Ajaib Al-Latif Ghias-ud-Din Mohammad Naghash;Artistic release of the Timurid Embassy in Herat from the Chinese Court

After the fall of the unified Mongol political system in Iran and China, the establishment of the anti-Islamic Ming dynasty in China and the Timurid Muslim rule in Iran; Interactions between the two lands were interrupted as in the pre-Mongol period. Contemporary, with the rule of Daiming Khan Ming and Shahrukh Teymouri, steps were taken by the two warring governments to establish political relations and to exchange diplomatic missions. Ghiasuddin Mohammad Naghash, one of the members of the embassy sent from Herat court to China in 822 AH. The present study seeks to answer the following question: What was the position of Ghiasuddin Mohammad Naghash in the influence of Iranian painting on Chinese painting? In order to answer to this question, it is assumed that with the presence of Ghias-ud-Din Mohammad, a painter at the Chinese court, and the creation of Ajaib al-Lataif and an illustrated one (the shrines of the Topkapi Museum), the ground for an Iranian painter's acquaintance with Chinese painting was provided and the Chinese pattern was reflected in his works in terms of subject matter.

This research has been done by descriptive-analytical method and relying on library resources. In this research, first historical reports from the Timurid embassy to the Chinese court were extracted from first-hand historical sources and compiled with the contents of the written embassy of Ajab al-Latif Ghias-ud-Din Mohammad Naghash. Reports related to the embassy have been compiled, and finally, by proving the attribution of these works to Ghias-ud-Din Mohammad Naghash, the influence of Iranian painting on Chinese painting has been examined in terms of subject matter in the works.

Relations between the Timurid and Ming dynasties improved during the reigns of Shahrukh Teymouri and Daming Khan Ming. The two sides sent embassy delegations to each other with the aim of normalizing relations. After receiving four delegations from the Chinese embassy and sending two ambassadors to the Ming court, Shahrokh Teymouri sent a high-ranking embassy delegation to the Ming court on behalf of himself and other Timurid princes. Ghiasuddin Mohammad Naghash, one of the prominent artists of Basanqar Mirza Library, was also on the board. During this embassy trip, he has recorded what he has seen and heard in the form of a travelogue. Although the original version of this travelogue is not available, a copy of it has been preserved in the well-known chronicles of Hafiz Abru and the informant Saadin Abdolrazaq Samarkandi. There is also an Ottoman Turkish translation of this work called Ajaib al-Latif. The reports in this travelogue correspond to the references in the Turkish Topkapi Museum with the signature of Professor Mohammad Siah Ghalam. . The most prominent manifestations of the correspondence between the written travelogue of Ghias-ud-Din Mohammad Naghash and the shrines of Master Mohammad Siah Ghalam can be reflected in the images of demons and other mythical creatures of Chinese temples, desert cows, dervishes and Chinese ascetics, chants and horses. In the travelogue, he referred to the mentioned places.

Mohammad Siah Ghalam is the same as Ghias-ud-Din Mohammad Naghash, a member of the delegation of Herat Embassy to China. The painter Ghias-ud-Din Muhammad was faithful to his style of painting in terms of form, but he owed Chinese painting in terms of the subject matter of his works. The Chinese pattern used by Ghias-ud-Din Mohammad Naghash later appeared in the works of Sheikhi or Yaghoubi, a painter at the Tabriz School of Painting in Turkmenistan. Sheikhi owes a lot to Chinese painting from a thematic point of view, and the clothes and decorations in his works have the color and glaze of Chinese paintings by the painter Maab Ghias-ud-Din Mohammad.