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  • Dao yi zhi lüe 島夷誌略 ("A Brief Account of Island Barbarians", 1349/1350) in the System of Chinese Historical-Geographical Descriptions of Foreign Lands in Late Middle Ages

Dao yi zhi lüe 島夷誌略 ("A Brief Account of Island Barbarians", 1349/1350) in the System of Chinese Historical-Geographical Descriptions of Foreign Lands in Late Middle Ages

Student: Kolnin Ilia

Supervisor: Dmitry Khudyakov

Faculty: Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs

Educational Programme: Asian Studies (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2020

Daoyi zhilüe 島夷誌略 (“A Brief Account of Island Barbarians”; 1349/1350; hereafter DYZL) is a prominent Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) work describing various foreign lands to the south of China. Its author Wang Dayuan 汪大淵 (before 1311 – after 1350), most likely a merchant, set sail twice to the Western and Eastern Oceans in the first half of the 14th century and after his return wrote a detailed account of 99 countries (a chapter for each country) all of which he claims to have seen himself, plus one extra chapter with brief notes on 9 imaginary places which he did not visit. No other Yuan dynasty source contains that much information on the outside world, especially on the trading activities, as DYZL does. Apart from that, it is also the earliest eye-witness historical-geographical description of foreign lands in the Southern Seas in Chinese history. Although first studies and a partial English translation of DYZL were carried out in the beginning of the 20th century not much research on this source has been done since then and these works are relatively outdated nowadays. Therefore, this paper’s main goal is to provide a new thorough study of DYZL by offering a deep investigation into the author’s biography, the structure of the source’s chapters and a comparison with earlier and later accounts of similar nature. This thesis includes DYZL's full draft translation into Russian as an appendix.

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