Description of the Foreign Peoples (Chau Ju-kua) (Zhao Rukuo (趙汝适))

The Song customs officer's survey of the overseas world, compiled from merchants and from Zhou Qufei, a generation after 1200 but describing trade routes that were the same in 1200. Part one gives each country with its ruler, products, trade goods and sailing times: Jiaozhi, Champa, Cambodia, Srivijaya and the Malay ports, Java, Brunei, Mai and Butuan in the Philippines, Chola and Malabar, Ceylon, the Arabs, Zanzibar and the Somali coast, Egypt and Sicily, Goryeo and Japan. Part two covers the goods. It is the clearest Chinese statement of who traded with whom, and of the ranking of the port states, around 1200.

About this source

Title: Zhu fan zhi (諸蕃志)
Author: Zhao Rukuo (趙汝适)
Author's dates: 1170 to 1231
Written: about 1225, while superintendent of maritime trade at Quanzhou
Language: Chinese
Covers: the countries and products of the maritime trade from Japan and Korea to Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, East Africa and the Mediterranean, as known at Quanzhou in the 1220s
Kind: Geography

Hirth and Rockhill's 1911 translation is out of copyright and free; its identifications of place names are dated and should be checked against modern work. Much of the material is copied from Lingwai daida (1178), so the picture is partly of the 1170s.

Where to read it

Editions

Yang Bowen (ed.), Zhu fan zhi jiaoshi, Zhonghua Shuju (1996) (not freely online)

Translations

F. Hirth and W. W. Rockhill, 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 commentary, at the Internet Archive

Read it online

About the source

Wikipedia: Zhu Fan Zhi