Cirebon Revisited: The Southward Yue-ware Trade Revealed by a Tenth-Century Shipwreck

JIANG Jiachen

The paper examines the Chinese ceramic cargo retrieved from the Cirebon shipwreck, a trading vessel lost in the Java Sea in the tenth century. Based on the object records created by Qatar Museums, the research provides a typological analysis on Yue ware and the northern whiteware recovered from the shipwreck. Further integrating archaeological materials on Chinese ceramics, the thesis reconstructs the Nanhai trade of Yue ware under the theoretical framework of interaction spheres. Historical accounts have been reviewed to evaluate the possible roles that Yue ware played in maritime trade, diplomacy, and religious exchanges under the rule of the Wuyue Kingdom in Zhejiang, China. The paper further explores the liberal pattern of the Nanhai trade within the specific historical context of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Building on the current research, the paper reinterprets the voyage of the Cirebon vessel. It has been concluded that the southward trade of Yue ware had primarily involved Mingzhou in Zhejiang and the port cities around the Malacca Strait region and Java in Maritime Southeast Asia. The rapid expansion of the trade in the second half of the tenth century was correlated with the political and economic factors associated with the dominance of Wuyue.