Maritime Silk Road

It was said that when he opened the Grand Canal in 611, he led a flotilla of vessels, one more sumptuous than the next, and they snaked down the canal a hundred miles long.

Once the Tang Dynasty began, they got to enjoy the benefits of a waterway already linked to everything that was starting to ramp up with a greatly enhanced maritime Silk Road.

And in the 7th century, it was an entirely different dynamic compared to the 3rd or even the 4th century.

During the earliest centuries AD, few ship captains dared to sail the open seas.

Longitude could only be guessed.

And still, there were no reliable maps to navigate by.

It's no wonder that the Maritime Silk Road grew so rapidly.

By the 7th century, in the Sui and Tang, navigation had become fully institutionalized and routine.

And then same year in 2013, In the month of September, the Belt and Road Initiative was announced by Xi Jinping.

The Belt component or the road component was announced in Kazakhstan and the Maritime Road in the month of October was announced by him from Indonesia.

So by 2013, what had happened was that we see that first of all, the global geopolitics had shifted one year earlier.

to the Indo-Pacific region.

We have, uh, Silk Route or the so-called Northern Route, and then we have the major, you can say, Southern Silk Route, you know, which, uh, traverses from India, central India, and then to the northeast, and then to Myanmar, and then go up to Yunnan, connecting China.

And then another one is the Maritime Silk Road.

So I look into various facets of exchanges, you know, along these routes and how these connected peoples of India and China.

Interesting discovery, um, you know, for both India and China to look at the history of their relationship.

So even if, uh, President Xi Jinping and Modi, they met in, uh, Chennai, Mamallapuram, uh, Mahabalipuram...

In fact, Mahabalipuram is also the place, you know, in, uh, Chinese sources it's called Fangzhi, you know.

And then India and China, for the first time, I think, if we talk about the Maritime Silk Road, so we, we find a place there in Hanshu.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, the Song dynasty in China was riding an economic boom powered by advanced metallurgy and the early use of paper money.

The southern capital at Hangzhou became a cosmopolitan hub where traders from Africa, Arabia, and East Asia converged via the Maritime Silk Route.

Technological feats like iron smelting, printing with movable type, and gunpowder experiments were underway, hinting at changes that would reshape warfare elsewhere.

Jump over to West Africa.