A Boat Without Nails: The 1,200-Year Voyage Behind Xi's Summit With Oman's Sultan
Xi Jinping hosted Oman's Sultan Haitham in Beijing on a visit state media framed around two monuments — one in Guangzhou, one in Salalah — commemorating a maritime friendship dating to an 8th-century Omani voyage to Tang-dynasty China, the voyage said to have inspired Sinbad.
When President Xi Jinping sat down with Oman's Sultan Haitham bin Tarik in Beijing on November 2, Chinese state media did not lead with trade figures. They led with two monuments: one in Guangzhou, one in the Omani port of Salalah, built 28 years and 10,000 kilometers apart to commemorate what CCTV called a friendship "more than a thousand years old" (延续千年的中阿友好历久弥坚). The visit was, in state television's framing, the first by an Omani head of state since the two countries established relations.
The history both monuments honor is genuinely remarkable, and Chinese coverage this week has been telling it in loving detail. In the 8th century, an Omani navigator named Abu Obayda sailed from the port of Sohar across the Indian Ocean to Guangzhou — in a wooden ship built without a single iron nail, its planks sewn together with coconut-fiber rope and tree resin. The voyage took more than seven months. Guangzhou, then the great international port that Arab geographies knew as "Khanfu," received his cargo of frankincense and linen and sent him home with silk, celadon and camphor. Guangzhou Daily's telling adds a flourish an international reader may know better than the voyage itself: this journey, the paper says, is the real-life prototype of Sinbad the Sailor from One Thousand and One Nights.
Six centuries later the traffic ran the other way: Zheng He's treasure fleets called at Oman's Dhofar coast four times, swapping Chinese silk and porcelain for Omani frankincense — and raising the exchange from private trade to state diplomacy. In 1995 Oman funded the "Sohar" monument in Guangzhou; in 2023, for the 45th anniversary of relations, China funded a Zheng He monument in Salalah, unveiled that May in a 3D-printed construction that Chinese state television covered as a curiosity in its own right.
The present-day file is where the summit's substance sits. China is Oman's largest trading partner, and Oman ranks fourth among Arab states in trade with China. In 2025, Chinese-brand cars sold around 12,000 units in Oman and Chinese phones about 500,000 — roughly half the country's handset market. The cooperation has moved up the value chain: Oman's first satellite entered orbit in November 2024 through launch cooperation with China, Oman joined the China-launched World AI Cooperation Organization as a founding member, Chinese firms are building Oman's first grid-scale solar-plus-storage project, and Mandarin is now taught in Omani public schools, with a first "Chinese Bridge" competition held in Nizwa. Direct flights link the two capitals.
The meeting produced the expected diplomatic furniture — agreements on supply chains, green development and digital finance — and a familiar formula. Xi proposed the two countries be "stable and reliable energy partners, high-potential investment partners and collaborative high-tech partners," a three-part framing that state media has since promoted as the visit's headline. Sultan Haitham, for his part, affirmed Oman's support for the one-China principle.
What gives the story its color is the framing choice. Gulf states' relations with China are usually told in barrels and contracts; here, official media reached for a hand-sewn boat and a pair of stone monuments. Whether the "three partners" formula delivers substance will show in the energy and technology deals that follow. But the story Beijing wants told is clear: the newest partnership in the Gulf is being narrated as the oldest one on the books.