Porcelains shine light on China-Kenya links

On the quiet island of Lamu, Kenya, where the monsoon winds once guided great trading ships to East Africa's shores, fragments of an ancient world still linger — some behind glass at the Lamu Museum, others tucked inside humble homes in the local Swahili settlements.

Inside the museum, shelves glitter with blue-and-white porcelain bowls, celadon dishes and delicately painted jars — treasures that tell a thousand-year story of trade between the Swahili coast and China.

"The majority of the porcelains are in pieces," Mohammed Mwenje, the curator of Lamu Museum, said. "Some came broken, others were found as shards during excavation."

The collection spans a millennium — from Tang to Song to Ming dynasties, from 18th-century traded plates to 20th-century imports. Most of the earliest pieces were excavated from sites such as Shanga, Manda, Takwa, and Gedi — once-thriving coastal towns linked to vast Indian Ocean trade networks.

Mwenje noted that beyond illustrating the scale of maritime trade, porcelains also became cherished possessions in old Lamu families.

"In the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, owning Chinese porcelain was a status symbol," Mwenje said. "Families used them to decorate homes, tombs, and host important visitors."

For Mwenje, the porcelains reveal a far deeper story than trade. They show that Kenya's connection with China stretches back centuries — much earlier than commonly perceived.

A large part of the Chinese porcelains displayed in the museum were made during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), when Chinese diplomat and navigator Zheng He led a vast fleet to sail to the Pacific and Indian Oceans as far as the East African coasts in Kenya and Somalia. Today, the vestiges in Lamu, including the porcelains, point to the great voyage 620 years ago.

In Lamu, the China story is not confined to museum shelves. It lives in the hands of ordinary people. In Siyu, one of the oldest fortified towns on Pate Island, lives a villager who has become an unexpected custodian of history.

For more than 15 years, Mansur Ile has walked the shores and wandered through abandoned homesteads once owned by wealthy Swahili families, carefully collecting porcelain fragments — some intact bowls; others decorated shards. He arranges them neatly in his home, creating a private archive of the coast's past.

His passion for history began in 1987, when he worked alongside renowned archaeologist Mark Horton, during excavations at Shanga, where a major statistical study of Chinese ceramics was conducted.

In Siyu, the family of Baraka Badi Shee — which traces its ancestry to Chinese sailors — has also preserved porcelain fragments passed down through generations.

"They remind us of the ancient trade and our connection to the Chinese sailors," Mohammed Sharif, Shee's son, said.

In the same village stand two tombs believed to belong to a wealthy Swahili woman and her child. Their walls bear impressions of porcelain pieces that once decorated them — ornaments later removed and likely sold to collectors.

Mwenje said numerous pieces of evidence in Lamu pointed to the fact that Lamu was visited by Chinese sailors hundreds of years ago, including a one-meter-high ceramic jar wrapped with a dragon motif around its neck, found in the waters off the Lamu coast by fishermen and now sitting in a private collection in Shela village.

The fact that the local fishermen kept salvaging ceramic pieces in nearby waters also suggests there may be a big sunken ship near Lamu from China in ancient times, he said.

A major Sino-Kenyan archaeological mission, before the COVID-19 pandemic, once attempted to locate the shipwreck, but the efforts failed due to a lack of sophisticated equipment suited to local oceanic conditions, he said.

Mwenje said joint archaeological efforts are needed for research and protection of the porcelain artifacts in Lamu. Fishermen diving for lobsters in the area occasionally find ceramic jars — but often sell them to Europeans instead of offering them to the museum, he said.

Across Manda, Lamu, and Shanga, countless artifacts remain untouched. "Many sites were never fully excavated," Mwenje said, noting that Shanga — believed by locals to be where shipwrecked sailors once settled — holds vast potential for future research.

For Mwenje, the porcelains reveal a far deeper story than trade. They hold the key to retelling the millennia-long stories of China-Kenya exchange and communication.

"A lot of stories that have been told about the porcelain are from Western researchers. Yet in the 19th and 20th centuries, porcelains were so significant in Lamu that proverbs emerged around them — showing how deeply they became woven into Swahili culture," he said, adding that, he hopes Kenyan researchers will one day take the lead in telling the story.

Rachel Maina, a PhD student in the Department of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is studying Swahili-Chinese identity, focusing on how the community in Siyu perceives its Chinese connections.

"While a lot has been written on archaeology, nothing has been done about people's perceptions," she said. "I'm trying to uncover the untold stories of China's ancient ties with the coastal community," Maina said.

Following the great voyages during the Ming Dynasty, a change in imperial priorities brought China's large-scale Indian Ocean voyages to a halt. China became a secluded country over the next centuries. A modern resurgence came in the 20th century, after Kenya gained independence in 1963, and China renewed diplomatic, trade, and cultural ties with the country.

Meanwhile, the Lamu porcelain collection remains mostly in storage, fragile yet resilient, waiting for the day its story can be fully told through exhibitions, digital archives, and cross-cultural research.