Discovered but Forgotten

Autorentext
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).

Zusammenfassung
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 sourcesincluding written records, Chinese and Jesuit maps, and archaeological analysis of shipwrecksBin 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.

Inhalt
List of Figures, Maps, and Tables
Note on Chinese Weights and Measures in the Ming Dynasty
Acknowledgments
Part I. The Stage

1. Small, Remote, but Significant
2. From Zaitun
3. Sailing to the Indian Ocean
   Part II. A Destination
4. Who Once Landed in the Maldives?
5. The Kingdom of Atolls
6. Monsoons and Currents
7. Between the Son of Heaven and the Sultan
   Part III. The Cargo
8. The Trees of the Maldives
9. Ships Without Nails
10. Cowrie Shells
11. Dried Fish, Grains, and Handkerchiefs
12. Dragon's Spittle
13. Laka Wood and Frankincense
    Part IV. Reminiscences
14. A Ruined Buddhist Past
15. Port Marriage
16. A True Romance
17. An Echo: The China Bird
    Notes
    Bibliography
    Index