Medieval Quanzhou was the emporium travellers called Zaiton
Quanzhou is a Fujian port on the Jin River beside the Taiwan Strait—China's Song–Yuan maritime emporium that foreigners knew as Zaiton. The 2020 census counted about 8.78 million in the prefecture and 6.67 million in the built-up core across several districts and cities.
From the eleventh to fourteenth centuries it was China's prime foreign-trade harbour, praised by Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, launching Mongol fleets toward Japan and Java while hosting Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and Christian houses of worship.
UNESCO inscribed Quanzhou: Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China in 2021 for that commercial and archaeological legacy. The Chinese name recalls its old role as seat of Quan, or Spring, Prefecture.
The Arabic Zayton means olive, and it is traditionally tied to an old Chinese nickname, coral-tree city, after the Indian coral trees its 10th-century ruler Liu Congxiao reportedly planted around it; European maps also called it Chinchew. The city proper was founded under the Tang in 718 on land between branches of the Jin River, and Muslim traders arrived early. From 949 to 978 it was capital of the Qingyuan Circuit, a de facto independent state. It has a humid subtropical climate with summer typhoons, and major earthquakes struck in 1394 and on 29 December 1604.
A maritime trade office opened in 1079 or 1087, and the port became the starting point of the Maritime Silk Road, outshining Guangzhou; a 1095 inscription records two twenty-ship convoys arriving. Prosperity slipped in the 13th century as Southern Song currency restrictions and Ningbo's Japan trade bit, until the Yuan appointed the Muslim superintendent Pu Shougeng in 1277, who revived commerce. By 1283 about 455,000 people lived there, trading pepper, spices, gems, pearls and porcelain.
Source: Quanzhou
