"Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires: The Ottoman Empire, Ming Dynasty, and Global Age of Explorations," Journal of Early Modern History 25.5 (2021): 422-56.

Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 brill.com/jemh Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires: The Ottoman Empire, Ming Dynasty, and Global Age of Explorations Yuan Julian Chen | ORCID: 0000-0001-7412-5971 Boston College, Newton, Massachusetts, USA chendde@bc.edu Abstract This article studies two sixteenth-century Asian texts: Khitay namah, a Persian trav- elogue about the Ming dynasty written by the Muslim merchant Ali Akbar and pre- sented to the Ottoman sultan, and Xiyu, an illustrated Chinese geographical treatise with detailed travel itinerary from China to Istanbul by the Ming scholar-official Ma Li. In addition to demonstrating the breadth of Ottoman and Chinese knowledge about each other in the global Age of Exploration, these two books, written respectively for the monarchs of the self-proclaimed Islamic and Chinese universal empires, reflect the Ottoman and Chinese imperial ideologies in an era when major world powers aggres- sively vied for larger territories and broader international influence. Both the Ottoman and Chinese authors recast the foreign Other as the familiar Self  – Ali Akbar con- structed an Islamized China while Ma Li depicted a Sinicized Ottoman world – to jus- tify their countries’ claims to universal sovereignty and plans for imperial expansion. Like many contemporary European colonial writers, Ali Akbar’s and Ma Li’s explora- tion of foreign societies, their literary glorification of their own culture’s supremacy, and their imposition of their own cultural thinking on foreign lands all served their countries’ colonial enterprise in the global Age of Exploration. Keywords Ottoman Empire  – Ming dynasty  – Age of Exploration  – universal sovereignty  – cross-Eurasia travels – geographical treatise – Khitay namah – Xiyu © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/15700658-bja10030 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires 423 Introduction In the fourteenth century, two of the most influential early modern empires, the Ottoman Empire (1300–1923) and the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), rose in the western and eastern ends of Asia. Despite the great distance separat- ing the Ottoman Empire and the Ming, the pan-Eurasian trade and transpor- tation networks that had developed significantly since the Pax Mongolica allowed Islamic, Turco-Mongol, and Chinese missionaries, envoys, and mer- chants to constantly move between the two empires.1 These long-distance travelers not only promoted the circulation of goods across Asia but also intro- duced knowledge about distant countries to their homelands.2 These continu- ous commercial and cultural exchanges gave rise to a plethora of literature on encounters between these two empires.3 Khitay namah (Book on China), an early sixteenth-century travelogue about China written by the Muslim merchant Ali Akbar Khitai (fl. 1510s) for the Ottoman sultan, and the mid- sixteenth-century Xiyu (The Western Regions), a monograph on the geography and ethnography of Central and West Asia written by the Chinese scholar- official Ma Li (fl. 1514–1553, d. 1556) for the Ming emperor, are two exemplary works in this corpus. Although their languages, styles, and cultural contexts are disparate, Khitay namah and Xiyu share some fundamental common ground. Documenting the people, culture, and geography of the other country in impressive detail, these two Asian texts reveal that Islamic and Chinese scholars had gained substan- tial knowledge about each other’s societies by the sixteenth century.4 Despite recording much authentic information, however, both Khitay namah and Xiyu also contain a large amount of misinformation about the Ming dynasty and 1 One of the earliest and best-known cross-Eurasia travelers was the thirteenth-century Italian merchant Marco Polo, who traveled from Venice to China via Damascus, Tabriz, Shiraz, Balkh, and Kashgar, finally arriving at Beijing where he was granted an audience with the Mongol Khan Khubilai (r. 1260–1294) in 1275. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo: The Illustrated Edition, ed. Morris Rossabi (New York, 2012). 2 For some recent studies on inter-Asia connections and communications, see the three- volume series, Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, and Peter C. Perdue, eds., Asia Inside Out (Cambridge, MA, 2015–2019). 3 Much of this literature is collected and translated in Henry Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither: Being a Collection of Medieval Notices of China (London, 1866). 4 For a comprehensive survey of Islamic and Chinese geographical knowledge prior to the six- teenth century, see Hyunhee Park, Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds: Cross-Cultural Exchange in Pre-Modern Asia (New York, 2012). Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago 424 Chen the Ottoman Empire. While some of these inaccuracies might have stemmed from infelicities in the authors’ sources, I argue that the misrepresentations in Khitay namah and Xiyu are Ali Akbar Khitai’s and Ma Li’s intentional construc- tions to espouse the Ottoman and Chinese claims to universal sovereignty and cultural superiority. Moreover, written for their respective monarchs, Khitay namah and Xiyu illuminate the Ottoman and Chinese rulers’ growing aspiration to conquer and control faraway lands, a desire that was also shared by many European empires in the early modern period. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Europe lost not only its most glorious city to the Ottomans but also its access to established transportation routes to China and India.5 In histories written by the Europeans, their sustained ambition to reach the other end of Eurasia while bypassing the Ottoman-controlled territory spurred European empires to look for alternative routes and, in turn, ushered in the Age of Exploration and the dawn of the modern world. In this prevalent narrative of the Age of Exploration, Europe was the sole hero, creating the global system and leading the world to modernity, while the Ottoman and Chinese empires played little positive or active role – the Ottomans were portrayed as the vil- lains that blocked the adventurous Europeans in their quest for modernity; the Chinese empire, on the other hand, was treated as the inanimate land of treasures waiting to be exploited while lacking its own agency. This article contributes to the emerging scholarship that challenges the tra- ditional, Euro-centric narrative of the Age of Exploration.6 Ali Akbar Khitai’s and Ma Li’s works demonstrate that explorers from the self-proclaimed Islamic and Chinese universal empires, like contemporaneous European explorers such as Tome Pires of Portugal and Jan Huyghen van Linschoten of Holland, actively produced geographical treatises that legitimized their countries’ imperial expansion into faraway lands for wealth, power, and influence. These Asian scholar’s writings also reveal that the quests for more effective statecraft and more advanced technology were universal among early modern Eurasian empires. In a nutshell, the Age of Exploration was not just an era of European adventure as traditionally assumed, but a global process which Asia also actively participated in. 5 Robert Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, MD, 2006), 61. 6 For example, Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (New York, 2010), and Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 (New York, 1997). Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires 425 A Book on China for the Ottoman Sultan and Its Construction of Ottoman Universal Sovereignty While little is known about the family and upbringing of the Muslim scholar- merchant Sayyid Ali Akbar Khitai (hereafter, Ali Akbar), his last name, Khitai, literally meaning “China,” suggests he probably had some Chinese lineage.7 During the first decade of the sixteenth century, Ali Akbar traveled from his homeland of Transoxiana to China, then under the reign of the Ming dynasty, and stayed there for several months. After he returned to Central Asia from China circa 1510, Ali Akbar started writing about his experiences in the Ming empire.8 In 1516, he finally completed Khitay namah, or the Book on China, in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul.9 Written in Persian, the twenty-chapter Khitay namah described the monarch, government, military, religion, and many other aspects of Ming-dynasty China. Ali Akbar originally intended to dedicate his work to Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–1520). However, due to the sudden death of Selim I in Egypt when fighting the Mamluks, Ali Akbar later presented his work to his successor Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520–1566, Figure 1).10 Khitay namah is part of the rich corpus of travelogues on China produced by Islamic writers. The earliest extant work in this corpus is the mid-ninth century travelogue Information on China and India (Akhbar al-Sin wa‌ʾl-Hind), by the Arabic traveler Suleyman al-Tajir, who sailed from the Iranian port city Siraf to China, then ruled by the Tang dynasty (618–907). Suleyman al-Tajir highly 7 Yi Jinghua, “Wo dui Ali Akbar zhu Zhongguo jixing yishu de kanfa” [My opinion about Ali Akbar’s Khitay nama] in Ali Akbar, Zhongguo jixing [Book on China], ed. and trans. Zhang Zhishan (Beijing, 1988), 308–309. Kaveh Louis Hemmat, “A Chinese System for an Ottoman State: The Frontier, the Millennium, and Ming Bureaucracy in Khatāyī’s Book of China” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2014), 107. “Khitai” in Western Asian language is derived from “Kitan,” the name of a nomadic people that founded the Liao dynasty, which lasted from the tenth to early twelfth centuries. See Frederick W. Mote, Imperial China, 900–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 60. The Liao territory, at its height, encompassed Mongolia, Manchuria, and part of North China, including modern Beijing. The most com- prehensive and classical study of the Liao is Karl Wittfogel and Feng Chia-sheng, History of Chinese Society, Liao (907–1125) (Philadelphia, 1946). 8 Hemmat, “A Chinese System for an Ottoman State,” 113. 9 ʿAlī Akbar Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah: waṣf mamlakat al-Ṣīn, eds. Fuat Sezgin and Eckhard Neubauer (Frankfurt, 1994), 174. This is a facsimile of Khitay namah’s earliest extant Persian manuscript, MS Reisülülküttap 609 in the Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul. All references to contents in Khitay namah are based on this manuscript. Other than that, I mostly rely on Kaveh Louis Hemmat’s dissertation, the most comprehensive study of Khitay namah in English to date, to obtain other information about Ali Akbar not men- tioned in Khitay namah. 10 Hemmat, “A Chinese System for an Ottoman State,” 1. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago 426 Chen figure 1 Nakkaş ʿOsmān, “Süleymān the Magnificent as a young man.” In Loqmān, Şemāilnāme (1579), folio 47b. Manuscript painting. 20.5 × 13 cm. Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul. commended China’s advanced financial system, Chinese merchants’ honest business conduct, and the diverse Chinese diet.11 In the 1330s, the Moroccan merchant Ibn Battuta (1304–1369) started from Anatolia on a sailboat and arrived in Mongol-ruled China in 1345. In his Journeys (Rihla), Ibn Battuta summarized the wonders he saw in China – delicate silk clothes and porce- lain wares, large wooden ships sailing in the Grand Canal, and the clean and 11 Nizar F. Hermes, The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture, Ninth– Twelfth Century AD (New York, 2012), 22–37. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires 427 prosperous city of Hangzhou.12 From 1419 to 1422, Ghiyathuddin Naqqash, a court artist and ambassador of the Timur dynasty (1370–1507), visited Ming China with his fellow Timurid envoys and kept a detailed diary of their trip. Surviving in the writings of contemporaneous and later-period Persian schol- ars, the diary of Naqqash recorded the festive celebrations in the Ming court, the exquisite craftsmanship of Chinese artisans, and the empire’s booming markets.13 This long Islamic literary tradition in part inspired Ali Akbar’s writ- ing about China. Another inspiration for Ali Akbar’s composition of Khitay namah was the widespread fascination with China during the Age of Exploration.14 In the best-known example, Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella sponsored Christopher Columbus’s voyages with the hope that he would find China and bring back its riches. Columbus, despite his historic discovery of the New World, still regarded his voyages as a failure since he did not find China. He had to jus- tify his unfulfilled promise to his royal sponsors and explained that he really thought that he had reached “a province of Cathay.”15 Like the Spanish royals, other contemporaneous European royals, such as King Manuel of Portugal and Prince Maurice of Orange of Holland and Zeeland, also shared the same desire to access China’s fabled treasures and hence kept sending expedition teams and embassies to China.16 Like the European royals, the Ottoman aristocrats had also maintained a keen interest in Chinese products. Deeply influenced by Islamic chinoiserie that flourished from the Mongol period, the Ottoman elites had been col- lecting Chinese art and artifacts, in particular Chinese porcelains and paint- ings, since the early decades of the empire.17 However, although the Ottoman Empire enjoyed relative proximity to China as compared with Spain and other European empires, obtaining high-quality products from China was not easy. Ottoman porcelain acquisitions, for example, were mostly small-scale and 12 “Ibn Batutta’s Travels in Bengal and China (Circa 1347),” and “The Travels of Ibn Battuta in China, etc.,” in Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, 397–522. 13 Ghiyathuddin Naqqash, “Report to Mirza Baysunghur on the Timurid Legation to the Ming Court at Peking,” in A Century of Princes: Sources on Timurid History and Art, ed. W. M. Thackston (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 279–297. See also “The Embassy sent by Shah Rukh to the Court of China,” in Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, cxcix–ccxiv. 14 Hemmat, “A Chinese System for an Ottoman State,” 10. 15 Christopher Columbus, Select Letters of Christopher Columbus with Other Original Documents, Relating to His Four Voyages to the New World, ed. Richard Henry Major (New York, 2010), 2. 16 Michael Keevak, Embassies to China: Diplomacy and Cultural Encounters Before the Opium Wars (Singapore, 2017), 39–90. 17 Yuka Kado, Islamic Chinoiserie: The Art of Mongol Iran (Edinburgh, 2009). Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago 428 Chen sporadic during the first half of the empire  – by the mid-fifteenth century, the Ottoman Empire’s Inner Treasury only accumulated a little over one hun- dred pieces of Chinese porcelain. It was not until Sultan Selim I’s conquests in Persia, Syria, and Egypt from 1514 to 1517, after Ali Akbar returned from China, that the Ottoman court finally acquired its first significant quantity of Chinese porcelains by looting the royal collections of Tabriz, Damascus, and Cairo.18 Ali Akbar, similar to other contemporaneous explorers, catered to the shared “China fetish” among rising Western empires and aspired to show the wealth of China to his monarch. As he claimed in the preface of Khitay namah, his motivation for writing this book and presenting it to the Ottoman sultan was to “open the doors to the great house of treasure.”19 This trope is commonly found in Age of Exploration writings. The Portuguese doctor Tome Pires, who went to China on an official mission in the 1510s, opened with the claim that “things of China are made out to be great, riches, pomp and state in both the land and people” in the book on China in his monumental Suma Oriental.20 The Dutch historian Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, who accompanied Willem Barentsz on his expeditions to establish formal trade relations with China, wrote that China “hath many mines of golde and silver” and that Chinese people “have great riches in their houses, of gold, silver, and other common jewels.”21 Ali Akbar and these early modern European explorers all expressed the same keen interest in accessing China’s wealth. In this formative era of the modern global system, these travel writings highlighting treasures in distant lands undoubt- edly contributed to inspiring Eurasian empires’ desire for imperial expansion. However, unlike Columbus, Pires, van Linschoten, and many other Age of Discovery explorers, Ali Akbar did not go to China on any official mission or with any royal sponsorship. Nevertheless, when he entered China, Ali Akbar and his fellow travelers concealed their merchant identity and claimed that they were envoys. This false claim brought Ali Akbar and his friends tre- mendous benefit and convenience, since the Ming government, according to its regulations, covered all their transportation, lodging, and meal costs.22 18 Julian Raby and Ünsal Yücel, “Chinese Porcelain at the Ottoman Court,” in Chinese Ceramics in the Topkapi Saray Museum, Istanbul: A Complete Catalogue (London, 1986), 29–30. 19 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 32. 20 Tome Pires, The Suma Oriental of Tome Pires: An Account of the East, from the Red Sea to China, Written in Malacca and India in 1512–1515, trans. Armando Cortesão (New Delhi, 1990), 116. 21 Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Voyage to Goa and Back, 1583–1592, with His Account of the East Indies, trans. Arthur Coke Burnell and P. A. Tiele (London, 1874), 128. 22 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 57–58. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires 429 Ali Akbar described how they, after entering the border pass, traveled to Beijing in government-supplied carts and were even attended by servants. On their way, they stayed in government relay stations and received plentiful daily supplies of firewood, grain, flour, lamb, and wine. The Ming government pro- vided them with not only food but also clothing  – Ali Akbar and the other bogus envoys each received new pillowcases, bed sheets, and pajamas made of first-grade silk and brocade.23 The largest rewards came from the Chinese emperor. According to the Chinese tradition, the emperor, in return for foreign envoys’ tribute, would bestow them with generous gifts that were much more valuable than the tributary goods they presented. In Khitay namah, Ali Akbar reported that by presenting a lion to the Chinese emperor, one could receive thirty treasure chests that each contained a thousand bolts of fine Chinese silk and brocade.24 Such fraudulent practice, as Ali Akbar confessed in Khitay namah, was com- mon among Central and Western Asian merchants since only tribute-bearing foreign envoys were legally allowed to cross China’s borders at that time.25 Therefore, the only way that these merchants could do business in China was to present themselves as ambassadors bearing gifts to the Chinese emperor. This prevalent sham was an open secret among Chinese officials and even the emperors  – Ming-period government documents recorded that “merchants pretend to be ambassadors and claim that the horses, camels, and precious gems they bring are tributary gifts.”26 The primary reason that the Ming turned a blind eye to these fake foreign envoys was to uphold China’s claim to universal sovereignty. The Chinese trib- ute system operated under the premise that foreign countries that recognized Chinese superiority should regularly come to China to present tribute to the Chinese emperors.27 However, from the mid-fifteenth century onward, the Ming dynasty adopted a defensive, inward-looking national security strategy to protect the country from Mongol attacks. While the much-tightened bor- der defense strengthened the empire’s security, it also significantly cut off 23 Ibid. 24 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 144. See also Kaveh Louis Hemmat, “Children of Cain in the Land of Error: A Central Asian Merchant’s Treatise on Government and Society in Ming China,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30, no. 3 (2010): 447, and Ildikó Béller-Hann, “Ottoman Perception of China,” in Comité International d’Études Pré-Ottomanes et Ottomanes, VIth Symposium, Cambridge, 1rst–4th July 1984, eds. Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont and Emeri van Donzel (Istanbul, 1987), 60. 25 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 57–58. 26 Zhang Tingyu (1672–1755), Ming shi [History of the Ming] (Beijing, 1974), 332–8614. 27 On the tributary system in premodern and early modern China, see David Chan-oong Kang, East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York, 2010). Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago 430 Chen the Ming’s diplomatic connections with Central and West Asian countries. With the number of bona fide foreign envoys dwindling, the tributary system, which was essential to the propagation of Chinese universal sovereignty, was also compromised. To uphold the Sinocentric rhetoric of a world operating under Chinese universal sovereignty, therefore, the Ming government not only knowingly let these self-proclaimed “envoys” into China but also generously rewarded them to reciprocate the “tribute” they presented. In other words, through the Ming’s tributary system, merchants like Ali Akbar were able to conduct trade with the Ming court and make huge profits. The Ming court, in turn, ostensibly kept its tributary system functioning. Like earlier Islamic writers treating China, Ali Akbar wrote about the wealth and precious goods there – gold, silver, silk, gems, and porcelain – in which Eurasian consumers had long shown great interest. Yet compared to his pre- decessors, Ali Akbar went into far more detail. In one chapter, for example, Ali Akbar described how artisans produced porcelains, one of the most prized Chinese commodities, in a kiln in South China. According to his observa- tions, the Chinese artisans separated three pools of raw materials through several steps of grinding, mixing, and filtering and used them accordingly to manufacture three different grades of porcelain wares. Making porcelain was a profitable business – Ali Akbar noted that one batch of firing, which usu- ally contained ten wares, could sell as high as 100,000 dirhams, or more than 300 kilograms of silver.28 The highest-grade porcelains, however, were reserved for presentation to the Chinese emperor and were not for sale, let alone avail- able for export overseas.29 The official ban on the export of imperial-grade por- celains indicated that the chinaware collected in the Topkapı Palace might not be of the most superior quality. Ali Akbar’s detailed description of the porcelain production process probably suggested that he wanted to introduce such tech- nology to the Ottoman Empire so that fine porcelains could be manufactured domestically. However, it was not until the early eighteenth century that the artisanship for making real “china” was finally transmitted beyond East Asia.30 Another major difference between Khitay namah and earlier Islamic travel books on China was its focus on the government instead of on the society. An overarching theme in Khitay namah is the perfection of the Ming’s admin- istrative system, legal institutions, and military organization. For example, 28 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 118–119. Before the end of the seventeenth century, one dirham of silver in the Ottoman currency system weighed 3.072 grams. See Sevket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, UK, 2000), 32. 29 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 118–119. 30 Paul Khale, “Chinese Porcelain in the Lands of Islam,” in Opera Minora (Leiden, 1956), 330. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires 431 in the chapter entitled “Armies in the City,” Ali Akbar lauded the Chinese laws as follows: The Chinese know they should never be idle. Day and night, everyone, whether he is the emperor or a beggar, knows his duties and strictly obeys the laws. Doubtlessly, if all the Muslims could obey the Islamic laws as strictly as how the Chinese follow the Chinese laws, they would become as saintly as what Allah hopes them to be, despite the great difference between the Islamic and Chinese laws.31 While much of Ali Akbar’s knowledge about the Chinese government probably came from hearsay, a significant part stemmed from his personal experiences in China. In the seventh chapter of Khitay namah, entitled “Chinese prisons,” Ali Akbar recorded a firsthand account of a legal case he was involved in. On their “tributary” journey to Beijing, one of Ali Akbar’s friends had a fight with a Tibetan ambassador and eventually killed him. Initially, Ali Akbar’s entire group were thrown into a prison managed by the “Shinbu,” or the Ministry of Justice (ch: Xingbu). However, per the direct order of the emperor, the foreign- ers were not physically tortured like native Chinese prisoners. After several court examinations, the judge made the final ruling – the person who killed the Tibetan would be sentenced to death while the rest of the group, Ali Akbar included, were innocent. The judge sent the ruling to the emperor and received imperial approval in two days.32 After their release, Ali Akbar praised the just- ness of the Chinese legal system and its effectiveness in ordering the society: Allah! The Chinese laws are so strict and so well carried out. In China, for thousands of years people have obeyed and respected the laws. Therefore, Chinese laws are never undermined. Its enemies will never achieve vic- tories. From seven-year-olds to seventy-year-olds, whether he is king or dervish, a Chinese person dares not to violate or neglect the laws, not even a single bit.33 Throughout Khitay namah, Ali Akbar used various literary devices to illus- trate the power of Chinese laws. His attention to the justice system sets him apart from earlier Islamic scholars of China but connects him to other early 31 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 62. All direct citations from Khitay namah are translated by the author, with the generous assistance by Kayhan Nejad. 32 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 100–103. 33 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 107. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago 432 Chen modern European scholars. The eighteenth-century French Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, for example, opened his monumental General History of China with an overview of how the Chinese government used courts, tribunals, and pun- ishments to regulate the society.34 In an era when many world empires rose and vied for territories and resources, rulers of these empires not only wanted to accumulate wealth but also longed to learn more advanced statecraft to strengthen their reigns.35 Writing against this historical backdrop, Ali Akbar clearly intended to showcase his knowledge of an age-honored legal system, which he believed to be the foundation of China’s prosperity and longevity, and to demonstrate to the Ottoman sultan that such a model government could also advance the Ottomans’ long-term interest in this age of empires.36 Ali Akbar’s accounts of China’s porcelain production and his personal experience in the Chinese court system are examples of many impressively accurate details in Khitay namah.37 However, it is worthwhile to point out that Khitay namah also contains a notable amount of misinformation. Overall, the book’s depiction of China presents two conspicuous fallacies. First, the “China” represented by Ali Akbar was nearly perfect. The realities of the Ming dynasty, however, were far from such an ideal. For example, although Ali Akbar’s per- sonal experience showed the fairness and efficiency of the Ming legal system, the three centuries of Ming history had no lack of notorious miscarriages of justice.38 In another case, Ali Akbar mentioned that silver was cheap in China, thanks to the country’s abundant silver mines, and that one-quarter of China’s silver output could meet the entire world’s demand.39 In reality, however, sil- ver was expensive in the Ming dynasty as compared with contemporaneous 34 Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, The General History of China: Containing a Geographical, Historical, Chronological, Political and Physical Descritpion of the Empire of China, Chinese-Tartary, Corea, and Thibet (London, 1741), 2–8. 35 Marks, The Origins of the Modern World, 67–94. 36 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 138–140. 37 Some Chinese scholars believe that 80 to 90 percent of Ali Akbar’s accounts are accurate. See Zhang Zhishan, “Zhongguo jixing yanjiu wenxian pingjie” [Review of scholarship on Khitay namah], in Ali Akbar, Zhongguo jixing, 148. 38 Chinese historian Meng Sen compiled and analyzed some cases of miscarriage of jus- tice in the Ming period in Meng Sen, Ming shi jiangyi [Lecture notes on the history of Ming] (Beijing, 2012). On the creation of the legal system in the Ming period, see Edward L. Farmer, Zhu Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society Following the Era of Mongol Rule (Leiden, 1995). 39 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 115–116. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires 433 European countries. Due to the limited domestic supply of silver, the Ming empire’s economy largely relied on imported New World silver.40 Another remarkable misrepresentation in Khitay namah was the heav- ily exaggerated Islamic influence in China. Ali Akbar maintained that China was essentially an Islamized empire instead of a Confucian country as con- ventionally assumed. For example, he stated that the Ming emperor Zhengde (r. 1506–1521, Figure 2) piously practiced Islam. Ali Akbar cited several pieces of evidence to support his claim. First, the emperor built a large mosque in the vicinity of Beijing. Second, he engraved the Quran in both Persian and Chinese on the walls facing the direction of Mecca.41 And third, he always prayed to Allah for long hours.42 He also highlighted that the Ming emperor was particu- larly generous toward Muslim ambassadors – in addition to giving them gen- eral rewards like those he gave other foreign “envoys,” the emperor specifically gifted each Muslim “envoy” several Islamic style thawbs made of highest-grade Chinese silk.43 Moreover, Ali Akbar wrote that many Chinese people would soon convert to Islam because they revered the emperor and were eager to fol- low the faith of their monarch.44 It is true that some Islamic elements existed in Emperor Zhengde’s court. For instance, the emperor enjoyed Muslim food and appointed several Muslim officials. However, no evidence substantiates that he particularly favored Islam over other religions.45 In Ming society, Muslims enjoyed reasonable religious freedom  – the government permitted Muslims to live in China and allowed them to practice Islam. However, contrary to Ali Akbar’s claim, the vast major- ity of the Chinese population did not follow Islam and were not eager to be converted. Ali Akbar’s portrayal of Emperor Zhengde as a Muslim emperor was likely connected to a long-standing tradition among Ming-period Chinese Muslims. From the dynasty’s early decades onward, Chinese Muslims had long believed that the Ming emperors secretly practiced Islam. In particular, they 40 On silver in the Ming period, see Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (London, 2008), 152–184. See also Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley, 1999), 112–113. 41 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 43. Persian was the lingua franca of Chinese Muslims in the Ming period. See Liu Yingsheng, “A Lingua Franca along the Silk Road: Persian Language in China between the 14th and the 16th Centuries,” in Aspects of the Maritime Silk Road: From the Persian Gulf to the East China Sea, ed. Ralph Kauz (Wiesbaden, 2010), 87–96. 42 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 44. 43 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 144. 44 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 145–156. See also Hemmat, “Children of Cain in the Land of Error,” 434–448. 45 Toh Hoong Teik, “Shakh ʿĀlam: The Emperor of Early-Sixteenth-Century China,” Sino- Platonic Papers 110 (2000): 6. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago  434 Chen figure 2 Imperial portrait of Emperor Zhengde, Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk. 211.3 × 149.8 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires 435 claimed that the Ming’s founder, Zhu Yuanzhang (r. 1368–1398), was a Muslim emperor.46 Although this view finds no corroboration in non-Muslim Chinese sources, it must have appealed to Ali Akbar, who as a Muslim of Chinese descent shared strong religious and cultural ties with Chinese Muslims. Why did Ali Akbar portray China as a perfect Islamic country? The intended audience of Khitay namah was the Ottoman sultan, the self-proclaimed Caliph of Islam who, at that time, ruled over vast territories across three continents.47 In his dedication to Suleyman the Magnificent, Ali Akbar compared the sultan to Solomon, the wise king of ancient Israel, whose reign of justness and righ- teousness is highly praised in the Quran.48 He hoped that the Ottoman sultan, or the “Solomon of the age,” could use his power and wisdom to defend and manifest the Laws of Muhammad in the expanding Islamic Caliphate.49 The way to achieve this ambition, as Ali Akbar contended, was to learn from China. To make his case, Ali Akbar had to demonstrate two points: first, China’s government was a worthy example to emulate, and second, the Ming dynasty and the Ottoman Empire were fundamentally similar so that the Chinese sys- tem could be replicated. To prove the first point, Ali Akbar not only lavishly and repeatedly praised China’s government, especially its justice system, but also stated that Emperor Zhengde proclaimed “his country was like the country of Solomon.”50 This statement, of course, is entirely false, as Chinese sources offer no evidence that Emperor Zhengde ever mentioned King Solomon or Solomon’s country. Nevertheless, Ali Akbar made this seemingly eccentric claim to depict China as a fabled kingdom familiar to the Abrahamic tradition so that the Ottoman Empire’s “Solomon of the age” could follow China’s prime example. To demonstrate the second point, Ali Akbar had to show that China was not a country of pagans, but a de facto Islamic empire ruled by a pious Muslim emperor and a rapidly growing Muslim population. This misrepresentation could have stemmed partly from stories that Ali Akbar had heard from Chinese Muslims. However, the more probable explanation is that Ali Akbar wishfully and intentionally inflated the influence of Islam in China. Although centuries 46 Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, “The Marrano Emperor: The Mysterious Bond between Zhu Yuanzhang and the Chinese Muslims,” in Long Live the Emperor!: Uses of the Ming Founder across Six Centuries of East Asian History, ed. Sarah Schneewind (Minneapolis, 2008), 275–308. 47 Halil Inalcick, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600 (London, 1973). 48 Quran, 38:35. 49 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 26–27. See also Hemmat, “A Chinese System for an Ottoman State,” 157. 50 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 75. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago 436 Chen of cross-continental exchanges had brought more and more knowledge about China to the Islamic world, to most Central and Western Asians, China remained exotic and mysterious. The existence of some Muslim elements in China, regardless of how marginal they were, helped the Islamic world to look at this unfamiliar country through familiar lenses. Even the very name “China” in Persian, Khitay, which Ali Akbar used, and its European version Cathay, which European explorers from Marco Polo to Christopher Columbus had been using, reflected a distorted, Islamized inter- pretation of China. This appellation originated from “Kitan,” a nomadic people that founded the Liao empire (916–1125), which encompassed Manchuria, Mongolia, and part of North China. Although the Liao empire had assimi- lated considerable Chinese influence from the Song dynasty (960–1279), its Han-Chinese neighbor, it kept its distinct cultural and ethnic identity. After the downfall of the Liao in the early twelfth century, its diaspora fled to Central Asia and founded the Qara-Khitai khanate between China and the Islamic world.51 People to its west, influenced by the powerful presence of the Qara-Khitai and its historical affinity to China, naturally accepted the Qara-Khitai khanate, which eventually converted to Islam toward the end of the khanate around the turn of the thirteenth century, as what they thought should be “China.” In light of this tradition, the Islamized “Khitay” as depicted by Ali Akbar was another example of how the image of a Chinese Other was recast as an Islamic Self. Such reimagination of the Other was not unique to the Islamic world but also prevailed in contemporaneous European empires. The Christian Europeans, likewise, portrayed the Chinese emperor and people as eager to embrace their religion, Christianity. A decade before Ali Akbar’s travel to China, Columbus, while he still had not found China on his fourth voyage, reported that “the emperor of Cathay has, some time since, sent for wise men to instruct him in the faith of Christ.” Hence, Columbus, with the unsupported confidence to Christianize China, pledged himself to bring the word of God to China.52 The Jesuits, who went to China several decades after Ali Akbar, were excited to find that “worshipers of the cross” already resided in China by the time they arrived and hence envisioned a promising future for their mission in China.53 This literary device, universal in many writings during the Age of Exploration, 51 Michal Biran, The Empire of the Qara Khitai in Eurasian History: Between China and the Islamic World (Cambridge, MA, 2008). See also Yuan Chen, “Legitimation Discourse and the Theory of the Five Elements in Imperial China,” Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 44 (2014): 345–346. 52 Columbus, Select Letters of Christopher Columbus, 205. 53 Michela Fontana, Matteo Ricci: A Jesuit in the Ming Court (Lanham, MD, 2011), 241–267. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires 437 reflected how increasingly frequent cross-cultural encounters fed empires’ ambition to influence, assimilate, and conquer the distant Other. Published in the same year as Khitay namah was Thomas More’s Utopia.54 These two works are clearly different: while Utopia constructed a fictitious “nowhere” in a newly discovered continent, Khitay namah described an actual empire in a land long known to his people. Moreover, the two authors saw their subject countries in precisely opposite ways: Thomas More emphasized the disparities between the imperial order he lived in and the imaginary repub- lic of Utopia; while Ali Akbar strived to show parallels between the Ottoman Empire and the Ming dynasty in the east. Yet both works, written during the Age of Exploration, shared some essential similarities. Although China, unlike Utopia, was a genuine country instead of a fabled neverland, the “Khitay” in Ali Akbar’s depiction was a “country of Solomon” as much imagined as real. According to the two authors, the prosperities of both Khitay and Utopia hinged on the strict laws and punishments they implemented. In terms of religions in their subject countries, while Ali Akbar believed that the currently Confucian but religiously tolerant Khitay was on its way to becoming Islamized, Thomas More, likewise, wrote that after the Utopians heard of the Biblical miracles “it is not to be imagined how inclined they were to receive it.”55 Although Thomas More focused on differences while Ali Akbar highlighted similarities between their subjects and homelands, they both intended to show “how things should be” to their intended audiences, the monarchs.56 In other words, both authors constructed a distant, ideal state to express their political views and hoped that they could serve their king or sultan through their writings.57 At the dawn of the modern world, Ali Akbar and other Age of Discovery explorers that set out to find the fabled China deepened the connections between different cultures and expanded people’s perception of their worlds. Ali Akbar’s crossing of Amu Darya from the Islamic land of “Iran” to the pur- portedly pagan land of “Turan” might not be as trailblazing as Columbus’ voy- age across the Atlantic.58 Yet Ali Akbar, similar to his European contemporaries, 54 There are many English translations of Utopia, which was originally written in Latin. A recently published English translation, referenced here, is Sir Thomas More, Utopia: On the Best State of a Republic and on the New Island of Utopia, from a 1901 Edition (Auckland, New Zealand, 2008). Scholarship on Utopia and Thomas More is abundant. See, for exam- ple, Dominic Baker-Smith, More’s Utopia (Toronto, 2000). 55 More, Utopia, 150. 56 Utopia’s full title is Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia, which literally means “A little, true book, not less beneficial than enjoyable, about how things should be in the new island Utopia.” 57 Baker-Smith, More’s Utopia, 210. 58 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 30–31. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago 438 Chen used his travel to look for wealth and wisdom to serve his monarch’s expand- ing world empire. Utilizing his experience, knowledge, and imagination, Ali Akbar constructed a “Khitay” with a wise Muslim emperor, an exemplary sys- tem of justice, and a law-respecting, well-disciplined society. Despite the many authentic accounts about China in his book, Ali Akbar’s “Khitay” was more of an idealized “Chinatopia” than actual Ming-dynasty China. A Chinese Map of the Ottoman Empire and Its Proclamation of Chinese Universal Rule The life and works of Ma Li, the author of Xiyu, are much better documented than those of Ali Akbar. Hailing from Sanyuan county in Shaanxi province, Ma Li passed the civil service examination and started his official career in 1514. Before his officialdom, Ma Li was already well known for his scholarship even in foreign countries. For many years, he served in the Court of Imperial Entertainment (Guanglu si), where he participated in planning court events and receiving foreign envoys. After retiring to his hometown of Sanyuan in 1541, Ma Li began compiling a comprehensive gazetteer of Shaanxi. With the help of his friend Lü Nan, Ma Li completed the gazetteer Shaanxi tong- zhi (Comprehensive gazetteer of the Shaanxi Province) the next year.59 In this monumental gazetteer, one chapter, entitled Xiyu, or Western Regions, presents an overland itinerary between China and the Ottoman Empire with detailed descriptions of the people, geography, economy, and customs of over one hun- dred towns and cities in the Western Regions, which broadly refers to lands to the west of China.60 Xiyu inherited a long Chinese literary tradition of writing about foreign places. Chinese scholars had also shown great interest in faraway countries and cultures since before the Common Era. In his monumental Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), the Han-dynasty historian Sima Qian (d. 86 BCE) wrote about distant places such as the Parthian Empire, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Byzantine Empire.61 Much later in the twelfth century, scholar-official Zhao Rugua compiled a geographical treatise entitled Record of Foreign Countries (Zhufan zhi), which recorded the landscapes and lifeways of a 59 For the official biography of Ma Li, see Zhang Tingyu, Ming shi, 282:7249–50. 60 Ma Li and Lü Nan, Shaanxi tongzhi [Comprehensive gazetteer of Shaanxi Province], woodblock manuscript printed in 1542 in Shaanxi, digitized in Zhongguo jiben guji ku [Database of Chinese gazetteers] (Beijing, 2012), http://server.wenzibase.com/dblist.jsp. 61 Sima Qian, Shiji [Record of the Grand Historian] (Beijing, 1957), 123:3157–80. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires 439 number of Eastern African and Mediterranean countries.62 Writings on foreign lands flourished in the Mongol-Yuan period (1260–1368) when Pan-Eurasian exchanges became more convenient and common.63 During this era, Chinese literati not only wrote about geographies and ethnographies in the Islamic world and Europe but also recorded important political events in foreign lands. For example, completed in 1263, Liu Yu’s Xishi ji, or Record of An Embassy to the West, documented the Mongol conquest of Baghdad and the establish- ment of the Ilkhanate, providing valuable sources for these historical events in non-Middle Eastern languages.64 This literary tradition continued in the Ming period. The early Ming dynasty scholar-official Chen Cheng (1365–1457), based on his firsthand experience from several Ming emissary missions to Central and West Asia in the first decades of the fourteenth century, wrote a report about the landscape and economy of the Timur dynasty, the Kingdom of Tartar, and other countries with which the Ming maintained active diplomatic relationships at that time.65 By the sixteenth century, Chinese scholars had accumulated considerable geographic and ethnographic knowledge about the wide world to the west of China, laying the informational foundation for the composition of a compre- hensive treatise like Xiyu. In addition, Islamic knowledge also contributed to Ma Li’s writing of Xiyu. Like Ali Akbar, a Muslim of Chinese descent, Ma Li also had a dual background in Chinese and Islamic cultures, an observation that scholars have not paid much attention to before. Two pieces of evidence suggest that Ma Li was most likely a Chinese Muslim. First, his home county of Sanyuan had a large Muslim community. Second, his family name “Ma” was the most common surname among Chinese Muslims.66 Ma Li’s mixed Chinese and Muslim heritage suggests that his work not only had deep roots in the Chinese scholarly tradition of writing about foreign places but also benefited from the wealth of geographical knowledge that Muslim world travelers had accumulated for many centuries. 62 Zhao Rugua, Zhufanzhi [Record of foreign countries], woodblock printed manuscript printed in 1805, digitized in Zhongguo jiben guji ku [Database of Chinese classic ancient books] (Beijing, 2011), http://server.wenzibase.com/dblist.jsp. For English translation see Zhao Rugua, Chao Ju- Kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu-Fan-Chi, eds. Friedrich Hirth and W. W. Rockhill (St. Petersburg, 1911). 63 Park, Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds, 91–123. 64 Liu Yu, Xishi ji [Record of an embassy to the west] (Shanghai, 2013). 65 Chen Cheng, Xiyu xingcheng ii, Xiyu fanguo zhi [Records of the itinerary to the Western Regions, and Records of the foreign countries in the Western Regions] (Beijing, 2000). 66 Xue Wenbo, “Huihui xingshi kao 4” [Chinese Muslim surnames, no. 4], Ningxia Daxue Xuebao (Social Science Volume), no. 3 (1981): 77–79. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago 440 Chen However, unlike Ali Akbar, who mostly drew on his actual travel experiences to write Khitay namah, Ma Li wrote Xiyu primarily based on second-hand information. Ma Li, a scholar-official who had worked in the Ming capital cities of Beijing and Nanjing and spent his youth and retirement years in his home province of Shaanxi, probably never ventured beyond Chinese borders.67 However, that his writings were well known outside of China reveals his direct or indirect contact with non-Chinese scholars. He probably met many foreign- ers in Shaanxi, which was the first province foreigners passed through after entering China as Ali Akbar also mentioned in Khitay namah.68 Moreover, Ma Li’s official tenure at the Court of Imperial Entertainment allowed him to meet and receive foreign envoys. Therefore, even though he did not travel to Central and West Eurasia himself, Ma Li must have had plenty of channels to get in touch with traveling envoys, merchants, and pilgrims, from whom he gathered considerable knowledge to reconstruct a virtual journey from China to its west. Xiyu consists of an introduction, a concluding remark, and three body sec- tions. The first section is an extensive illustration split into ten woodblock- printed pages. Entitled Xiyu tudi renwu tu, or Illustration of Lands and Peoples in the Western Regions (hereafter, the Illustration), it portrays the landscapes and inhabitants along the route from China to the Ottoman Empire. The second part, Xiyu tudi neishu lüe, or Brief Record of Lands and Colonies in the Western Regions, traces the administrative history of the Western Regions from antiq- uity to the Ming dynasty. The last section, Xiyu tudi renwu lüe, or Brief Record of Lands and Peoples in the Western Regions (hereafter, the Brief Record), provides textual commentaries on the itinerary depicted in the Illustration. The first section, depicting over one hundred cities including fourteen in the Ottoman world, is mostly translated as the “Map of the Western Regions” in existing scholarship. However, this “map” does not heed some commonly accepted cartographical principles. First, although the commentary text in the third section documents different stop-to-stop distances, the “map” por- trays almost equal distances between most stops. Second, this “map” does not adhere to actual geographical directionality. In the Ottoman portion of the route, except for the third stop, the cities are all aligned on a straight westward line. Accordingly, the Record also consistently notes the direction from one place to the next as “west,” clearly deviating from actual directionality. The author, nevertheless, adopted this graphical method not because of a lack of cartographical techniques to make a realistic map. Chinese car- tographers had long been producing maps with systematic methodology of 67 Zhang Tingyu, Ming shi, 282:7249–50. 68 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 109. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires 441 measuring distances and directions.69 The 1136 Yuji tu (Map of the tracks of Yu), for example, used grids to present a realistically scaled, modern-looking map of Song-dynasty (960–1279) China and its neighbors.70 Ming-period car- tographers inherited these mapping techniques and produced many similar grid maps of East Asia. Moreover, combining established cartographic tradi- tion with new geographical knowledge passed down from the Mongol period, late fourteenth-century Ming cartographers produced the Da Ming hunyi tu (Map of the integrated territories of the Great Ming), an extraordinary world map that even demonstrates the distinct contours of Europe and Africa, its worldview far more advanced than the contemporaneous Catalan atlas of the “world.”71 Despite the existing know-how of making realistic maps, however, Ma Li chose to draw an out-of-scale “map” without adhering to actual distances and directions. Such a misrepresentation illuminates a preference for metaphoric values over cartographical precision – the term “west” does not correspond to the exact directionality of the route, but to a general impression that symboli- cally denotes travel in lands to the far west of China. Nevertheless, this illustra- tion highlights the importance of sequence and reveals the author’s attention to actual travel logistics. It is, therefore, more fitting to classify the Illustration as a stop-by-stop road map rather than a grid-by-grid realistic map. After the publication of Xiyu in Shaanxi tongzhi in 1542, the Illustration was reproduced in other Ming-period publications, including a colored remake in the Gansu zhenzhan shoutu lüe (Brief illustration of military defense in Gansu) published in 1544/1545 (Figure 3). Xiyu delineates a travel route that starts with China’s northwest border pass, Jiayu Pass, and extends all the way to the Ottoman Empire on the other side of the continent. The Ottoman portion of the itinerary, on the last page of the ten- page Illustration, consists of fourteen cities. This Ottoman journey begins with the two Holy Cities, Mecca and Medina. After Arabia, the route extends to the Levant, passing the six cities of Jerusalem, Beirut, Tripoli, Tartus, Latakia, and Aleppo. The last part of the itinerary lies in Asia Minor, including five major 69 Park, Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds, 14. 70 Joseph Needham, “Geography and Cartography,” in Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 3, Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth (Cambridge, UK, 1959), 547–548. The original map is carved on a stone stele in Xi’an, Shaanxi province. A nineteenth-century rubbing of Yuji tu is in the collection of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C. 71 Richard J. Smith, Mapping China and Managing the World: Culture, Cartography and Cosmology in Late Imperial Times (London, 2012). This map is in the collection of the First Historical Archives of China, Beijing. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago  442 Journal of early modern history figure 3 From Mecca to Istanbul: The last page of the Illustration of the Lands and Peoples of the 25 (2021) 422–456 Chen Western Regions. In Gansu zhenzhan shoutu lüe (Brief illustration of military defense in Gansu) (1544–1545). Album leaf, ink and color on paper. 90 × 52 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. via University of Chicago Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires 443 Anatolian cities: Adana, Konya, Ankara, Kütahya, and Bursa. Finally, the route ends at the Ottoman capital of Istanbul. Among these fourteen Ottoman cit- ies, only about half have been convincingly identified in existing scholarship. By analyzing the phonetic transliterations, physical locations, and historical geography and economy of these fourteen Ottoman cities, I have identified the previously unrecognized and misrecognized place names and summarized my identifications in the Appendix for the readers’ reference. As compared with Khitay namah, the accounts in Xiyu are mostly sketchy and lack details. However, many of its descriptions are genuine. For instance, Ma Li noted that there were water mills near Aleppo; that people in Ankara made brocade clothes and wool carpets; and that large cargo ships docked at Bursa.72 Archaeological and historical evidence corroborates these obser- vations. Near Aleppo, archaeological excavations have confirmed the exis- tence of an Ottoman period double water mill in the Balikh River basin.73 Sixteenth-century Ankara was celebrated for its burgeoning textile industry.74 In particular, Ankara monopolized the manufacturing of mohair, a luxury cloth that customers in Anatolia and Eastern Europe highly demanded.75 Bursa, a hub of the Ottoman silk trade, imported silk and a variety of other luxury commod- ities from the east and resold them to the rest of the Mediterranean world.76 These authentic accounts demonstrate the extent of sixteenth-century Chinese knowledge about the vast lands to the west of China. Just as the Ottomans and Europeans knew that the best silk and porcelains were made in China, the Ming dynasty also knew that Ankara produced good wool and that huge cargo ships docked at Bursa. When the Ottomans and Europeans made portolan charts to navigate their way to China, the Ming dynasty also produced its world maps and logistics maps to guide their way to foreign lands. In a word, China, like the empires that were committed to reaching it, was also an active participant in the Age of Exploration. However, as Khitay namah does for China, Xiyu not only presents accurate descriptions of the Ottoman world and the rest of the West Regions but also 72 Ma Li, Shaanxi tongzhi, 32b. 73 Tony J. Wilkinson, “The Archaeological Landscape of the Balikh Valley, Syria,” in The Oriental Institute 1995–1996 Annual Report, ed. William M. Summer (Chicago, 1996), 28. 74 Suraiya Faroqhi, Bruce McGowan, Donald Quataert, and Sevket Pamuk, eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, Volume II: 1600–1914 (Cambridge, UK, 1994), 457–458. 75 Halil Inalcik, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, Volume 1: 1300–1600 (New York, 1994), 275. 76 Kate Fleet, European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (Cambridge, UK, 1999), 98–99; Inalcik, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, Volume 1, 218–255. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago 444 Chen figure 4 Left: Chinese style houses in Aleppo and Adana. Right: Xunjian si (Office of Patrol and Investigation) on a mountain near Ankara. Detail, Illustration of the Lands and Peoples of the Western Regions. contains some notable misrepresentations. First, all houses in the Illustration were depicted in Chinese architectural style (Figure 4, Left). Second, the Illustration and the Brief Record both depicted an “Office of Patrol and Investigation” (Figure 4, Right), a Chinese institution designated for patrol- ling border regions, on a mountain to the west of Ankara. Lastly, Ma Li wrote that Han-Chinese people lived in Beirut, Tartus, Latakia, Konya, and Istanbul. In particular, the populations in Beirut, Tartus, Latakia, and Konya were “all Han-Chinese.” Why would Ma Li portray the Ottoman Empire as having Chinese houses, Chinese communities, and even a Chinese government office? We may find some clues from similar precedents in earlier Chinese dynasties. For exam- ple, in Han shu, or the History of the Later Han, the author Fan Ye (398–445) describes people in the Roman Empire as “tall, well-built, and good looking, just like the Chinese.” Fan Ye hence names the Roman Empire as the “Great Qin” (Da Qin), literally “Great China” since “Qin” was the name of the first Chinese imperial dynasty (221–207 BCE).77 Similarly, Ma Li’s descriptions of Chinese buildings, Chinese populations, and a Chinese administrative office in the Ottoman world make one believe that this remote, powerful country was a mirror of China itself.78 77 Fan Ye, Hou Han shu [History of the Later Han dynasty] (Beijing, 1965), 88:2919. 78 Edwin G. Pulleyblank describes such portrayals as the making of “counter-China.” See Edwin G. Pulleyblank, “The Roman Empire as Known to Han China: The Roman Empire Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires 445 However, Ma Li’s motivation went beyond finding a Chinese counterpart in the Ottoman Empire. Similar to Ali Akbar’s portrayal of China as an Islamic country, Ma Li included these outlandish Chinese elements in the Ottoman territory to support the Ming dynasty’s claim to universal sovereignty. In Xiyu’s introduction section, he explained as follows: The Western Regions have been colonial territories [of China] since ancient times. People there have been building walled cities, living in houses, cultivating for food, and weaving for clothing. They could not be compared with the Xiongnu nomads, who moved constantly to chase water and grass, did not cultivate or weave but hunted for livelihood and believed in stealing. Therefore, people there [in the Western Regions] could be bestowed with [Chinese] laws and teachings. Dunhuang is also in the Western Regions. When [Chinese] laws and teachings prevailed [in Dunhuang], generation after generation of virtu- ous talents emerged there, not unlike the three prefectures of the capi- tal city. How can they be called the “western barbarians”? Their nature and mind are the same [as ours]. When they are also made to practice the same livelihood and receive the same governance and teaching, then how could the emergence of virtuous talents not happen there? As for the Xiongnu, their ways of livelihood were different from us so their hearts must be different. They were mostly people who used arrows and made armor. However, they were barbarians so how could they be acculturated? Therefore, ancient kings kept the Xiongnu outside but bestowed laws and teachings to the western people. This policy was the foundation of their documented achievements. The current survey shows that Dunhuang is in the territory of Shazhou military prefecture. Hami, only three hundred li away from Shazhou, also used to be in the territory of Dunhuang. Lands to the west [of Shazhou] were all called Hami. On the map, in the farthest borderlands, there are several official bureaus of patrol and inspection and Chinese vil- lages and houses. These used to be [China’s] colonial territories in the past. Therefore, I make illustrations to record them in anticipation of [Chinese] laws and teachings [to reach there]. Sages who hope to suc- ceed to already documented glories could find reference [in this work].79 in Chinese Sources by D. D. Leslie; K. H. J. Gardiner,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 119, no. 1 (1999): 71–79. 79 Ma Li, Shaanxi tongzhi, 14a–14b. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago 446 Chen In a nutshell, Ma Li argued that the Western Regions were Chinese colonies and should remain so. He used the example of Dunhuang, an oasis town that flourished under the rule of the Tang dynasty, to make the case for Sinicizing the Western Regions. He attributed the Tang’s past success in Dunhuang to the Western Region’s people having the same “nature and mind” as the Chinese. In contrast, the “nature and mind” of the Xiongnu, the nomadic ancestors of the Mongols, were different from those of the Chinese, and hence they were doomed to be the enemies of China. Accordingly, the Ming should colonize the like-minded Western Regions and alienate the lands of the nomads. Ma Li, therefore, used the existence of Chinese people, Chinese houses, and a Chinese administrative office active in the Ottoman Empire as a basis to rein- force his view – people there had already learned about Chinese teachings and adapted to Chinese ways of life because of earlier Chinese rule. Because of the Western Regions’ sameness and readiness, he believed that the Ming could legitimately claim universal sovereignty in the Western Regions to as far west as Istanbul. As exciting as this argument might have sounded, however, even Dunhuang, Ma Li’s prime example, was already hundreds of kilometers outside of the Ming dynasty’s northwestern border, not to mention the distant Ottoman Empire. How could the Ming realize such an impossible plan? In his concluding remarks, Ma Li offered his opinion on the Ming strategy in the Western Regions: Confucius discussed governance and said: “If those who are near are pleased, those from afar will come.” This is because governance depends on pleasing those who are near, and pleasing those who are near depends on the cultivation of virtues … If so, [the emperor could achieve] abun- dant virtues and ultimate kindness, which not only the people would not forget, but Heaven also would not disapprove. Winters and summers would be regulated, and rain and shine would occur according to their times. All people of all lands, without exception, would accept the grace [of the emperor] and submit … Later dynasties did not understand this principle. [The emperors] then demanded people who were good at traveling to distant regions to com- municate with [the Western regions] and even demanded generals who were good at fighting to intimidate them. Therefore, [these dynasties’] gains could not compensate for their losses, and eventually led to foreign barbarians besieging China. They did what was useless and undermined what was helpful. This was the track that led to the overturn of the cart. The current Western Regions are, in fact, colonies of Dunhuang’s past territory. People there also practice agriculture and sericulture so they Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires 447 can be attracted. If people sincerely wish [to come to China], then bring them in and settle them. This is because our government can cultivate virtues and please those who are near like what Confucius stated … so it can be done.80 Just as Ali Akbar imagined Sultan Suleyman to be the Solomon of his age, Ma Li also invoked legendary wise kings as role models for the current and future Ming rulers. However, while Ali Akbar used contemporaneous Ming China as the model for his sultan to build a Solomon’s country, Ma Li had no interest in asking his emperor to learn from any contemporaneous foreign countries. Instead, like generation after generation of Chinese literati before him, Ma Li urged his emperor to follow the examples of the legendary sages. Citing Confucius, Ma Li envisioned the Ming emperors following the Way of the ancient Chinese sage kings, who used the “soft power” of cultural influence to attract people instead of using military coercion to conquer foreign coun- tries. Ma Li maintained that by disseminating the superior Chinese civilization and impressing foreign subjects with the Chinese emperor’s great virtues, the already Sinicized residents of the Western Regions would once again willingly submit to Chinese rule, just like they did in the age of the sage kings. In sum, similar to how Ali Akbar represented China as an Islamized coun- try in Turan and therefore part of the Islamic world order, Ma Li regarded the entire Western Region, the Ottoman world included, as legitimate Chinese ter- ritory under Chinese universal sovereignty. In fact, when used in premodern Chinese government documents, the appellation “Western Regions” stands for the jurisdiction of the Protectorate of the Western Regions established in the Han and Tang dynasties, which roughly corresponds to the modern Xinjiang Autonomous Region in China and does not include the vast lands of the Middle East.81 However, when used in poetry and other literary works from the second century BCE onward, the phrase “Western Regions” can refer 80 Ma Li, Shaanxi tongzhi, 33a–33b. 81 In the Han period, for example, the Western Regions refers to the area between the Jade Gate (yumen guan) and the Pamir Mountains. See Ban Gu, Hanshu [History of the Former Han] (Beijing, 1962), 96. In the Tang dynasty, the eastern boundary of the Western Regions shifted several times, the first time from Dunhuang to Gaochang (present-day Turfan), and then from Gaochang to Khotan; while its western boundary was loosely confined by the Persian world. See Rong Xinjiang and Wen Xin, “‘Xiyu’ Gainian de Bianhua Yu Tangchao ‘bianjing’ de xiyi” [The semantic shift of ‘Western Region’ and the westward extension of the ‘border’ in the Tang dynasty], Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Sciences) 49, no. 4 (2012): 113–119. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago 448 Chen metaphorically to all territories to the west of the Chinese Empire.82 Ma Li, by obscuring the administrative boundaries and the poetic connotations of the term “Western Regions,” pushes Ming sovereignty as far as the Ottoman Empire and imagines that in the future the Chinese Empire will rule over the entire vast Western Regions.83 Conclusion Contrary to the prevalent narrative, the Europeans were not the sole active players in building the modern global system. Empires’ ambition to expand territories and accumulate resources stimulated discoveries and increasingly connected the world. When the Europeans navigated oceans to find new trade routes and colonize new lands, the Ottomans swept over three continents to build the most powerful Islamic empire history had yet to witness. Meanwhile, Ming-dynasty China, whose geographic knowledge about the world already surpassed that of any other contemporaneous empire, had its own plan to expand westward. In a word, the Age of Discovery was an age of empires and their expanding, overlapping claims to universal sovereignty. Written during the Age of Exploration, Ma Li’s Xiyu and Ali Akbar’s Khitay namah definitively illuminated the breadth of the Chinese and Ottoman understanding of each other’s geography and society. However, like many contemporaneous European writers, both Asian authors chose to recast the foreign Other as the familiar Self. In Ali Akbar’s framing, China was a de facto Islamic country where its emperors worshiped Allah and its people were eager to convert to Islam. According to Ma Li, the Ottoman Empire was a Sinicized land where Han-Chinese resided, and the legacy of past Chinese rule remained. Such literary devices, for one, narrowed the cultural gap between two countries with disparate religions, customs, and cultures. World explor- ers in the Age of Discovery, whether of Europe or Asia, oftentimes observed the Other through their own cultural prisms. As a result, what they saw was a vision that, despite its similarity to the objective reality, was nonetheless bent, blurred, and reshaped in conformity with the observers’ imaginations. But more importantly, both Ali Akbar and Ma Li used such a perspective to 82 Yuan Chen, “Chunfeng Yumen” [Spring breeze passes the Jade Gate], Fujian Wenxue, no. 5 (2014): 72–76. 83 Excavated documents from several Silk Road sites in present-day Xinjiang show that even during the Han and Tang dynasties Chinese rule in the Western Regions was largely nomi- nal while local regimes had much autonomy. See Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (New York, 2015). Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires 449 espouse their countries’ claims to universal sovereignty and to justify plans for further imperial expansion into these areas. Writing in an age of empires, Ma Li and Ali Akbar had to demonstrate more than the mere depth of their geographic and ethnographic knowledge. Whether to colonize new lands or reconquer previous territories, a growing empire required not only knowledge of these places but also the wisdom to govern them. Having advised or hoping to advise their monarchs, Ma Li and Ali Akbar were certainly aware of their respective leader’s ambition to be the universal ruler. Xiyu and Khitay namah, accordingly, had to present both the knowledge and the wisdom to their royal audience. Ali Akbar’s proposed wis- dom of governance lay in the subject of his book, China. As a new country claiming an old tradition, the Ottoman Empire would not shy away from learn- ing from a contemporary, especially one with a long history that itself spoke of the effectiveness of its statecraft. Ali Akbar capitalized on the imagination of China to represent it as a law-confirming, well-regulated “country of Solomon” in the east that his sultan, the “Solomon of the age,” would find worthy to emu- late. Ma Li, on the other hand, believed the best statecraft could not be found anywhere other than China itself. Yet China, a country with a long and well- documented history of governance, must find wisdom in the rich lessons of its past. Therefore, Ma Li more elaborately traced the ebbs and flows of Chinese influence in the Western Regions since the reign of China’s legendary sage emperors and urged the emperor to learn from the country’s most successful periods in the Western Regions. Overall, both Ali Akbar and Ma Li, through their writings on distant ter- ritories, upheld the supremacy of their own civilization and regarded spread- ing it to the world as the honorable duty of their rulers. Ali Akbar urged the Ottoman sultan to learn from China, an essentially Islamized country with exemplary administrative and legal systems, in order to promulgate the Law of Muhammad to the world.84 Ma Li, likewise, deemed it the duty of the Chinese emperor to disseminate superior Chinese civilization to the faraway but already Sinicized Ottoman world, where traces of past Chinese reigns still remained, and the Chinese way of life still prevailed. Early modern European colonial writings were also profuse with similar rhetoric glorifying the origi- nator’s own culture or religion. Such rhetoric, paralleling how these authors foisted their own cultural thinking onto foreign territories, was also an essen- tial element of the colonial enterprise. 84 Khiṭāʾī, Khiṭāyńamah, 168. See also Hemmat, “A Chinese System for an Ottoman State,” 181; Ildikó Béller-Hann, “Ottoman Perception of China,” 64. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago 450 Chen Acknowledgements My special thanks go to Kayhan Nejad, who graciously spent much time and effort reading the original Persian manuscript of Khitay namah with me. I would also like to thank Professors Valerie Hansen, Alan Mikhail, and Peter C. Perdue for their careful reviewing of numerous drafts of this article and for their most valuable suggestions and comments. Appendix: The Ottoman World in Xiyu: A Road Map from Mecca to Istanbul This Appendix translates the final segment of the Brief Record of Lands and Peoples in the Western Regions (the Brief Record), the third part of Ma Li’s Xiyu. Ma Li introduced fourteen Ottoman cities in this segment, which corresponds to the last page of the Illustration of Lands and Peoples in the Western Regions (the Illustration). While many of the Ottoman localities drawn on the road map have been identified in the existing scholarship, half of these place names were either misidentified or remain unidentified.85 In this Appendix, I will also offer my identification of these place names to reconstruct the Ottoman por- tion of Ma Li’s virtual journey to the west. My methodology has three compo- nents: finding linguistic similarities between the places’ transliterated Chinese names and their original Persian, Arabic, or Turkic forms; making sense of the geographical sequence and the stop-to-stop distances of the itinerary; and matching Xiyu’s descriptions with the historical economy, geography, and soci- ety of the sixteenth-century Ottoman realm.86 85 Beyond the scholarship directly cited in the Appendix, other studies that I have consulted include Zhao Yongfu, “Ming dai Xiyu tudi renwu lüe bufen Zhong Ya, Xi Ya diming kaoshi,” Lishi dili 21 (2006): 354–365; Ralph Kauz and Liu Yingsheng, “Armenia in Chinese Sources,” Iran & the Caucasus 12, no. 2 (2008): 175–190; Shen Yuping, “Youguan Xiyu tudi renwu lüe zuozhe de kaocha,” Xibei minzu yanjiu, no. 4 (2009): 130–140; Li Zhiqin, ed., Xiyu shidi sanzhong ziliao jiaozhu (Urumqi, 2012); Nurlan Kenzheakhmet, “The Qazaq Khanate as Documented in Ming Dynasty Sources,” Crossroads 8 (2013): 131–156; and Liu Yingsheng, “Cities and Routes of Ferghana in the ‘Xiyu tudi renwu lüe’ and the ‘Xiyu tudi renwu tu,’” Journal of Asian History 49, no. 1–2 (2015): 229–251. 86 Due the limitation of my language skills, I rely mostly on secondary scholarship of Ottoman history rather than primary sources in Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires 451 Ma Li’s virtual journey in the Ottoman world started in the Arabian Peninsula: After traveling west for another six days, one reaches the country of Tianfang. Its city has two walls. Muslim monks live in the city. The rest all entered the city for worship…. Fifteen days’ journey west of the country of Tianfang is the city of Miqieli. There are Muslims wearing headwraps and cultivating fields. The first stop, the country of Tianfang, was the Islamic Holy City Mecca. Mecca had long been known in Chinese sources as “Tianfang,” literally “heav- enly house,” where “Muhammad first preached his religion.”87 Xiyu referred to Mecca as a country (guo) instead of a city (cheng), indicating the Holy City’s relative autonomy. The following stop, Miqieli, has been identified by Chinese scholar Lin Meicun as Misr, the Arabic name of Egypt. Lin also suggests that the city before Mecca, transliterated as Yedena, was the other Islamic Holy City, Medina.88 The route from Medina to Mecca and then to Egypt, however, was an inconve- nient detour. Moreover, traveling to Egypt in the sixteenth century, over 1,600 kilometers away and across the Red Sea from Mecca, should have taken more than fifteen days. Considering the logistics, I believe the stop after Mecca cor- responds to Medina, which is phonetically close to Miqieli, while the stop pre- ceding Mecca was another town on the Arabian Peninsula. Next, the route entered the Levante: Going further west one arrives at the city of Yaman. There are black- haired Muslims. Products include agate, amber, rhinoceros, sheep, cloth, and a variety of cotton. Located further west is the city of Wengulu. Its residents are all Han-Chinese. Their heads are not wrapped, and they wear hats. They cul- tivated dry fields. Products include coral, glass, and seven types of flora. A river lies to the east of the city. People row boats to cross it. Located further west is the city of Adumin. There are Muslims cultivat- ing dry fields. Products include floral handkerchiefs and a variety of fruits. Most scholars have identified Yaman as Amman.89 However, sixteenth- century Amman was not known for its cloth or cotton. I suggest Yaman is 87 Zhang Tingyu, Ming shi, 332:8624. 88 Lin Meicun, Menggu shanshui ditu (Beijing, 2011), 178–179. 89 Lin Meicun, Menggu shanshui ditu, 179. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago 452 Chen Jerusalem. First, visiting the three Holy Cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem sequentially was a straightforward itinerary. Second, phonetically, Yaman could have been the transliteration of the first syllable and the ending sound of “Jerusalem.” Third, Jerusalem’s historical economy matches Ma Li’s record of cloth and cotton production in Yaman – Jerusalem was close to Jabal Nablus, an important Levantine agricultural and textile-manufacturing center, and had some of the most prosperous cotton-weaver markets during the Ottoman period.90 Lastly, the “black-haired” were probably not Muslims but Orthodox Jews wearing full-head-sized black kippahs. Some Japanese and Chinese scholars have variously identified Wengulu as Ankara or Maghrib.91 However, traveling from Jerusalem to Ankara (in Anatolia) or Maghrib (in North Africa) entailed leaving and then returning to the Levante, creating logistical inconsistencies. I suggest Wengulu is Beirut. In terms of travel sequence, Beirut was one of the largest Levantine cities down the road after Jerusalem. Geographically, the Beirut River was probably the river that “lies to the east of the city” as Ma Li described. Linguistically, Wengulu could be the transliteration of “Magoras,” the ancient name of the Beirut River.92 I suggest that the third Levantine city, Adumin, is Tripoli, whose Arabic form is “al-Tarablus.” Tripoli was a large city along the coast after Beirut and one of the most important agricultural production and textile-manufacturing centers in the Fertile Crescent. Xiyu’s accounts of its farmlands, textile production, and fruit growth can be confirmed by the historical and contemporaneous econ- omy of Tripoli. For example, a later Ottoman economic report states that the farmlands in Tripoli yielded a variety of grains and vegetables; that the city produced silk; and that a variety of fruits and tree nuts grew in the orchards in Tripoli.93 The journey then continued in the Levante: Located further west is the city of Nieleduosi. Its city is square and sur- rounded by houses. There are waters nearby. There are rowboats on the waters. Its residents are all Han-Chinese. Their heads are not wrapped, 90 Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley, 1995). Amnon Cohen, Economic Life in Ottoman Jerusalem (New York, 1989). 91 Lin Meicun, Menggu shanshui ditu, 180–181. 92 Edward Robinson and Eli Smith et al., Biblical Researches in Palestine, and in the Adjacent Regions: Journal of Travels in the Year 1838, Volume 2 (Boston, 1874), 491–492. 93 Charles Issawi, The Fertile Crescent, 1800–1914: A Documentary Economic History (New York, 1988), 290. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires 453 and they wear hats. They cultivated paddy fields. Products include saheila cloth, steel swords, and a variety of fruits. Located further west is the citadel of Saheisi. Its city has two walls. Its residents are all Han-Chinese. Their heads are not wrapped, and they wear hats. Products include black, silver, white, and purple woods and a variety of medicinal herbs. Located further west is the city of Halimi. There are Muslims wear- ing headwraps. They raise a lot of sheep and horses. They cultivate dry fields. There are water mills. Products include yellow grapes and a variety of fruits. Nieleduosi and Halimi have been credibly identified as Tartus94 and Aleppo (Harim in Armenian), respectively.95 Geographic and archaeological evidence confirms Ma Li’s descriptions of these two cities. For example, the “waters nearby” Tartus must have been the Mediterranean Sea. As mentioned earlier in this article, Ma Li also wrote about the water mills near Aleppo, which archae- ological evidence confirms. Nobody has yet identified the citadel of Saheisi between Tartus and Aleppo. I suggest it is the toponym of the Salah El-Din’s Citadel (Figure 5), located near Latakia between Tartus and Aleppo. Xiyu remarked on the castle’s two- walled fortification, which coincides with the architecture of the Salah El-Din’s Citadel as a strategic military fortress in Ottoman Syria. Major exports from Ottoman-period Latakia included trees and herbs, which Ma Li also men- tioned in Xiyu.96 After Aleppo, the itinerary reached Anatolia. The next five stops are as follows: Located further west is the city of Adena. It is within the jurisdiction of the city of Lumi. There are Muslims. They cultivate millet. Products include cotton. Located further west is the city of Feiji. Its city has one wall. Princes live there. Its residents are all Han-Chinese. They cut off hair bangs, let down their hair, and wear hats. They cultivate paddy fields, raise silkworms, 94 Lin Meicun, Menggu shanshui ditu, 180. 95 Hori Nao, “Chūō Ajia Oyobi Nishi Ajia ni Kansuru Min Dai no Ichi Shiryō: ‘Saiiki Shokoku’ to ‘Saiiki Tochi Jinbutsu Ryaku’ ni Tsuite” [A Ming-dynasty historical document about Central Asia and West Asia: Countries in the Western Regions and the Brief Record of Lands and Peoples in the Western Regions] Isuramu Sekai 14 (1978): 37–55. 96 Daniel Crecelius, “Damiette and Syrian-Egyptian Trade in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century,” in Syria and Bilad Al-Sham Under Ottoman Rule: Essays in Honor of Abdul Karim Rafeq, eds. Peter Sluglett and Stefan Weber (Leiden, 2010), 166. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago 454 Chen figure 5 Salah El-Din’s Citadel, Latakia, Syria photo credit: https://kiaoragaza.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/ aid-convoy-photojournal-8/saladins-castle-syria/. weave golden robes and saheila cloth, and make velvet carpets. Products include gold, coal, and pearls. Located further west is the city of Angelu. There are Muslims wearing headwraps and cultivating dry fields. They make a variety of clothes … Products include large grapes. There are mountains to the west of the city. On top of the mountain, there is the Office of Patrol and Inspection. Located further west is the city of Ketai. There are Muslims wearing headwraps and cultivating dry fields. Products include white cotton and linen. Safflowers grow at the foothill of the mountain. There is a river to the west of the city. There are two water mills in the river. Located further west is the city of Beiluosa. There are Muslims cultivat- ing dry fields. Products include a variety of fruits. There is a sea to its west. Ships in the sea can carry thousands of people, three months of food, and armor and supplies. Scholars have identified three of these five Anatolian cities.97 Adena is Adana, a major agricultural center in southern Anatolia that, as Ma Li correctly noted, 97 Lin Meicun, Menggu shanshui ditu, 186–187. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires 455 produced millet and cotton.98 Angelu is Ankara, and Beiluosa is Bursa. As men- tioned earlier, Ma Li’s accounts of Ankara’s textile industry and Bursa’s large cargo ships match the historical economy of these Anatolian cities. Yet Feiji and Ketai remain to be identified. I suggest Feiji is Konya. Feiji is probably the transliteration of “Phrygia,” the name of the ancient kingdom that ruled over Konya after the Hittites. Located between Adana and Ankara, the city enjoyed prosperous textile and mining industries in the sixteenth century.99 Some gold mines in Konya remain active to the present day.100 These facts tally with Ma Li’s accounts of the city’s cloth, carpets, gold, and coal. In addition, Ma Li noted that a prince (or princes) lived in the city, a fact that is also verified by the history of Ottoman Konya – since the annexation of the Karaman province in the mid-fifteenth century, the Ottoman sultans had been sending their sons to govern Konya, the former Seljuk capital.101 I believe Ketai refers to Kütahya. According to Ma Li, Ketai was another major cotton production center like Adana. From the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, the most productive places for cotton in Anatolia were Adana, Tarsus, Aydin, Erzincan, and Kütahya.102 Among these cities, only Kütahya bears phonetic similarity to Ketai. Moreover, some Ottoman sources confirm that along the Porsuk River, which coursed through Kütahya, there were sev- eral water mills in operation during the Ottoman period, just as Ma Li men- tioned in Xiyu.103 To the west of Bursa was the destination of the route, a large city called Lumi. Ma Li described Lumi as follows: Located further west is the city of Lumi. Its city has two walls. A sover- eign prince lives in the city. There are Muslims wearing headwraps and 98 On cotton production in Adana, see Suraiya Faroqhi, “Notes on the Production of Cotton and Cotton Cloth in XVIth and XVIIth Century Anatolia,” The Journal of European Economic History, no. 2 (1979): 405–417. 99 Stanford J. Shaw, Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey: Volume 2, Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey 1808–1975 (Cambridge, UK, 1977), 123. 100 Alaaddin Tok, “The Ottoman Mining Sector in the Age of Capitalism: An Analysis of State-Capital Relations (1850–1908)” (master’s thesis, Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History, 2010), 99. 101 Carline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire (London, 2005), 70–71. 102 Suraiya Faroqhi, “Notes on the Production of Cotton and Cotton Cloth in XVIth and XVIIth Century Anatolia,” 406–407. 103 Murat Dagli, “Kütahya in the Eighteenth Century: Transformation or the Persistence of the Old Order” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2012), 168–221. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago 456 Chen Han-Chinese. There are translators. People cultivated dry fields. It has no products. The statement that there were translators suggests Lumi must be a multilin- gual, multicultural, cosmopolitan city. Which sixteenth-century metropolis is Lumi? The nineteenth-century German Sinologist Emil Bretschneider argued that Lumi was the Chinese toponym for “Rum” and identified it as Rome.104 However, during the Ottoman period, the appellation “Rumi” referred to not just Rome but also the Ottoman Empire in general, which then occupied the “Lands of Rum.”105 In addition, unlike the Catholic Rome, the Lumi in Ma Li’s depiction was governed by a sovereign prince, suggesting it was a capital city with a monarch. Therefore, I believe Lumi is more likely Istanbul, the Ottoman capital where the sultans lived and ruled over the empire. In sum, Xiyu delineates the following travel route in the Ottoman Empire: Mecca  => Medina  => Jerusalem  => Beirut  => Tripoli  => Tartus  => the Salah El-Din’s Citadel near Latakia  => Aleppo  => Adana  => Konya  => Ankara  => Kütahya => Bursa => Istanbul (Figure 6). figure 6 The Ottoman portion of the travel route delineated in Ma Li, Western Regions (reconstructed using QGIS). 104 Emil Bretschneider, “Chinese Intercourse with the Countries of Central and Western Asia in the Fifteenth Century,” The China Review: Or, Notes and Queries on the Far East 5 (1877): 241. 105 Cemal Kafadar, “A Rome of One’s Own: Reflections on Cultural Geography and Identity in the Lands of Rum,” Muqarnas 24 (2007): 7–25. Journal of early modern history 25 (2021) 422–456 Downloaded from Brill.com10/12/2021 03:02:40PM via University of Chicago