At this time, though many Arab merchants were settled at the ports of Canton, Zaitun, and Kinsai, the bulk of the commerce, it would seem, was carried on in the larger and stronger junks of the Chinese, and the best account that we have of the intercourse of China with foreign countries is to be found in the report on external trade, written by Chao Ju-kua, early in the thirteenth century.[127] This Chao was ‘inspector of foreign shipping’ at Chüan-chou Fu, a town on the coast of Fukien, which may perhaps be identified with the Zaitun of Marco Polo. In any case it was, at that time, the principal starting-point for foreign commerce. We have in his report a curious account of the trade with Bruni, on the north-west coast of Borneo, an island with which the Chinese had already had some intercourse for several centuries, and ‘green porcelain’ is mentioned by him in the list of the merchandise there imported. We need not dwell here on the well-known passion of the Dyaks of Borneo for celadon porcelain, and the big prices that they are prepared to give for fine old pieces (_Cf._ Bock, _The Head Hunters of Borneo_, p. 197 _seq._). Of the specimens of celadon and other wares brought from this island we shall speak shortly. Modern travellers tell us that the larger jars, ‘decorated with lizards and serpents’ (probably the early smooth-skinned dragon of the Chinese), are preserved as heirlooms. Besides their medicinal value they are a complete protection from evil spirits for the house in which they are stored. From later Chinese writers (of the sixteenth century) we learn that these large jars were used in Borneo in place of coffins, and it is a significant fact that a similar mode of burial is still in use in Fukien, the district from which these vessels were exported, but not elsewhere in China. To return to our Sung inspector of trade, as quoted by Dr. Hirth, Chao tells us that at the ports of Cambodja, of Annam, and of Java, the Chinese bartered both green and white porcelain against pepper and other local products. But at that time the great emporium for the Western trade was the port known to the Arabs as Sarbaya, the modern Palembang in the island of Sumatra. Here, or at Lambri, in the same island, the junks laid up for the winter, and in the spring the Chinese goods were carried further west to Quilon, on the Malabar coast of the Deccan, this time probably in Arab bottoms. The porcelain and the other Chinese exports were now distributed to the various lands with which the Arabs traded at that time. Chao Ju-kua, in this connection, mentions Guzerate, and an island that most probably can be identified with Zanzibar. At any rate, at this last spot fragments of celadon porcelain have been discovered in recent days in association with Chinese ‘cash’ of the tenth and eleventh centuries.