ABSTRACT
In 1998, fisherman fishing for sea cucumber off the coast of Belitung Island in the Java Sea discovered the wreck of a ninth-century Arabic merchant ship. Among its cargo were more than 70,000 ceramic vessels, three of which are examples of the earliest intact ceramics made in the blue and white palette, made in Changsha in what is now Hunan Province, China. 1 Such underwater finds are surely changing the narrative of world history, enabling scholars to revise the dates of global trade and globalization to ever earlier instances, pointing to the importance of maritime routes as well as overland routes in the interconnected world of trading networks that linked East Asia to Europe with Persianate lands.
