周运中: Zheng He xia Xiyang xin kao 郑和下西洋新考

Chinese scholarly works on the history of the early Ming voyages led by Zheng He 郑和 and other court eunuchs abound and many books on this subject merely repeat what is already known. The present work, in short characters, is very different. Its author, Zhou Yunzhong, a young scholar now with Xiamen University in Fujian, has published a large number of excellent articles which often deviate from the standard repertory of maritime history because they investigate new topics and explore hitherto..

Sulu in a Late Ch’ing Novel- A Brief Note on a Rare Book

Sulu in a Late Ch’ing Novel-A Brief Note on a Rare Boo

Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300-1800

The title of this book is somewhat “open”: Geographically, the so-called “Silk Road of the Sea” extends from Korea and Japan in the East to the shores of the Gulf, Red Sea and East Africa in the West, but in this case, there is no coverage of the entire sailing corridor and its many branches; the focus is on Singapore and its exterior links to China, continental and insular Southeast Asia and, occasionally, Sri Lanka and India. In other words, there is no full account of the “total system,” t..

周运中: Zhongguo Nanyang gudai jiaotong shi 中国南洋古”背栖梨, Zhou Yunzhong

This ambitious book, in short characters, with a preface by Wang Rigen 王日根, the series editor, can almost be read as a sequel to Zhou Yunzhong’s earlier monograph, Zheng He xia Xiyang xin kao 和下西洋新考 (Beijing 2013), reviewed for Archipel 89 (2015). While the focus of the earlier work is on Chinese navigation under the Ming dynasty and the so-called Zheng He map, the new monograph investigates the long period from the late Zhou through to the fourteenth century, up to the decades preceding the ..