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Introduction
In his discussion of Southeast Asia's commerce with India and China, Anthony Reid remarks, "Situated between the world's two major sources of fine cloth--India for cottons and China for silks--Southeast Asia became internationally known as a consumer rather than as a producer of textiles."1 Reid's allusion to Southeast Asian consumption of Chinese silk and Indian cotton cloth implicitly raises questions about the nature of commercial relations between these two great Asian civilizations. While it is well known that India and China supplied much of the Southeast Asia and West Asia with cotton and silk cloth respectively, much less is recorded about the degree to which these 'countries' or regions sold their apparently complementary textile products to each other, and whether or not other additional natural or manufactured goods comprised an important segment of Indo-Chinese trade. While the available sources to study the commerce between South Asia and China in pre-European times are predictably fragmentary, they suggest a pattern of complementary trade relations in textile manufactures as well as a broader range of commercial exchanges.
In broad outline, Indian and Chinese sources suggest two things about Indo-Chinese commerce in textiles prior to the sixteenth century. These are, first, that China sold silk textiles to India throughout nearly two millennia from the early years of the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) to the period of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644 CE), and did so even though Indians began producing the cloth in the early Gupta period and vastly expanded silk cloth production from the thirteenth century onwards. Second, it is equally likely, although much harder to document, that India or its cultural surrogates--the Indianized states of Southeast Asia--sold cotton cloth to China at an early but undetermined date in the Christian Era, and that certain kinds of Indian cotton cloth continued to be sold in China well after the Chinese cultivation of cotton and production of cotton cloth blossomed in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Put another way, silk cloth production originated in China and the Chinese always produced certain varieties of silk cloth or thread not matched in India or other silk-producing regions, while cotton cloth was first manufactured in South Asia, where Indians continued to produce certain varieties that always...