South China Sea Before the advent of the Chinese-invented mariner's
compass in the 11th century, the seasonal
monsoon winds controlled
navigation, blowing north from the equatorial zone in the summer and south in the winter. the northern half of Vietnam would not become fully independent from
Chinese rule until AD 938.) In 1975, an ancient shipyard excavated in Guangzhou was dated to the early
Han dynasty (202 BC AD 220) and, with three platforms, was able to construct ships that were approximately 30 m (98 ft) in length, 8 m (26 ft) in width, and could hold a weight of 60 metric tons. During the
Three Kingdoms, travelers from
Eastern Wu are known to have explored the coast. The most important were Zhu Ying and
Kang Tai, both sent by the Governor of Guangzhou and Jiaozhi
Lü Dai in the early 3rd century. Although each wrote a book, both were lost by the 11th century: Zhu's
Record of the Curiosities of Phnom (
t ,
s ,
Fúnán Yìwù Zhì) in its entirety and Kang's
Tales of Foreign Countries During the Wu Period (
t ,
s ,
Wúshí Wàiguó Zhuàn) only surviving in scattered references in other works, including the
Shuijing Zhu and the
Yiwen Leiju. Later, during the
Eastern Jin, a rebel known as Lu Xun managed to fend off an attack by the imperial army for a hundred days in 403 before sailing down into the
South China Sea from a coastal commandery. For six years, he occupied
Panyu, the largest southern seaport of that time.
Southeast Asia Between the 15th and 18th centuries, much of
Southeast Asia was explored by Chinese merchants. Some parts of Malaysia were settled by Chinese families at this time, and Chinese garrisons established Similarly, some Chinese traders settled in north Java in the 1400s, and after China legitimized foreign trade again in 1567 (licensing 50 junks a year), hundreds of Chinese trade colonies developed in what is now Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Indian Ocean and beyond junk ship, 13th century; Chinese ships of the Song period featured
hulls with
watertight compartments Chinese envoys sailed into the
Indian Ocean from the late 2nd century BC, and reportedly reached
Kanchipuram in India, known as
Huangzhi (黄支) to them, or otherwise
Ethiopia as asserted by Ethiopian scholars. During the late 4th and early 5th centuries, Chinese pilgrims like
Faxian, Zhiyan, and Tanwujie began to travel to
India by sea, bringing Buddhist scriptures and
sutras back to China. By the 7th century, as many as 31 recorded Chinese monks, including
I Ching, managed to reach India the same way. In 674, the private explorer Daxi Hongtong was one of the first explorers to end his journey at the southern tip of the
Arabian Peninsula, after traveling through 36 countries which were located west of the
South China Sea. Chinese seafaring merchants and diplomats who lived during the medieval
Tang dynasty (618–907) and
Song dynasty (960–1279) often sailed into the Indian Ocean after visiting ports in Southeast Asia. Chinese sailors would travel to
Malaya, India, Sri Lanka, into the
Persian Gulf and up the
Euphrates River in modern-day
Iraq, to the
Arabian peninsula and into the
Red Sea, stopping to trade goods in Ethiopia and
Egypt (as Chinese
porcelain was highly valued in old
Fustat,
Cairo).
Jia Dan wrote
Route between Guangzhou and the Barbarian Sea during the late 8th century that documented foreign communications, the book was lost, but the
Xin Tangshu retained some of his passages about the three sea-routes linking China to
East Africa. Jia Dan also wrote about tall
lighthouse minarets in the
Persian Gulf, which were confirmed a century later by
Ali al-Masudi and
al-Muqaddasi. Beyond the initial work of Jia Dan, other Chinese writers accurately described Africa from the 9th century onwards; For example,
Duan Chengshi wrote in 863 of the
slave trade,
ivory trade, and
ambergris trade of
Berbera,
Somalia.
Seaports in China such as
Guangzhou and
Quanzhou – the most
cosmopolitan urban centers in the medieval world – hosted thousands of foreign travelers and permanent settlers. Chinese
junk ships were even described by the Moroccan geographer
Al-Idrisi in his
Geography of 1154, along with the usual goods they traded and carried aboard their vessels. brought from
Somalia in the twelfth year of Yongle (1414) From 1405 to 1433, large fleets commanded by Admiral
Zheng He – under the auspices of the
Yongle Emperor of the
Ming dynasty –
traveled to the Indian Ocean seven times. This attempt did not lead China to global expansion, as the Confucian bureaucracy under the next emperor reversed the policy of open exploration and by 1500, it became a capital offence to build a seagoing junk with more than two masts. Chinese merchants became content trading with already existing tributary states nearby and abroad. To them, traveling far east into the
Pacific Ocean represented entering a broad wasteland of water with uncertain benefits of trade.
Exchanges Chinese Muslims traditionally credit the Muslim traveler
Sa`d ibn Abi Waqqas with introducing
Islam to China in 650, during the reign of
Emperor Gaozong of Tang, although modern secular scholars did not find any historical evidence for him actually travelling to China. In 1008 the
Fatimid Egyptian sea-captain
Domiyat, in the name of his ruling
Imam Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, travelled to the Buddhist pilgrimage-site in
Shandong in order to seek out
Emperor Zhenzong of Song with gifts from his court. This reestablished diplomatic ties between China and Egypt which had been broken since the
Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (907–960). == Technique ==