A Song customs inspector's handbook, written from merchants' reports, that reaches the African coast within a generation of 1200: Bipaluo (Berbera) with its ostriches and giraffes, Zhongli (the Somali coast), Cengba (Zanzibar and the Zanj coast) with its ivory and ambergris and its trade with the Arabs, Kunlun Cengqi (perhaps Madagascar or Pemba), and Wusili (Egypt) with Alexandria's lighthouse. These are the only non-Arabic notices of the Swahili and Somali coasts of the period and show what reached China: ivory, ambergris, rhinoceros horn and slaves, in exchange for cloth and porcelain. Garbled and second hand, but independent of the Arabic tradition.
About this source
- Title
- Zhufanzhi (the entries on Africa)
- Author
- Zhao Rugua
- Author's dates
- 1170 to 1231
- Written
- 1225, at Quanzhou
- Language
- Chinese
- Covers
- the countries of the maritime trade as known at the port of Quanzhou in the early thirteenth century
- Kind
- Geography
Another entry in this library covers the Zhufanzhi for Asia. Hirth and Rockhill's identifications of the African names are partly superseded; Yang's 2020 digital translation is the current one and its link was taken from the Wikipedia article.
Where to read it
Editions
- The original is lost; the text is known from extracts in the Yongle encyclopedia reassembled in the Han hai collection (1781) and later editions (not freely online)
Translations
- F. Hirth and W. W. Rockhill (trs), Chau Ju-kua: his work on the Chinese and Arab trade in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, entitled Chu-fan-chi (St Petersburg, 1911), English with notes
- Shao-yun Yang (tr.), A Chinese Gazetteer of Foreign Lands: a new translation of part 1 of the Zhufan zhi (2020), English, digital