Accounts of China and India

Abu Zayd al-Sirafi, Tim Mackintosh-Smith

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479814428
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The ninth and tenth centuries witnessed the establishment of a substantial network of maritime trade across the Indian Ocean, providing the real-life background to the Sinbad tales. An exceptional exemplar of Arabic travel writing, Accounts of China and India is a compilation of reports and anecdotes about the lands and peoples of this diverse territory, from the Somali headlands of Africa to the far eastern shores of China and Korea. Traveling eastward, we discover a vivid human landscape—from Chinese society to Hindu religious practices—as well as a colorful range of natural wilderness—from flying fish to Tibetan musk-deer and Sri Lankan gems. The juxtaposed accounts create a kaleidoscope of a world not unlike our own, a world on the road to globalization. In its ports, we find a priceless cargo of information. Here are the first foreign descriptions of tea and porcelain, a panorama of unusual social practices, cannibal islands, and Indian holy men—a marvelous, mundane world, contained in the compass of a novella.

ACCOUNTS OF CHINA AND INDIA: THE SECOND BOOK

2.1.1
Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī’s evaluation of the First Book

Abū Zayd al-Ḥasan al-Sīrāfī said: I have examined this foregoing book (meaning the First Book), having been commanded to look carefully through it, and to verify the information I find in it about the affairs of the sea and about its kings and their various circumstances,⁸³ and to compare this information with other reports passed down about these kings, known to myself but not appearing in the book. I found the date of the book to be the year two hundred and thirty-seven [851–52]—a time when maritime business still ran on an even keel, on account of all the toing and froing overseas by merchants from Iraq. I also found that everything recounted in the First Book follows a truthful and veracious line. The only exception is the report about the food the Chinese offer to their dead and which, when they leave it by the corpse at night then find it gone in the morning, they allege the dead person has eaten. This tale had already reached our ears, but we did not know if it was true until someone we trusted as an informant arrived from those parts. When we asked him about the story, he dismissed it as untrue and added, “The allegation is just as baseless as that of the idolators who claim that their idols speak to them.”

THE CHANGED SITUATION IN CHINA, AND THE CAUSE OF IT

2.2.1
The revolution of Huang Chao, and the Khānfū massacre

Since that above-mentioned date, however, the situation has changed, in China in particular. Because of events that occurred there, the trading voyages to China were abandoned and the country itself was ruined, leaving all traces of its greatness gone and everything in utter disarray. I shall now explain what I have learned concerning the cause of this, God willing.

The reason for the deterioration of law and order in China, and for the end of the China trading voyages from Sīrāf, was an uprising led by a rebel from outside the ruling dynasty known as Huang Chao. At the outset of his career he had been involved in armed banditry and hooliganism, causing general mayhem and attracting a rabble of witless followers. In time, when his fighting capacity, the size of his forces, and his lust for power had grown strong enough, he marched on the great cities of China, among them Khānfū: this city is the destination of Arab merchants and lies a few days’ journey from the sea on a great river where the water flows fresh. At first the citizens of Khānfū held out against him, but he subjected them to a long siege—this was in the year 264 [877–78]—until, at last, he took the city and put its people to the sword. Experts on Chinese affairs reported that the number of Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians massacred by him, quite apart from the native Chinese, was 120,000;⁸⁴ all of them had gone to settle in this city and become merchants there. The only reason the number of victims from these four communities happens to be known is that the Chinese had kept records of their numbers. Huang Chao also cut down all the trees in Khānfū, including all the mulberry trees; we single out mulberry trees for mention because the Chinese use their leaves as fodder for silkworms: owing to the destruction of the trees, the silkworms perished, and this, in turn, caused silk, in particular, to disappear from Arab lands.

2.2.2
The progress and eventual defeat of the revolution

After destroying Khānfū, Huang Chao marched on one city after another, laying waste to each. So powerless was the king of China to withstand him that the rebel eventually closed in on the royal capital, known as Khamdān;⁸⁵ the king fled it for the city of Bamdhū on the border of Tibetan territory, and set up his court there. The rebel’s power, meanwhile, kept on growing from day to day. His whole aim and purpose was the destruction of cities and the slaughter of their inhabitants, for he did not belong to any royal lineage and therefore could not aspire to gain the throne itself.⁸⁶ Moreover, he took his destruction to such extremes that China has remained in chaos down to our own times.

For a time, the rebel’s campaign went on unchecked. And then the king of China wrote to the king of the Taghazghuz—a people from the land of the Turks, to whom they are neighbors and kinsmen by marriage⁸⁷—and sent envoys to him, asking him to free him from the curse of Huang Chao. In response, the king of the Taghazghuz dispatched one of his sons against the rebel at the head of a vast number of troops, and, after ceaseless fighting and many great battles, Huang Chao was eliminated. Some people claimed that he was killed, others that he died a natural death.⁸⁸

2.2.3
The breakup of China and the decline of its foreign trade

The king of China then returned to his city known as Khamdān, only to find it left in ruins by Huang Chao and to find himself debilitated, his treasury depleted, and his captains, commanders, and capable officers all dead. As a consequence, all the provinces were taken over by warlords: they prevented the central government from gaining access to revenues and kept hold of all the wealth that was in their hands. Because of the weakness of his own hand, necessity compelled the king of China to accept their excuses; for their part, the warlords feigned obedience to the king and pronounced the customary formulae of allegiance⁸⁹ but without actually obeying him in the matter of revenues or in other areas in which provincial rulers had formerly carried out the royal will. Thus China went the way of the Persian emperors when Alexander killed Darius the Great and divided Persia up among factional rulers.⁹⁰ Moreover the warlords, acting neither with the king’s blessing nor at his bidding, supported each other in their quest for further power: when a stronger one besieged a weaker, he would conquer his territory, annihilate everything in it, and eat all the defeated warlord’s people, cannibalism being permissible for them according to their legal code, for they trade in human flesh in their markets.⁹¹

On top of all this, they extended the hand of injustice against merchants coming to their land. And, in addition to the harm done to the merchants, Arab captains and shipowners began to be subjected to injustices and transgressions. The Chinese placed undue impositions on merchants, seized their property by force, and sanctioned practices in which the custom of former times would in no way have allowed them to engage. Because of this, God—exalted be His name—withdrew His blessings altogether from the Chinese, the sea itself became uncooperative,⁹² and ruin befell the ships’ masters and pilots of Sīrāf and Oman, as ordained, in the course of events, by God the Ruler, may His name be blessed.

VARIOUS PRACTICES AND MANUFACTURES OF THE CHINESE

2.3.1
How criminals are put to death

One aspect of judicial practice among the Chinese was mentioned in the First Book, but only that one, namely, that married men and women who commit adultery are put to death, as are thieves and murderers. The actual manner of execution is as follows. First, the hands of the man to be executed are firmly bound and pushed over his head, on to the back of his neck; then his right leg is forced through the space formed by his right arm, and his left leg through that formed by his left arm. This means that both his feet are now at his back, and his whole body is compressed and remains like a ball; there is no way he can free himself, and no need of anything to hold him in this position. When he is in this state, his neck becomes dislocated, the vertebrae of his spine are displaced from their supporting tissue, the joints of his hips are twisted the wrong way around, and all the parts of his frame are compressed into each other: thus his spirit becomes constricted, and if he is left in such a position for even a part of an hour, he will perish. If however he remains alive too long, he is then beaten with a particular wooden stave of theirs, a particular number of times, on the parts of his body where the blows will be fatal; the number of blows is never exceeded, but it is never less than enough to kill him. Then he is given over to those who will eat him.

2.3.2
The Register of Harlots

Among the Chinese are certain women who do not wish to be virtuously married but prefer a life of sexual promiscuity. The practice is for such a woman to go to the office of the chief of police and declare her renunciation of the married life⁹³ and that she wishes to be entered into the list of harlots and to request that she be subject to the conventions customary for those of her kind. They have a number of conventions with regard to women wishing to lead a promiscuous life. For example, she must record in writing her ancestral descent, her physical appearance,⁹⁴ and her place of residence. She is then entered officially in the Register of Harlots, and a cord is placed around her neck from which is suspended a copper tag impressed with the ruler’s seal. She is also presented with a written authorization that attests her entry into the list of harlots and states that she must pay such-and-such an amount of copper cash each year to the public treasury;⁹⁵ it also states that anyone marrying her is to be put to death. Thereafter, she pays her dues annually, and no opprobrium attaches to her. The women of this class go out in the evenings, dressed in all manner of attire, and unveiled.⁹⁶ They go to wanton and licentious foreigners who have arrived in the land, and also to the Chinese themselves, spending the night with them and leaving the following morning. We praise God for the guidance by which He has purified us from such temptations!

2.3.3
Chinese copper coinage

Regarding their use of copper coins to transact business, the reason for it is that they look on people who use gold dinars and silver dirhams as mistaken. For they argue that, if a thief enters the house of one of the Arabs who use dinars and dirhams, it is quite possible for him to carry off on his back ten thousand dinars and the same quantity of silver, which would spell ruin for the owner of the money. If a thief enters the house of one of their people, however, he can carry off no more than ten thousand of the copper coins, which are worth only ten mithqāls of gold.⁹⁷ These coins are made of copper alloyed with a mixture of other metals. Each of them is the size of a baghlī dirham and has a hole at its center large enough to take the cord on which the coins are strung. The value of each thousand of these coins is a mithqāl of gold: a thousand are strung on the cord, with a knot tied after every hundredth coin. When anyone buys land or any sort of goods or even something as cheap as vegetables, he pays with these copper coins, according to the price of his purchase. They are to be found at Sīrāf and bear a legend in Chinese characters.⁹⁸

2.3.4
Their manner of saving their possessions in event of fire

Turning to outbreaks of fire in China and the information reported in the First Book about buildings, the cities there are constructed, as stated, of wood and panels of woven bamboo, rather like the reed panels of our lands.⁹⁹ The structures are plastered with clay and with a substance peculiar to the Chinese, which they produce from hemp seeds and which turns milk-white: when walls are painted with this, it gleams with extraordinary brightness. The doorways of their houses have no thresholds, because their goods and treasures and all their possessions are kept in chests mounted on wheels, so they can be moved about. If fire breaks out, these chests and their contents can be pushed to safety, with no threshold to impede their swift exit.

2.3.5
Eunuch slaves, provincial rulers, and their manner of riding in public

On the subject of eunuch slaves, which was mentioned summarily in the First Book, they function as overseers of taxes and as door keepers of the treasury. Some of them are of non-Chinese origin, captured in the borderlands, then castrated; others come from the native Chinese population and are castrated by their fathers, then presented by them to the ruler as a means of gaining favor. All matters to do with the ruler’s own household and his treasuries, as well as with foreigners arriving in the city of Khānfū (to which the Arab merchants go), all this is the concern of these slaves.

It is a custom of theirs that when these slave officials and the rulers of all the various cities ride out in public, they are preceded by men with wooden instruments like clappers:¹⁰⁰ when they beat them, the sound can be heard from far away, and none of the populace remains on any part of the road along which the slave or...