On a hill above the Chinese port city of Quanzhou in the spring of 1417, a Ming admiral named Zheng He burned incense at the tombs of two men whom tradition identified as Companions of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). His father and grandfather had made the Hajj. His ancestors had come from Bukhara. In a few days he would raise a Chinese-language stele and take 28,000 men and 317 ships south on the northeast monsoon, the largest navy the world had ever seen, to a port on the coast of East Africa.

This first episode of a three-part series walks through the Indian Ocean trading world that Zheng He represented at its peak. From the stitched-hull dhow, flexing like a basket in a monsoon swell, to the Swahili coast city of Kilwa under Sultan al-Hasan ibn Sulaiman. From the Malabar port of Calicut, where Muslim merchant guilds served a Hindu king and dominated the spice trade, to Quanzhou itself, the largest port in the world under the Song and Yuan, where Ibn Battuta in 1345 counted a hundred big junks in the harbor and gave up counting the small ones.

The episode covers Pu Shougeng, the Muslim merchant-official who ran Quanzhou's Maritime Trade Bureau for thirty years and in 1276 betrayed the fleeing Song royal family to the Mongols. It covers the 1357 Ispah Rebellion and the destruction of Quanzhou's Muslim community that followed. It covers Zheng He's seven treasure voyages between 1405 and 1433. And it ends at Calicut on May 20, 1498, when a Portuguese ship arrived carrying cannon that would end the thousand-year cosmopolitanism Muslim merchants had built across the Indian Ocean.

Sources drawn on include Ibn Battuta's Rihla, al-Masudi's Muruj al-Dhahab, the Kilwa Chronicle, Ahmad ibn Majid's navigational manuals, the Cairo Geniza India-trade letters, and modern scholarship by S.D. Goitein, K.N. Chaudhuri, Janet Abu-Lughod, and Ross Dunn.

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