Place · maritime port city · China
Guangzhou / Canton, China
A major southern Chinese maritime gateway connecting the South China Sea with Indian Ocean networks. Chinese Buddhist pilgrims such as Yijing used the maritime corridor through Southeast Asia on journeys between China and India.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Tradition
- Chinese pilgrimage and maritime-trade records
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 23.129, 113.264
Connections (5)
- South India to south ChinaKānchī / Kānchīpuram / Kanchipuram
South Indian ports linked into a Bay of Bengal and South China Sea trading system that carried Tamil merchants, Buddhist monks and Hindu ritual specialists to southern China. Kanchipuram participated in this network as an inland religious and political centre feeding coastal ports rather than as a direct maritime terminus.
- Maritime Buddhist corridorTamralipta / Tamluk
Tamralipta was the eastern Indian terminal of the sea route to China: pilgrims and merchants sailed from here through the Straits to Guangzhou, and Yijing's voyages in the 670s and 690s describe the whole circuit, including his long stops at Srivijaya to learn Sanskrit on the way. The maritime road replaced the Central Asian one for Chinese Buddhists over the seventh century, and these two ports were its ends.
- Maritime routeAngkor Wat, Cambodia
By Yijing's time in the 670s the route from India to China ran through Srivijaya in Sumatra, where he stopped for years to learn Sanskrit and to translate. The maritime road made Southeast Asia a link in the chain rather than a destination at the end of it. Yijing wrote his account of monastic discipline in Srivijaya rather than in India, sending it home from Sumatra, so the fullest description of Indian monastic practice was composed abroad.
- Maritime routeBodhidharma
Coming by sea rather than over the passes is the significant thing about this tradition. Buddhism had reached China overland through Gandhara and the Tarim for four centuries; the Guangzhou route through the Straits, used by Yijing and dozens of others, meant that a south Indian monk could reach a Chinese court without crossing Central Asia at all.
- Maritime routePalembang / Srivijaya
The Guangzhou to Srivijaya to Tamralipti route is the maritime alternative to the Central Asian road, and Yijing is its best witness: Persian ships, monsoon seasons, a Sumatran stopover for Sanskrit, and a Buddhist establishment in the Straits teaching the Indian curriculum. He made both legs twice and never once went overland.
On these journeys
Sources
Yijing travel accounts; scholarship on early India–Southeast Asia–China maritime networks
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