Bin Yang

Chinese traders and explorers first visited the Maldives, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, in the early fourteenth century. The traveller Wang Dayuan "discovered" the island sultanate for the Chinese world, and merchants increasingly dealt in Maldivian goods such as coconuts, cowrie shells, and ambergris. Zheng He's fifteenth-century voyages ventured to the islands, by then a trading hub, and brought...