Guangzhou has a long history of foreign trade and is the birthplace of the ancient Maritime Silk Road in China.

The ancient Maritime Silk Road Guangzhou has a long history of foreign trade. It has long been the main port of China's foreign trade and the birthplace and important port of the ancient Maritime Silk Road in China. Merchant ships have come and gone for thousands of years. Therefore, Guangzhou is called the Millennium Capital.

Since the Qin and Han Dynasties, China's foreign economic and cultural exchanges have taken two routes: one is the Silk Road from China and Xinjiang to Central Asia and then to Southwest Asia.

The other is the Maritime Silk Road, which starts from Guangzhou, crosses the South China Sea from the coastal port of China, enters the Indian Ocean, and reaches the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula. The opening of these two routes has made the trade and cultural exchanges between China and other parts of the world increasingly prosperous.

During the Sui and Tang Dynasties, Huangpu Port was already the anchorage of foreign ports for ships entering and leaving Guangzhou. With the development of navigation technology, maritime trade is becoming more and more convenient, and China's foreign trade center has slowly moved to Guangzhou, making Guangzhou the largest foreign trade port in China.

The Historical Background of the Ancient Maritime Silk Road

The embryonic form of the Maritime Silk Road existed in the Qin and Han Dynasties. The earliest known historical record of maritime communication between China and foreign countries comes from Hanshu Geography. At that time, China was in contact with countries in the South China Sea. Unearthed cultural relics show that the exchange between China and foreign countries may have been earlier than that in the Han Dynasty.

Before the mid-Tang Dynasty, China's main channel to the outside world was the overland Silk Road. Later, due to the war and the shift of economic center of gravity, the Maritime Silk Road replaced land as the main channel for trade exchanges between China and foreign countries. In the Tang Dynasty, there was a sea route along the southeast coast of China called "Guangzhou Tonghai Island", which was the name of the earliest Maritime Silk Road in China.

With a total length of 14000 km, this route was the longest ocean route in the world at that time, passing through 100 countries and regions. During the Song and Yuan Dynasties, it was an important carrier of human historical activities and cultural and economic exchanges between the East and the West, covering more than half of the earth.

During the Sui and Tang Dynasties, the main bulk cargo transported by sea passage was silk, so later generations called this sea passage connecting East and West the Maritime Silk Road. During the Song and Yuan Dynasties, the export of porcelain gradually became the main commodity, so it was also called "the road of marine ceramics". At the same time, because a large part of the exported goods are spices, it is also called "the spice road at sea".