminal for ships arriving from the Nanhai ( South Seas ) and hosted alien communities, though information about most of those communities is frustratingly sparse. We have already encountered Yangzhou, with its strategic placement at the entrance to the Grand Canal, as the site of the 760 slaughter of Persians and Arabs angstrom well as the port from which Chinese-manufactured Muslim ceramics were exported. We besides know that Jiaozhou ( near modern Hanoi but then the southernmost port of the Tang empire ) was an important port of call for Arab and Persian ships coming to China – Ibn Khurradadbih described Luqin, presumably Jiaozhou or its port, as having “ chinese stones, chinese silk, chinese porcelains of good quality, and rice ” and besides that it prospered in the years following the persian and arabian raid of Guangzhou in 758. For a glimpse of what liveliness was like for the nautical merchants in China, we must turn to the department store of Khanfu ( Guangzhou ). It was, in the words of Wang Gungwu, a big deal village or frontier settlement, inhabited by merchant-adventurers, extraneous traders, and non-Han peoples of Guangdong, a city in which Han Chinese were a distinct minority. Writing in the tenth century, al-Masʿudi described the noteworthy geographic go around of the merchant community in Khanfu in the mid-ninth hundred. Within the city “ there were buildings [ with occupants ] from Basra, Siraf, Oman, the cities of India, the islands of Zabedj ( Java ) and Sinf ( ? ), and other realms, and they were stocked with their trade and cargoes. ” The city was hearty enough to impress the taiwanese monk Ganjin ( Jianzhen 鋻真 ), who visited Guangzhou in 750 and marveled at the “ enormous variety show of races ” there and offered this description : “ The city has triple fortifications. The governor general commands six banners, each constituting an army, and their dignity is no unlike than that of the Son of Heaven [ i, the emperor ]. The city is filled with purple and blush and it is surrounded by the bid of the suburbs. ” Such a respectful impression of this frontier frontier settlement might well not have been shared by chinese officials coming from the great cities of the north, but from the position of Heian cities or the port cities across the sweep of nautical Asia, Guangzhou could well have looked autocratic. Within Guangzhou, the foreigners – and the west Asians peculiarly – resided primarily in the “ extraneous quarter ” ( fanfang 蕃坊 ), under the authority of a alien headsman. Discrete residential quarters for foreign merchants were a common feature of ports across nautical Asia, indeed arab readers would not have been surprised by Sulayman ’ second description of Khanfu ’ s Muslim community with its estimate that was cited sooner. chinese sources provide confirmation of this. Li Zhao, writing in the early ninth hundred, mentions a foreign headsman ( fanzhang 蕃長 ) who presided over the extraneous traders and cooperated with the authorities in drawing up the manifests for the arriving ships. Liu Xun 劉恂 of the belated Tang described this meet with the Guangzhou headman : “ At the house of the Fan-ch ’ iu [ Fanqiu ] 番酋 ( ignite. foreign foreman ), I once ate the iranian dates brought over from his own country. The fruit had sugar-like color, soft skin and flesh and tasted as if it was beginning baked and then boiled in water. ” Since the chinese sources about always use the ambiguous “ sports fan ” for “ foreigner, ” we generally can not determine the heathen identity of the headman, or even determine whether there was merely one headman at a time, but in the encase of Liu Xun ’ second account the iranian dates powerfully suggest that the “ headman ” was in fact west asian .The As to the Hua-wai-jen [ Huawairen ] 化外人 ( illuminated. men outside the chinese influence = foreigners ) living in China, all offences committed between persons of the same group shall be tried according to their customs and laws, but the offences committed between persons of different customs and laws shall be tried according to the chinese laws. The adjudicative functions that Sulayman ascribed to the Muslim evaluator in Guangzhou are supported by an important Tang text. According to the sixth chapter of the Tanglü shuyi 唐律疏議 of 635, The comment elaborates : By the Hua-wai-jen are meant those foreigners from countries ( guo 國 ) with sovereigns. They each have different customs, and their laws are not the lapp. consequently if the offenders be of one and the like group, they shall be judged according to their own laws and customs ; on the early hand if the offenders be of different groups, for case a Kao-li [ Gaoli ] 高麗 man against a Pai-chi [ Baiji ] 白濟 homo [ both parts of Korea ], they shall be judged according to Chinese laws. Whether such fine distinctions as those that were applied to Koreans in the chinese lotion of extraterritoriality were besides made of west Asians we can not say for indisputable, but the tell from Sulayman suggests that the chinese authorities were content to recognize religious preferably than geographic identity in their encase. That Guangzhou had a foreign quarter does not mean that foreigners – and their families – were message to live in it. In the biography of the ill-famed Wang E, whose commandeer of imported goods for his private advance was detailed above, the statement is made that “ The Cantonese and foreigners ( lolo ren 夷人 or ‘ easterly barbarians ’ ) lived amongst each other [ in the foreign draw ]. Because the land was undesirable, they sought to live in the river market [ area ]. ” Far more informative is the remarkable report in the biography ( or biographies ; the versions in the Old and New Tang Histories vary slightly ) of Lu Jun 盧鈞, who came to Guangzhou as prefect and military governor in 836, a generation after Wang E had been there. After describing how Lu had reversed the bribe policies of his predecessors and governed honestly, thereby relieving the vexations of the extraneous merchants, it describes his response to conditions in Guangzhou that he found unacceptable. Foreigners were living together and intermarrying with the Chinese, and many foreigners had bought rice fields and built houses. If the local authorities tried to interfere with them, they combined and rose in disgust. In response, Lu Jun enacted laws forcing the foreigners to live in a separate quarter ( lolo chu 異處 ) and forbade them from marrying with chinese or acquiring down and houses. To some extent this score reflects the social fluidity of a frontier city, a fluidity that Lu Jun, good Confucian official that he was, was attempting to counter. In the like biography we are told that Guangzhou had become a plaza of exile where the children of discredited officials who had been sent there found themselves stranded, unable to return evening after pardons had been secured. Jun arranged for aid for their aesculapian and marital needs, in all helping several hundred families. After his three-year term, “ several thousand Chinese and foreigners ” requested that a shrine be built to honor Jun. For our purposes, the critical wonder is, who were the foreigners who were intermarrying and settling with the local population ? Were they tribal peoples from Lingnan, merchants from southeast Asia or west Asians ? The Old Tang History uses the term man liao 蠻獠 ( both terms for southern peoples ) to describe those who lived together with local inhabitants ( turen 土人 ), and that could be taken to mean the local tribal peoples. however, it besides talks about the Man ships ( manbo 蠻舶 ) of the South Seas arriving in Guangzhou, while the New Tang History states that it was fan liao 蕃獠 who lived together with the Chinese ( Huaren 華人 ), thus employing the character normally used for west Asians. From this evidence we can conclude that the maritime merchants were surely among those who were intermixing with the local population in Guangzhou, and while we can not say conclusively that these included Persians and Arabs, there is no reason why they should have been excluded. More broadly, the passage indicates that at least portions of the alien merchant community had put down roots in Guangzhou and assumed settler rather than sojourner condition. This was an crucial development, and foreshadowed the Muslim merchant communities of late centuries. One limit of the Tang–Abbasid sources for the merchant communities in China is that they give us no about information about individual merchants or about their internal serve. apart from the invaluable history of the Guangzhou community with its Muslim judge in the Account of China and India, which has been discussed above, the remainder of the ninth-century share of this work containing the accounts of Sulayman and other anonymous sources contains nothing about person merchants or their lives. What is does award, however, is a wealth of descriptive fabric concerning China ( and India, though lone the chinese parts concern us here ). If we view this material as constituting the Muslim maritime community ’ s collective cognition of China, then an psychoanalysis of these texts can tell us a big deal about the community ’ s social position and the kinds of information to which they had access. The descriptions of China with which we are refer come from the ninth-century parcel of the Account ( late in the work, Abu Zayd has some extra information from the tenth hundred ) and cover a wide stove of topics presented in 72 number items, most of which are short entries in the Akhbar al-Sin wa-l-Hind translation. Some of the entries are devoted to maritime travel, asian interface cities and India, and some compare India and China. however, most concern China, and among them certain subjects stand out by virtue of the frequency of their occurrence or the detail of their coverage. The discipline of department of commerce is an case of the latter. Although treated in only three entries, these are among the longest entries in the work. They detail how officials processed and taxed the cargoes of arriving ships ( # 34, quoted earlier ), the mechanisms for adopt, lend and manage defaults ( # 44 ), and the unplayful consequences of bankruptcy ( # 45 ), all matters of the farthermost importance for merchants. The credit practices, we might note, were based upon written agreements and were backed up by the push of the jurisprudence for those who defaulted. Related tangentially to commerce are the accounts of chinese buildings, which are described as having been built with wood ( # 60, 72 ) and therefore a cause of the fires park to Guangzhou. The result, we are told, was to increase the rarity of merchandise in the Sino-Arab craft, since it would burn in the warehouses. By far the two most frequently occurring subjects are government and the personal lives of the Chinese, and the former are largely skew towards local government. Concerning the empire as a whole, we are told that the king of China has over 200 urban metropolises, each with its prince and eunuch ( # 33 ), and the king himself is described in entirely the vaguest of terms : as one of four kings of the earth, beneath the arabian king but above the Roman king ( # 24 ), as deficient designated heirs ( # 54 ), and as secluding himself two months of the year in order to inspire fear among his subjects ( # 39 ). Concerning the functions of government at the local anesthetic charge, the entries are far more knowing, reflecting the first-hand observations of arabian merchants. They describe local anesthetic officials in some contingent ( # 37, 38 ), arsenic well as tax income ( falsely stating that the Chinese had no down taxes, alone head taxes ) ( # 40, 47 ), legal proceedings ( # 38, 58, 67 ), neologism ( # 34 ), schools ( # 48 ) and the documents required for travel around the empire ( # 43 ). One scheme entrance describes a public bell – to be found in every vicinity – that anyone who has suffered an injustice can ring, and then present his grievance to the “ prince. ” From Song chinese sources we know that the Chinese indeed had such a populace grievance system, though using drums rather than bells. last, armies and war are mentioned alone twice, and then briefly ( # 56, 72 ), a expression of the largely pacific character of this world of department of commerce in the mid-ninth century .The entries describing the lives of the Chinese present abroad and fascinating array of observations. Concerning Their food consists of rice, and sometimes they cook kushan [ fret ] which they pour over the rice and then eat it. The members of royal houses eat wheat bread and kernel of all the animals and pork and even other animals. Among the fruits they have apple, yellowish pink, citron, pomegranate, quince, pear, banana, sugar-cane, melon, fig, grapeshot, cucumber, glistening cucumber, crab-apple, walnut, almond, hazel-nut, pistachio, plum, apricot, sorb and coconuts. They do not have in their nation many date-palms except a [ hermit ] date-palm tree in the house of one of them. Their toast consists of the heady drink in prepared from rice. They do not have wine in their nation, nor has it been exported to them. They neither know about it, nor do they drink it. It is from rice that vinegar, intoxicating wine, sweetmeat and things resembling them are fix. The entries describing the lives of the taiwanese show afield and fascinating range of observations. Concerning appearances, we are told that the chinese “ are fine-looking and boastfully, ” with skin “ of a white imbue and a shade of red ” and very black hair, and besides that women leave their hair’s-breadth uncovered, in contrast to the men, who cover theirs ( # 49 ), that all chinese dress in silk, using multiple layers in the winter and a individual layer in summer ( # 21 ) and that chinese about never have beards ( # 65 ). food and the formulation of food is another common subject ; the taiwanese staples of wheat and rice, fruit trees, and the butchery of kernel are all briefly described ( # 62, 72, 71 ). Most instructive is # 22, with its details of cook and foods of all sorts : other topics include marriage ( # 57, 61 ), illness and medicine ( # 46, 72 ), death and burial ( # 35 ), writing by all Chinese, “ poor or rich, small or great ” ( # 36 ), and the love of music ( # 55 ). signally specific information is besides given on toilet practices ( # 23, 71 ) and the males ’ lack of circumcision ( # 63 ), and the charge is made that chinese “ capitulation themselves to sodomy with young slaves ” ( # 59 ). There are, ultimately, respective references to taiwanese religion : to their idolize of statues ( # 64 ), the role of priests speaking for the statues ( # 70 ), and their practice of Buddhism, with its belief in the reincarnation of souls ( # 72 ). The most judgmental entrance ( # 23 ) likens them to the Zoroastrians : “ They eat carrion and other similar things, just as the Magians do ; in fact, their religion resembles that of the Magians. ” There is nothing, however, that would hint at any concern with proselytizing the Chinese. Taken as a wholly, these ninth-century descriptions of China and the taiwanese uncover a noteworthy breadth of cognition, but cognition with definite limitations. Against undefined and at times fanciful ideas about the empire and monarchy, we have concrete and detailed accounts of those elements of government, law and products that one would expect from merchant observers. I would suggest that the accounts of the customs and activities of the people reflect a flush of social and even personal familiarity that came from extended mansion in Guangzhou, a residence which, as we have seen, included survive among the Chinese and flush intermarrying with them. At the same fourth dimension, nothing in these accounts suggests any significant interaction with the local elite, with the exception of the “ prince, ” credibly the provincial governor, whose habits are described, possibly as a result of official interactions, including banquets, held for the merchants .About the interactions of the maritime merchants themselves we are almost entirely ignorant. We know from the … the hero is invited by a group of his alien friends in Ch ’ ang-an [ Chang ’ an ] to attend a meet for the inspection of treasures : here he finds the respective hu [ Persian merchants ] seated in a formal hierarchy meaning of the relative respect of their goods, and, as might be expected, the hero is found to have the most cherished object of all and is honored by transfer to the head of the assembly. About the interactions of the maritime merchants themselves we are about wholly ignorant. We know from the Account that the Guangzhou Muslims had a headman who led them in prayers and delivered the weekly sermon ( khotba ). Whether the merchants had extra bodied practices we do not know as in southerly and southeast Asia, but Edward Schafer provides an intrigue glimpse of what he calls reciprocal benefit associations among iranian merchants. In the three examples that he found in Tang tales, merchants gathered to socialize, compare their treasures, and in one case even to pool their resources to purchase a valuable bone. In the most revealing narrative, Beyond this, we can speculate that the mechanism for Islamic trade in west Asia and the Mediterranean were employed by the Muslim merchants in Tang Guangzhou. These included the universal and limit investment partnerships ( mufawada and ‘ inan ), which offered a degree of fiscal security in the pool of funds, and commenda contracts, in which an agent-manager was entrusted with capital or trade. There were besides corollary practices that “ rendered potential the delegating of ability and agency to associates, colleagues, and tied strangers, as economic circumstances required, ” for case, by allowing an investor or merchant to entrust his goods to another, who would act for him in disposing of the goods and provide him with the proceeds at no charge. Although this description is largely based upon eleventh-century sources from western Asia, it is highly likely that the Guangzhou Muslims made use of these practices – or some much like them – that relied upon trust and honor more than written contracts of the screen ascribed to the Chinese. As an model of the importance of ethics in department of commerce, we might cite the encase of Abu ’ Ubayda ‘ Abdallah ibn al-Qasim, known as “ al-Saghir ” ( the humble ), from a small Omani market town, who was involved in the China deal and traveled there, probably before 758. On one occasion, when he discovered that his partners in the aloes wood trade had disparaged a cargo of wood – credibly from China – to drive down the price, and had then praised the same goods after purchasing them so as to drive up the price, he broke off the partnership. The Arab-Persian merchants in China were not simply isolated individuals pursuing wealth on their own, but part of a diaspora creating the most effective and desegregate long-distance craft network that maritime Asia had ever seen, and their success was to a bombastic extent dependent upon shared values and common entrust. At the like time, neither the craft nor the trade diaspora was a sterilize entity. As we will see below, both undergo dramatic developments in the eighth and one-ninth centuries that had profound consequences for their subsequent histories in China .
The Waxing and Waning of the Settlements
Over the 700-year course of the Muslim communities that we are exploring in this book, the period of the recently Tang was possibly the most dramatic, marked by three traumatic events : the Arab-Persian raid on Guangzhou in 758, the massacre of Persians and Arabs in Yangzhou in 760 and the larger slaughter of Muslims, Christians and Zoroastrians in Guangzhou in 879. These have all been mentioned earlier ; here our care will be focused upon how these events shaped the history of the west asian communities in China. Although there is no discernible connection between the events of 758 and 760, both occurred during the Rebellion of An Lushan 安祿山, which wracked the Tang from 755 to 763 and for a time threatened to topple the dynasty. The rebellion was fought out chiefly in the north – most famously with the insurgent capture of Chang ’ an in the one-sixth calendar month of 755 and the flight of the emperor Xuanzong 玄宗 and his cortege to Sichuan – but the stallion empire was profoundly affected, initially by the chaotic conditions that prevailed for the better share of a ten, since the initial rebellion spawned many local rebellions ( particularly after An ’ south assassination in 757 ), and, in the longer run, by the multi-faceted sabotage of the power of the central government. The Yangzhou slaughter was in fact a product of this season of rebellion, for it occurred when alleged government troops, sent to put down the local rebellion of Liu Zhan 劉展, entered the city of Yangzhou, and in their looting and killing made the big Persian and Arab merchant community a particular target. There is an matter to discrepancy among the four accounts of the massacre that sheds some light on the nature of that community. They are found in the biographies of the two Tang generals responsible for putting down a local rebellion. In the Old and New Tang History biographies of Zheng Jingshan 鄭景山, both express that “ respective thousand Arab and persian merchants were killed. ” By contrast, the biographies of Ma Shengong 馬神功 both mention only iranian merchants as having been killed. Why were the Arabs omitted ? I would argue that this reflects the long-standing nature of the Persian community in Yangzhou, to which Arabs were a holocene summation. We know nothing about that community in the aftermath of the slaughter, so we can alone speculate as to length and extent of the damage visited upon it and the South Seas trade with which it was involved. There is one morsel of attest from the ninth hundred indicating that a discrete Persian community continued. The japanese Buddhist monk Ennin 圓仁, who recounted a drawn-out stumble that he made to China ( in a diary that remains an important generator for information on late Tang China ), described how, during his stay in Yangzhou in 839, an official solicitation for funds to repair a balcony at a local Buddhist temple resulted in a contribution of 1,000 strings of cash ( out of 10,000 needed for the repairs ) from the “ Persian state of matter ” ( Bosiguo 波斯國 ). The use of guo is curious, since it typically refers to a state. however, because of the local nature of the restoration plan, it seems most likely that Bosiguo referred either to the Persians jointly ( possibly including Arabs ) or else to a persian headsman who spoke for the residential district. In any event, Persians had clearly survived the 760 slaughter. In contrast to Yangzhou, Guangzhou in 758 was far from the scenes of rebel activity and the government was preoccupied with its campaign to take back the capital ( accomplished with the help of Tibetan and Uighur soldiers ), so this raid by Arabs and Persians in a frontier interface seems to have elicited no chemical reaction. The foray, an account of which began this chapter, is recounted in four places, two each in the Old and New Tang Histories. The least instructive, from the New Tang History annals, merely says that Arabs and Persians “ plundered ” ( kou 寇 ) Guangzhou. In their treatises on Persia ( and Persians ), the two histories are largely in accord, describing how the two groups plundered the city, burning its warehouses and storehouses and then leaving by ocean, though the New Tang History states that the Persians followed the Arabs in the “ raid ” ( xi 襲 ), presumably coming from the sea, capturing the city of Guangzhou, and burning its storehouses. The annals of the Old Tang History provide a very different account : “ [ Officials from ] Guangzhou memorialized, [ reporting ] that soldiers from the countries of Arabia and Persia besieged the city, and the prefect, Wei Lijian 韋利見, abandoned the city and went into hiding. ” Whatever their differences, all four accounts agree that this was indeed a raid and not a takeover of the city. To return to the question with which we began this chapter, who were these raiders and from where did they come ? Two suggestions – that they were the intersection of increase trade natural process following the establishment of Baghdad as the Abbasid capital in 750, or that they were disgruntled arabian troops sent by the Caliph to help Guo Ziyi ( the loser in the Battle of Talas ) to quell an rebellion – both seem highly improbable, since neither theory explains how these groups would have made their manner to the coast of China. That it was the work of unhappy traders besides seems unlikely : they might have engaged in an urban riot, but the raid as describe suggests sack rather than simple destruction. Rather, the most likely explanation is that they were followers of the piratical strongman of southern Hainan, Feng Ruofang 馮若芳 .In 749, the Chinese monk Feng Ruofang captured two or three iranian merchant ships every year, taking the goods for himself and the sailors ( “ materiel ” ) as his slaves. The place where these slaves, men and women, lived was to be found three days to the north and five days to the confederacy. The villages in that area became the base of the irani slaves of Ruofang. In 749, the chinese monk Ganjin, whose description of Guangzhou was quoted early, made unexpected landfall on Hainan Island, when the ship on which he was traveling about dip in a typhoon. once there, he was escorted by the inspector general to Wan ’ an prefecture 萬安州 ( modern Lingshui ) in the far south, where he was entertained for three days by the prefectural foreman, Feng Ruofang. According to Ganjin, This curious fib, dated equitable ten years before the Guangzhou raid, is supported by an entry in the early Song literary collection, the Taiping guangji 太平廣記 of Li Fang 李昉, which recounts a Tang narrative of one Chen Wuzhen 陳武振, whose sign of the zodiac in Zhenzhou ( modern Yaxian in southwestern Hainan ) was filled with gold, rhinoceros horns, elephant ’ sulfur ivories and hawksbill turtle turtles. The reference of this wealth came from “ merchants from the west ” whose ships had foundered on the seashore. His success in doing then was attributed to his moude fa 牟得法 ( method acting of capture ), which involved reciting incantations from a mountain when a merchant ship appeared then as to call up wind and waves and trap the ship on the slide. This report is from the “ magic trick ” ( huanshu 幻術 ) section of the compendium, and so one might question its dependability. however, the strike parallels with Ganjin ’ randomness account make it probably that Feng Ruofang was the model for Chen Wuzhen, and it should be noted that the southerly seashore of Hainan lay right field along the most coarse sea route from the south to Guangzhou. possibly most important, in holocene years archaeologists have found conclusive proof of ancient Muslim communities dating to the Tang and Song periods in southerly Hainan. Two abandoned Muslim cemeteries were discovered in coastal areas ( one in Lingshui, the early in Yaxian ) with numerous tombs and stele with Arabic inscriptions. Although none of them provide dates, they may well be associated with an eleventh-century inflow of Muslims into Hainan that will be discussed in the next chapter, some of them, stylistically at least, can be dated to the ninth hundred, and respective have persian titles, thus indicating a connection with the Tang community ( see Figure 1.5 ) .
Returning to the raid of 758, were the Persians and Arabs shipwrecked merchants and seamen who had been captured by Feng Ruofang and possibly operating under his instruction ? Could they have been a group that had escaped from the clutches of Feng and were acting on their own ? We can entirely speculate, but the very being of these west Asians in Hainan, living outside of the normal bounds of Tang–Abbasid trade, makes them the likely candidates for those who undertook the pirate-like foray of Guangzhou. Whatever the identity of the raiders, the raid itself marked the begin of a period of great unmanageable for the port of Guangzhou. Li Mian ’ second praised tenure as governor of Lingnan, which, as we observed earlier, resulted in the increase of arriving ships from the western Regions to over 40 per year, was the exception in the former eighth hundred. Earlier, in 763, the Commissioner of Maritime Trade ( a eunuch ) got rid of the military governor and allowed his men to ransack the city. then, in 773, his successor was killed by a mutinous officer who held the city for three years. order was restored in 775 when the general Lu Sigong 路嗣恭, with a storm of 8000, took the city and killed 10,000 of his “ chap traitors. ” He besides acted against the merchant community, executing those merchant ship crew members ( shangbo zhi tu 商舶之徒 ) who had served the rebels and confiscating the family property of the merchants, worth several million strings, keeping that for himself rather than sending it to the capital. This displeased the emperor, who did not reward Lu for his military success. not surprisingly, it besides soured the foreign merchants on Guangzhou as a port, with the result that Annan ( Hanoi ) became their prefer port .In 792, the court received a request from the governor of recently, many sea-ships bearing valued and strange [ goods ] gone to Annan to trade in the grocery store there. I wish to send an military officer to go to Annan and close the market, and request that your imperial stateliness send one central [ government ] official to accompany him. In 792, the court received a request from the governor of Lingnan to address the trade woes of Guangzhou by imperial decree : Although the emperor butterfly was inclined to grant the request, it was countered by the curate Lu Zhi 陸贄, who in one of the clearest statements of grocery store forces to be found in any Tang document, submitted that : The merchants of aloof countries merely try profits and will come if treated with easing, but would leave if constantly troubled. Guangzhou was always [ the port ] where assorted ships ( i, merchants dealing in the Nanhai deal ) assembled ; now [ the merchants ] have suddenly changed their minds and gone to An-nan. If this was not due to excessive tax income and noise, it must surely have been because [ the Guangzhou officials ] have not received them and guided them as they should have done. Lu argued further that, since Annan and Guangzhou were both part of the empire, it was unfair to discriminate against one in favor of the other. It is not clear whether there was an attack to close the Annan interface ( the submission implies that the request was denied ), but the fact is that in the ninth hundred Guangzhou was able to regain its prevailing military position in the nautical deal, and the Arabic Account that were analyzed above are a contemplation of this, for they do not make any note of the eighth-century troubles. then came the slaughter of 879 .Like the events of 758 and 760, the massacre came at a time of national convulsion caused by the rebellions of government forces that had begun some nine months before in In prison term, when his active capacity, the size of his forces, and his crave for power had grown hard enough, he marched on the great cities of China, among them Khānfū : this city is the destination of arab merchants and lies a few days ’ travel from the sea on a great river where the water flows clean. At first gear the citizens of Khānfū held out against him, but he subjected them to a long siege – this was in the year 264 [ 877–878 ] – until, at final, he took the city and put its people to the sword. Experts on chinese affairs reported that the number of Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians massacred by him, quite apart from the native Chinese, was 120,000 ; all of them had gone to settle in this city and become merchants there. The alone reason the count of victims from those four communities happens to be known is that the Chinese had kept records of their numbers. Huang Chao besides cut down all the trees in Khānfū including all the mulberry trees ; we single out mulberry trees for mention because the taiwanese use their leaves as fodder for silkworms : owing to the end of the trees, the silkworms perished, and this, in call on, caused silk, in particular, to disappear from arabian lands. Like the events of 758 and 760, the massacre came at a time of national convulsion caused by the rebellions of Wang Xianzhi 王仙芝 and Huang Chao 黃巢, which transpired during the years 874–878 and 878–884, respectively. In the opinion of Robert Somers, this drawn-out period of rebellion was “ … the final stage of a long period of social dislocation and far-flung mobilization that had begun many decades before. ” Ironically, Guangzhou was an about accidental victim, for when Huang Chao and his troops approached the city in the one-fifth calendar month of 879, they were ending a long time period of flight south from strongergovernment forces that had begun some nine months before in Henan. After Li Tiao 李迢, the military governor of Guangzhou, refused to surrender, Huang ’ s forces stormed the city and sacked it. Four medieval Arab authors have provided accounts of the rape and kill, but those of Abu Zayd al-Sirafi and al-Masʿudi ( 896–956 ) are the most valuable. Abu Zayd ’ sulfur account is the earliest ( c. 914 ) and the most detailed. After describing Huang and the origins of the rebellion, Abu Zayd continues : Al-Masʿudī ’ randomness version largely agrees with Abu Zayd ’ second, though it puts the act of those killed at 200,000, “ a portentous phone number of inhabitants. ” It besides states that Huang ’ randomness forces destroyed the mulberry plantations outside of Guangzhou, thereby striking at the silk trade wind, “ as the destruction of mulberry stopped the export of chinese silk to Muslim countries. ” That the two accounts agree on Huang Chao ’ s end of mulberry trees provides authoritative testimony for the importance of silk as an export commodity during the Tang. Although Abu Zayd ’ second figure of 120,000 has been accepted at face value by many historians, possibly because of the claim that they came from the taiwanese census, it and al-Masʿudi ’ s tied larger calculate are about surely exaggerations. There is no suggestion in the Account from 851 that such a great number of westerners had congregated in Guangzhou, a act that would have exceeded the populations of many of the leading cities in the ninth-century worldly concern. If one considers, far, that the only Tang statistic we have for the annual transport traffic into Tang Guangzhou is for 40 ships ( in the early 770s ), it should be clear that there was no way for such a number to have been employed in Guangzhou, even if they could have made their way there .That said, there can be no doubt that a tragedy of major proportions occurred at the hands of Huang Chao and his followers. For Abu Zayd, moreover, the consequences for the Arabs’ maritime trade with China were profound. In his account, after describing how the Chinese appealed unsuccessfully to the Turkish King of then [ the chinese ] stretched out their hands, along with that [ development ], towards tyrannizing those of the [ foreign ] merchants who journeyed to [ deal with ] them. And when this happened, it combined in it the appearance of dictatorship and aggression towards Arab embark captains and boat owners. then they compelled the merchants [ to do ] that which was not binding upon [ by legal agreement ], and forcibly deprived them of their properties. They legalized that which custom had not so far allowed as a depart of their activities. then God, great be His name, completely stripped them of blessings. And the sea forbade its side [ to passengers ], and, by the rule emanate from the Almighty, blessed be His name, bleakness befell the ship captains and guides [ ampere far as ] Siraf and ‘ Uman.
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That said, there can be no doubt that a calamity of major proportions occurred at the hands of Huang Chao and his followers. For Abu Zayd, furthermore, the consequences for the Arabs ’ nautical trade with China were profound. In his account, after describing how the Chinese appealed unsuccessfully to the turkish King of Taghazghaz for help in putting down the rebellion, he writes of the trade : Although we can not corroborate the particulars of these arabian accounts with taiwanese sources, what is important is the arabian smell of rupture, treachery and passing ( the loss of properties being no small matter for merchants ). As we will see in the future chapter, they and ( at least ) many of their fellow merchants from across Asia departed China and moved their operations to southeast Asia. The massacre therefore marks the begin of a menstruation of passage that would result in the reconstitution of the Muslim communities in China, but with distinctly different parameters and practices, and quite possibly contributed to a passage to a more segment long-distance trade, with fewer ships traversing the entire road from western Asia to China. Reflecting on the Tang period as a whole, I would suggest that the west asian merchants of Guangzhou occupied an anomalous position. As essential middlemen in a highly lucrative trade that fed a luxury grocery store in China ( specially at the court ) and supported large-scale ceramic product well beyond southern China, they were the recipients of big government policies and were able to settle and flourish in Guangzhou ( a well early cities like Yangzhou ). Yet they were besides at the mercy of exorbitant demands by corrupt officials and, more seriously, they were the targets ( and on juncture agents ) of ferocity. This undoubtedly owed much to the frontier, colonial nature of Guangzhou in the Tang conglomerate, where both eunuchs representing the imperial family, a primary consumer of spell luxuries, and the military were able to play outsize roles, the latter in both agitate and inhibit uprisings. But the great wealth and racial and cultural foreignness of the west asian merchants, when combined with their significant numbers, would besides have made them slowly targets. This element of violence seems to have been a feature of the menstruation, for as we will see during the succeed Song menstruation ( 960–1279 ), large-scale ferocity involving the foreign merchants in the port cities of China was nonexistent .
