China has been one of the leading sources of overseas visitors to the Maldives in recent years. Bin Yang, a professor of history at City University of Hong Kong, makes the argument in Discovered but Forgotten that this is to some extent a rerun of the situation in the 14th and 15th centuries when the Maldives were firmly on Chinese maps of places to visit.

Bin Yang identifies the early 14th-century Wang Dayuan as

a Chinese merchant during the Pax Mongolica, who might have been the first Chinese person to land in the Maldives and who provided a relatively detailed and accurate albeit extraordinarily brief textual description of the Indian Ocean archipelago.

He was “a member of the Chinese literati and most probably also a merchant who traveled from Quanzhou”, as well as a contemporary of the renowned Ibn Battuta who beat the great explorer to the Maldives by a decade.

Wang visited the Maldives in the winter of 1330, left in the spring of 1331 for South India, and might have visited North or East Africa before his return to Quanzhou in 1334 … In 1349 Wang completed the Daoyi Zhilue 岛夷志略, in which more than 220 foreign places were recorded, mostly in maritime Asia. Wang’s book was used as a key travel guide by Zheng He, the Chinese eunuch of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), during his seven voyages to the Indian Ocean nearly six decades later.

Zheng He seems to have stopped there a few times on various voyages; Bin Yang references works by Ma Huan, who served as interpreter.

That was, however, just about it:

In the sixteenth century, no advances were made on the Chinese knowledge of the Indian Ocean world …

and

from 1600 onward mention of the Maldives simply disappeared from Chinese writings.

Bin Yang concludes

In Chinese history the Maldives rose like a rocket and came down like a stick, lying deep in the seabed and covered thickly with mud. Alas, with barely a sound, the Maldives simply disappeared from the Chinese world.

The actual amount of firm history is, in other words, rather thin. Bin Yang justifies giving the Maldives and Chinese-Maldivian relations its own book by arguing, for example, that

the presence of Maldivian envoys at the Ming court illustrated the expansion of the Chinese tributary world into the Indian Ocean …

although the rest of us might marvel at the entire idea of “Maldivian envoys at the Ming court” (the Maldivian Embassy in Beijing was only established in 2007).

In practice Bin Yang has used this somewhat circumstantial Chinese interest in Maldives as the thread around which to weave a wide-ranging—and really quite fascinating—discussion of Chinese forays into the Indian Ocean, the visits of other medieval and late-medieval visits to the region (including Ibn Battuta who lived in the Maldives for a better part of year and took on four wives), shipbuilding without nails, trade, the ever-important and versatile coconut, shipwrecks, ambergris, sexual mores and much else. Some of this has been written about before of course, albeit from a perspective based further to the west.

One section of this longer discussion which stands out is the chapter on cowrie shells and their use as currency. This is fascinating to the extent that one might suggest the author dedicate an entire book to the subject, had he not already done so. China retained masses of cowrie shells, and they figured in at least one of the well-known shipwrecks. Bin Yang argues that in China itself, these were more a store of value than an actual currency, although in other parts of the region, the shells were used as money with well-established exchange rates to, say, silver. He writes that the Maldives were the source for the cowries that ended up in China; this comes across, however, more as plausible inference than proven fact.

Bin Yang does not go into much detail here about how cowrie shells operate as money, except to note that in Maldives themselves, they were not currency but a commodity, traded for grain. In the Indian Ocean littoral they were used as money, implying that the supply was stable and rare enough that the shells could maintain their value; when the supply conditions changed, however, their value could collapse:

From the sixteenth century onward European arrivals began to ship cowries from the Indian Ocean to West Africa in such quantities that these shells eventually ruined the existing West African monetary systems and economies on the one hand and brought about the European domination of the world on the other.

One cannot help but be reminded of silver production in Spanish America.

“The Maldives in Chinese History, c. 1100-1620”, the subtitle to Discovered but Forgotten, rather undersells the book. It is rather more a discussion, from a mostly Chinese perspective, how China slotted in to the history of the medieval and early-modern Indian Ocean. It includes both a broad-brush view as well as deep dives into the nature of the various shipwrecks and their cargo and such details as Maldivian Buddhism and the islands’ apparently high-quality, and well-noted at the time, textile production.

Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.