FUJIAN- As a part of their one-week trip to Fujian Province, in the southeast of China, a number of foreign journalists visited Quanzhou City in this province.

Quanzhou, a coastal city in Fujian, is renowned for its long history and rich culture. It was once the starting point of the ancient Maritime Silk Road and a global maritime trade center back in the Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1271-1368) dynasties.

Quanzhou is a prefecture-level port city on the north bank of the Jin River, beside the Taiwan Strait in southern Fujian.

It is Fujian's largest most populous metropolitan region.

Among the different places that the journalists visited during their stay in this city, Quanzhou Maritime Museum was an outstanding one, as they were really amazed by the rich collection of the museum.

The following is the summary of an introduction for the exhibition provided to the Tehran Times by Zeng Guoheng, Quanzhou City Cultural Promotion Ambassador.

Founded in 1959, the Maritime Museum is the first museum in Quanzhou and the first maritime-themed museum in China. With tens of thousands of cultural relics, including a Song-Dynasty shipwreck, religious stone carvings from the Song-Yuan period and ceramics for export, the museum vividly reproduces China’s flourishing maritime communication and trade which brought the East and West closer together during the Song-Yuan period. In 2008, it was rated as a first-class museum of China by the National Cultural Heritage Administration. The museum currently has five exhibition halls open to the public, showcasing the cultural heritage of the Maritime Silk Road in Quanzhou with artifacts, documentary materials and ship models.

The exhibition hall which is described as follows is “Quanzhou: Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China” the thematic exhibition showcases the outstanding universal value of Quanzhou’s world heritage sites.

Quanzhou was inscribed on the World Heritage List, the name of the property of inscription is named as “Quanzhou: Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China”.

Quanzhou is located on the southeastern coast of China, and according to scholars, formed the first global system in the 10th-14th centuries, connecting, from west to east, most of the inland and coastal regions of the North Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean and the western coast of the Pacific Ocean (the South China Sea and the East China Sea). In the 10th-14th centuries, the global system had no hierarchy, but there was a fulcrum. The major cities in these regions were joined together by sea routes, and Quanzhou was a mega-port with a highly integrated territorial system combining production, transportation, cosmopolitanism and cultural interchange. The 22 heritage sites nominated for inscription on the World Heritage List include sites of administrative buildings and structures, religious buildings and statues of multi-cultural communities, cultural memorial sites and monuments, production sites of ceramics and ironware, as well as a transportation network comprising bridges, docks and pagodas

that acted as navigation markers. They comprehensively reflect Quanzhou’s integrated maritime trade system that combined production, transportation and marketing, as well as its multi-culturalism. The serial property illustrates Quanzhou’s status as a global-level emporium and key commercial hub during a highly prosperous stage of Asia’s maritime trade in the 10th-14th centuries. The property demonstrates Quanzhou’s great contributions to the economic and cultural development of East and Southeast Asia.

To reach China with plain sailing, merchant ships familiar with the patterns of monsoons usually chose to reach Quanzhou Bay in March and April with the help of the southwest monsoon, when the city was bathed in a sea of fiery red coral tree flowers. The coral tree is a tall deciduous tree that blooms in spring with red flowers, but the flowers and leaves are not simultaneous. In the 10th century, Liu Congxiao, the governor of Quanzhou who was vigorously promoting overseas trade, increased the circumference of the city walls sevenfold to accommodate the city’s economic development, and planted coral trees (Citong in Chinese) around the city, hence Quanzhou’s nickname – “the City of Coral Trees”. Later, based on the local dialect, Citong was Romanized as Zayton by merchants from West Asia who came to Quanzhou for trade during the Song-Yuan period; from then on, Quanzhou became the world-famous harbor of Zayton in the writings of explorers.

Quanzhou’s connection to the world was China’s connection to the world. During the Yuan Dynasty, trade in the harbor of Zayton flourished like never before, and this was also the time when Quanzhou enjoyed the broadest and more frequent exchanges with the world in the political, economic and cultural spheres.

Quanzhou’s rise as a global hub of commerce and trade couldn’t have been possible without the efficient functioning of its water-land transportation network. The construction of numerous bridges and roads improved the connection between the harbor and the hinterland; the visibility of pagodas as navigation markers ensured the direction and safety of sea vessels entering and leaving Quanzhou Bay; and the construction of multiple ports and docks in different locations facilitated the loading and unloading of goods. Together, these formed the “great logistics” system of Song-Yuan Quanzhou.

The development of overseas trade greatly stimulated the development of Quanzhou’s manufacturing industry and commodity economy. From the 10th century onwards, many specialized production bases for ceramics and textiles emerged in various counties of Quanzhou. At the same time, with the growing importance of the harbor of Zayton, Quanzhou became a transit and distribution center of import and export goods for overseas trade. During the Song-Yuan period, a wide variety of goods were exported to foreign countries, including ceramics, silk, tea, copper mirrors, oil paper umbrellas, fans and so on.

In the surging tide of East-West trade, the most numerous, broadly traded and influential commodity was Chinese ceramics. Some scholars even refer to this medieval sea trade route as the “Ceramics Road”. Quanzhou was southern China’s leading center for ceramics production and port for exports.

From the Distribution Map of Porcelain Kilns in Quanzhou, we can see that there were nearly 500 kiln sites in Quanzhou between the Southern Dynasty and the Ming-Qing period, including 78 during the Song-Yuan period. There were many famous kilns specializing in the production of ceramics for export, such as Cizao Kiln, Dehua Kiln, Anxi Kiln, Dongmen Kiln and Nan’an Kiln, whose products were marketed all over the world.

From the Song-Yuan period onwards, with the sustained prosperity of maritime trade, the products of Dehua Kiln were distributed to Japan, Southeast Asia, India, Africa and Europe, in addition to domestic markets. Aside from the products, Dehua Kiln’s stepped-kiln firing techniques spread to the Korean Peninsula and Japan, among other regions. The coarse porcelain products such as sauce-color-glazed porcelain produced by Dehua Kiln and Cizao Kiln had obvious quality differences, apparently catering to different levels of demand in overseas markets and complementing one another in the foreign trade market. Cizao Kiln and Dehua Kiln together demonstrate Quanzhou’s remarkable capabilities in basic industries and strong capacity for export as the engine of global maritime trade and as the emporium of the world.

With “great logistics” and “great manufacturing”, a thriving maritime hub also required an effective management system to institutionally regulate and safeguard the development of maritime commerce across the city. In Quanzhou, the combination of official trade institutions and local beliefs in the sea gods provided the basis and direction for the sustainable development of overseas trade through legal regulations and township ordinances.

The second year of the Yuanou era (1087) of the Song Dynasty was a crucial year for Quanzhou, as the government of the Song Dynasty formally established a Maritime Trade Office in Quanzhou to manage maritime trade affairs after the governor of Quanzhou, Chen Cheng, repeatedly petitioned the imperial court to do so. This marked the establishment of the important status of the Port of Quanzhou. Maritime trade offices were government agencies in the Song, Yuan and early Ming Dynasties to manage maritime trade in the seaports. They are equivalent to modern customs houses. They were the administrative agencies for foreign trade in ancient China. The establishment of a Maritime Trade Office in Quanzhou greatly benefited local merchant ships, and from them on, many ships from neighboring provinces also chose to set sail from the Port of Quanzhou. This also led to an influx of foreign merchants. As Quanzhou’s foreign trade increased, tax revenues from the ships surged. By the early Southern Song Dynasty, Quanzhou had been comparable to Guangzhou, and the Port of Quanzhou rose rapidly to become a leading port in the East.

Quanzhou owed much of its prosperity as a global hub of maritime trade to the presence of foreign merchants and their communities, which, along with the imperial clansmen, local elites and Chinese merchants, formed the social fabric of the city and projected it into a global trade dimension.

The flourishing Port of Quanzhou attracted not only traders from around the world, but also imperial clansmen, who made their homes in Quanzhou.

Long-term maritime activities led to open-mindedness and broad-mindedness among the people of Quanzhou, manifested in a higher level of inclusivity for religions. Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism coexist in harmony and interacted with one another, absorbing many foreign religious elements. This is reflected in the architecture, carvings and embellishments, demonstrating the blend of the indigenous civilization and maritime culture.

Quanzhou Qingjing Mosque, one of oldest surviving mosques in China

During the Song-Yuan period, Quanzhou hosted a large number of Arab, Persian and Central Asian Muslims. The Muslims built half a dozen mosques in the city. In 1009, the second year of the Dazhong Xiangfu era of the Song Dynasty, the Quanzhou Qingjing Mosque, one of the oldest surviving Islamic mosques in China, was founded. And in 1310, the third year of the Zhida era of the Yuan Dynasty, pilgrims from the Persian city of Shiraz contributed funds to renovate the mosque’s gate, dome, pavement and windows. The half-dome gatehouse of Qingjing Mosque was a popular architectural feature for mosques in the Middle East during the Middle Ages.

The Muslims who emigrated to Quanzhou during the Song-Yuan period intermarried with the local population; their descendant have the surnames of Ding, Jin, Xia, Ma, Guo, Pu, Ge and Huang, numbering over 60,000 to date. Today, among the families of Arab descendants living in Quanzhou, the Ding family in Chendai Town, Jinjiang City, and the Guo family in Baiqi Village, Dongyuan Town, Huian County, are the largest.

In the 1980s, when the first International Symposium on Manichaean Studies was held in Sweden, a large photograph of the statue was used as the emblem. In February 1991, when the experts of the Maritime Route mission of the UNESCO program of the “Integral Study of the Silk Roads viewed the statue, they excitedly proclaimed that it was the most significant discovery of the whole mission.

Although a thousand years have elapse, the series of historical sites and monuments that fully demonstrate Quanzhou’s role as the emporium of the world in Song-Yuan China still stand in the dynamic and vibrant land of Quanzhou. The conservation of heritage today is a gift for the future.

Photo: Zeng Guoheng, Quanzhou City Cultural Promotion Ambassador, explains about the thematic exhibition of Quanzhou: Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China, at the Quanzhou Maritime Museum