Maritime Commodity Trade with the Jiankang Empire

Our perception of Chinese engagement with “exotic” maritime commodities is strongly colored by the work of Edward Schafer (Golden Peaches of Samarkand; Vermilion Bird), who focused on the experience of connoisseurs during the Tang Empire. Though Schafer’s work was groundbreaking for its time, it has left us with some misperceptions. The system of maritime commodity trade was in fact developed under the Jiankang Empire (a.k.a. the Chinese southern dynasties, 3rd-6th centuries CE), whose ruling class had much closer ties to the Southeast Asian traders who actually built and operated the network. This talk will present an overview of that network: its geography, its operation, and the growth of large-scale commodity trading prior to the establishment of Tang rule in the early seventh century. The focus will be on aromatics and medicinal substances, which were the most important and valuable products imported to Jiankang, and on silk, the primary export. ———————————————————-Andrew Chittick is the E. Leslie Peter Professor of East Asian Humanities and History at Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, FL. A native of California, he received his PhD in History from the University of Michigan in 1997. He is the author of Patronage and Community in Medieval China: The Xiangyang Garrison, 400-600 CE (SUNY Press, 2010) and The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History (Oxford University Press, 2020). He has held research fellowships with the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore. He is currently a Visiting Research Professor at the NYU Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, studying maritime interchanges between East Asia and Southeast Asia in the first millennium CE.