Malindi

Malindi was a Swahili port on the East African coast, northeast of its rival Mombasa. It lived on Indian Ocean trade, and its present site prospered again from the thirteenth century.

In 1414 Zheng He's fleet brought a Malindian envoy and a giraffe to the Ming court. In 1498 its sultan welcomed Vasco da Gama, who hired a pilot for India and raised a stone pillar. A Portuguese trading post followed in 1502, but in 1593 the Portuguese and the sheikh's court moved to Mombasa. By the 1820s a British survey found only the pillar above the ruins.