Andrew Chittick

This project revises our understanding of Sino-Southeast Asian maritime exchange in the first millennium CE, centering the narrative on Southeast Asian commercial networks. Using early Chinese textual sources, Southeast Asian archaeology, and spatial mapping, it details the scope and sophistication of these networks. Their impacts include the Chinese adoption of many Southeast Asian commodities; the spread of distinctive styles of maritime Buddhism; impressive economic developments in south China in the third-sixth century compared to the more famous early Tang period (seventh-eighth centuries CE); and the underlying social and economic basis of the “ceramics revolution” of the eighth and ninth centuries.