Putuo: Maritime Silk Road

By Wang Liansheng



Putuo: Maritime Silk Road

By Wang Liansheng

March 4, 2014 was a big day for Zhoushan, an archipelago in East China Sea and part of Zhejiang province. On that day, a leadership group was founded to handle the preparations and application work for getting Zhoushan as part of the Maritime Silk Road onto the UNESCO list of world heritage sites. Soon enough an expert committee came into being to operate on a dayto-day basis. The committee has determined a list of sites that should be included in the application documents. Mount Putuo, Shuangyu Port and eight light houses are key sites on the list.

Putuo, an island, looks like a mountain if you consider the sea as a huge landmass. That's why it is known as Mount Putuo and generally speaking why many islands are known as mountains in ancient Chinese literature. Since the Tang, Mount Putuo has been regarded as Guanyin Bodhimanda. In 863, a Japanese monk carrying a statue of Guanyin set out from Ningbo to travel to Japan. The ship ran into Silla Reef, a reef named of Silla Kingdom on the Korea Peninsula, near Putuo and got stranded for days. That's how the legend about Guanyin who refused to leave took shape and got spread. The statue stayed at Putuo and the island gradually became the goddess's sacred place.

The archipelago was part of Mingzhou （the present-day Ningbo） when the prefecture was officially founded as an administrative unit. It remained part of Mingzhou until 1953. This partly explains why Zhoushan, a group of islands, played a big part in the Maritime Silk Road. There had to be a huge economic powerhouse somewhere near the departure port. In ancient times, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces were this huge economic powerhouse. Industry, agriculture and business flourished in the region. In the Tang, celadon produced at kilns across Zhejiang was big export. Silk produced in Zhejiang was another big item of export. Hangzhou alone could produce several dozen kinds of silk. Moreover, papermaking, salt making, mining and ship building also flourished in the province.

The trade routes first developed between China and the Korean peninsula and Japan. Silla Kingdom on the peninsula monopolized the trade routes for a while. Putuo was where ships waited for the safety of tides and winds on their way into and out of Mingzhou. Once docked at Putuo, inbound ships were relatively safe since the waves on the route from Putuo to Mingzhou were apparently not as fierce as on the high seas even though islands were many and tides were complex. However, when outbound ships left Putuo behind and headed for high seas, hazards were unpredictable and much greater. The name of Silla Reef became known during that time. So many ships from the peninsula had run into it that both local people and the ship crews from Silla knew where it was and what it was called. In 2003, a monument was established on the reef after it was eventually identified, in honor of the ancient trade and cultural exchanges between China and Korea.

Mount Putuo is presumably where Guanyin worshipping started seriously and has spread wide to the world. Nowadays, more than 6 million pilgrims at home and abroad visit Putuo. A museum at Putuo has artifacts from ancient India, Japan, Burma, the Philippines, Cambodia and France.

2009年5月20日，本文作者接受央视10频道记者采访。Wang Liansheng, the writer of this story, in an interview with CCTV Channel Ten on May 20, 2009

Over more than 1,000 years since Guanyin Bodhimanda formed in Putuo in the Tang, Guanyin worshipping has spread. There are one Guanyin Bodhimanda in Korea and thirty-three Guanyin Bodhimandas in Japan. There are numerous Guanyin Temples across the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other parts of the world. Many of these temples have a Guanyin statue ceremoniously acquired at Putuo.

During the Ming Dynasty （1368-1644）, Putuo saw a lot of government welcome ceremonies performed on the sea near the island. There are detailed records of these ceremonies：who came in from Japan and Korea and what they did at Putuo and what ceremonies were conducted on the sea in their honor.

Like the rest of the archipelago, Putuo has many unique sites of the ancient Maritime Silk Road, which cannot be seen in some big coastal cities. It can probably be said that without the Maritime Silk Road, without the flourishing trade route, the merchant ship that was carrying the Japanese monk who was carrying the Guanyin statue wouldn't have come to Putuo.