This chapter considers the spread of ceramics produced in the Chinese empire to destinations within Eurasia, East and Southeast Asia, and throughout the Indian Ocean during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It charts the circulation of Raozhou ceramics as they were traded through the region and far beyond, beginning to show the intricate ways in which local knowledge about making and selling things feeds into and is fed by global patterns of consumption. Moreover, it shows how the look and feel of Raozhou’s porcelain, or the materiality of these goods, changed during this period. To understand these changes, this chapter suggests, one has to consider both local factors, such as the availability of raw materials in the immediate vicinity of the kilns, and global factors, such as the desire for large vessels amongst consumers of porcelain in nomadic communities and in the Islamic worlds of Central Asia. The combination of both local and global factors is key in understanding the changes that occurred during this period.

This chapter takes a foundational Muslim tradition known from early Arab sources and widespread in Muslim Southeast Asia, namely Adam’s banishment from paradise and his landing in Sarandib (the Arabic name for Sri Lanka), as a starting point to ask whether Adam’s fall to earth in this particular site mattered to, or shaped in some way, Malay perceptions of exile to colonial Ceylon, and if so, how? Based on references to Adam and his plight found in Malay sources from Sri Lanka, Arabic sources, among them Ibn Battuta’s Travels, and the Javanese Serat Menak Serandhil (a volume of Menak tales narrating the life of the Prophet’s uncle Menak Amir Hamza, which unfolds in Sarandib), the chapter argues that the ancient story of Adam’s banishment from paradise to earth, a paradigm for all future banishments, was deployed to frame and partially give meaning to exile to Ceylon. Recalling Adam’s fall shifted the temporal frame of political exile under colonial domination and located contemporary, worldly events within a divinely determined chronology.