I find material histories very interesting. It seems that one could take merchandise against a hundi(promise to pay) in Golcunda and pay it in St.Petersberg . There was a system of nagar-seth and Armenian merchants in Yemen, Bukhara through all the land routes upto Venice and Russia . The earliest record of an Indian residing in Quanzhou dates back to the 6th century. An inscription found on the Yanfu temple from the Song Dynasty describes how the monk Gunaratna, known in China as Liang Putong, translated sutras from Sanskrit. Trade particularly flourished in the 13th century Yuan Dynasty. In 1271, a visiting Italian merchant recorded that the Indian traders were recognised easily. The history of Quanzhou’s temples and Tamil links was largely forgotten until the 1930s, when dozens of stones showing perfectly rendered images of the god Narasimha — the man-lion avatar of Vishnu — were unearthed by a Quanzhou archaeologist called Wu Wenliang. Elephant statues and images narrating mythological stories related to Vishnu and Shiva were also found, bearing a style and pattern that was almost identical to what was evident in the temples of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh from a similar period. Wu’s discoveries received little attention at the time as his country was slowly emerging from the turmoil of the Japanese occupation, the Second World War and the civil war. It took more than a decade after the Communists came to power in 1949 for the stones and statues to even be placed in a museum, known today as the Quanzhou Maritime Museum. thehindu/news/national/behind-chinas-hindu-temples-a-forgotten-history/article4932458.ece https://youtube/watch?v=Gcb643uVtSc&feature=youtu.be
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 13:51:04 +0000
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