Introduction

In his discussion of Southeast Asia's commerce with India and China, Anthony Reid remarks, “Situated between the world's two major sources of fine cloth—India for cottons and China for silks—Southeast Asia became internationally known as a consumer rather than as a producer of textiles.”Footnote ¹ Reid's allusion to Southeast Asian consumption of Chinese silk and Indian cotton cloth implicitly raises questions about the nature of commercial relations between these two great Asian civilizations. While it is well known that India and China supplied much of the Southeast Asia and West Asia with cotton and silk cloth respectively, much less is recorded about the degree to which these ‘countries’ or regions sold their apparently complementary textile products to each other, and whether or not other additional natural or manufactured goods comprised an important segment of Indo-Chinese trade. While the available sources to study the commerce between South Asia and China in pre-European times are predictably fragmentary, they suggest a pattern of complementary trade relations in textile manufactures as well as a broader range of commercial exchanges.

In broad outline, Indian and Chinese sources suggest two things about Indo-Chinese commerce in textiles prior to the sixteenth century. These are, first, that China sold silk textiles to India throughout nearly two millennia from the early years of the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) to the period of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644 CE), and did so even though Indians began producing the cloth in the early Gupta period and vastly expanded silk cloth production from the thirteenth century onwards. Second, it is equally likely, although much harder to document, that India or its cultural surrogates—the Indianized states of Southeast Asia—sold cotton cloth to China at an early but undetermined date in the Christian Era, and that certain kinds of Indian cotton cloth continued to be sold in China well after the Chinese cultivation of cotton and production of cotton cloth blossomed in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Put another way, silk cloth production originated in China and the Chinese always produced certain varieties of silk cloth or thread not matched in India or other silk-producing regions, while cotton cloth was first manufactured in South Asia, where Indians continued to produce certain varieties that always found a market in China. And the knowledge of silk and cotton cultivation was transmitted to India and China, respectively, both via the so-called ‘Silk Road’ routes of Central Asia as well as the southeast overland route that linked Szechwuan and the Chinese heartland with Burma, Assam, Bengal and the Ganges valley.

Chinese silk, Sanskrit cinapatta or ‘Chinese cloth’ was imported into India during Mauryan (322–183 BCE) or early Han times. It may first have arrived via Burma, but undoubtedly came in larger amounts via Xinjiang to Kashmir, or through Bactria and Kabul. Later, especially from the eighth century CE onwards, the maritime route steadily grew in importance for Sino-Indian commerce of all kinds.Footnote ² Chinese silk cloth is referred to in early Indian Buddhist texts and, more specifically, identified in the Arthashastra (c. second century CE).Footnote ³ It is not known when Indians first began weaving silk cloth themselves, but silk weavers' guilds are known to have existed by the fourth and fifth century CE. However, until the Sultanate era, that is, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries CE, Indians used only silk from wild cocoons, not knowing, evidently, how to use mulberry silk cocoons or how to unravel thread from boiled cocoons.Footnote ⁴ The Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hsüan-tsang describes this Indian silk by its indigenous name, kauseya. Therefore, it is not surprising that substantial amounts of Chinese silk continued to be highly prized and were sold in India during the next millennium. Various Sanskrit texts attest to its use by the Indian royalty from the first through the seventh century CE; it was valued by the Indian elite, male and female, who in the plays of Kalidasa (c. first century BCE to fifth century CE) wear it for weddings. Embassies from T'ang rulers (618–907 CE) visiting India in the seventh century are known to have brought large amounts of silk to Indian courts.Footnote ⁵ The ample Sanskrit vocabulary and literary references to silk give an idea of the prevalence of silk cloth among the Indian elite of this period, although some of this cloth also came from Iran.Footnote ⁶ Even though the warm, humid Indian climate has left no identifiable Chinese silk artefacts from the pre-European age, substantial amounts of Chinese silk continued to arrive in India in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Chinese chronicler Ma Huan discusses this trade in his account of the 1433 Ming voyage to the Indian Ocean, although he also mentions Indian silk production both in Bengal and Kerala.Footnote ⁷

Although Indian use of Chinese silk is generally known, the Chinese consumption of cotton cloth is rarely discussed in the surveys of Asian trade. However, what was the ‘Silk Road’ for Chinese silk was, in the reverse direction, a ‘Cotton Road’. Cotton and cotton cloth, known by its Sanskrit-derived name as pai-tieh, first reached territories where China periodically exercised suzerainty in the present-day Xinjiang.Footnote ⁸ Fragments of cotton cloth with an Indian Buddhist design dating to the eastern or later Han have been found in the ruins of a site near Niya, east of Khotan, on the southern and most Indianized section of the ‘Silk Road’.Footnote ⁹ Whether or not this cloth was actually produced in Niya or imported from India, cotton cultivation and cotton cloth production seems to have developed in Xinjiang at roughly the same time as Indians began producing their own silk cloth. By the sixth century CE, the administrative and military city of Gaoch'ang, near the present-day Turfan, was known to produce pai-tieh or, in Chinese, mien-hua cloth, and in tribute lists from the T'ang era, Gansu is identified as a source of cotton, as well as hides and other exotica from the wilds of Central Asia.Footnote ¹⁰ Cotton cloth production is described in The History of the Liang Dynasty (502–556 CE). “The State of Kaoch'ang was abundant in a special kind of herb which had fruit resembling cocoons . . . . The fruits of this herb were called pai-tieh seeds. People in this state used this fibre material for weaving cloth, which appeared very soft and white. Such cloth used to be exchanged for other commodities.”Footnote ¹¹ The other route for the transfer of cotton cultivation to China was from east Bengal, Assam and Burma to western Yunnan, and this may also have occurred during the Han dynasty.Footnote ¹²

However, just as it took several more centuries for Indians to develop silk industry on a large scale, so too the production of cotton cloth in China proper, that is beyond the border territories of Xinjiang and Yunnan, did not develop into a major industry until the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Scholars offer different reasons for this relatively slow development. One is that hemp had long been successfully cultivated and used for cloth in China.Footnote ¹³ A second is that the prevalence and popularity of silk cloth, especially in major production centres such as Xian, made it difficult for this foreign cloth to penetrate the Chinese market.Footnote ¹⁴ A third and related reason is that the variety of cotton grown in Xianjian, Gossypium herbaceum, a short-stem variety, was inferior both to that grown in India, as well as to the variety that entered China through the south. This variety, Gossypium arboreum, which originated in East Bengal, became the basis for the Chinese cotton industry. As for the reason(s) why cotton production expanded so quickly in the thirteenth century, this has been attributed to the development of a new ginning frame sometime in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century and, second, to the virtually simultaneous Mongol, Yuan dynasty (1271–1368 CE) stimulus of cotton cultivation, in which the Mongols demanded cotton to clothe their troops, not the first or last time in world history that warfare stimulated a major industrial development.Footnote ¹⁵ Under the Mongols, five provinces paid a cotton tax in kind, and later during the Ming era, peasants with certain sized holdings were required to use part of their land to produce cotton.Footnote ¹⁶

Yet, as in the case of Indian use of Chinese silk, even as China's cotton cloth industry developed, China continued to import cotton cloth throughout the pre-European centuries. It is impossible to estimate the volume of these imports, or always to identify the original source, whether India or Southeast Asia. It seems likely from the extant fragmentary evidence that it was aristocratic Chinese consumers who sought out certain especially fine varieties of cotton cloth. While the tribute of inferior Gansu cotton took place, T'ang sources indicate that cotton was an expensive foreign product and that most Chinese monks who wished to follow strict vinaya texts requiring them to wear cotton found it too expensive.Footnote ¹⁷ T'ang era texts also extol the ‘sunrise clouds of morning’ or ‘rosy cotton’ or ‘morning sunrise clouds’, beautifully printed fine cloth that came from the Indianized states of Southeast Asia and Burma. Burmese Buddhists, like Chinese Buddhist monks, were said to wear cotton cloth because of their Buddhist non-violent beliefs, which forbade them to use silkworms and thus injure living things.Footnote ¹⁸ At least some of the cotton cloth that T'ang writers praised probably came from India, for Indian musicians who played in Xian (Ch'ang-an) are described in at least one source as being clothed in ‘dawn-flushed cotton’.Footnote ¹⁹ Hsüan-tsang also records giving fine silks in China to ‘foreign Brahman guests’ while coveting fine Indian cottons presented to him by visiting Indian Buddhist monks. It is during the early Ming era, when Chinese cotton production was widespread, that Ma Huan offers specific information about Chinese knowledge of and interest in Indian cotton. He is particularly informative about Bengali fabrics, and after remarking, “The land [of Bengal] produces five or six kinds of fine cloth,” he enumerates six types of cotton cloth, followed by several types of silk. One of these cotton fabrics, a “cloth as fine as starched paper,” known as pi cloth, perhaps the fine muslin cloth for which Bengal was famous, is a type often mentioned in Chinese sources.Footnote ²⁰ Ma Huan's careful description of Bengali cotton cloth—and one South Indian, probably Coimbatore variety sold in the Kerala port of Calicut (Kozhikode)—indicates that the Chinese continued to purchase fine varieties of Indian cotton cloth in the pre-European era.

While there appears to be a reciprocal symmetry to Indo-Chinese cloth production and sales, it is impossible to estimate the overall ‘balance of payments’ relationship of these great continental economies. Apart from the political differences of the two regions—a centralized Chinese state that could dictate production and commerce, as opposed to a decentralized South Asia with regional Indian economies—there is not even the kind of substantial anecdotal information available for Indo-Chinese commerce that is extant for Indo-Roman trade, in which Roman currency paid for Indian cloth and spices. However, one thing is certain, and that is the connection suggested above, between Buddhism and Indo-Chinese commerce in textiles. Thus, during the T'ang era, when rulers enthusiastically patronized Buddhism, T'ang embassies and Buddhist monks exchanged silk in India for Buddhist artefacts. Buddhist religious artefacts seem to have been the Indian equivalent of Chinese export porcelain. Even in the earlier ‘Six Dynasties’ era, the demand for such artefacts was ‘enormous’. It is difficult to overestimate their popularity in China and equally difficult, of course, to estimate their value relative to Chinese silk in India, as they represent quite distinct types of commodities. Nonetheless, during the T'ang, “Along the familiar trade routes through the deserts of Central Asia, or through the Southern Seas, a great traffic in holy and venerable objects passed from India and its cultural dependencies into T'ang [China] . . . . The reverence shown to relics of the saints and masters of Buddhism, and even the Buddhas themselves, was phenomenal, and what is more these objects fetched a great price in the public markets.”Footnote ²¹ Bodhi trees, while not exactly artefacts, were one of the commodities the Chinese coveted; they arrived in China with a mission from the north Indian ruler, Harsha of Kanauj, in 641 and again from the Gangetic kingdom of Magadha in 647.Footnote ²²

Apart from these cotton and Buddhist artefacts, India exported a number of other commodities to China. In the late Han, when Indo-Chinese trade was stimulated by the Kushanas' (first–third centuries CE) control of Indian and Central Asian territory, Indians sent coral, pearls and glass to China.Footnote ²³ Incense also appears in sources as Buddhism spread into China in the early centuries of the Christian Era, yet another example of the connection between Buddhism and Indo-Chinese trade. The T'ang era also saw the Chinese import Indian drugs and medical texts, many of them also associated with flourishing Chinese Buddhist culture of the period.Footnote ²⁴ Indian scientists also arrived in China. Astronomy, one of the most respected Indian sciences in the T'ang, is not necessarily directly linked to Buddhism, although one of the most eminent Indian astronomers residing in China in the eighth century was named Gautama Siddhartha. However, two other Indian families, who along with Gautama Siddhartha monopolized the science of calendrical calculations at the Chinese court, bore the names Kasyapa and Kumara.Footnote ²⁵

The presence of Indian scientists in China is only one indication of the relative frequency with which Indian merchants, pilgrims, medical crackpots and others visited China. The idea of the kala panni, the belief that Indian caste restrictions inhibited Indians from travelling overland or overseas, may have been true for certain Indians at certain times, but it did not prevent Brahmins from taking up residence in Xian—or from offering their magical, legitimizing services to monarchies in Southeast Asia—much less prevent the northern and southern Indian merchants from travelling to Chinese territories to trade. Iranian or Iranized merchants, principally Parthians and Sogdians, apparently dominated the Indo-Chinese trade in the pre-Buddhist and Buddhist era. Parthians, who controlled Iran and parts of Central Asia for several centuries from the second century BCE to the early Christian Era, competed with Roman merchants to supply Indian and Chinese goods to the Red Sea region, but in the second century CE during the Kushana era, Sogdian and to some degree Indian merchants became increasingly influential. Sogdians controlled much of the trade along both the Central Asian land and Southeast Asia sea routes from the fourth century CE to the end of the T'ang, and their letters reveal the presence of sophisticated Sogdian merchant guilds operating in Xinjiang, northwestern India and Southeast Asia.Footnote ²⁶

Yet, even though Sogdian merchants dominated both Central Asian and Southeast Asian Indo-Chinese commerce during these centuries, Indian merchants are still known to have been active in Xinjiang. The Sogdian letters cited above also contain hints that in Loulan, in the northeast Taklamakan desert region, Indian merchants cooperated with Sogdians. A document dated to the seventh century CE found near Turfan records that three merchants surnamed Zhu, a probable Chinese designation for Indian merchants (tianzhu), received silver payment for some unnamed goods.Footnote ²⁷ At a much later date, Indian merchant guilds from the South Indian Chola kingdom are known to have played an undefined role in the Indo-China trade, although it is difficult to determine how many may have traded in Southeast Asian or even Chinese ports. However, it is certainly well established that the Chola kingdom welcomed merchants as enthusiastically as the Zamorins of Calicut, whose entrepôt Ma Huan describes in his account of the 1433 voyage as “The great country of the Western Ocean.”Footnote ²⁸

The picture of Indo-Chinese trade that emerges from the fragmentary sources of the pre-European era suggests a kind of economic symmetry where the export of cloth and Buddhist artefacts may possibly have balanced off the Indian imports of silk and, during the Sultanate era, the occasional shipment of porcelain. The latter was sought after by Muslim monarchs but not usually by their Hindu predecessors or contemporaries, except those, perhaps, who had been influenced by Muslim tastes.Footnote ²⁹ Given the enormous time period of this survey and the knowledge that even in discussing Indo-Chinese trade, one is often citing regional peculiarities, it is difficult to make many categorical judgements about the economic relations of the two great Asian civilizations. Thus, while Chinese merchants may have been willing to pay an Indian merchant in seventh-century Turfan with silver and, on other occasions, to purchase Indian products with gold and copper, Ma Huan mentions the Chinese purchasing “precious stones, pearls and corals” in Calicut with “hemp-silk or other such articles which must be given in exchange for it” in 1433.Footnote ³⁰ And the value of Chinese silk must usually have been sufficient as an exchange commodity, even for overpriced Buddhist artefacts.

Apart from this apparent symmetry of trade, the other obvious fact of Indo-Chinese commerce was the central importance of Buddhism in stimulating commerce of all kinds. This cultural dictate also caused the Chinese to value Indian commodities such as incense and to regard Indians as a people skilled not only in spiritual matters but in professions such as medicine. Records from the Sung dynasty indicate, for example, that during the course of the eleventh century Indian Buddhist monks, who were by then making pilgrimages to Wu Tai Shan in Shanxi province, brought vast quantities of aromatics and medicine coveted by the Chinese. This aspect of Indo-Chinese relations seems to have been largely one sided, no doubt reflecting China's enormous wealth, particularly the wealth of its centralizing dynasties—and also perhaps, during the T'ang era, the “Occidentalism” of a confident empire—for whom Indians as well as Central Asian Turks were an intriguing curiosity.