Iranian merchants in tang dynasty tales free download

They also held public offices to control the immigrants and the Zoroastrian, Manichean and Nestorian temples in China. Such duties interested also Persian immigrants especially nobles , who, after the destruction of the Sasanid Empire A. According to a Chinese source on the Sui period A. He was also an expert in the production of tiles for the surface architectural decoration. The Central Asian weaving techniques, in fact, were superior to the Chinese and in great demand because of the lust for exoticism at the Tang court.

The Sogdian taste influenced every Chinese artistic field in this period. Painters from Central Asia are especially celebrated in the sources but foreign elements are traceable also in sculpture and metalwork.

The positions of the Sogdians at court was aggravated by the rebellion of An Lushan A. But the Chinese, already threatened by the Tibetans, asked the Uighur Turks for help. The Sogdians were able to maintain their privileges in China because of the protection granted by the Uighurs, and increase their power at the latter's court.

The Sogdians and the Persians, then, enjoyed the funds of the Tang court, at least until the arrival of Minister Li Mi who refused them such privileges in This was one of the measures adopted by the Chinese minister in order to oppose the power of Iranians at the court, and remove their control over the production of goods competing with the Chinese.

In the Kirghiz destroyed the Uighur Empire and obliged the population to migrate to China. One group settled in today's Xinjiang region where most of the people are still Uighur, but another group was directed to the Central Plains of China, and then blocked by the Tang army who took advantage of the situation to slaughter a great number of Uighurs and Sogdians.

Another strike against the Iranian community in China was the religious persecutions of against Buddhism, in particular, and foreign faiths in general, including Zoroastrianism, Manicheism and Nestorianism. The activity of Sogdians in China inevitably decreased. They resisted along the southern maritime trade routes for some time but they eventually disappeared completely with the arrival of the Mongols in the 13th century.

But they left an indelible sign in the art and culture of the Chinese, of the Uighurs and indirectly of the Mongols. The Chinese, in fact, adopted the division of the week in seven days, it seems, just because of the Sogdians.

Many fruits and vegetables were introduced from the west, thanks to the Sogdians who are described in Chinese sources as being fond of music and wine. The importance of Sogdian music and dance particularly in Central Asia, and later at the Tang court, should not be underestimated. The Uighurs, who nowadays have an adaptation of the Arabic alphabet, in the beginning adopted the Sogdian script derived by the Syriac alphabet but written in vertical lines. Later, even the Manchu founders of the Qing Dynasty adopted the same alphabet with some modifications.

Traces of the activity of the Sogdians can be observed among the recent archaeological discoveries in Korea and Japan, especially regarding sumptuary arts. In the imperial repository of the Shoso-in at Nara Japan large amounts of precious objects silks, metalwork, glass and musical instruments were discovered which at first were considered the result of the encounter between Persian and Chinese art.

It is absolutely unacceptable for Chaffee to attempt to revive this false claim pp. Again, the alleged evidence of supposedly Muslim names of people from Southeast Asia is at best extremely dubious. It is well known that mere phonetic resemblance is very weak evidence. Such an assumption is pure fallacy. It is not acceptable to rely on modern Chinese pronunciations whether of standard Chinese or of dialects : the pronunciations of the relevant period must be taken into account.

Yet Chaffee never cites any work on historical pronunciations of Chinese. The writings of authorities such as Karlgren, Pulleyblank, Coblin and Schuessler are never referred to at all, and are not in his bibliography. Unfortunately, it seems that Chaffee believes that it is possible to make almost anything from Chinese transcriptions he is certainly not alone. This erroneous reconstruction of Pu Ximi can be traced back to Hirth and Rockhill, writing in , when the reconstruction of pronunciations of Chinese at various periods in the past was at a very early stage.

Why was ya used when a was available? The phonetic resemblance is virtually non-existent. It has more often been identified with Sohar, but the grounds for this are tenuous in the extreme. The first vowel is obviously not a good match phonetically. Other examples could very easily be cited. The existence of many of them is purely speculative, based on such dubious evidence as that of phonetic similarity.

In a translation p. This translation is in fact badly wrong in a number of respects. Hirth and Rockhill cite Chavannes to support this. It is not clear why Hirth and Rockhill were not aware of this. Ever since its publication in , it has been extensively used by historians, particularly historians of Southeast Asia who lack knowledge of Chinese. Unfortunately, Hirth and Rockhill are often very misleading. All the identifications of toponyms are either questionable or demonstrably wrong some have been discussed above.

It is quite clear that many Dashi embassies whether from the Caliphate or other Muslim polities, such as the Qarakhanids travelled to China overland, not by sea. Visits to China by embassies, and probably also by an occasional merchant, are not doubted, but the permanent presence of Muslim merchants in Chinese ports is questionable. Once Chaffee reaches the Yuan period from p.

His narrative is not free of errors, but there is substantial evidence that large numbers of Muslims entered China during the period of Mongol rule. I have no doubt that Pelliot was correct. Haw s. Related Papers John W. According to Wang Gungwu, by the mid-eighth century a transition was underway in which the Kunlun merchants were giving way to Persians and Arabs with their long-distance trade, a change that became fully apparent in the ninth century. It should be stressed, however, that there was always an active trade with southeast Asia, most particularly with Srivijaya, the maritime power centered in eastern Sumatra, either in the course of travel between China and west Asia, as in the case of the two shipwrecks, or exclusively between China and southeast Asia.

Srivijaya, the dominant southeast Asian power from the late seventh to early eleventh century, was also a favored trading partner of the Tang. Among the many treatments of this important docu- ment, see Frederick Hirth and W. Rockhill, trans. Both the anonymous traveler writing in in An Account of China and India , whose description of the Muslims in Guangzhou was cited above, and the slightly later Book of Routes and Realms Kitab al-Masalik wa-l-mamalik of Ibn Khurradadbih d.

The account further notes that the south China coast had a reputation for dangerous reefs and storms. The author provided a general timetable for the whole trip: roughly a lunar month 29—30 days for each of the four legs of the trip, marked by Kollam Malay, Kalah Bar, Sanf and Khanfu. With stops, the whole trip would take around six months. The route it describes was lengthy and complex but also well known and frequently traveled.

Khanfu was not the end of the road for many of the Arab and Persian merchants who made their way to China. There is evidence, moreover, that Persian merchants were active not only in the ports but in many Tang cities,48 this in marked contrast to the Song period, when foreign merchants were restricted to designated port cities.

It was, of course, the wealth of exotic and much sought-after goods that caused this travel. Ever since Roman times, silks from China had been highly sought after throughout the Eurasian world, and the fact that Ibn Khurradadbih begins his list with three varieties of Chinese silk bears witness to the demand for it in Abbasid society. Yet increasingly during the Tang it was the Arab and Persian merchants who arrived with them at Chinese ports.

Special mention should be made of pearls, for which there was a ready market in both east and west. Since pearl beds were to found throughout Asian waters, no region had a monopoly on them. Indeed, as Edward Schafer has shown, Persian merchants in Tang China were typically regarded as very wealthy and bearers of or seekers after valuable pearls, not infre- quently pearls with magical qualities ascribed to them.

The musk, silk and porcelain alone were reported to have been worth 3 million dinars. Tang Supervision of Maritime Trade Throughout the medieval maritime world, local rulers and govern- ments had a natural interest in the merchant ships that arrived on their shores, and their policies included patronage of the traders, taxation, forced purchase and free trade.

In many cases the foreign communities themselves acted on behalf of the local rulers. BAR International Series , , p. This was not the end of the story of Ishaq. Ishaq subse- quently left on another voyage to China, but his ship was seized in Sumatra and he was killed there. According to Wang Zhenping, the Tang central government was theoretically not involved in foreign trade.

Then three-tenths of the goods are taken in kind, as duty, and the remainder is returned to the merchants. Any goods that the ruler needs he also takes, but he gives the very highest price for them and pays immediately, so he does no harm to the merchants.

The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, p. To quote an imperial edict from , unusual in addressing the issue of maritime trade: The foreign ships from the Southern Seas are come from distant countries, expecting the merciful treatment of our Kingdom. Therefore, the foreigners should of course be treated with kindness, so as to excite their gratitude. It is needless to say, we are striving to lead a life of frugality and abstinence. How should we desire the curious foreign things?

We deeply feel sorry that those foreign peoples should be so uneasy, and even feel that the present mode of taxation is too heavy for them. We should allow them lenience, so as to invite the good-will of those peoples. He sent out every day more than ten boatfuls of horns, tusks, pearls and shells, which he had bought, under the name of common goods through all seasons without interruption. I have converted the romanization to Pinyin. We have already encountered Yangzhou, with its strategic location at the entrance to the Grand Canal, as the site of the massacre of Persians and Arabs as well as the port from which Chinese-manufactured Muslim ceramics were exported.

It was, in the words of Wang Gungwu, a large trading settlement or frontier settlement, inhabited by merchant-adventurers, foreign traders, and non-Han peo- ples of Guangdong, a city in which Han Chinese were a distinct minority. The governor general commands six banners, each constituting an army, and their dignity is no different than that of the Son of Heaven [i.

The adjudicatory functions that Sulayman ascribed to the Muslim judge in Guangzhou are supported by an important Tang text. They each have different customs, and their laws are not the same. That Guangzhou had a foreign quarter does not mean that foreigners — and their families — were content to live in it. Because the land was undesir- able, they sought to live in the river market [area]. After describing how Lu had reversed the corrupt policies of his predecessors and governed honestly, thereby relieving the vexations of the foreign merchants, it describes his response to conditions in Guangzhou that he found unacceptable.

If the local authorities tried to interfere with them, they combined and rose in revolt. Jun arranged for assistance for their medical and marital needs, in all helping several hundred families. It should be noted that there were no legal prohibitions to Chinese- foreign intermarriages. Were they tribal peoples from Lingnan, mer- chants from southeast Asia or west Asians?

More broadly, the passage indicates that at least portions of the foreign merchant community had put down roots in Guangzhou and assumed settler rather than sojourner status.

This was an important development, and foreshadowed the Muslim merchant communities of later centuries. One limitation of the Tang—Abbasid sources for the merchant commu- nities in China is that they give us no almost information about individual merchants or about their internal functioning. Apart from the invaluable account of the Guangzhou community with its Muslim judge in the Account of China and India, which has been discussed above, the remainder of the ninth-century portion of this work containing the accounts of Sulayman and other anonymous sources contains nothing about individual merchants or their lives.

What is does present, however, is a wealth of descriptive material concerning China and India, though only the Chinese parts concern us here. The descriptions of China with which we are concerned come from the ninth-century portion of the Account later in the work, Abu Zayd has some additional information from the tenth century and cover a wide range of topics presented in 72 numbered items, most of which are short entries in the Akhbar al-Sin wa-l-Hind translation.

However, most concern China, and among them certain sub- jects stand out by virtue of the frequency of their occurrence or the detail of their coverage. The subject of commerce is an instance of the latter. Although treated in only three entries, these are among the longest entries in the work.

The credit practices, we might note, were based upon written agreements and were backed up by the force of the law for those who defaulted. The result, we are told, was to increase the rarity of merchandise in the Sino- Arab trade, since it would burn in the warehouses. Concerning the empire as a whole, we are told that the king of China has over urban metropolises, each with its prince and eunuch 33 , and the king himself is described in only the vaguest of terms: as one of four kings of the world, beneath the Arab king but above the Roman king 24 , as lacking designated heirs 54 , and as secluding himself two months of the year in order to inspire awe among his subjects One intriguing entry describes a public bell — to be found in every locality — that anyone who has suffered an injustice can statements about China, most of which involve comparisons with India.

Ahmad, Arabic Classical Accounts, pp.