The Maritime Silk Road

[Randy W]

Why is the Maritime Silk Road largely forgotten today, especially compared with its overland counterpart? The answer, at least in part, lies in the difficulty of conducting archaeological excavations on seabeds miles under the surface.

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China’s Underwater History
The Maritime Silk Road remains relatively obscure. New technologies for identifying and recovering lost ships could help change that.

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Indeed, historians like Masaaki Sugiyama argue that globalization has its roots in the 13th and 14th centuries, when the Mongol empire unified a territory stretching from China in the East to Central Europe in the West. If the Mongols are credited with anything in the popular imagination, it’s generally with reviving and overseeing the expansion of the Silk Road, the complex network of overland trade routes that brought Marco Polo to the Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) court in Beijing. Less well known, however, is the Yuan’s naval prowess — not just their failed invasions of Japan, but their vast trading fleets that helped connect China with Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and North Africa. And nowhere was more important to this nascent but burgeoning maritime trade than the city of Quanzhou, on China’s southeastern coast.

Quanzhou was home to a sturdy fleet of seafaring vessels as early as the Tang Dynasty (618-907). These were hardy ships, constructed from robust materials like durable nanmu wood from southern China. Some were longer than 60 meters, stem to stern, and could carry more than 600 people at a time. Their designs made use of sophisticated carpentry techniques such as mortises and tenons, as well as powerful sealants made of lime and tung oil — technologies not dissimilar from those used on Columbus’ ships 800 years later — which allowed for the creation of independent, watertight cabin spaces capable of containing flooding at sea.

By the Yuan Dynasty, Quanzhou had become the largest seaport in East Asia. In 1346, the famed traveler and travel writer Ibn Battuta arrived in Quanzhou by boat from Calcutta. He later recounted witnessing hundreds of large ships and thousands of small boats along Quanzhou’s quays, some of them able to transport up to 1,000 passengers.