Place · maritime port city · China

Quanzhou

Function

Trade & production

Tradition

Quanzhou maritime and Tamil merchant history

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

24.870, 118.670

Connections (7)

• Tamil maritime inscriptionKānchī / Kānchīpuram / Kanchipuram

  Quanzhou on the Fujian coast preserves a bilingual Tamil-Chinese inscription of 1281 and the carved remains of a Shiva temple built there by Tamil merchants — hard evidence of a south Indian trading and religious community living in a Chinese port. Kanchipuram belongs to the Tamil world that sustained that diaspora, and the inscription's donor asks for the welfare of the Yuan emperor, which is a merchant community making its accommodation with a foreign state in stone.

• Maritime routeKaveripattinam (Puhar)

  The Quanzhou inscription of 1281, in Tamil and Chinese, records a Śiva temple built in a Chinese port by a Tamil merchant with the Yuan emperor's sanction, and some three hundred carved stones from it survive in the city. It is the furthest east an Indian temple inscription has been found, and it belongs to the same Tamil merchant-guild network — the Ayyavole and Manigramam — that ran the Bay of Bengal trade out of Kaveripattinam and Nagapattinam.

• Trade routeThe Chola fleet and the merchant guilds

  The bilingual Tamil-Chinese inscription of 1281 at Quanzhou, and the carved remains of a Shiva temple built there by Tamil merchants, are the furthest trace of the network the Chola campaigns were fought to keep open — two and a half centuries after the fleet sailed and long after the dynasty had gone. The inscription's donor asks for the welfare of the Yuan emperor, which is a merchant community making its accommodation with a foreign state in stone.

• AnalogueHoq Cave, Socotra

  The Hoq cave on Socotra and the Tamil inscription at Quanzhou are the two furthest points where Indian traders left writing on stone, four thousand miles apart at opposite ends of the same network. Both are incidental records — a sailor's name scratched on a cave wall, a merchant's temple dedication — and both survive because nobody thought them important.

• TransmissionMount Kōya

  Kukai studied esoteric Buddhism at Chang'an and brought it back to found Mount Koya, and the Chinese ports were where Indian, Central Asian and Japanese monks met the merchants who carried their texts. Quanzhou's Tamil Shiva inscription and Koya's Sanskrit mantras are two residues of the same route: one commercial, one liturgical, both Indian at the far end.

• Traveller routeTangier

  Tangier to Quanzhou is the longest single route in this repository, and the thing Ibn Battuta demonstrates is that it could be travelled inside one legal and linguistic world: he found Arabic-speaking qadis, Sufi lodges and Maliki law from the Atlantic to the South China Sea, and was employed as a judge at two points along it. The Rihla is a description of that world's extent.

• Maritime routeIlamuridesam (Lamuri / Lambri, Aceh)

  Quanzhou to Sumatra to the Palk Strait is the standard eastern route of the period, and Polo did it in a fourteen-ship Mongol convoy escorting a bride to Persia. He gives the monsoon waits, the stockade on the Sumatran shore and the pepper duty; Yijing had described the same passage as a monk buying deck space six centuries earlier.

On these journeys

• The epigraphic record
• Ibn Baṭṭūṭa — qāḍī, exile, envoy (1333–1347)
• Marco Polo — the Indian Ocean homeward (c. 1292–95)
• The Indian Ocean World — the whole rim
• India connected to the world

Sources

Wikipedia, “Quanzhou”. Epigraphia Indica and the Annual Reports on Indian Epigraphy (Archaeological Survey of India).

• Wikipedia — Quanzhou