ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the circulation of objects and imagery within the Asian trading system. It examines the Muslim courts of Sultanate India centred in Delhi in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the early Mughal courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which, along with other wealthy Muslim courts of West Asia, served as significant markets for the porcelain producers of southern China in the Yuan and early Ming periods. Eminent Monk Faxian continued his journey on an Indian merchantman from Sri Lanka to Srivijaya, and thence to southern China. The Akbar al-Sin wa’l-Hind , itself a compilation of a number of earlier Arabic sources, gives the first full account of the India–China trade. The Topkapi Saray Museum is the most extensive holding of Chinese ceramics preserved today that formed part of the China–Middle East trade; inventories exist from 1495.
