the middle east 365recorded to have brought gifts from the caliphs to the imperial court.
They may have doubled as envoys or posed as such.
The other way taken by the missions was by land via Central Asia.
Neither route was without risks. Ships could be wrecked and goods
lost. An undated entry states that Arabs, when calling at Champa en
route to China, at times had their goods confiscated (Wen-hsien t’ung-
k’ao 339:57a). This could have happened to merchants and envoys
alike. Caravans travelling through Central Asia encountered robbers.
In both cases, the Arabs complained to the Chinese authorities. The
Sung court advised them in 1023 that the sea route to Canton was
to be preferred (Wen-hsien t’ung-k’ao 338:56b).
Unfortunately, the sources hardly ever specify how the missions
had arrived in China. Only when a shipmaster is mentioned can we
be absolutely sure, and these cases are only 7 out of 77. One has
to rely on circumstantial evidence, where possible, to gain a better
understanding of the situation. Horses would not have been brought
from Arabia by a long sea voyage. It can be assumed, therefore, that
when horses were offered by the envoys, these came by land from
West Turkestan. This may also be true for the lion and leopards. But
small luxury articles could be carried by land as well as sea.
The time element should help us to get a step further. The Arab
ships left the Middle East with the beginning of the summer monsoon
and reached China in 130 to 140 days. They returned with the begin-
ning of the winter monsoon during the same or in subsequent years.
This means that they departed from the Middle East about the middle
of April and reached China in about the middle of August. Adding
the necessary land travel, they would have arrived in the capital in
early September or about the 8th month in the Chinese calendar. The
ships could arrive a month later but not beyond that time because
of the beginning of the adverse winter monsoon in middle October.
In addition, the envoys might not have proceeded directly from the
Chinese port of call to the capital. The agent of the shipmaster T’o-
p’o-li was not received at the Sung court until the 3rd month of 1000,
some seven months after his presumed landing. That narrows the time
limit during which Arab missions must have arrived by land to the
4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th months.
Using this extremely rough calculation, only about 5 of the 30 Arab
missions during T’ang could theoretically have come by sea.^28 During
(^28) For three of the missions, the month of reception is not known.