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“Silk Road, Cotton Road or . . . . Indo-Chinese Trade in Pre-European Times”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2009

STEPHEN F. DALE
STEPHEN F. DALE*
Affiliation:
OSU Department of History, 367 Dulles Hall, 230 West 17th Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210, USA Email: dale.1@osu.edu
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Abstract

India and China were the most important producers of textiles in the world prior to the industrial revolution. However, whereas the Western historiography usually discusses Indian cotton and Chinese silk in connection with European imports, or with their sales in the Indian Ocean and the Middle East, cotton and silk were also exchanged between India and China. Indeed, Indian cotton and Chinese silk were probably the principal manufactured goods exchanged between these civilizations. Although Indian records are fragmentary, especially when compared with the voluminous Chinese sources, Indian cotton goods are known to have reached the Indianized states in Xinjiang in the early Common Era (CE), and may have been produced there, in Khotan and the neighbouring states, by the time that indigenous silk production was known to exist in India in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. Yet, while in later centuries large amounts of cotton cloth were produced in China while indigenous centres of silk production developed in India, exchanges of the finest types of cotton and silk cloth continued, usually driven by cultural and social factors in each civilization.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 79 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

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16 Chao, The Development of Cotton Textile Production in China, 19.

17 Liu, Silk and Religion, 51–2.

18 Schaeffer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, 206.

19 Ibid., 207.

20 Note by J.V.G. Mills in Ma Huan, Ying-yai Sheng-lan, 162, n. 1.

21 Schaeffer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, 265–6.

22 Ibid., 122.

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24 Schaefer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, 182.

25 Ibid., 275.

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27 Ibid., 140–63.

28 Ma Huan, Ying-yai Sheng-lan, 137.

29 Chinese porcelain fragments have been found in the ruins of buildings at Vijayanagar. I am indebted to Sanjay Subramanyam and Cathy Asher for suggesting that ‘Hindu’ rulers in times of Muslim dominance may also have valued the Chinese export porcelain. For a reference to porcelain fragments, see Fritz, John M. and Michell, George, City of Victory, Vijayanagara (New York, N.Y.: Aperture, 1991), 100.Google Scholar

30 Ma Huan, Ying-yai Sheng-lan, 141.