纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 060基尔瓦陶器碎片（4）（在线收听）

"The city comes down to the shore and is surrounded by a wall and towers, within which there may be 12,000 inhabitants. The streets are very narrow, as the houses are very high, of three and four stories, and one can run along the tops of them upon the terraces, as the houses are very close together. And in the port are many ships."

Kilwa was the southernmost, and the richest, of a chain of towns and cities strung along the East African coast, running from Tanzania north though Mombasa in modern Kenya to Mogadishu in Somalia. These communities were always in touch with each other, sailing up and down the coast, and they also mixed constantly with traders coming across the ocean.

Back with the evidence of all this trade - the broken crockery - it's quite clear even to me that the pale green sherds are Chinese porcelain, fragments from beautiful, luxury bowls or jars - Celadon ware, which the Chinese were manufacturing in industrial quantities and exporting not just to south-east Asia but across the Indian Ocean to the Middle East and to Africa. Novelist Abdulrazek Gurnah remembers finding his own bits of Chinese pottery on the beach as a child: