Accounts of China and India. Abu Zayd al-Sirafi
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Название: Accounts of China and India
Автор: Abu Zayd al-Sirafi
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Культурология
Серия: Library of Arabic Literature
isbn: 9781479814428
isbn:
The book has a long history and is connected to an even longer and deeper one. In the early 13th 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 11th 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 15th 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 18th 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 and scholarly translation is a cause for celebration.
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
New York University
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank in particular: my old friend Dr Ḥasan ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shamāḥī of Ṣanʿāʾ, for helping me tease out some of the knottier problems of the text; Ianthe Maclagan and Tim Morris, for their wonderful hospitality in Oxford and Andalusia; Professor Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, for restoring some especially tricky arabicized Chinese terms to their original forms; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, for supplying with remarkable speed a superb digital copy of the only known manuscript; and Philip Kennedy, Chip Rossetti, and Gemma Juan-Simó for their unceasing encouragement and editorial support from Abu Dhabi and New York. I am also indebted to the late Professor Sauvaget, whose work on the First Book of the Accounts was truly a labor of love, for a number of suggested readings and interpretations.
INTRODUCTION
This is a book about an ocean and the lands that lie on its shores, about the ships that cross it and the cargoes they carry. In its own words, it is a book about
the Sea of India and China, in whose depths are pearls and ambergris, in whose rocky isles are gems and mines of gold, in the mouths of whose beasts is ivory, in whose forests grow ebony, sapan wood, rattans, and trees that bear aloewood, camphor, nutmeg, cloves, sandalwood, and all manner of fragrant and aromatic spices, whose birds are parrots and peacocks, and the creeping things of whose earth are civet cats and musk gazelles, and all the rest that no one could enumerate, so many are its blessings.1
It might have been the inspiration for John Masefieldʼs quinquireme of Nineveh in his poem “Cargoes,” with its
cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.
(And, yes, there is sweet white wine in this book too, made from the sap of the toddy palm.) But it is about more than that, for there is a whole human landscape: ships’ captains and customs men, kings and courtiers, princes and paupers—and a few cannibals and kidnappers, to add spice.
What’s more, the book describes a real, live world, almost palpably real, despite the passing of eleven centuries. It is built from facts, not sailors’ yarns. As the author says in his closing words, “I have avoided relating any of the sort of accounts in which sailors exercise their powers of invention,”2 sailors, according to his illustrious predecessor al-Jāḥiẓ, not being “respecters of the unvarnished truth. The stranger the story the more they like it; and, moreover, they use vulgar expressions and have an atrocious style.”3 Reality and solidity are what are implied by the first word of the title: akhbār, accounts, are reports from credible witnesses. And each khabar, each account, fits in with the others to be assembled into a jigsaw picture of a world not unlike our own, a world on the road to globalization.
It is a short book, but it has a sweeping perspective, from the Swahili coast to a rather mistily glimpsed Korea. It is therefore one of those books that seems bigger than it is. And, like the ports of that immense Afro-Asiatic littoral, its pages are busy with people and piled with goods, not just with the luxuries listed above but also with a priceless cargo of information, especially on China. Here are the first foreign descriptions of tea and porcelain, and a whole panorama of Chinese society, from the Son of Heaven and Confucian ethics down to toilet paper and bamboo urinals.
And all this marvelous, mundane world is contained in the compass of a novella. As its own last words say, wa-in qalla awlā:4 Less is more.
DATING AND AUTHORSHIP
If Accounts of China and India is good value in its geographical and material coverage, there is a bonus: it is, in fact, two books.
Book One, according to the author of Book Two, dates to the year 237/851–52.5 There is no reason to doubt this date, and internal evidence supports it.6 The author of Book One, however, is unknown. It does not help that the first pages are missing from the only manuscript copy known to have survived; these might have given an author’s name. Nor does it help that another writer, Ibn al-Faqīh, a writer much closer in time to the composition of Book One than we are, quoted some of its text with an attribution to one Sulaymān al-Tājir.7 This Sulaymān the Merchant was undoubtedly one of the informants for Book One; he is the only one mentioned in it by name.8 Commentators in search of authors have therefore leapt on Sulaymān and credited him with the whole book. It is perfectly usual in Arabic books of the time for their authors to appear in the text, as Sulaymān does, in the third person, as if I were to interject suddenly, “And Tim Mackintosh-Smith said …” This is, in itself, no obstacle to the attribution of authorship to Sulaymān, but it is likewise not an argument for it. Much ink has been shed over the question, but, in the end, we have no incontrovertible evidence for Sulaymān or anyone else being the author of Book One.
There is a further possible element of mystery: the author of Book One may have been unknown even to the author of Book Two. It is certainly strange that the latter, in the evaluation of Book One that forms the preamble to his own work,9 does not say who wrote that earlier book. Later on, when he has another chance to name the author of Book One, he seems intentionally to avoid doing so: he calls him merely “the person from whom that First Book was taken down.”10 To me there seems to be only one entirely cogent reason that the author of Book Two СКАЧАТЬ