The Chinese histories cited above and their corroborating sources are of course the products of the subsequent eleventh century. Nonetheless, all refer to the slaves transferred from Śrivijaya and Java on to China as either sengzhi or cengqi. These names are Chinese approximations of the then-contemporaneous term Zanj and its many variations, which was the name generically assigned by the Arab slave-traders to the Bantu peoples that they were engaged in steadily extracting and enslaving in considerable numbers from along the central and southern seaboard of East Africa (Wyatt, 2010, pp. 69-70, 111, 155).  
Our recognizing this linguistic connection affords us two tenable answers to yet another seminal question, with one solution being somewhat more plausible  
than the other. Given the vast distance separating the South China Sea region and the eastern equatorial coastline of Africa as poles at opposite ends of the Indian Ocean, how had these tribute-bearers of Śrivijaya and Java even come into possession of the slaves that they bestowed upon the two Tang Chinese emperors? One may contend of course that the Śrivijayans and Javanese had acquired the Africans they purveyed directly from East Africa, by travelling to and appropriating them from somewhere along the south-eastern shoreline or perhaps from slightly nearer Madagascar or Pemba. However, for them to have done so would require sailing a distance of over 4,000 miles $(6,440 \mathrm{~km})$ and then returning, with there being no evidence that the early inhabitants of the Indonesian archipelago ever developed and constructed ocean-going ships capable of such an extensive journey (Alpers, 2009, pp. 47-48; Anderson, 2015, pp. 254-58). Therefore, much more likely than the Śrivijayans and Javanese having procured the slaves referred to in the Chinese records themselves is that they had done so by purchase from Arab traders. Once in possession of them, they then had elected to trans-ship the slaves along as items of exotica to China.