Interplays and Interactions on the Maritime and Overland Silk Roads in the First Millennium ce

Abstract

This article concerns the contacts and interactions that took place on the Maritime Silk Road during the first millennium ce. The term ‘Maritime Silk Road’, like the ‘Silk Road’ itself, can be quite vague. It has come to mean any trade or travel from Japan and Korea across the sea routes of East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, to the Mediterranean and Europe. The focus here, however, follows the subject of the October 2021 ‘China, India and Iran’ conference in Cambridge, where the article was first delivered, and is confined to China, Southeast Asia, India and Persia. It first explains how my interest in this topic came about. Then it highlights some of the ways in which these interconnections manifested themselves during the first millennium by analysing examples from the Chinese dynastic histories and the travel accounts of Buddhist pilgrims. Finally, it discusses two sets of examples of these phenomena mentioned in Rong Xinjiang’s 榮新江, Sichou zhilu yu dong-xi wenhua jiaoliu 絲綢之路與東西文化交流. One of these examples concerns China’s relations with the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258 ce) during the Tang period (618–907), and the other concerns the overland and maritime movement of Persian nobles and merchants to China after the fall of the Sasanian Empire (224–651 ce), and their integration into Chinese society.