Long before oceans were crossed, overland caravans and monsoon-driven ships linked China, India, the Islamic world, Africa, and Europe in a web of commerce and ideas.
Stop 01 · c. 126 BCE
The Road Opens
Around 126 BCE the Han dynasty's envoy Zhang Qian returned to China after more than a decade in Central Asia, much of it as a captive of the Xiongnu. His reports of Ferghana, Bactria and Parthia, states rich in unusual products, persuaded Emperor Wu to look west, and China began trading silk westward in earnest. Zhang himself went out again, to the Wusun, in 119–115 BCE. The network of routes later called the Silk Road eventually ran for more than 6,400 kilometres overland. It carried silk, spices and horses, and, just as importantly, ideas and techniques: Buddhism travelled east along it, papermaking spread west, and so, in time, did disease.
Around 126 BCE the Han dynasty's envoy Zhang Qian returned to China after more than a decade in Central Asia, much of it as a captive of the Xiongnu. His reports of Ferghana, Bactria and Parthia, states rich in unusual products, persuaded Emperor Wu to look west, and China began trading silk westward in earnest. Zhang himself went out again, to the Wusun, in 119–115 BCE. The network of routes later called the Silk Road eventually ran for more than 6,400 kilometres overland. It carried silk, spices and horses, and, just as importantly, ideas and techniques: Buddhism travelled east along it, papermaking spread west, and so, in time, did disease.
After Augustus annexed Egypt, Rome's sea trade with India grew fast. The geographer Strabo learned that as many as 120 ships a year were sailing from the Red Sea port of Myos Hormos to India, where under the Ptolemies only a few had dared. Ships used the seasonal monsoon winds to cross the Arabian Sea. A Greek handbook from the mid-1st century, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, lists the ports and the goods. At Muziris on India's Malabar Coast, which Pliny the Elder called the first emporium of India, merchants traded pepper, pearls, ivory and Chinese silk for Roman gold coins, glass, coral and wine. Pliny grumbled that the East drained Rome of 100 million sesterces a year.
Under the Tang dynasty (618–907), the Silk Road reached a golden age. Chang'an, the Tang capital, was for much of this era the largest city on Earth, and its West Market even had a Persian bazaar. Sogdian, the language of merchants from around Samarkand, served as a common tongue across Central Asia, and the city was home to Sogdians, Nestorian Christians, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans and Muslims. Goods and faiths flowed both ways: the monk Xuanzang travelled to India and back between 629 and 644 to collect Buddhist scriptures. The golden age had limits. The An Lushan rebellion of 755–763, led by a half-Sogdian general, ravaged the empire, and in 878–879 rebels under Huang Chao massacred foreign merchants at Guangzhou.
South of the land routes, seasonal monsoon winds powered a vast maritime trade. From the 8th century, if not earlier, Muslim merchants and missionaries spread Islam along the ocean's western shores, and Swahili towns on the East African coast grew rich. Kilwa, at its peak home to over 10,000 people, exported gold, ivory, tortoiseshell and incense; Ibn Battuta, visiting in 1331, called it one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Dhows carried gold, ivory, textiles and spices to Arabia and India, and Calicut became the hub of Indian pepper exports. The trade also moved enslaved Africans, perhaps 1,000 a year between 800 and 1700. By some accounts this sea network came to eclipse the overland Silk Road.
Whoever controlled the Strait of Malacca, a channel some 900 kilometres long between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, controlled the sea route between India and China. From the 7th century the maritime empire of Srivijaya, centred on Sumatra around Palembang, grew rich on this traffic. The Chinese monk Yijing stayed there for six months in 671, and its name first appears in the Kedukan Bukit inscription of 682. Srivijaya became a great centre of Buddhist learning in Southeast Asia, and by one account its maharaja Samaratungga oversaw the building of Borobudur on Java, finished in 825. Its power waned after the Chola Empire of southern India launched a series of major raids on its ports in 1025.
A parallel trade crossed the Sahara by camel caravan. Camels, known in the region from the 3rd century, made regular crossings possible, and from the 7th and 8th centuries routes linked Morocco with the bend of the Niger. Ibn Battuta reported caravans of about 1,000 camels, some as large as 12,000. West African empires, Ghana and then Mali, grew wealthy exchanging gold, panned and mined in Bambuk and Bure, for salt from mines such as Taghaza, where buildings were said to be built of salt. When Mansa Musa of Mali made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, his lavish gifts in Cairo reportedly lowered the value of gold in Egypt and made his name across the Muslim world.
By the 14th century the Javanese empire of Majapahit, founded by Raden Wijaya in 1292–1293 in the wake of a Mongol invasion, claimed overlordship across much of the archipelago. It peaked under Queen Tribhuwana and her son Hayam Wuruk, with the minister Gajah Mada, who swore not to rest until the islands were united. The court poem Nagarakretagama of 1365 lists 98 tributaries from Sumatra to New Guinea, though historians debate how real that rule was. The empire grew rich on the spice trade. Cloves, nutmeg and mace, native to the Maluku and Banda islands and grown almost nowhere else, drew merchants from China, India and Arabia, and would soon lure Europeans halfway around the world.
Between 1405 and 1433 Ming China sent seven great fleets into the Indian Ocean under Admiral Zheng He, a eunuch born into a Muslim family in Yunnan, who had been captured by Ming armies as a boy in 1381. The first voyage, ordered by the Yongle Emperor, carried about 27,800 men in 317 ships, 62 of them large treasure ships. The first three voyages reached Calicut; later ones sailed on to Hormuz, Arabia and the East African coast as far as Malindi. The fleets brought back foreign envoys and exotic animals and destroyed a pirate fleet at Palembang. After 1433 court officials dismantled the programme, cancelled further voyages and broke up the seagoing ships.
Europeans came by sea. On 8 July 1497 Vasco da Gama left Lisbon with four ships and a crew of 170, rounded the Cape of Good Hope and, at Malindi, hired a Gujarati pilot who knew the monsoon winds. He reached Kozhikode (Calicut) on 20 May 1498, opening the first sea route from Europe to India and challenging Venice, which had virtually monopolised the European spice trade through Levantine and Egyptian ports. The Portuguese soon turned to force. In 1511 Afonso de Albuquerque captured Malacca, the port through which seagoing trade between China and India passed, and that November sent ships on to the Spice Islands. An age of European empire in Asian waters had begun.