Dashi ...reconsidered

The Chinese term Dashi 大食, commonly understood in the Song dynasty to refer to Arabs or Arab Muslims, is an important argument in discussions of a maritime network that linked western Asia to southern China from the tenth until the twelfth centuries. This article will show that the narrow definition of Dashi as Arab or Western Asian is inaccurate, that interpretations of the available Chinese source material are sometimes flawed, and that the resulting narrative is questionable. Confronting the existing Chinese texts with their modern interpretations by contemporary scholars demonstrates that repeated claims to long-distance Arab trade are exaggerated, and that there is a high probability of continued South Asian and Southeast Asian involvement in a trade that is said to have ceased in the eighth century, with the arrival of Arabs in China. Several conclusions can be drawn from the textual evidence under scrutiny: Dashi by no means referred to Muslims from western Asia; Dashi as an inclusive term at different times and in different contexts designated a) Central Asian (as far as overland relations were concerned) and b) Southeast Asian people (as far as maritime relations), and possibly, c) Southeast Asian people, from the tenth to the twelfth century and, lastly, while maritime trade with the western parts of the Indian Ocean existed in the time under consideration, it was not conducted by long-distance cross-ocean journeys in vessels manned with Arab or Persian crews. In the following, I will survey western interpretations of Dashi from the last 150 years as well as modern opinions regarding shipwrecks, and then continue to (non-)existing pictorial evidence and the original textual material from the Song dynasty.