Iraqi port city of Basra at its head—and especially from Sīrāf, that great trans-oceanic terminus. Most important, they all seem to have visited and spent time in the places they talk about. There is a glimpse of them as a group at the end of Book Two, where the writer apologizes for his lack of information on al-Sīlā (Korea): “None of our circle of informants has ever made it there and brought back a reliable report.”16 These are the true authors, this circle of ex-expatriates, old China and India hands back home, swapping memories of far-off lands like a coterie of Sindbads—and all the more wonderful for being real characters with real stories.
THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Those merchant-informants traveled through an open world. Arab expansion—and especially what could be called the Asianization of the Arab-Islamic polity under the Abbasid dynasty from the mid-second/eighth century on—had thrown open an eastward-facing window of trade and travel. The new age is summed up in a saying attributed to al-Manṣūr, the second Abbasid caliph and builder of Baghdad. Standing on the bank of the river of the recently founded imperial city and watching the silks and porcelain unloading, he exclaimed, “Here is the Tigris, and nothing bars the way between it and China!”17 At the same time, and at the other end of that eastward way, the Chinese were discovering new far-western horizons, with the Tang-dynasty geographer Jia Dan describing the maritime route to Wula (al-Ubullah, ancient Apologus) at the head of the Gulf, then up to Bangda (Baghdad).18
The hemiglobal scope of commerce comes across in the diversity of goods described in the Accounts: Indian rhino horn, Tibetan musk, Gulf pearls, Chinese porcelain, Sri Lankan sapphires, Maldivian coir, Arabian and East African ambergris, Abyssinian leopard skins. It also comes across in the sheer mobility of individuals mentioned—people like the merchant from Khurasan in eastern Iran, who “made his way to the land of the Arabs, and from there to the kingdoms of the Indians, and then came to [China], all in pursuit of honorable gain,” in his case from selling ivory and other luxury goods. In China, his merchandise was taken illegally by an official, but his case reached the ears of the emperor, who chastised the official concerned: “You … wanted [this merchant] to return by way of these same kingdoms, telling everyone in them, ‘I was treated unjustly in China and my property was seized by force’!”19 By rights, the emperor said, the official should have been put to death for his action. The message is plain: bad publicity would damage China’s reputation as a stable market and a serious trading partner, and that damage would spread across the whole vast continent of Asia. Then, as now, it was supply and demand that propelled and steered the ship of trade, but it was confidence that kept it afloat.
More literally, however, what drove the ships along the “maritime Silk Road” of the Indian Ocean was the great system of winds with its annual alternating cycle, taking vessels eastward in one season and back west in another—the Arabic for “season,” mawsim, giving English (via the Portuguese moução/monção) its name for that system, “monsoon.”20 The two great termini of the monsoon trade were Sīrāf in the Gulf and the Chinese city of Khānfū—which was, according to Abū Zayd, home to 120,000 foreign merchants in the later third/ninth century;21 the ports of Kūlam Malī in southwestern India and Kalah Bār on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula were the two major havens and crucial entrepôts along the way. Of these four, Kalah Bār has never been pinpointed, while Kūlam Malī survives, sleepily, as the Keralan town of Kollam; only Khānfū remains the great emporium it was, the Chinese megalopolis of Guangzhou. As for Sīrāf, birthplace of Abū Zayd and, in a sense, of this book, it is now the site of a small village; but the village crouches on the ruins of the palaces of rich ship owners and traders, merchant princes of the monsoon who dined off the finest Chinese porcelain and whose wealth grew ever greater through that climactic third/ninth century.22
And then, in the last quarter of that century, disaster struck. As Abū Zayd puts it, “the trading voyages to China were abandoned and the country itself was ruined, leaving all traces of its greatness gone.”23 From 260/874 on, China was convulsed by one of those rebellions that seem to well up there every few centuries; the emperor’s fears of instability came home to roost, in the heart of his palace in the Tang capital, Chang’an, captured by the rebel leader Huang Chao in 266/880. As for bad publicity, it could hardly have been worse than news of the wholesale massacre of foreign merchants in Khānfū/Guangzhou. The Gulf ʼs direct seaborne trade with China withered away. “China,” Abū Zayd goes on, “has remained in chaos down to our own times.”24 The lesser Indian trade remained, and Gulf merchants still struck deals over Chinese goods, but only at the halfway point of Kalah Bār. Book Two is haunted by the knowledge that the good old days were over.
THE LITERARY AND CULTURAL CONTEXT
Books of akhbār, oral accounts set down in writing, are very old indeed. An akhbār collection on the ancient Arabs attributed to the first/seventh-century ʿAbīd ibn Sharyah is, by some accounts, the oldest extant Arabic book, after the Qurʾān.25 Moreover, the fact that this ʿAbīd was a professional storyteller demonstrates how the genre sits on the division—or maybe the elision—between spoken and written literature. And if those ancient akhbār had as their subject matter pre-Islamic battles and heroes, then the inspiration for the overarching theme of this book is almost equally old. Time and again, the Qurʾān tells its listeners to “go about the earth and look.”26
Akhbār, then, are supposedly verbatim oral reportage, a secular parallel to the literature of hadith, which records the sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions. And although a full-scale science of akhbār never developed as it did for hadith, there was some attempt at classification. Al-Masʿūdī, for example, identifies two types of oral report, those that are on everyone’s tongues and those that have been passed down a chain of narrators.27 He also neatly defines akhbār by what they are not: his own book is one of khabar, not of baḥth and naẓar—that is, it presents facts as they are reported but does not analyze them through research and investigation.28 In other words, akhbār, like journalism today, were seen as the first draft of history—and, in the case of Accounts of China and India, of geography, ethnology, economics, zoology, and much else besides.
All this means that there is an immediacy to the information. Particularly in Book Two, there are snippets of “writerly” commentary that stitch together the patchwork of accounts, but most of the text has the feel of having been told and taken down directly. An example is the account, mentioned above, of the aggrieved merchant. First, Abū Zayd has his word as literary anchorman—“The Chinese used to monitor their own system, in the old days, that is, before its deterioration in the present time, with a rigor unheard of elsewhere”—but he then gives the nod to his informant, who launches straight into his tale: “A certain man from Khurasan … came to Iraq …”29 And the tale spools out spontaneously, occasionally getting lost in its own subordinate clauses as we all do when we speak. To listen to these accounts is to hear the unedited voice of oral history.
“Unedited” does not mean “unrehearsed”: as with all travelers’ tales, the accounts had no doubt already acquired a polish in the telling and retelling. Nor is it likely to mean “verbatim,” for Abū Zayd and his anonymous predecessor probably further burnished their informants’ grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. Despite this, some of the language is slightly wayward. It is not bad Arabic, as the French scholar Ferrand claimed;30 rather, it preserves features of the spoken Arabic that it represents on the page—even today, actual spoken Arabic is nearly always standardized before it goes down on paper. The multiplicity of contributors and the duality of compilers also make for occasional repetitions and very occasional contradictions.31 Geographically and thematically, too, although the compilers did their best to organize the material, the book as a whole is no disciplined Baedeker—it has more in common, in fact, with the online, interactive travel websites of our own age—nor, of course, does it have the neatness of a discrete journey by a single traveler. Instead, it weaves the threads and fragments of many journeys together into a text that, for its size, must be one of the richest in all the literature of travel and geography.
There is a danger, with all this richness