Gulf of Martaban

The Gulf of Martaban gave its name to one of the most widely travelled objects of Asian maritime trade: the large storage jar. Ports along this lower Burmese coast linked the China–India porcelain trade with exports of Siamese and locally produced glazed wares. Arab, Chinese and European accounts trace this commerce from the fourteenth century into its decline in the eighteenth.

By the sixteenth century, Portuguese merchants were buying jars through Martaban. English and Dutch East India Company ships later used them to carry spices and roots; larger vessels held water, oil, wine, rice or gunpowder. Their commercial name spread beyond a single manufacturing district, encompassing jars made in several Asian countries. Around the gulf, the traffic in ceramics therefore joined local production to a much wider shipping economy, in which durable containers travelled alongside the goods they protected.