Port of Appeal: Examining the Socio-Materiality of Sino-Foreign Maritime Cultural Exchange at Liu Family Harbour, Taicang

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Globalisation of Sino-foreign Maritime Exchange: Ocean Cultures", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Despite its agrarian origins, China has a steep seafaring tradition stretching back more than two millennia; its coastal ports and harbours used as transit points since ancient times. Located in the river-sea transit zone between Nanjing, the then capital, and the East China Sea, at the convergence of the Yangtze and Liu rivers, Liu Family Harbour’s unique geographical, environmental and climatic characteristics created a nodal point for shipboard and coastal communities, that served as a vector of maritime cultural interaction, material exchange and the transmission of cultural and geopolitical knowledge from the earliest times to the present day. This paper uses archaeological, textual, iconographic and environmental evidence to assess Liu Family Harbour’s ‘Parameters of Attractiveness’ to understand why it was named the ‘Number 1 Port in the World’ during the Yuan Dynasty (1291-1368 CE) and was subsequently selected as the staging post for the Zheng He fleet (1405-1433 CE).

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Globalisation of Sino-foreign Maritime Exchange: Ocean Cultures   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow