Today, several hundred tombstones inscribed in Arabic comprise the main visible vestige of the once-thriving Muslim seafaring community in the Chinese port of Quanzhou, which in the fourteenth century boasted six mosques. John Chaffee traces the rise and ultimate dispersal of this and other Muslim communities in southern Chinese ports through the lens of the trade diaspora concept. This network of Arab and Persian maritime merchants, initially anchored in the ports of Arabia and the Persian Gulf, was sustained above all by Islam — not only as their religious faith, but also their legal norms and cultural practices, such as dietary laws — in addition to family and business connections. Over the long arc from the eighth to the fourteenth century, however, the ties between these Muslim merchants and their West Asian homelands attenuated, and they gradually reoriented themselves to their Chinese domiciles. By the tenth century Muslim merchants largely ceased making the long journeys from the Persian Gulf to the coasts of China in favour of more segmented voyaging, transferring cargoes at Kalah, a still-unidentified port presumably located in the Straits of Melaka. The demise of the unified Islamic empire of the Abbasid caliphate and the violent struggles between the Chola kingdom and Srivijaya confederation for control over access to the lucrative China trade further disrupted their anchorage in their homelands.
Chaffee sees the arc of this history unfolding in three phases. In the eighth to ninth centuries, during the Tang dynasty, Muslim merchants dominated China's overseas trade and its port communities, then perched on the empire's distant southern frontiers. Chaffee describes the Tang authorities as hostile to these foreign merchants, citing the massacres of Muslim communities in Yangzhou in 760 CE and Guangzhou in 879 CE, yet both of these episodes occurred amid devastating rebellions that wracked the dynasty, and certainly neither was instigated by the imperial court. In any event, the southern coastal kingdoms that emerged from the dissolution of the Tang dynasty in the early tenth century avidly promoted foreign trade as a source of economic prosperity and state revenue, and the reunified Song dynasty followed suit. Although the Song government excluded foreign traders from its walled cities, Muslim merchants — now more settlers than sojourners — founded their own communities in the extramural faubourgs of cities such as Quanzhou, which in the twelfth century displaced Guangzhou as China's pre-eminent seaport. Following the Mongol conquest of the Southern Song in 1276 the Muslim trade diaspora in China entered a third phase under a regime that (apart from the era of Khubilai's overseas campaigns of conquest, down to his death in 1294) also encouraged foreign trade. But the Mongol rulers also took a more interventionist stance, favouring the cartel of ortoγ merchants — mostly Central Asian Muslims who acted as personal agents of their Mongol princely patrons and as fiscal managers for the Yuan state (two roles that often blurred together) — over ordinary merchants. Informal privileges and political patronage enabled some ortoγ traders to amass great fortunes from maritime trade. Although the Muslim community in Quanzhou reached its apogee of development and autonomy, one wonders how the ortoγ of Central Asian origins and the Arabs and Persians who came from the maritime world interacted with each other. The evidence of the tombstone inscriptions suggests that the vast majority of Quanzhou's prominent Muslim merchants descended from the maritime trade diaspora.
The ortoγ and Muslims in general began to lose some of their privileges in the late Yuan period, but it was the restoration of Chinese rule under the Ming dynasty that brought a swift end to the Muslim maritime trade diaspora. The Ming founder, the Hongwu Emperor (r. 1368–98), sought to dismantle the vibrant market economy of the Song–Yuan era and instantiate the autarkic village world of family farms enshrined in the Confucian Classics. In 1372 Hongwu enacted a prohibition on private overseas trade that would endure for nearly two centuries. In the wake of the maritime ban the Muslim trade diaspora communities quickly withered. Chaffee suggests that the diaspora entered a new phase in which ‘Sino-Muslim’ traders took refuge in many parts of Southeast Asia from Luzon to Java to the Straits of Melaka. Lacking the anchor of a homeland, these Sino-Muslim communities ultimately were absorbed into the new surge of Muslim traders from the Indian Ocean into insular Southeast Asia.
These final considerations concerning the ultimate fate of the Muslim trade diaspora in China mark one of the few occasions in which Southeast Asia emerges in Chaffee's narrative. While he acknowledges that the Straits of Melaka became the fulcrum of a ‘multi-polar’ trading world during the Song dynasty, Chaffee's focus remains strictly trained on the Muslim diaspora, scarcely acknowledging that Malay ships, traders, and products constituted a major share of China's overseas trade in the Song dynasty, or that Chinese seafarers also flooded maritime Asia from Korea and Japan to Java and the Straits of Melaka. But this book is not meant to be a comprehensive survey of China's maritime trade, nor is it a study of economic history. It is instead a work of social history and cross-cultural encounters. Chaffee concludes that although foreign trade became increasingly integral to the Chinese economy during the Song dynasty, the Muslim communities in Quanzhou and other seaports remained unassimilated. Ironically, the privileged position of the ortoγ and other Muslim merchants under Mongol rule only deepened their isolation from the Chinese majority. Indeed, according to Chaffee the Muslim merchants reverted to a ‘semi-colonial’ status in the Yuan period (pp. 175–6), by which he seems to mean that their foreignness exposed them to violent reprisals. Despite the great wealth of individual merchants under the Yuan, the social accommodation accorded to the Muslim trade diaspora in the Song already was waning before its demise in the early Ming.
