CityReads│Zaiton in Maritime China in the 10-14th Centuries

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Zaiton (Quanzhou) in Maritime China in the 10-14^th Centuries 

Quanzhou (Zaiton) was a microcosm of maritime China during the 10^th and 14^th centuries.  

Billy K. L. So. 2001. Prosperity, Region, and Institutions in Maritime China: The South Fukien Pattern, 946-1368, Harvard University Asia Center.

Clark, H., & So, B. K. L. (2002). Prosperity, Region, and Institutions in Maritime China: The South Fujian Pattern, 946-1368. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 62(1), 188.

Why city rises? Why city falls? These are one of the classic questions often asked in urban studies.

I am traveling in Quanzhou, a port city in south Fujian, which used to be known as Zaiton, one of the greatest port cities in the world during the 10^th and 14^th centuries. Zaiton or Zayton  is the Arabic name of Quanzhou, once popular in English, means "City of Olives" and is a calque of Quanzhou's former Chinese nickname Citong Cheng, meaning "tung-tree city", which is derived from the avenues of oil-bearing tung trees ordered to be planted around the city by the city's 10th-century ruler Liu Congxiao.

Except for a period running roughly from 1000 to 1400, Quangzhou has not been a significant factor in the larger history of China. But during that period Quanzhou experienced an economic transformation that temporarily situated it atop the empire's international trade networks. Between the12th and 14th centuries, when the ties between Quanzhou and the so-called "South Seas" reached their fullest development, those networks held an unprecedented economic and cultural importance for the larger empire. The rich source base generated by this window of prosperity combines with the finite time it covered to structure a well-defined, and thus manageable, narrative of growth, fluorescence, and decline that is a microcosm of the medieval economic revolution.

Zaiton was visited by both Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta; both travelers praised it as one of the most prosperous and glorious cities in the world. Therefore Quanzhou is the right place to ask this question, why Zaiton rose and fell in the 10th and 14th centuries?

To gain some understanding of it, I am reading a book by historian Billy K. L. So, Prosperity, Region, and Institutions in Maritime China:The South Fukien Pattern, 946-1368.

The book is divided into three parts: “The Process: An Economic Cycle of South Fukien”, “The Space: South Fukien (Fujian) as a Regional System”, and “The Structure: A Transaction-Cost Analysis of the South Fukien Economy”. Part One studies the region first as a frontier, and then looks at the historical process of economic development. Part Two analyses South Fujian as an internally integrated region, and Ch’uan-chou (Quanzhou) as a regional center and then gives a case study of regional economic integration. His morphological analysis of Quanzhou city goes well beyond a simple description of walls, gates, yamens, and temples, all of which can be derived from any responsible gazetteer but tell us little about the actual morphology of the settlement. So draws on a wide range of sources to analyze exhaustively the urban neighborhoods, describing how the city and its residents were spatially organized inside the walls and providing one of the best insights into middle-period urban structure that has been written. Part Three discusses patterns of trade in terms of merchants, organization, and knowledge and then both formal and informal institutional constraints. The three "interwoven themes", prosperity, region and institution, he argues, create an articulated and inseparable whole that must be understood in its entirety.

In a nutshell, in the 10th-14th centuries, Quanzhou had a profound influence on the history of international trade and cultural exchanges between China and the West. At that time, Quanzhou had three major characteristics: First, it was the major center of foreign trade, mainly trade at sea. Second, the strong presence of foreign culture. At that time, many residents of Quanzhou absorbed many elements from foreign culture, making Quanzhou an international city. Third, there were many foreigners living in the area. West Asian Muslims were in Quanzhou. The most explicit evidence is from is from tombs of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, evidence points to a Muslim community as early as the eleventh century. There is in addition strong evidence of the presence of southeast-or possibly south-Asians as well.

As far as the history of the 10th-14th century is concerned, Quanzhou is definitely not a typical Chinese city, To some extent, Quanzhou during the 10^th and 14^th centuries can be compared to Hong Kong in the 1970s and 1980s, or Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s. Quanzhou is indeed the exemplary port city in maritime China in the medieval time.

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