Medievalist, historian, premodern Japan, DH, project juggler. @shinpaideshou. She/her. Like my content? 
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Our last presenter for the morning is Valerie Hansen (History, Yale University), who is introducing “The View of the World in 1225 as One Chinese Official, Zhao Rukuo, Saw It.” 
#DGMA19 #GlobalMiddleAges #medievaltwitter
Hansen is examining a book written by Zhao Rukuo, a trade official who wrote an original book in 1225 on China’s foreign trade, “Record of Various Foreign People,” based on historical records and his conversations with people living in Quanzhou.
The full text of this source is available at: http://www.sabrizain.org/malaya/library/chufanchi.pdf …
This is, though, a text from 1911, so there's issues not only of translation, but also romanization. These affect the way we interact with texts and talk about them with one another.
Zhao Rukuo (1170-1228) was a member of the Song imperial clan and was Supervisor of Foreign Trade, in charge of collecting taxes on ships coming to Quanzhou. 
This text shows a detailed knowledge of China’s long-time trading partners (Korea, Japan, Vietnam, etc.) but also distant locales like Sicily, Tanzania, and Somalia. The text has two sections:
The first gives brief histories and lists products from about 46 places- Southeast Asia, Arab world, India, East Africa, Central Asia, Egypt, Philippine Islands... he's the first to write about some of these places.
The second is an entirely new format, going commodity by commodity, listing countries that produced them, variations in quality, etc. 42 different commodities like incense, fragrant woods, spices, animal products (mostly fragrant items, though!).
Paul Wheatley did a "map of Zhao Rukuo's 'world'" mapping many of these commodities, but this is deceiving- did he really have a geographical or informed conception of these places? Probably not. But it does show us the scale of trade.
Zhao Rukuo is making these historical entries on various locations, but also bringing them up to current events. For example, in the entry on India he describes a monk arriving by sea in the late 10th century, but ends with his own time.
Amanda Respess opens the discussion! Notes that Hansen has shown us examples of the premodern in the everyday through her examples of old sites we can visit today.
Respess provides examples of shipwrecks and the materials found in them that she researches, cargo that evidence the commercial networks going through Quanzhou.
Respess notes that in order to get from our westerly areas to Quanzhou in the east, you have to pass through the Indian Ocean area, which means it’s the most densely populated with shipwrecks. 
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We're returning to the idea Cross brought up of the "objects that carry a portable world" and Hansen suggests Zhao Rukuo's book is such an object here. But it's a taste of another place- an experience of something.
Something about this text that I really enjoy thinking about is it gives us a chance to see something we brought up yesterday- what happens to those who are left or stay behind? Is this text a way to play with the notion of a "travel narrative"? Or does it break the mold? Both?
de Pee suggests we might think of this comparatively with some of the issues that were brought up in Fromherz's talk about the Gulf yesterday- does this text let us see this cosmopolitan locale where some exchanges occur outside the imperium, even if Zhao Rukuo is an official?
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