The Red Sea (Greek: Erythra Thalassahas; Latin: Mare Rubrum; Arabic: Bahr al Ahmar) has been a critical conduit for trade between the Mediterranean world and the lands touched by the Indian and Pacific Oceans since prehistory. The King James version of the Bible describes in its ‘Book of Kings’ a commercial naval expedition sent in the 10th century by the king Solomon and the king Hiram I of Tyro to Ophir, possibly Mahd adh Dhahab in Saudi Arabia (1 Kings 9: 26–28). The fleet, made of Phoenician ships and crewed by Tyrian sailors, sailed from Ezion-Geber, a port on the Red Sea close to modern Eilat, bringing back gold, silver, sandalwood, pearls, and other exotic merchandise.

The Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE and the simultaneous economic development in the Mediterranean basin represented a turning point for the Red Sea, directly integrating it with the commercial networks of the Indian Ocean. Its role as the maritime gate to the eastern parts of the Roman empire is documented by a geographic and trading manual named, in Latin, ’Periplus Maris Erythraei’. It was written in Hellenistic Greek in the 1st century, probably between the years 40 and 70, by an unnamed writer, very likely an Egyptian Greek merchant based at Berenice Troglodytica (modern Baranis) on the Egyptian Red Sea coast. The work gives an accurate description of the harbours and emporiums on the coasts of the Red Sea, eastern Africa, Arabian peninsula, Persian Gulf, western and eastern India, and up to the Ganges river in modern Bangladesh (Fig. 1). Each place is described in terms of location, political affiliation, and merchandise that could be obtained or sold. The ‘Periplus’ reports that, amongst many other goods, silk was available to the Roman and Greek merchants in the form of fabric and yarn in the market town of Barygat (modern Bharuch, at the mouth of the river Narmada, in Gujarat, India), as well in Nelkinda (possibly Niranam, in Kerala, India), and even details China as its source (Casson, 1989, pp. 81, 85).

... there is a very great inland city called Thina from which silk floss, yarn, and cloth are shipped by land via Bactria to Barygaza and via the Ganges River back to Limyrike. It is not easy to get to this Thina; for rarely do people come from it, and only a few. The area lies right under Ursa Minor ... (Casson, 1989, p. 91)

Fig. 1 Red Sea region, showing locations mentioned in the article
Photo © map from Google Earth, downloaded 16 January 2023,
modified by the author

The vivid descriptions of the different places give the impression of the Red Sea as a rich trading highway, with inland goods transferred by caravans to the emporiums located on the African and Asian coasts. Still, sailing was not a simple task: the Red Sea is narrow with quickly changing climatic and wind conditions, low depth, and insidious coralline reefs. It is only partially included in the monsoon pattern that dictated Asian navigation for thousands of years. The wind in the northern part, between Suez and the 23rd parallel north (approximately 130 kilometres north of Jeddah), is dominated by the persistent high-pressure zone over the Sahara, which causes a dominant downward wind pattern from the north quadrant to the south, all year. The wind pattern in the southern part is governed by the same monsoon system dominating in the Indian Ocean, with the wind blowing towards the northeast between November and March and towards the southeast between June and September.

One of the earlier Chinese texts mentioning the Middle East in terms of trading places and harbours is the Zhu Fan Zhi (‘A description of barbarous people’ or ‘Record of foreign nations’). The work is divided in two parts, the first book dedicated to the places of trade and the second to the products exchanged. It was written by a member of the Song royal family, Zhao Rukuo (1170–1231) at the end of his public career. In 1224 he was appointed magistrate of the harbour of Quanzhou, Fujian province, completing the Zhu Fan Zhi one year later. Zhao Rukuo never travelled to the places described in this text, but as the administrator of the most important southern port of the Song empire (960–1279), he was in daily contact with sea captains and merchants arriving in Quanzhou from western, southern, and eastern Asia. He provides long, sometimes inaccurate descriptions of Baghdad, Alexandria, Arabia, Oman, Zanzibar, the Somali coast, Kish island in the Persian Gulf, Basra, and even Mosul. Still, the Red Sea and the harbours located on its coasts are not mentioned: even the location of Mecca is given in reference to Ma-lo-pa (current Mirbat, in southwestern Oman), more than 1,600 kilometres away as the crow flies, across the Saudi desert. The focus of Zhao Rukuo is clearly the commerce; the second part of his book lists the main goods imported to China.

Frankincense, or ‘milk incense’ (ru xiang), imported from the area corresponding to current Yemen (Latin: Arabia Felix), is second in the list of 38 products, and the author differentiates between thirteen different qualities, from the highest, called ‘picked incense’ (jian xiang), down to the lowest, ‘incense powder’ (chan mo). A specific category is given to the incense damaged by water during the ship transport (shui shi hei jiao). Myrrh (mo yao) is the third product in the list; ‘dragon’s blood’ (xue jie), another type of incense from Socotra island, is the fourth one (Hirth and Rockhill, 1911, pp. 195–98). Due to their organic nature, no evidence of these imports has been found in archaeological excavations in China, and we are aware of them only thanks to literary sources like the Zhu Fan Zhi or a later text by Wang Dayuan, Dao Yi Zhi Lue (‘A brief account of island barbarians’), published in 1349 or 1350 in Quanzhou. The focus of Zhao Rukuo’s text is on the products imported to China, not on Chinese exports to the Red Sea region. Still, Chinese trade goods like silk and ceramics had already been traded for many centuries there.

Fig. 2 Fragments of jars; the two lower fragments are from the same jar
China, Yuan dynasty (1272–1368)
From the Red Sea shipwreck
Blue-and-white porcelain (after Carswell, 2000, p. 176)

Shards of Chinese ceramics, from the Tang (618–907) through the Qing (1644–1911) dynasty, have been excavated in various harbours and emporiums of the Persian Gulf, Oman, Yemen, Red Sea, and western Africa, showing that the commerce connecting East and West through the Red Sea was continuing to follow the trading routes already established in the Roman period (Fig. 2). The large amount of Chinese ceramic shards from the Yue, Changsha, Xing, Ding, Longquan, and Jingdezhen kilns found in the Egyptian port of Fustat, in old Cairo, are witnesses to the important maritime trade that passed along the same routes used by the Tyrian sailors in the 10th century. Chinese shards have been found as well in Myos Hormos (modern Quseir al-Qadim), Aydhab, and in riverine sites along the middle and upper Nile river (Mikami, 1988). No shipwrecks containing Chinese ceramics before the Yuan dynasty (1272–1368) have been discovered yet in the Red Sea, but there is no doubt that they do exist, very likely still buried inside its treacherous coralline reefs. The two earliest known Red Sea shipwrecks with Chinese ceramics are from the Yuan dynasty, from the period between 1340 and 1355. They were discovered from the late 1990s to early 2000s in the southern part of the Red Sea: one off the coast of Yemen, the other at the entrance of the Jeddah harbour. The information about these two shipwrecks is very scant, basically limited to their approximate location and to the few Chinese ceramics recovered (Fig. 3).

No official excavation report of the shipwreck near Yemen (known as the ‘Red Sea shipwreck’) has been published. The first author to mention this shipwreck was John Carswell, who only stated that he was not aware of its exact location, only that it was somewhere in the Red Sea (Carswell, 2000, p. 175). It appears that a group of recreational divers discovered the broken Yuan wares during a diving cruise on the Red Sea coast of Yemen.

The divers recovered 57 broken Yuan blue-and-white dishes, bowls and jars from Jingdezhen, and the bottom part of a large Longquan fluted bowl, very likely from the Dayao Fengdongyan kilns (Zhejiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, 2009, pp. 70–71). The position of the wreck was recorded, with plans to return to recover the entire cargo. All the objects published by John Carswell in 2000, as well as the publications by Regina Krahl in 2015 and in 2019, show heavy coral incrustation, which suggests that the pieces recovered were the ones visible on the coralline sea floor while the rest of the cargo was very likely hidden in the coralline reef (Fig. 4). The coral in the Red Sea has an average rate of growth of 2.2 to 2.8 millimetres per year (Cantin, 2010, pp. 322–25), which implies that, in the six and one-half centuries that passed between the sinking of the ship and the moment of the discovery, the coralline-reef level increased by about 1.6 metres, encasing the majority of the ship remains and its porcelain cargo. The single Longquan and Yuan blue-and-white broken wares were brought to Sotheby’s London and quickly authenticated. Later, the divers went back to the spot off the Yemen coast where they had recovered the pieces, fully equipped for the difficult task of digging in the coralline reef to reach the rest of the cargo. They never found it again.

The second Yuan period shipwreck found in the Red Sea, near Jeddah, is even more mysterious and less documented than the Red Sea wreck. The shipwreck was discovered by a British diver close to the entrance to the harbour of Jeddah in the late 1990s or early 2000s. The only published reference can be found in an article by Regina Krahl (Krahl, 2012), which features pictures of a Yuan eight-faceted blue-and-white yuhuchunping and a small hemispherical cup decorated on the external walls with a band of simplified floral scroll. The reference given for the shipwreck is an unpublished 2001 manuscript authored by a certain Paul Bingham, ‘From the Bottom of the Red Sea’. Both items are part of a category of Yuan blue-and-white porcelains characterized by a pale blue colour and unsophisticated painting style; such works are often found in Indonesia and Philippines but are rarely seen in the Middle East and Central Asia. As mentioned by Krahl, the two pieces may have been the personal possession of a merchant or sailor.

As we have seen, the Yuan blue-and-white porcelains found in the two shipwrecks from the Red Sea are quite different: in large part, top-quality wares from the full maturity of the blue-and-white Yuan style in the Red Sea shipwreck, and lower-quality wares for the Southeast Asian market in the Jeddah one.

The number of known Yuan shipwrecks whose cargo included blue-and-white wares is quite small: the two Red Sea shipwrecks mentioned above; a small fluvial boat in Heze, Shandong province; the Shiyu 2 shipwreck, featuring an accumulation of Jingdezhen blue-and-white, Dehua ware, and Putian ware shards in the Paracel islands; the Quang Ngai shipwreck, found very close to the beach on the coast of central Vietnam; and the unpublished Belitung shipwreck, discovered by Indonesian fishermen somewhere off Belitung island in 2015, whose cargo contained high-quality Shufu wares, including small-waisted bowls and dishes, Longquan celadon brushwashers, and a limited number of Yuan blue-and-white wares of small size and average quality. A few Yuan blue-and-white and Jingdezhen white wares have been excavated from the Palawan wreck (Palawan island, southern Philippines, late 15th century) and the Brunei wreck (Brunei, northwestern Borneo, c. 1500), but they were already antiques when they sank with the ship.

To this short list can be added the Pedra Branca or Temasek shipwreck, which was discovered in late 2014, about 150 metres north-northwest of the Pedra Branca islet (1°19’48’’N, 104°24’27’’E), 44 kilometres west of Singapore, a small outcrop of granite rocks hosting a lighthouse. The Singapore government began planning for the archaeological excavation of the shipwreck, but for various reasons the work was delayed until 2018 and 2019, which allowed a group of Indonesian divers based in Bintan (one of the Riau islands, Indonesia) to pillage the shipwreck and steal the majority of the small number of surviving entire or slightly damaged blue-and-white pieces. From a report published in April 2022, it appears that only one completely intact piece was recovered by the team of Singapore archaeologists led by Dr Michael Flecker: a blue-and-white straight-neck vase that was likely used as base for a hookah water pipe (Flecker, 2022).

The Temasek shipwreck contains typologies of wares found in both Red Sea shipwrecks discussed earlier. A fragment found in the Singapore shipwreck—a large Longquan bowl with the holed foot closed by a sprig-moulded flower-shaped rondel—has a close correspondence to the only Longquan ware found in the Red Sea shipwreck (see Fig. 4), as well as to a shard excavated in Fustat (Mikagi, 1985, p. 31).

An item pilfered by the Bintan divers, a blue-and-white octagonal yuhuchunping decorated with vertical floral scrolls (Fig. 5), is a close sibling of the yuhuchunping found in the Jeddah shipwreck. A round cup in the Jeddah shipwreck shares its small size and decorative pattern with many shards and broken everted-rim cups pillaged from the Temasek shipwreck (Fig. 6).

Fig. 7 Small cup
From the Temasek shipwreck
Blue-and-white porcelain; diameter 8.4 cm, height 4.4 cm
Photo © Mr X

A similar cup was excavated in 1998 from the tomb of the first ancestor of the Ruan family in Baili town, Taihu county, Anhui province (Anhui Provincial Museum 2009, p. 38), together with a blue-and-white small dish decorated with two geese and a blue-and-white ewer (height: 23.3 centimetres) decorated with floral scrolls, a clear hint to the high status acquired by the Ruan family.

The Temasek cargo also contained a small number of blue-and-white high-quality large jars, but all of them were recovered by the Indonesian divers before the official excavation. The jar in Figure 8 is decorated with floral scrolls of a painting quality comparable to the ones found in the Red Sea shipwreck. Both shipwrecks contain bowls decorated with the classic theme of ‘mandarin ducks in the lotus pond’, but the ones from the Temasek shipwreck appear to be painted with higher-quality cobalt (see Fig. 3).

The main difference between the Red Sea and the Temasek shipwrecks is that the latter does not seem to contain any large Yuan blue-and-white dishes of the type often seen in the Ardabil shrine or in the Topkapi palace, which represent the majority of the Red Sea known cargo. No charger was apparently part of the wares illegally recovered by the Bintan divers, and Dr Flecker confirmed that, for the time being, no shard coming from these large dishes has been identified in the more than 4000 fragments of Yuan blue-and-white, Longquan celadon, and Jingdezhen Qingbai and Shufu wares, which are progressively cleaned, identified, and registered. From their similarity to the decorative motifs used on the David vases (1351) in the British museum, it is probably possible to date many of the blue-and-white porcelains found in the Red Sea and Temasek shipwrecks to the period between 1345 and 1355, with the Jeddah shipwreck likely contemporaneous or slightly earlier.

Roberto Gardellin is an independent researcher.

Fig. 8 Large jar
China, Yuan dynasty (1272–1368)
From the Temasek shipwreck
Blue-and-white porcelain
Photo © Mr X

Selected bibliography

Anhui Provincial Museum, Porcelain Treasures in Yuan Dynasty, Beijing, 2009.

Neal E. Cantin, Anne L. Cohen, Kristopher B. Karnauskas, Ann M. Tarrant, Daniel C. McCorkle, ‘Ocean Warming Slows Coral Growth in the Central Red Sea’, Science 329, no. 5989 (16 July 2010): 322–25.

John Carswell, Chinese Blue and White Around the World, London, 2000.

Lionel Casson, ed., The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text With Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, Princeton, 1989.

J. P. Cooper, ‘No Easy Option: Nile Versus Red Sea in Ancient and Medieval North-South Navigation’ in W. V. Harris and K. Lara, eds, Maritime Technology in the Ancient Economy: Ship Design and Navigation, Journal of Roman Archaeology, Supplementary Series 84 (2011): 189–210.

Michael Flecker, ‘The Temasek Wreck (Mid-14th Century)’, Temasek Working Paper No. 4, Singapore, 2022.

Regina Krahl, China without Dragons: Rare Pieces from Oriental Ceramics Society Members, London, 2018.

—, ‘Yuan Blue-and-White from West and South Asia, with Special Reference to the Red Sea’, in Splendor in Smalt: Art of the Yuan and Blue-and-White Porcelain—Proceedings, Volume 1, Shanghai, 2015, pp. 196–212.

Tsugio Mikami, ‘Chinese Ceramics from Medieval Sites in Egypt’, in Takahito Mikasa, ed., Cultural and Economic Relations between East and West: Sea Routes, Wiesbaden, 1988.

Zhejiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Longquan Dayao Fengdongyan yaozhi chutu ciqi [Porcelains excavated from the Fengdongyan kiln site at Dayao, Longquan], Beijing, 2009.

Chinese Trade in the Red Sea: Two Shipwrecks with Yuan Blue-and-White Porcelains

A Tribute to Robert Chang Chung Shien (1927–2024)