Yuan China

The Muslims of Zaytun

A Muslim quarter in the great port of China, c. 1345 CE

746 AH / c. 1345 CE

Imagined 360° reconstruction of The Muslims of Zaytun

Educational historical reconstruction

Where

Zaytun (Quanzhou), on the coast of southern China

24.8741, 118.6757 · View on OpenStreetMap

Background

Zaytun, the city the Chinese call Quanzhou, on the south-eastern coast of China, was in the age of the Mongol Yuan emperors one of the greatest seaports in the world, the eastern terminus of the maritime trade that linked China through the Indian Ocean to the lands of Islam and beyond. Through its crowded harbour passed the silk and porcelain of China, carried west in the great junks and exchanged for the spices, incense and goods of the Indies, of India, Persia and Arabia. Among the foreign merchants who gathered at Zaytun was a large and prosperous community of Muslims, Arabs, Persians and others, who had come over generations by the sea-road and settled there, building their mosques, maintaining their own qadis and shaykhs and hospices, and living and worshipping as Muslims at the very eastern edge of the known world, under the protection and rule of the non-Muslim Chinese emperor. When the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta reached China about 1345, after his long journeys across Asia, he came to Zaytun and was received and entertained by its Muslims as a brother and a man of standing, and he marvelled, as he records, to find at so vast a distance from his homeland the call to prayer, the Friday congregation and the fellowship of Islam. The Muslim community of Zaytun and the other ports of China is a striking witness to the reach of the Muslim trading world and to the peaceful spread of Islam, carried to the ends of the earth not by armies but by the ships and the faith of merchants. This scene depicts the harbour of Zaytun and its Muslim quarter. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.

What you see

An immense and crowded harbour on a far eastern coast, said to be among the greatest ports in the world, its waters thronged with hundreds of ships, the towering junks of China loading silk and porcelain for the western seas.

Within the great foreign city stands a Muslim quarter with its own mosque of stone in an unfamiliar style, a market, a hospice for travellers and a qadi and shaykh of its own; a community of Muslims living far from the lands of Islam, under the rule of a non-Muslim emperor.

This is Zaytun, the port the Chinese call Quanzhou, the great emporium of the southern coast of China in the age of the Mongol emperors, where a flourishing community of Muslim merchants from across the seas had settled, prayed and traded at the eastern end of the world.

The traveller from the far West is welcomed by the Muslims of the city as one of their own, lodged and feasted; he marvels to find, at the very ends of the earth, brethren in faith, the call to prayer and the Friday congregation.

Here the long sea-road of the Muslim traders reaches its furthest point: the network of faith and commerce that ran from the Atlantic across the Indian Ocean ends on the China coast, where Islam had come not by conquest but by the ships of the merchants.

Ibn Battuta's account of Zaytun is one of the chief Muslim sources for the port. The scene depicts the harbour and the Muslim quarter; no individual is shown by likeness.

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