1. What is the Maritime Silk Road?

 

The Maritime Silk Road is a network of sea routes between the 2nd century BC and the mid-to-late 19th century, before steam-powered boats replaced sailing ships. Through those routes, the ancients took advantage of natural conditions, such as monsoons and ocean currents, and used traditional navigation techniques to carry out multi-disciplinary exchanges with major sea areas and coastal zones in the middle and low latitudes of the world.

The term “Maritime Silk Road” is a combination of “silk road” as its base and “maritime” to define its coverage and form of transportation. The “Silk Road”, derived from ancient Greek geographical writings, had referred to a trade route from the Euphrates River eastward to the kingdom of “Seres” (China), as recorded by the ancient Greek geographer Marinus. In the mid-19th century, the British geographer Henry Yule verified and documented this route. Later, the German geographer Richthofen gave the trade route a more descriptive term, the “Silk Road (Seidenstrasse)”, in the first volume (1877) of his China: The Results of My Travels and the Studies Based Thereon. The name was then widely disseminated by the Swedish scholar Sven Hedin's bestseller, The Silk Road.

In the early 20th century, the French scholar Chavannes extended the concept of the Silk Road, stating that “the Silk Road consists of two routes, one by land and the other by sea; the North route starts from Sogdiana and the South is a passway by sea connecting to harbours in India”. Later on, Paul Pelliot, Ji Xianlin and others also mentioned or examined the sea route from China to India in their respective treatises. In the 1960s, a series of studies by Japanese scholars on the maritime porcelain trade, with China as the exporting country, gave rise to the name “Maritime Silk Road”. With porcelain, the main trade item of interest, the Maritime Silk Road only borrowed the symbolic meaning of the “Silk Road”. Until 1974, the Chinese scholar Jao Tsung-I discussed the route of Chinese silk’s outbound transportation in the name of “The Silk Road of the Sea” in the appendix to his The Cloth of Shu and Cinapatta – On Early Links between China, India and Burma. That was similar to what Ji Xianlin had discussed on the “South China Sea Road” via which Chinese silk had been exported to India. In the 1980s, Chen Yan explicitly addressed the “Maritime Silk Road” as the route by which Chinese silk products were shipped out of China at different times.

 

2. The Space and Time Frame of the Maritime Silk Road

 

(1) Spatial Form

As a composite transportation system, the Maritime Silk Road extends from the Japanese archipelago in East Asia to the west coast of the Mediterranean Sea. According to its geospatial characteristics and historical development, the areas involved can be roughly divided into six plates: East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, West Asia, East Africa and the Mediterranean. In terms of a visual form, the Maritime Silk Road is presented as a network interwoven by numerous shipping routes connecting many important ports, such as Alexandria, Beirut and Istanbul on the Mediterranean plate; Mogadishu, Mombasa and Kilwa on the East African plate; Hormuz and Aden on the West Asian plate; Calicut, Cochin, Thanjavur and Galle on the South Asian plate; Malacca and Palembang in the Southeast Asian plate; and Guangzhou and Ningbo in the East Asian plate.

The formation and development of those ports along the Maritime Silk Road was influenced by geographical and related political, economic and cultural factors, but also highly relevant with inland production patterns and water traffic system. In the specific period after these ports were well established, they had long-term continuity and a strong adsorption effect, becoming and serving as regional trade distribution hubs and frontiers of cultural exchanges for quite some time. With ports as the core, the entire vast areas, based on the important waterway transport and navigation infrastructure, coupled with the production facilities for maritime trade goods and/or the results of trade and cultural exchange activities, became the most important nodes that constituted the overall form of the Maritime Silk Road.

Throughout the interaction network of the Maritime Silk Road, some nodes, with their goods and materials, technologies, population and purchasing power, provided particularly important support and guarantee for cross-plate navigation. These nodes were also geographically concentrated, so that the areas connected by them became the key destinations for trade, cultural and technological exchanges along the Maritime Silk Road. They are also the sites where the most tangible evidence of those exchanges has been discovered. Under the world heritage framework, we can consider these “spheres of active interaction” as the most important and typical carriers of the unique values of the Maritime Silk Road.

 

(2) Time Frame

 

Before the 2nd century BC, there had been some maritime trade within each of these plates and among neighbouring plates. By around the 2nd century BC, with the development of various routes and the expansion of commerce, it can be argued that the Maritime Silk Road, which connected those major plates, was actually formed. Over its 2,000-year history, the Maritime Silk Road were distinctively characterised by four major periods.

The first period (from the 2nd century BC to the late 6th century) was the inception of the Maritime Silk Road. With the mastery of monsoonal patterns, the previous regional trade networks were interconnected to form an initial global trading system, which also led to cultural and religious interactions. In terms of goods, Roman gold coins from the West and silk from the East were the most typical items in this system of interaction. Culturally, Christianity spread from the Mediterranean to South Asia, and Buddhism spread from South Asia to Southeast Asia and East Asia. Meanwhile, the geographical advantage of Southeast Asia made it a key link in maintaining this global network.

The second period (from the early 7th century to the late 10th century) marked the maturation of the Maritime Silk Road, when the trade and cultural exchange network developed further and in a more systematic way. There were increasing varieties of goods exchanged, with porcelain beginning to appear in all plates along the route and the spices trade further raising the status of Southeast Asia. Culturally, Chinese civilisation developed steadily, Islamic civilisation emerged and Buddhism further spread from China to other parts of East Asia. As interaction deepened, foreign merchant communities were born and Muslim traders started to set foot around the world.

The third period (from the early 11th century to the mid-15th century) was the heyday of the Maritime Silk Road, creating a flourishing scene of diverse and harmonious coexistence among civilisations and people. A large number of relics from the shipwrecks of this period bear witness to its frequent exchanges of goods. The spread of religions furthered cultural exchanges. For example, Southeast Asia and East Africa were Islamised to some extent, with the latter witnessing Swahili communities emerged; Hindu merchants and sailors left Hinduism and its architectural relics in the East Indian Ocean region; and the tribute trade system in East Asia matured and the Chinese government strongly supported overseas trade, with Chinese merchants active in Southeast Asia during Zheng He's seven voyages. The Maritime Silk Road brought about multi-cultural urban communities, such as those in Quanzhou, Malacca and Galle.

The fourth period (from the mid-15th century to the mid-to-late 19th century) was the transition to continued development. This period began with the Age of Discovery and the galleon trade and ended with the widespread use of steamships. The goods for exchange were still mainly porcelains, spices and peppers, but the main traders changed as Europeans began to set foot along the Maritime Silk Road and opened up new routes across the Pacific from the Americas. Culturally, Catholicism was spread rapidly by European colonists and hence co-existed with Buddhism and Islamism that had taken root in those important “spheres of active interaction”. In fact, this period was marked by significant transition and transformation, as the Maritime Silk Road was inevitably expanded into a truly global network after the mid-15th century when Western European navigators began the “galleon trade” as a result of the “great geographical discoveries”. New trading centres and routes gradually replaced traditional areas with the greatest interactions and the most frequent trade, and as the new routes were expanded and the scale of trade grew, the subjects and modes of trade changed substantially.

After the mid-to-late 19th century, steamships replaced wooden sailing ships as the main means of maritime transport. A number of European countries established extensive colonies along much of the maritime trade routes. By then, the transition from traditional maritime trade routes to the modern ones was completed.

 

3. The Heritage System of the Maritime Silk Road in China

 

Scattered across China's vast coastal areas are a good number of tangible heritage related to the Maritime Silk Road. Involved areas inside China consists of four major spheres of active interaction, namely Huang-Bohai (Yellow and Bohai seas), Yangtze basin, East China Sea and Taiwan strait, and South China Sea. Over a course of over 2,000 years of connection and interaction, these areas formed a close trade, political, cultural and religious exchange system with Japan and the Korean peninsula in Northeast Asia as well with the Southeast Asian plate, together constituting the core of the East Asian plate of the Maritime Silk Road.

Chinese historic sites along the Maritime Silk Road are distributed in China's coastal provinces/cities/regions of Hebei, Shandong, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan, plus the Macao Special Administrative Region. They are the most important witnesses to the Chinese maritime culture, and the most typical tangible expression in the East Asian plate of the active navigation practices, prosperous commodity trade and extensive cultural exchanges conducted on the Maritime Silk Road, bearing testimony to the past civilisational progress building on the sea. In these areas, the "Maritime Silk Road: Historic Sites in China" composed of a series of typical historic properties of cross-oceanic interaction, can vividly reflect the development process and values of China's active role on the Maritime Silk Road in the East.

The Maritime Silk Road heritage falls into three categories: infrastructures, production relics and related heritage assets.
(1) Infrastructure: including wharves, aids to navigation (lighthouses, religious buildings or other types of buildings used for navigation purpose), docks, warehouses, forts, administrative institutions, maritime worship facilities, etc;
（2) Production facilities: mainly including goods production facilities (porcelain kilns, textile workshops, handicraft product workshops, raw material collection and production sites, precious metal mining sites, etc.), facilities for commercial activities (markets, trading posts, camps, etc.);
(3) Related heritage assets: including relics of religious exchanges (sites of religious activities and tombs), relics of cultural exchanges and relics of political and diplomatic exchanges.

Specifically, in China's maritime silk road heritage system, ‘infrastructure’ includes remnants of ports and navigation facilities comprising wharves and shipyards, remnants of administration facilities represented by offices of local authorities and warehousing facilities, sacrificial facilities for sea gods/goddesses peculiar to marine navigation, all of which bear unique witness to the material, technologic and spiritual security essential to ancient maritime interactions; production facilities of porcelain – China's top product for export on the Maritime Silk Road – composed of kilns, witness the flourishing of commodity trade along the Maritime Silk Road and the resulting spread and exchange of production technology and aesthetic ideas; and, heritage assets including religious relics, tombs of relevant personages and settlements which are direct products of the close trade, religious and cultural interactions brought about by the Maritime Silk Road, embody the profound influence of the Maritime Silk Road on human history and civilisation.

China's Maritime Silk Road historic sites are the crystalisation of the ancient people’s fearless, explorative spirit and the concept of peaceful interaction and pluralistic coexistence on the Maritime Silk Road. They bear testimony to the constant sea trade and people-to-people exchanges of long history, to the consequently extensive exchanges in religion, culture and technology, and to the “sea-based” special cultural tradition in Chinese coastal society.