Accounts of China and India. Abu Zayd al-Sirafi

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СКАЧАТЬ no doubt. He is there at the outset, staking his third-person claim to authorship in the book’s opening words, “Abū Zayd al-Ḥasan al-Sīrāfī said …”¹¹ If we knew nothing else about him, we would know from his surname that he was from—or at least had some connection with—the city of Sīrāf on the Iranian shore of the Gulf, which for much of the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries was the most important port for long-distance trade across the Indian Ocean. But we do know a little more, from no less an authority than the great historian–geographer al-Masʿūdī: he met Abū Zayd in Basra and says that he “had moved there from Sīrāf in the year 303 [915–16].” Al-Masʿūdī then gives a lineage for Abū Zayd (in which the names of earlier ancestors show an Iranian ethnic origin) and adds that he was “a man of discrimination and discernment,” that is, that he was a man of learning, with a well-developed critical sense.¹²

      In contrast to Book One, in Book Two it is the date that is the problem. It was obviously being written well after the end of the Huang Chao rebellion in China, suppressed in 271/884, and some considerable time into the ensuing decades of anarchy; these events are reported near the beginning of the book.¹³ Book Two was finished, as will become clear below, by the time al-Masʿūdī was working on his own Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems (Murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar) in 332/943–44. But that still leaves a wide range of possible dates. We will return to the question.

      There is another question to ask and to return to. Immediately after declaring his authorship, Abū Zayd says, “I have examined this foregoing book (meaning the First Book), having been commanded to look carefully through it, and to verify the information I find in it,” and moreover to supplement it “with other reports … known to myself but not appearing in the book.”¹⁴ These supplementary accounts grew into Book Two. Abū Zayd undoubtedly wrote Book Two, but who was its instigator, the mysterious figure who commanded or instructed him to do so? If he was some important literary patron, why not commemorate him by name? Why hide him with a passive verb, the “anonymous” voice of the Arabic grammarians? Throughout Book Two, that nameless presence peers over the author’s shoulder.

      Then again Abū Zayd and his predecessor, the writer of Book One, were, strictly speaking, compilers, not authors. The material of both books came from the informants who contributed their akhbār, their eyewitness accounts. Other than Sulaymān the Merchant and a certain Ibn Wahb, whose report of his visit to China is incorporated into Book Two,¹⁵ they too are nameless. But these two suggest identities for the anonymous remainder. The other contributors were almost certainly merchants like Sulaymān (rather than mere yarning sailors); they were probably from the Gulf region—Ibn Wahb was from the Iraqi port city of Basra at its head—and especially from Sīrāf, that great trans-oceanic terminus. Most important, they all seem to have visited and spent time in the places they talk about. There is a glimpse of them as a group at the end of Book Two, where the writer apologizes for his lack of information on al-Sīlā (Korea): “None of our circle of informants has ever made it there and brought back a reliable report.”¹⁶ These are the true authors, this circle of ex-expatriates, old China and India hands back home, swapping memories of far-off lands like a coterie of Sindbads—and all the more wonderful for being real characters with real stories.

      THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

      Those merchant-informants traveled through an open world. Arab expansion—and especially what could be called the Asianization of the Arab-Islamic polity under the Abbasid dynasty from the mid-second/eighth century on—had thrown open an eastward-facing window of trade and travel. The new age is summed up in a saying attributed to al-Manṣūr, the second Abbasid caliph and builder of Baghdad. Standing on the bank of the river of the recently founded imperial city and watching the silks and porcelain unloading, he exclaimed, “Here is the Tigris, and nothing bars the way between it and China!”¹⁷ At the same time, and at the other end of that eastward way, the Chinese were discovering new far-western horizons, with the Tang-dynasty geographer Jia Dan describing the maritime route to Wula (al-Ubullah, ancient Apologus) at the head of the Gulf, then up to Bangda (Baghdad).¹⁸

      The hemiglobal scope of commerce comes across in the diversity of goods described in the Accounts: Indian rhino horn, Tibetan musk, Gulf pearls, Chinese porcelain, Sri Lankan sapphires, Maldivian coir, Arabian and East African ambergris, Abyssinian leopard skins. It also comes across in the sheer mobility of individuals mentioned—people like the merchant from Khurasan in eastern Iran, who “made his way to the land of the Arabs, and from there to the kingdoms of the Indians, and then came to [China], all in pursuit of honorable gain,” in his case from selling ivory and other luxury goods. In China, his merchandise was taken illegally by an official, but his case reached the ears of the emperor, who chastised the official concerned: “You … wanted [this merchant] to return by way of these same kingdoms, telling everyone in them, ‘I was treated unjustly in China and my property was seized by force’!”¹⁹ By rights, the emperor said, the official should have been put to death for his action. The message is plain: bad publicity would damage China’s reputation as a stable market and a serious trading partner, and that damage would spread across the whole vast continent of Asia. Then, as now, it was supply and demand that propelled and steered the ship of trade, but it was confidence that kept it afloat.

      More literally, however, what drove the ships along the “maritime Silk Road” of the Indian Ocean was the great system of winds with its annual alternating cycle, taking vessels eastward in one season and back west in another—the Arabic for “season,” mawsim, giving English (via the Portuguese moução/monção) its name for that system, “monsoon.”²⁰ The two great termini of the monsoon trade were Sīrāf in the Gulf and the Chinese city of Khānfū—which was, according to Abū Zayd, home to 120,000 foreign merchants in the later third/ninth century;²¹ the ports of Kūlam Malī in southwestern India and Kalah Bār on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula were the two major havens and crucial entrepôts along the way. Of these four, Kalah Bār has never been pinpointed, while Kūlam Malī survives, sleepily, as the Keralan town of Kollam; only Khānfū remains the great emporium it was, the Chinese megalopolis of Guangzhou. As for Sīrāf, birthplace of Abū Zayd and, in a sense, of this book, it is now the site of a small village; but the village crouches on the ruins of the palaces of rich ship owners and traders, merchant princes of the monsoon who dined off the finest Chinese porcelain and whose wealth grew ever greater through that climactic third/ninth century.²²

      And then, in the last quarter of that century, disaster struck. As Abū Zayd puts it, “the trading voyages to China were abandoned and the country itself was ruined, leaving all traces of its greatness gone.”²³ From 260/874 on, China was convulsed by one of those rebellions that seem to well up there every few centuries; the emperor’s fears of instability came home to roost, in the heart of his palace in the Tang capital, Chang’an, captured by the rebel leader Huang Chao in 266/880. As for bad publicity, it could hardly have been worse than news of the wholesale massacre of foreign merchants in Khānfū/Guangzhou. The Gulf ʼs direct seaborne trade with China withered away. “China,” Abū Zayd goes on, “has remained in chaos down to our own times.”²⁴ The lesser Indian trade remained, and Gulf merchants still struck deals over Chinese goods, but only at the halfway point of Kalah Bār. Book Two is haunted by the knowledge that the good old days were over.

      THE LITERARY AND CULTURAL CONTEXT

      Books of akhbār, oral accounts set down in writing, are very old indeed. An akhbār collection on the ancient Arabs attributed to the first/seventh-century ʿAbīd ibn Sharyah is, by some accounts, the oldest extant Arabic book, after the Qurʾān.²⁵ Moreover, the fact that this ʿAbīd was a professional storyteller demonstrates how the genre sits on the division—or maybe the elision—between spoken and written literature. And if those ancient akhbār had as their subject matter pre-Islamic battles and heroes, then the inspiration for the overarching theme of this book is almost equally old. Time and again, the Qurʾān tells its listeners to “go about СКАЧАТЬ