Discovered but Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, C. 1100-1620 - Softcover

Yang, Bin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 023121233X ISBN 13: 9780231212335

Verlag: Columbia University Press, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Chinese traders and explorers first visited the Maldives, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, in the early fourteenth century. The traveler Wang Dayuan “discovered” the island sultanate for the Chinese world, and merchants increasingly dealt in Maldivian goods such as coconuts, cowrie shells, and ambergris. Zheng He’s fifteenth-century voyages ventured to the islands, by then a trading hub, and brought their envoys to Beijing. But the Maldives faded from Chinese records by the end of the sixteenth century, after the Ming state suddenly retreated from the Indian Ocean and shifted focus to Southeast Asia.

Discovered but Forgotten is a pioneering examination of China’s relations with the Maldives and Sino-Indian Ocean interactions, offering new ways to understand Chinese maritime exploration and the global history of the Indian Ocean. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including written records, Chinese and Jesuit maps, and archaeological analysis of shipwrecks—Bin Yang provides a comprehensive account of Chinese links to the Maldives and the Indian Ocean world from ancient times through the late Ming era. He scrutinizes Chinese understandings of the islands, emphasizing both seafaring material culture and textual knowledge production. Yang reconsiders the works of travelers such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta in light of Chinese explorations, and he opens a window onto a colorful world of intriguing commodities, port marriages, and voyages across the vast waters of maritime Asia. Transregional and interdisciplinary, Discovered but Forgotten reveals how a remote archipelago shaped the vast Chinese empire.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bin Yang is a professor of history at City University of Hong Kong. His books include Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan (Columbia, 2008) and Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money: A Global History (2019).

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Columbia University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 023121233X
• ISBN 13: 9780231212335
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Columbia University Press; https://cup.columbia.edu/; ; OFFICE OF THE GENERAL COUNSEL 412 LOW MEMORIAL LIBRARY 535 W. 116THSTR; NEW YORK; NY; 10027; USA
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