LITMIR.BIZ

      FOREWORD

      ZVI BEN-DOR BENITE

      The Indian Ocean has been the site of travel, trade, war, and above all, transregional human history for several millennia. Written and literary evidence for it can be found even in early biblical narratives about King Solomon bringing ivory from India. But only with the appearance of the Accounts of China and India (Akhbār al-Ṣīn wa-l-Hind) in the 9^th and 10^th centuries do we find a comprehensive account of the Indian Ocean. Accounts purports to be accounts about China and India, but in fact, it tells the story of the entire Indian Ocean—its shape, its geography, its shores, and the countries and cultures behind them. It is very evident that the compilers of this work conceived of it in this more expansive way since in several places the narrative presents thoughtful discussions about the different civilizations flourishing on the ocean’s shores. Readers will find these discussions in various places throughout the work. In this respect Accounts of China and India is not merely a travelogue describing the regions between the Arab lands of the Eastern Gulf and the kingdoms of China and India. It is, rather, a world history, recounting the story of a nexus of human cultures in the 10^th century.

      That Accounts of China and India is a world history should come as no surprise. It draws on the accounts and practical experiences of Arab merchants that sailed to China and back, and is therefore one of the best examples of medieval Arab geography. Indeed, in the three centuries that followed the Arabs’ inheritance and practical unification of most of the Mediterranean and West Asian worlds—from Andalusia in the west to the borders of China in the east—they engaged in many ambitious geographical projects. The aim was to write and map the geography (and the history, since the two were inseparable)—of the world as they knew it. Accounts can be seen as one the epitomes of this grand project. And China (al-Ṣīn in Arabic), located beyond the eastern boundaries of the world, occupied a special place in the geographical imagination of the Arabs. By virtue of being a place where different laws—natural, cultural, political—prevailed, narratives about travel to China challenged, almost by necessity, notions about the world the Arabs themselves inhabited and about the inhabited world generally.

      But Accounts of China and India is not only a geographically informed meditation about the world. Based on actual stories by real merchants and travelers, it gives us vivid detailed descriptions. Accounts is in fact one of the earliest foreign accounts of China during the Tang dynasty and indeed the fullest and the most detailed of its time. Its importance is invaluable, not only because it mentions events such as the Huang Chao rebellion (835–884), but also, and principally, because of its detailed description of daily life in Canton, the main port city in Southern China during the Tang. We know much about the economic and commercial transformation that China underwent during the Tang dynasty, but we know much less about how foreign merchants, who played a vital role in it, experienced it. Accounts is unique in this regard. It tells us a great deal about the lives of foreign merchants in China—their interactions with the Chinese, the challenges they faced, and their perceptions of the place where they sojourned.

      The book has a long history and is connected to an even longer and deeper one. In the early 13^th century Zhao Rugua (1170–1228), the supervisor of maritime trade in Quanzhou (Zaitun)—the city rivaled Canton as the central hub of Arab mercantile activity after the 11^th century—compiled the Zhufanzhi (Records of Foreign Peoples). The Zhufanzhi was based on stories and information provided by foreign merchants of a very similar background of those that fed Accounts of China and India a few centuries before. Accounts was probably on the mind of travelers such as the Moroccan, Ibn Baṭṭūṭah (1304–1368 or 1369), who traveled in the Indian Ocean and China during the Mongol period. During the early 15^th century, when the Chinese set sail in the Indian Ocean under the admiralship of Zheng He (1371–1433 or 1435), one of their missions was to update the knowledge contained in the Zhufanzhi. The product of this expedition was the Yingyai Shenglan (Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores) of the scribe Ma Huan (c. 1380–1461). It cannot be a coincidence that Ma Huan, a Chinese Muslim from the Yangzi Delta was in charge of Zheng He’s mission. Ma Huan was most probably a descendant of Arab Muslim merchants that settled in China in earlier times—perhaps not as early as the time when Accounts was compiled, but certainly as part of the same maritime activity described in it. Famously, Zheng He, was also a Muslim.

      During the early 18^th century, at the height of the European Age of Sail, French, and later English, the European readership was very interested in the goings-on in an ocean that was proving important for trade and conquest. Accounts was one of the very first geographical accounts of the Indian Ocean to be translated into European languages. Almost three centuries after its first publication in English, and at a time when China, India, and the Indian Ocean are rising once more in global prominence, the publication of this beautiful

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