Ghiyath al-Din Naqqash

Ghiyath al-Din Naqqash was a Timurid envoy and the author of the diary of the 1419–1422 embassy to China. Nothing reliable is known about the years of his life, his birthplace or his family: Timurid historians recorded no personal details about him, and the word “Naqqash” in his name is a nickname or occupational label meaning a painter or decorator.

Because of this epithet Vasily Bartold took him to be a painter. The Encyclopaedia Iranica describes him as an artist active in Herat around 1419–1430 in the service of Shah Rukh’s son Baysunghur, and suggests he may be the painter of the same name mentioned in a document of the early 1430s as adding finishing touches to paintings in manuscripts of Baysunghur’s library; no work signed by him survives, so the link cannot be proved.

In 1419 the Timurid ruler Shah Rukh Mirza sent a large embassy from Herat to the court of the Yongle Emperor of China. The envoys of Shah Rukh were joined by representatives of his son Baysunghur, and the party numbered several hundred people, about five hundred counting the merchants. Ghiyath al-Din Naqqash served as the official diarist of this caravan.

The embassy left Herat on 24 November 1419 and travelled by way of Balkh and Samarkand along the northern branch of the Silk Road: through Tashkent, Sayram, Turpan and Hami. The envoys entered China at the Jiayuguan pass in August 1420, passed through Suzhou, Ganzhou, Lanzhou and Xi’an, and reached Beijing on 14 December 1420. They stayed in the capital for about five months, left in May 1421, crossed out of China in January 1422 and returned to Herat on 29 August 1422.

Naqqash’s diary describes the cities passed on the way, China’s economy and markets, the courier-station system, court ceremonies, banquets and executions. The original is lost; the text survives inside Hafiz-i Abru’s Zubdat al-tawarikh and Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi’s history Matla‘ al-sa‘dayn. It is one of the few detailed accounts of China written in the medieval Muslim world.