Cumin, Camels, and Caravans

by Nabhan, Gary Paul

  During the Song dynasty, the coastal flats around old Zayton were called the Land of Bridges, because 313 causeways and bridge complexes spanned water courses in this stretch of Fujian Province. But the Land of Bridges brand was metaphorical, as well. From the seventh to the fourteenth century, the entire economy and multicultural community here also functioned as a bridge between the Far East and the Middle East, between the Han Chinese on one hand and the Arab-Persian domain on the other.1

  For several years, I had dreamed of making a pilgrimage to Zayton, the easternmost terminus of the Maritime Silk Road. I knew that it had been called “the emporium of the world,” for it served as a major redistribution point for both loads of aromatics that had been sent eastward and loads about to head west across the seas.2 I had imagined colorful exchanges among speakers of various dialects of Chinese, as well as those of Farsi, Arabic, Hebrew, and Hindi, as they bantered and bartered for silk, spices, incenses, and teas. Today, the Zuan Ziu dialect is what is primarily spoken in Quanzhou, although the street English of American rock and hip-hop can be heard at all hours.

  There remains some debate over when, why, and by whom the harbor that predated modern Quanzhou had been given the name Zayton, but few historians deny the coincidence with a loan word from Arabic. There is some doubt that it was originally derived from zeitun, the same Arabic word that was Hispanicized into aceituna, the word still used for “olive” in most of Iberia and the Americas. Historians have found Chinese documents from the tenth century suggesting that the port was then called Zi-tong, but it is not clear whether this was a cognate with the Zayton term used by Persian and Arab traders who had arrived in the region by 758.3 The name likely refers to the olive tree introduced from the Middle East—or at least to an olive branch as a sign of peace and multicultural prosperity. Of course, no one knew how long such peace and prosperity might be shared among people of very different races and faiths before they would wither.

  As I walk across the Anping Bridge, I look in vain for remnants of olive trees—the ones for which Zayton may have been named—but see none along the edges of the tidal backwaters. A group of English-speaking tourists pass by me, and I hear one of them assert that Anping’s bridge is the longest one built during the medieval era that remains standing anywhere in the world today. It was constructed of giant pink granite slabs around 1140, and those same slabs are still in place, though softened and stained by saltwater spray, oil, acid, and constant foot traffic. Each roughly half-meter-wide slab is fit tightly against the next one to make a bridge seven meters wide. Row after row of slabs was brought by boat from a nearby island and placed in the tidewater estuary until they spanned a stretch of water measuring 2,250 meters. Anping’s historic structure is also called Wuli (or “Five Li”; a traditional li is 500 meters) by the Han Chinese, suggesting that its original span was nearly 2,500 meters. Of course, the Han was not the only ethnic population to have traversed the bridge during the twelfth century. On the very same slabs on which I walk, Arabs and Persians, Jews and Saracens, Tamils and Moguls, and Gujaratis and Cham (from present-day Vietnam) walked before me. When that steadfast pilgrim from Tangiers, Ibn Battuta, came here in the 1340s, some two centuries after the bridge was built, he claimed that nearly twenty thousand of the people who were milling around Zayton’s harbor could be described as semu ren, or those [from the West] with colored eyes. He specifically mentioned the presence of several Persians there, including a Muslim dean, a judge, a merchant, and a Sufi sheikh.4

  Among the semu ren were the dashi ren, Arabic-speaking peoples who had arrived in ever-increasing numbers since the eleventh century, when maritime commerce to China began to exceed overland trade.5 They came with cargo from the port of Aden on the coast of Yemen; from Mecca in the interior of Saudi Arabia; from the Gulf of Hormuz; from al-Malighi in Persia; and from Bukhara in present-day Tajikistan. Some had sailed in boats across the Maritime Silk Road; others had journeyed along landlocked routes that edged sand seas and snow-capped mountain ranges. They first came for spices, medicines, and incenses and later for tea and silk. The merchants of Zayton had so much silk passing though their hands that the name of the harbor, in modified form, became synonymous with the silky feel of luxury: satin.

  Yes, satin from a term that had already become widespread in the Middle East and North Africa for olive. The Chinese may have regarded olives as an exotic delicacy as much as the Arabs and Persians regarded silk as an exotic fabric. Not only did their marketable items change hands, but their words moved from one culture to the next, referring to altogether different things even though they possessed the same status. For example, jujubes, fruits native to Asia that look like small dried dates when mature, were called Chinese dates by the Arabs. It was believed that if you could afford such luxury in your home, a treasure that originated in some exotic place halfway around the known world, then you surely have become a member of the elite. Your power to extract resources from someplace else—a place that you have never seen—no doubt seemed limitless!

  As I walk along the bridge, I begin to whiff a peculiar fragrance in the air and look up from the pink granite slabs to see what it may be. I follow my nose some two dozen steps to a Buddhist temple where incense is being burned and the mantra Om mani padme hum is being chanted. My nostrils open to those fragrances, ones that enchant me with olfactory sensations of sandalwood, aloe wood, frankincense, and myrrh.

  FIGURE 16. The eastern part of the Anping Bridge, between the Shuixin Zen Temple and the Shuixin Pavilion. (Photo by Vmenkov. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

  Other, more familiar fragrances are in the air, as well. As I glance around at the little island in the estuary on which the temple sits, I notice that rose bushes and citrus and pomegranate trees are in bloom. They are the same aromas that I have known from my time in the aromatic gardens of the Middle East. Although I fail to spot a single olive tree, I have no trouble smelling the Arab influences that have held on in Fujian.

  Not far from Anping Bridge, another ancient bridge, the Luoyang, also still survives, standing at the edge of the tidewater estuary at Houzhu Harbor in Quanzhou Bay. There, sometime between 1239 and 1265, a 380-ton cargo ship sank into the mud. When the ship was discovered in 1973, and then unearthed from the tidal flats the following year, divers and excavators found that much of it had remained intact and that most of its storage chambers were remarkably free of water damage. Archaeologists carefully opened thirteen of its sealed chambers and found that two and a half tons of aromatics had been preserved for more than seven hundred years. These goods had apparently come in from ports on the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and the bays off of the Horn of Africa. Sorting through the cargo, the archaeologists easily recognized frankincense, ambergris, aloe wood, dragon’s blood, and peppercorns. But there were bits of other spices and incenses that they could not initially identify with confidence by only smell or sight.

  So the archaeologists asked Chinese historians if any documents had survived from the era of the ship that talked about what was being traded at the time, in the hope that they might contain information that would guide them in identifying the other aromatics. They were surprised to learn of still-extant ledgers that registered an astonishing diversity and abundance of items being traded in and out of Zayton during the medieval period.

  The ledgers recorded the purchase and delivery of black cardamom, green cardamom, saffron, and fennel; of white pepper, long pepper, ginger, and cloves. They tracked the movements of cinnamon, cinnabar, cassia, and star anise and of hazelnut, betel nut, pine nut, and fenugreek. Although not often regarded as spices today, apricot, rhubarb, coconut, and hemp seeds were treated no differently than cumin or coriander. The ledgers affirmed transcontinental trade to China of aloe wood, sapanwood, frankincense, and myrrh and catalogued the uses of dragon’s blood, sandalwood, aloe leaves, and osmanthus. And if these treasures were not enough to delight and awe the archaeologists, the ledgers also noted cargo ships carrying ivory from elephant tusks and
horns from rhinoceroses.

  At first glance, you might presume that the Han Chinese themselves had become the masters at managing maritime trade during the Song dynasty, with their own sailors and merchants exchanging goods with their equivalents from dozens of other nations. In addition, foreign sailors did drop off cargo, receive their payments from the Han, buy some Chinese-made goods, and then embark on another round-trip journey to exchange more items of value with Han Chinese merchants in Zayton. But elite groups other than the Han took primary responsibility for managing most of this maritime trade into China over the course of five centuries. These groups certainly included Muslims, largely of Arab, Uighur, Turkish, and Persian descent; probably a few Jews and Nestorian Christians; and perhaps some Hindu traders from Southeast Asia or the Indian subcontinent.

  One thing is certain: even before Sa‘ad ibn Abi Waqqas, Muhammad’s maternal uncle, brought the first alert of Islam’s growing power to the emperor Han Wudi in 616, his father and other relatives from Mecca and Medina had already organized trading expeditions to Fujian Province as early as 586. His father returned with other Arab traders in tow around 628. By 629, Han Chinese historians themselves were recording Muslim residents settling around the harbors of present-day Quanzhou. During the gap in his own visits, Sa‘ad ibn Abi Waqqas was strategically assisting with the Central Asian expansion of the Islamic empire. But in 651, now recognized as an imam, he returned to Zayton with his son and was welcomed back by the Tang emperor, Gaozong, who had been born in the year before the imam’s first arrival and had taken the throne just two years prior to his second (and presumably last) visit. His son and another pioneering saint of Islam were buried in the Lingshan Tombs just outside of Quanzhou’s city limits, and that site has served as a major shrine and touchstone for seafaring Muslims ever since.6

  Why did the emperor grant these outside groups trade privileges and allow the son of Sa‘ad ibn Abi Waqqas to build the Huaisheng Mosque on behalf of the incipient Muslim community that had already congregated there? (The mosque has been rebuilt on the same site at least twice since then, and today it is also known as the Lighthouse or Guangta Mosque.) One theory is that the emperor sensed he could personally benefit from levying taxes and tribute on their goods, despite what it might cost him politically or economically to tolerate the Muslims living and worshipping in their own quarter of Zayton. And yet, the Han Chinese could not have been fully aware of how rapidly the Islamic empire was expanding, nor would they have believed assertions that Islam had gained more power than any other faith or kingdom in the known world. The Han playfully called the chants of the Qur’an the Hui jiao, or “teachings of the Hui,” and referred to Islamic religious, social, and economic protocols as dashi fa, or “Arab law.”

  The first mosque did not hold the burgeoning Muslim population of Zayton for very long, and six more were built in the port town over the next few centuries. Between 1127 and 1350, Zayton had the largest populations of Arabs and Persians of any city in the Far East. When Marco Polo visited the city in 1292, it had nearly surpassed Alexandria as the most important port for spice trade in the world. Rustichello da Pisa’s recounting of the Polo family travels made Marco Polo’s port of departure from China seem no less wondrous: “Zayton [is] the port for all the ships that arrive from India laden with costly wares and precious stones . . . it is also the port for all the merchants [sending goods out] of all the surrounding territory. And I can assure you that for every one spice ship that goes to Alexandria to pick up pepper for export to Christendom, Zayton is visited by one hundred.”7

  FIGURE 17. Qingjing Mosque in Quanzhou, the oldest surviving Arab-style mosque in China, is a reminder of the arrival of Arab spice traders in the port of Zayton during the time of the Prophet Muhammad. (Photo by the author.)

  Members of Fujian’s Muslim community (now called Ding Hui) were recruited to play bureaucratic and diplomatic roles in the Southern Song (1227–79) and Yuan (1271–1368) dynasties. Two of the Ding Hui families, the Xia and the Ding, claim to trace their descent to particular founding fathers from Persia, Borhan al-Dīn Kazerūni and Sayyet-e Ajall Shams-al-Dīn Bokārī, through centuries-old genealogies.8 Another such family from this community, reputed to be of Central Asian origin, was called the Pu or Po clan. Its patriarch, Pu Shugeng, was appointed minister of foreign trade in 1274, and his son also played a long and effective role in mediating between Muslim traders and the Southern Song government. Over subsequent generations, the Pu became the most influential Muslim family in maintaining trade relations with longstanding allies.9

  Later, during Ibn Battuta’s last few days of visiting Zayton in 1346, he affirmed that “its harbor [had grown to be] among the biggest in the world, or rather is the biggest,” frequented not only by hundreds of Chinese junks but also by many more dhows from the Middle East that brought merchants to trade or permanently reside there.10 The same year, the Franciscan brother Giovanni de Marignolli noted that Zayton’s foreign-born residents were not exclusively Arab, Persian, and Turkish Muslims. Assyrian, Genoese, and Venetian Christians were living there as well, as evidenced by the three cathedrals that stood near the port. One Star of David inscribed in stone cut during this era has intrigued urban historians and archaeologists alike. It suggests a Jewish presence during some era of Zayton’s history. In fact, in the City of Light, a tract of somewhat dubious origin, Jews as well as Saracens are noted as being present among Zayton’s many traders.11 In short, Persians and Arabs may have had the run of Zayton at that time, but the Han seemed to tolerate the People of the Book among them as much as the Muslims did. Perhaps it was the city’s very plurality that allowed it to function as the emporium of the world, attracting merchants from over seventy foreign countries and eclipsing all other Chinese port cities in the magnitude of its trade.12

  Then, around 1350—just four years after Ibn Battuta and Giovanni de Marignolli witnessed Zayton in all its multicultural glory—some-thing altogether unprecedented began to occur there. Cross-cultural tensions emerged that irrevocably changed the relationship between the East and the West. It appears that the wealthiest of the Muslim traders became impatient with paying tribute to the Han, for they, not their Chinese hosts, were largely responsible for the economic prosperity of Zayton. The Arab and Persian merchants began to keep to themselves the riches they had accrued through maritime trade, and for a brief moment in time, Farsi became the lingua franca of all harbors in the East China Sea. One prominent Arab trader based in Zayton came to control one-fourth of China’s entire revenue for external sources, virtually monopolizing the wealth gained from transcontinental spice trade. This phenomenon signaled another sort of structural advance for globalization: if a merchant could actually control more wealth than his political hosts, economic imperialism threatened to outflank both political and military imperialism.

  Needless to say, this did not sit well with the Chinese, or even with the other ethnicities in the merchant class of Zayton. They began to chip away at this Muslim-run economic stronghold. While the poor became pirates and scavengers that robbed as much as they could from the Muslims, the Chinese bureaucrats tried to impound, tax, embezzle, or sabotage Muslim-controlled cargoes. Exasperated, the Muslim merchant class recruited two Persian mercenaries, Saif ud-Din and Anmir ud-Din, who formed the espāh (Persian) or yi-si-ba-xi (Chinese) militia to break the backs of bandits, bureaucrats, and black-market traders who were rebelling against Persian and Arab control of all capital in the city. (In Central and South Asia, as in Africa and Asia Minor, the terms espāh and sipahi were used for militias of mercenary soldiers, usually, but not necessarily, of the Islamic faith.) Not surprisingly, the Chinese ruling class, which still benefited from the wealth amassed by the Muslims, had been slow to respond to the people’s outrage that foreigners had become the medieval equivalent of Wall Street’s 1 percent. Believing that the emperor would not get in their way, in 1357, several thousand of the Muslim mercenaries went on the offensive and took full control of parts of Fuji
an Province, including Xinghua (today’s Putian), Fuzhou, and the mercantile sector of Zayton’s harbor.

  When the imperial elite finally protested, the Arab and Persian Muslims not only asserted economic autonomy but also declared political independence, establishing the now-obscure sovereign Muslim state of Ishafran, which controlled all maritime trade in and out of Fujian. Although there is only limited documentation in European languages regarding the brief tenure of Ishafran, its rise and demise remain part of the oral history of the Hui.

  Why the new state was called Ishafran is not well established. The word may be cognate with the Arabic term ‘ishra, which had been used to describe the longtime “mutually beneficial economic relationships established by Muslims” with various Asian, Arab, and African peoples.13 If that is the case, perhaps the power structure of Ishafran was hoping to market its corporate takeover of Zayton as one that would eventually allow wealth to trickle down to all who played along with the new hierarchy.

  What the Persians and Arabs attempted in Fujian was nothing less than audacious. They undermined the power of their hosts and declared their colony of venture capitalists a sovereign nation—not a satellite of Arabia or Persia but its own entity—in order to control globalized trade along routes back toward their homelands, which lay months of travel to the west of the East China Sea. It became known as the Ispah Rebellion.

  Perhaps it was the moral equivalent of the British colonists in North America declaring independence from England at the same time that they were claiming economic and political sovereignty over lands and waters that clearly belonged to Native Americans. Or, we might consider as analogs some contemporary moves by transnational corporations to transcend (or skirt) the laws and mores of their host nations to achieve greater capital gains and more autonomy: the 2012 revelation that Wal-Mart may have bribed its way into becoming the largest source of food, beverage, and spice sales (as well as the largest private-sector employer) in Mexico, or, as noted earlier, Texas-based Halliburton establishing a second headquarters in a port of the United Arab Emirates, where taxes as well as moral scrutiny may be held to a minimum.