Would it have come over the spice roads all the way from eastern china or would it have been pirate loot sold in Mumbai and then fenced farther west?
Hate to nitpick, but Mumbai didn't exist in those times - it was a group of islands and not a major port.
Major trading ports of India at the time were Muziris, Goa, Surat etc.
(we call them "chop shops" in english because they used to file off the chops and serial #s the eastern chinese oems engraved on their statuary)
What are "chops"?
I always thought chop shops were so called because they chop up stolen cars into small pieces that are hard to trace and sell them individually.
> In the western world, Asian seals were traditionally known by traders as chop marks or simply chops, a term adapted from the Hindi chapa and the Malay cap, meaning stamp or rubber stamps.
These are still _quite a big deal_, eg https://www.ft.com/content/48baeb67-2d3c-41c3-8645-e89ac69a9...