CHAIRPERSON
Assoc Prof Jack Meng-Tat Chia, Department of History, National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
François Pyrard, a French refugee in the Maldives (1602–1607), recorded a “China bird” in this archipelago sultanate. Exploring the circulation of the information on China’s cormorant among early European explorers, this talk sheds some fresh light on the history of the Maldives (and thus of the Indian Ocean), maritime China (and thus maritime Asia), and Sino-Indian Ocean interactions. Selected from my new monograph, Discovered but Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, c. 1100–1620, the case of cormorant adopts a trans-regional and interdisciplinary approach to scrutinize the Chinese activities in and conceptualization of the Indian Ocean before and after the Zheng He Voyages (1405–1433). “Discovered” and named by the Chinese at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Maldives would be soon forgotten in the Chinese world by the end of the sixteenth century after the Chinese state suddenly retreated from the Indian Ocean. This research hence challenges the conventional narrative under the regional framework and highlights the role of maritime networking in the Asian world before the arrival of Europeans.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Bin Yang is Professor of History at the City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include Chinese history, world/global history, and history of science, technology and medicine. He is the author of eight monographs including the three in English, namely, Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan (Second Century BCE to Twentieth Century CE) (Columbia University Press, 2008, based on dissertation awarded the 2004 Gutenberg-e Prize by the American Historical Association), Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money: A Global History (Routledge, 2019), and Discovered but Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, c. 1100–1620 (Columbia University Press, 2024). He has published research papers in some internationally prestigious journals such as The China Quarterly, Modern Asian Studies, Journal of World History, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and Journal of Women’s History, and been awarded numerous fellowships or book prizes such as the 2004 Gutenberg-E Prize and the Best Asian Books of the Year 2023.
