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money escaped Mu’iz, and he reorganised the whole tax system into a central collecting body which did away with the local collectors, who used to take a considerable rake-off of their own. In one day he collected over 475,000 US dollars (modern equivalent) in taxes from Fustat-Misr alone. 4
    In A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages, Stanley Lane Poole tells us, One hundred and twenty thousand labourers were kept at work winter and summer in maintaining and improving dams and canals. The old canal traditionally called the Amnis Trajanus connecting Babylon (Cairo) with the Red Sea was cleaned and reopened in less than a year and corn was sent to Medina by ship instead of by caravan as in the previous year. 5
    In short, a wealth of evidence from Greek, Roman, and Arab writers states that the canal enabled ships to carry goods from the Nile to the Red Sea and vice versa. Grain was transported from the wheat fields of the Sudan to Rome, Mecca, Arabia, and India. Chinese porcelain and silk could be brought to Rome, Venetian glass to India.
    In 642, Amir ibn Al-As dredged out the old canal, which was filling with silt brought down by the Nile. A century later there was a rebellion in Mecca and Medina, and in 767 the Abbasid Abu Ja’far al-Mansur blocked the canal to stop corn supplies from reaching Mecca. Shortly afterward, in 780, during the caliphate of Al Mahdi the canal was reopened. Then in 870 Ahmad ibn Tulun dredged the canal once again, and a further expansion took place in 955.
    The next huge improvement to the canal was caxrried out by Sultan al-Malik an-Nasir in 1337, who assigned no fewer than 100,000 men to the job. He also built the Nilometer on the south of Roda island, which can be seen to this day. It measured the height of the river and thus served as a flood warning.
    This final canal widening and dredging is summarized by historian James Aldridge in Cairo: Biography of a City , based on descriptions by the fifteenth-century Egyptian historian al-Madkrizi:
    The land which emerged round Elephant Island was marshy and soft and Makrizi, who tells us all this, says the Mamluks used to practise archery there. But in the middle of the fourteenth century Al Nazir joined the Red Sea canal to the new bank of the river through this new swampy land, thus draining it. This new exit for the old canal was called Khalig Al Nasir, and it remained the exit of the Red Sea canal until this century, although it was later diverted again and called the Ismailiya Canal. It met the river where the Egyptian Pharaonic Museum is now, near the Nile Hilton. This final version of Nazir’s canal was only filled in at the end of the nineteenth century to make what is now Rameses II Street, and anyone with a moment to spare on top of the Nile Hilton can look down on this street and trace the line of the old canal right up to the station square which was once the port of Al Maks. 6
    As we have noted, one of the Chinese names for Cairo was Misr, a name derived from the pharaonic name for the river port in Babylon. As time passed, Al-Fustat and Misr became interchangeable names for the port and the city of Cairo, “no doubt because all trade with Egypt was directed eventually to the river port of Misr or it came from Misr,” Aldrich explains. “So it seems logical that sooner or later it was all known as Fustat-Misr (which is what al-Makrizi often calls it) and then simply as Misr. Today, Egyptians still call both their country and Cairo simply Misr.”
    On November 26, 2004, the Oriental Ceramic Society of France held a conference in Paris on trade between China and the Mediterranean prior to the sixteenth century. The conference produced a wealth of fascinating detail about the export of Chinese ceramics to Egypt, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. 7
    Excavation sites in the southern suburbs of Cairo have produced Chinese ceramics dating from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries. In “Chinese Porcelain from