The Maritime Silk Road was the sea route that connected southern China with Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and East Africa from about the second century BCE to the 15th century CE. Ships left Guangzhou and later Quanzhou, crossed the South China Sea, passed the Strait of Malacca or the Sunda Strait, sailed across the Indian Ocean to Sri Lanka and southern India, and went on to ports such as Siraf in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea coast, and Swahili ports such as Kilwa, with secondary routes running on to Zanzibar, the Comoros and Madagascar. In the early 15th century Zheng He’s Ming fleets sailed it as far as Malindi in what is now Kenya. Silk and above all ceramics went west; frankincense, camphor, spices, ivory and pearls came east. Austronesian sailors from Southeast Asia pioneered it, Persian, Arab and Tamil merchants worked its western half, and Chinese-built ships joined only from the tenth century. It mattered because sea transport was far cheaper than caravans, and because the same ships carried Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam between continents.
Han Sea Links, 111 BCE–220 CE: Hepu, Rinan and the Envoy of 166
Long before any Chinese dynasty took an interest, Austronesian peoples were trading jade from Taiwan around a 3,000 km arc of the South China Sea, and by 1500–600 BCE Island Southeast Asian sailors had reached Sri Lanka and southern India with cloves, nutmeg, sandalwood and coconuts. Beads of northern Indian design turn up at Khao Sam Kaeo in peninsular Thailand, dated about 400–100 BCE. Around the second century BCE these regional networks joined up with the older sea lanes of the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea, and a single chain of routes ran from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea.
China’s link to it came through conquest. In 111 BCE Emperor Wu of Han absorbed the southern kingdom of Nanyue and set up commanderies on the coast, including Hepu in today’s Guangxi and Rinan and Jiaozhi in what is now northern Vietnam. Chinese monks bound for India later booked passage on the large Southeast Asian ships the Chinese called kunlun bo. At the western end, the first-century Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written by a Greek-speaking merchant from Roman Egypt, explains when to sail from Egypt to catch the monsoon winds to Arabia and India. The Book of the Later Han records that in 166 CE an envoy claiming to come from “Andun”, king of Daqin (Rome), most likely Antoninus Pius or Marcus Aurelius, arrived from beyond the frontier of Rinan bearing ivory, rhinoceros horn and tortoiseshell. Medallions of both emperors have been found in that region, and Roman-era objects at Óc Eo in the Mekong Delta, probably the port Ptolemy called Cattigara.
Tang Guangzhou and the Belitung Wreck, 618–879
Under the Tang dynasty (618–907) Guangzhou, usually identified with the port Arab writers called Khanfu, became the great foreign port of China. By the seventh century Arab dhows were following the earlier Persian routes to Sri Lanka and on to Guangzhou, bringing the first Muslims to Southeast Asia, and Persian became the common language of maritime trade. Much of this traffic began or ended at Siraf on the Iranian shore of the Persian Gulf, where excavations have turned up East African ivory, Indian stone and Afghan lapis lazuli.
The best evidence for this trade lies on the seabed. In 1998 fishermen found a wreck at 17 m depth in the Gelasa Strait off Belitung Island, Indonesia. It was an Arabian dhow about 18 m long and 6.4 m wide, its planks sewn together with coconut-fibre rope, and it had sunk around 830 on the return voyage from China. It carried about 60,000 items, mostly Changsha bowls packed in straw cylinders and storage jars. One bowl is inscribed with a date equal to 826 CE, and the cargo included Koranic inscriptions, Persian motifs and some of the earliest known intact blue-and-white dishes: goods made in China to suit West Asian buyers. The collection is on display at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore.
The Tang period ended in violence for Guangzhou’s foreigners. In 878–879 the rebel Huang Chao captured the city. Abu Zayd al-Sirafi later put the number of foreigners killed, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians among them, at 120,000, and al-Masudi at 200,000; the historian Morris Rossabi considers both numbers inflated. Chinese records do not mention the massacre, and the Japanese scholar Shine Toshihiko has argued that Khanfu was really Qinzhou, further west on the Gulf of Tonkin.
Srivijaya and the Strait of Malacca, 682–1025
All sea traffic between the Indian Ocean and China had to pass the Strait of Malacca or the Sunda Strait, and for more than three centuries a Sumatran kingdom controlled both. The Chinese monk Yijing spent six months in Srivijaya in 671, and the Kedukan Bukit inscription found near Palembang, dated to the Śaka year 605 (682–683 CE), is the earliest to name it. A Hindu-Buddhist state on the Musi River, Srivijaya rose by subduing rival ports such as Melayu and Kedah, then grew rich supplying aromatics and Buddhist goods to the Tang market. Some scholars place its first centre at Muaro Jambi on the Batang Hari River rather than at Palembang.
Regional ships also carried the trade: the Butuan boats in the Philippines, eleven lashed-lug vessels dated between 689 and 988, were buried with goods from China, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Persia. Srivijaya’s dominance probably ended after 1025, when the Chola Empire of southern India raided its ports. It was then forgotten so completely that the French historian George Cœdès only put forward its existence in 1918.
Song and Yuan Quanzhou, 1087–1366: The Port of “Zaitun”
Cut off from the overland routes, the Song dynasty turned to the sea. From the tenth century Chinese shipwrights began building ocean-going trading ships, and the court relaxed its restrictions on private trade. Quanzhou in Fujian, called Zaitun by Arab traders, received a maritime trade office in 1079 or 1087; an inscription of 1095 records two convoys of twenty ships each arriving from the southern seas every year, and by 1120 the prefecture claimed about 500,000 people. A report of 1206 lists merchants there from Arabia, Iran, India, Sumatra, Cambodia, Brunei, Java, Champa, Burma, Korea and Japan, and Tamil merchants carved images of Vishnu and Shiva and built Hindu temples in the city. Frankincense was so prized that the trade superintendents’ promotions depended on how much of it they brought in.
A Southern Song merchant ship lost in this period has been raised whole. The Nanhai One, found in 1987, is 30.4 m long and 9.8 m wide and was reported to hold 60,000 to 80,000 items; in 2007 it was lifted into a seawater tank inside the Maritime Silk Road Museum in Guangdong. Under the Mongol Yuan dynasty Quanzhou stayed open. Marco Polo sailed from it in 1292 escorting the princess Kököchin to Persia and called it one of the two greatest ports in the world for commerce; Ibn Battuta called it the greatest. That cosmopolitan city ended in violence. In 1357 the city’s Persian garrison rose against the Yuan in the Ispah rebellion; when loyalist forces crushed it in 1366, most of Quanzhou’s foreign merchants were killed. UNESCO listed Quanzhou as the “Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China” in 2021.
Zheng He’s Seven Voyages, 1405–1433
The last and largest phase was state-run. Zheng He, born Ma He to a Muslim family in Yunnan, commanded seven expeditions for the Yongle and Xuande emperors. The first left on 11 July 1405 with, by the usual count, 317 ships and almost 28,000 crew, although Edward Dreyer argues the ship total double-counts and the real fleet was nearer 250. The fleets called at Java, Brunei, Siam, Malacca, Calicut and other Indian ports, Hormuz and the Arabian Peninsula, and the Swahili coast, exchanging gold, silver, porcelain and silk for ostriches, zebras, camels and ivory. A giraffe brought back from Malindi was presented at court as a qilin, a sign of heavenly favour.
How big those ships were is still argued over. Some old Chinese accounts give the nine-masted treasure ships a length of 44.4 zhang, about 127 m, which would make them almost twice as long as any wooden ship otherwise recorded; many scholars think 60–75 m more likely, and Zhao Zhigang has argued for about 70 m. The voyages were expensive and politically contested. The Hongxi Emperor stopped them on 7 September 1424, and the Xuande Emperor allowed only one more, launched in 1431 and ended in 1433. Zheng He probably died on that last voyage and was buried at sea.
Sea Bans, Kilwa and the Portuguese, 1433–1511
Ming policy had already worked against private shipping. The first haijin, or sea ban, issued in 1371, limited China’s legal foreign trade to tribute missions; it pushed trade into smuggling and piracy rather than stopping it, and was lifted only in 1567. At the African end, the Swahili city of Kilwa Kisiwani in today’s Tanzania had prospered on the gold trade from Sofala. Ibn Battuta, visiting in 1331, called it one of the most beautiful cities in the world; its elite displayed imported ceramics from Arabia and China in purpose-built wall niches, and its own coins, minted from about 1100 to 1600, have been found as far inland as Great Zimbabwe.
The Portuguese then broke the old system by force. They sacked and burned Kilwa in July 1505, and in 1511 Afonso de Albuquerque captured Malacca, the port through which, by then, the seagoing trade between China and India was concentrated. The route itself never closed, but control of it passed to armed European companies. The overland counterpart is followed in our stop-by-stop guide to the Silk Road, and the pepper and clove trade that shared these waters in our guide to the spice routes.