The Nanhai Trade: Early Chinese Trade in the South China Sea

The early history of the maritime trade of China had been largely studied (at the time of this 1954 study) from the Western point of view, that is, as the eastern terminal point of a trade carried and dominated by Indians, Persians and Arabs. This had also been true of the early history of Southeast Asia. Historians, both of China and of Southeast Asia, had seen the trade mainly as the coming of Western merchants in search of gold, silks and various kinds of spices. No study (then) had yet been made of the ancient trade between China and Southeast Asia which was known to the Chinese as the Nanhai trade. This book, The Nanhai Trade: Early Chinese Trade in the South China Sea, introduces this subject. It examines various features of this trade, especially the economic background and the Chinese imperial and regional attitudes towards it. The period covered is the eleven centuries before the founding of the Sung dynasty in 960 -- roughly the period from the Han dynasty to the T'ang. This one of Professor Wang Gungwu's early studies, now re-issued under the Eastern Universities Press imprint.