Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v1.c5.s2.t8.3.1

v1.c5.s2.t8.3.1

A piece of plain-woven cloth unearthed in a boat-like coffin in Wuyi Mountain, Chong’an, Fujian, in the early 1980s dates back about 3,000 years. It is the earliest cotton cloth in China which shows that the history of India-China trade in cotton cloth is very long. African cotton (levant cotton) with short and thick fibre was introduced into western China from Africa in the Eastern Han Dynasty (1ˢᵗ to 3ʳᵈ century CE). Cotton cloth and cotton clothes have been unearthed in places such as the southern part of the Tarim basin, Hetian and Lop Nor in Xinjiang several times. Cotton textiles unearthed in the ruins of Niya in 1959 showed that cotton cloth had been very common in that area in the later part of the Eastern Han Dynasty. *Juan* I of Zhao Rushi’s *Record of Foreign Countries* in the Song period several centuries later recorded that products of Namburi (Ma’bar in South India) included foreign cloth in different colours and douluo cotton. Products of the Chola kingdom were said to include coloured silk cloth and Ceiba cloth. The *Record of Eminent Monks in the Southern Seas* compiled by Chen Dazhen et al., in the Yuan period noted that varieties of cloth made in present-day South Asia included white foreign cloth, flower foreign cloth, bi cloth, sheared flannelette and sheared coarse cloth etc. Tribute offered by different Indian states to the Chinese emperor in the Yuan Dynasty included such cloth.