The Belitung wreck (9th century AD)
The Belitung wreck (9th century AD)
This page contains additional material and images for Chapter 6 of my book A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks.
The passage from the sixth voyage of Sinbad the Sailor that I quote at the beginning of my chapter on the Belitung wreck comes from the first edition of Sir Richard Burton’s The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, published privately by him in 1885. The powerful image of the ‘roc’ attacking the ship reproduced below is from that book. Images of monsters and birds abound in the artefacts from the wreck, including the dreaded makara, a kind of sea monster, but also delightful renderings of birds, in gold and bronze work, pottery appliqués and whimsical decoration on the inside of Changsha bowls. This gives a strong sense of the aesthetic and philosophy of Tang China, the source of much of the cargo, while the finds also reflect the Persian and Islamic world from which the ship itself originated – the world of Sinbad the Sailor and the thousand and one nights.
Many of the finds from the wreck are displayed in a special gallery in the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore. In 2017 the museum published an excellent volume on the wreck, The Tang Shipwreck: Art and Exchange in the 9th century, edited by Alan Chong and Stephen A. Murray with expert contributions. You can read the entire volume for free here. Several of the chapters appeared in an earlier form in another volume that can read for free online, Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds, published by the Smithsonian Institution, the National Heritage Board of Singapore and the Singapore Tourism Board to accompany an exhibition of the wreck finds in 2011. Both of those volumes contain numerous photos of finds from the wreck, including those that I mention in my chapter. You can also see fascinating articles not only on the Belitung cargo but also on the fabled kingdom of Srivijaya in the Autumn 2021 issue of Wreckwatch magazine, also available for free online.
Dr Michael Flecker, director of excavations at the Belitung wreck in the second season, contributed a paper on the wreck to an issue of the journal World Archaeology entitled Shipwrecks that I co-edited in 2001. He has published extensively on the wreck elsewhere, including chapters in the two books linked above. I am very grateful to him for giving permission for the publication of the two underwater photos shown in the book, and to Dr Sean Kingsley for much assistance as well.
Click on the images to enlarge:
The roc attacking Sinbad’s ship, from Volume 6 of Sir Richard Burton’s The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night (The Burton Club, 1885).
Map from 1748 showing Southeast Asia, with the location of the Belitung wreck beneath the arrow. Srivijaya, the fabled ‘Kingdom of Gold’, lay in Sumatra adjacent to Belitung Island, and Changsha - source of much of the ceramic cargo - is also on this map, some 3,500 kilometres north-north-east of Belitung across the South China Sea. The map superbly illustrates the navigational challenges of the region, with the Malacca Strait between mainland Malaya and Sumatra being the only sea route between east and west. Ships from the west - from Persia and the Islamic world - may first have reached the South China Sea not long before the Belitung wreck. For the ancient mariners of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a first-century AD merchant’s guide to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, the limit of their exploration was probably Sri Lanka and south-eastern India - goods from further east were brought by south-east Asian merchants across the Bay of Bengal from the Malacca Strait, and beyond that they only knew from sailors’ accounts of the fabled Chrysê, ‘Land of Gold’, and a far-off place called ‘Thina’.