2 - Medieval Commercial Activities in the Indian Ocean as Revealed from Chinese Ceramic-sherds and South Indian and Sri Lankan Inscriptions

Summary

It gives me great pleasure to present a paper at this plenary session of the Conference on Early Indian Influences in Southeast Asia, since I have been working for a long time on the early historical relations between Southeast Asia and India as one of my important research topics. In the 1990s I organized a project on this topic and took Indian scholars to Southeast Asian countries to study early Indian influences on Southeast Asia, exactly the same topic as that of this Conference. If you are interested in this project, please see my publications on that — (1) “Indian Commercial Activities in Ancient and Medieval Southeast Asia”, in Contributions of Tamil Culture to the Twenty First Century: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference-Seminar of Tamil Studies, Thanjavur, 1995, edited by Karashima, Annamalai, and Rajaram. Chennai, IATR, 2005 (yet to be released), and (2) Ancient and Medieval Commercial Activities in the Indian Ocean, published by Taisho University in 2002 as a combined report of three projects, namely the one mentioned above, a second on Chinese ceramic-sherds in India and Sri Lanka, and a third on merchant-guild inscriptions in South India and Sri Lanka. The topic of my paper today, however, concerns mostly the latter two projects.

In China they started to make trade ceramics in the ninth century and their export overseas greatly increased from the thirteenth century. Reflecting such development of ceramic trade is the great number of Chinese ceramic sherds that have been discovered in Southeast and West Asian countries, not to mention Korea and Japan in the East. However, in South Asia, particularly in India, their discovery had been reported only sporadically until the discovery by chance of a good number of high quality Chinese ceramic-sherds in 1985 in Periyapattinam near Ramesvaram in South India. (Figures 2.1, 2.2) Encouraged by this discovery I organized a research project for surveying the South Indian and Sri Lankan coasts to search for Chinese ceramic sherds, through which we have been able to obtain a great number of them in many medieval port sites and dynastic capitals.