The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  When Kungp’a was fairly in his cups, Yomjang suddenly drew the long sword from the scabbard which hung at the rebel’s waist and cut off his head with a single stroke. When they heard of this, all of Kungp’a’s officers and men prostrated themselves before Yomjang in fear and astonishment.75

  Before long Yomjang had married his own daughter to the king and been promoted to a high rank, for he was worthy whereas Chang Pogo definitely was not, in the hierarchical society of early medieval Korea.76

  The career of Chang Pogo offers another reminder that the commercial networks across the sea have often been maintained by maritime nations that stood between great empires, rather than by the inhabitants of those empires. Silla in the north and Śri Vijaya in the south were home to skilled mariners who effected links between great civilizations such as Tang China that looked inwards away from the sea, but also saw opportunities across the sea to obtain precious goods and flattering recognition of their political power. The Koreans, Malays and Indonesians prove to have been the real pioneers in crossing the open sea.

  11

  ‘Now the world is the world’s world’

  I

  The term ‘insularity’ conveys a sense of isolation and looking inwards. Sometimes historians seize upon any word ending with -ity out of an unbridled love for abstract terms that are supposed to bring sophistication and ‘theory’ to their writings. But much of what has been said so far in this book demonstrates how lacking in that sort of insularity island societies were. Even when contact with the mainland was restricted by order of a court or government, ways were found to elude these rules, and such official contact as there was could be both intense and productive. Japan provides the perfect example of this apparent but unreal insularity during the early Middle Ages. The nature of its ties across the sea changed significantly in the twelfth century, and is richly documented. A new era of more open trade began, and the continuous presence of foreign merchants, nearly all Chinese, became a fact of life, especially around Hakata. Maritime trade within the Japanese archipelago also flourished; the seat of government at Kamakura (from 1185 onwards) possessed a viable port and consumed so much sake that a decision was made to ban its sale. 32,274 jars of the drink were confiscated, while around the Inland Sea port towns mushroomed, serving the megalopolis of Kyoto. The Japanese became much more expert shipbuilders too, although this was a slow development and even in the early thirteenth century the shogun only trusted a Chinese shipbuilder to construct a vessel capable of reaching China.1 The government, or bakufu, became worried by the rapid growth of trade from Hakata through the Inland Sea to Kamakura, partly because there were government ships to which the bakufu wanted to give priority; Chinese interlopers seemed to be winning the competition to dominate this sea passage.2 Overall, contrary to the view of Japan as a society that was not greatly involved in or influenced by its maritime links to Asia, what emerges is a picture of a society that revelled in its outside contacts, which were now mainly with China.

  These contacts did not affect the lives of the very poor – the peasants who planted rice for demanding masters, whether warlike nobles or wealthy monasteries, or the fisherfolk or ‘People of the Sea’ whose livelihood depended upon the sea, but who did not take part in the trade networks that reached towards the great cities of China under the Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties. The People of the Sea owed the imperial court tribute in seafood and salt, for consumption of fish was much more common among richer members of society, while Buddhist disapproval of killing animals for meat made fish even more desirable. The People of the Sea operated boats up and down the coast under the protection of emperors, nobles and abbots to whom they owed allegiance. Under the patronage of nobles and abbots, guilds, or za, became a feature of town life.3 All this was part of a process of commercialization that transformed medieval Japan between about 1200 and 1400. Gradually, markets and fairs took on a more cosmopolitan character; one could buy textiles, paper and metal goods, even luxury items and weapons made in the big cities of Japan and, occasionally, in China.4

  Mostly one bartered for goods in the market, but copper coinage was used more and more often by more and more people, including peasants; a delightfully painted scene on a temple scroll from this period portrays people buying and selling in the market and holding strings of cash.5 This reliance on cash can be traced back to the middle of the twelfth century, if not earlier. The coins were themselves Chinese, for – despite a short-lived plan to mint coins in the emperor’s name in the early fourteenth century – the Japanese rarely produced their own coins. The Japanese government had its doubts, because the massive influx of cash stimulated inflation; attempts to ban the import of copper coins from China, at the start of the Kamakura period, had no effect, and by 1226 the government was encouraging the use of coin rather than pieces of cloth in everyday trade. Vases containing tens of thousands of Chinese coins have been turned up by Japanese archaeologists.6 As economic links were forged across ever larger expanses of Japan, bills were settled and loans made in Chinese cash. As in contemporary Europe, observers did not quite know whether to admire those who accumulated wealth through moneylending or to condemn them as exploitative usurers (though, interestingly, Buddhist monks and Shintō priests tended to favour moneylending, unlike the Catholic Church in medieval Europe).7

  The Chinese deplored the constant outflow of bullion to feed the growing economy of Japan; Japanese traders were accused of hoovering up all the coins in the coastal towns they visited within twenty-four hours of their arrival. When China tried to limit the number of Japanese ships that could trade in its ports to five each year, the decree was rendered useless by the willingness of customs officers to accept bribes, so the number of ships was closer to fifty. It was easy to hide coins in the hold or simply to wait for the customs officers to disappear before taking the cash on board.8 This passion for Chinese coins was stimulated by a simple, obvious feature of cash: copper coins did not deteriorate, whereas payment in silk, common earlier, involved the use of material that could be soiled, torn or burned; and an alternative to silk was rice, which was far more bulky and no less likely to deteriorate. The use of coin reduced transaction costs for itinerant merchants, as it was no longer necessary to shift bulk goods around in order to make payment.9 Besides, there was a sense of connecting to Chinese culture when using Chinese coins, and this was felt as much in Korea or Vietnam as it was in Japan; these coins may have been plentiful, but they possessed prestige.

  The Japanese court came to prefer private trade to formal exchanges of tribute for gifts, but that did not mean they were keen to see foreign merchants turning up all over their empire. In the tenth century, suspicion of these outsiders led the government to control the number of times a merchant could visit Japan – Chinese visitors were limited to one trip every three years and trips overseas by Japanese traders were strongly discouraged. The obvious way round this for Chinese merchants who were stopped by the Japanese authorities was to claim that the fierce currents of the open sea had carried them willy-nilly to Kyushu. And, once they had arrived, local officials declared they could not go back until the winds turned, a polite way of allowing them to stay without breaking out-of-date rules. Or Chinese merchants might simply claim on tenuous grounds that they were acting on behalf of a high official.10 Hakata Bay remained the point of contact with China, and the government made up for the disappearance of handsome gifts from the Tang court by insisting on the compulsory purchase of the luxury goods it required, setting its own price.11

  Chinese books were in special demand at court, including Buddhist religious texts such as the Lotus Sutra and collections of Tang poetry; in the early eleventh century the regent Fujiwara no Michinaga was given the Tang anthology three times, and in 1010 he gave a printed copy, with commentary, to the emperor. The first printed book to arrive in Japan was brought by a monk named Chōnen in 986, and consisted of a collection of the main Buddhist texts that had recently been produced in Chengdu after twelve years
spent laboriously preparing the woodblocks. Thereafter the Japanese fell in love with printing.

  Buddhist rituals also demanded specific perfumes for different occasions, so any chance to obtain these across the sea needed to be seized, while fine perfumes appear again and again in The Tale of Genji.12 Admiration for Chinese culture remained the key to Japanese trade with China. In the later Middle Ages a more self-confident Japan became less embarrassed at presenting itself as culturally the equal of its old teacher, while Japan remained hungry for Chinese goods, so that trade burgeoned, achieving much greater volumes than in the years around 900. Yet the appetite for Chinese books, though strong, weakened somewhat as the Japanese began to produce their own court literature, in their own script and language.

  One of the most lasting influences across the sea was the popularization of tea, which was originally a very special drink; the Zen Buddhists spread knowledge of tea-drinking in the twelfth century, as an aid to contemplation. Tea parties enhanced by a tasting of fine dishes made of rice, noodles, tofu and exotic fruit, as well as poetry readings, became fashionable in high society from 1185, during the Kamakura period. Japan began to produce its own excellent tea (the imperial court demanded tribute in tea as early as 815); but it was common to sample both Chinese and Japanese teas at these events, and high-quality Jian bowls were imported all the way from southern China for just this purpose. Rather later, in the eighteenth century, the tea lodge and tea ceremony came into fashion, and the rituals were codified. At first, tea was drunk after steeping the leaves, or part of a brick of powdered tea, in water; tradition attributes the arrival of whisked matcha, powdered green tea drunk thick and strong, to the traveller Eisai, who had tasted something similar in China at the end of the twelfth century. Both documents and material finds (Chinese tea bowls) show that this type of tea was known earlier.13 Still, the crucial point is that the sea route from China continued to bring ideas and practices to Japan. Tea, with its close links to Buddhism, had a special impact, but there were other favourite luxuries that came across the waves. Imported parrots had already fascinated the Heian court in the eleventh century, especially since they seemed to be perfectly capable of learning Japanese. Even while the imperial court in Tang China officially disapproved of private trade across the sea, the desire for gold, in which (as Marco Polo later pointed out) Japan was rich, richer than much of China, made tolerance of this traffic inescapable; and the same applied to pearls, whether from Honshu or from the island of Tsushima, a product that is still the pride of Japan:14 ‘Their trade ships arrive on our shores by a north-easterly wind, and they bring us all sorts of merchandise: products of high value – gold leaf, gold dust, decorative pearls, pearls for medicinal use, mercury, stag horn …’15 To these could be added lacquered boxes and folding fans.16 All this testifies to the fact that not just Japanese merchants but Japanese mariners were gaining in confidence after the disastrous China voyages of Ennin’s time.

  It proved impossible to control foreign traders once they began to arrive in large numbers. At Hakata, a town began to develop where, in the early days of the Kōrokan, there had been only very limited facilities. Moreover, Hakata contained a large colony of Chinese settlers, some of whom married Japanese women and produced a generation of mixed parentage, who could then claim to be Japanese and exempt from any restrictions on foreigners. Good connections helped; in 1150 just such a merchant exchanged Chinese books for thirty ounces of gold dust from the Minister of the Left, the senior minister at court, and was asked to bring even more Chinese books to his patron. In the twelfth century 1,600 Chinese families are said to have lived in Hakata Bay; meanwhile the Koreans gradually disappeared from the maritime trade routes.17 During the excavation of the metro at Fukoaka, the city on Kyushu which incorporates the medieval port of Hakata, 35,000 fragments of native and Chinese pottery were found, the latter coming mainly from centres of production on the Chinese coasts. Some of this pottery was of very high quality. The fragments included sherds of pale green celadon wares, as well as the white pottery of Yuezhou which was known sometimes under the name hisoku, or ‘forbidden object’, because it was originally reserved to the Chinese imperial family alone, but here it was in Hakata on its way, presumably, to the imperial court at Kyoto (also known as Heian, which had replaced Nara as the seat of government several centuries earlier).18 Everyone tried to cash in on this trade. At the start of the eleventh century, the Fujiwara clan were happy to obtain foreign goods such as furs, medicines and perfumes by way of the estates they held on Kyushu, even though direct contact with foreign merchants had until recently been officially prohibited. Among these luxury imports were pigments such as verdigris, a by-product of oxidized copper used to make green paint.19

  This trade between Japan and the mainland underwent a series of distinct phases in the Middle Ages. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there is fuller evidence for regular commercial exchanges. At least one well-laden vessel a year reached Hakata full of luxury goods for the Japanese elite.20 This does not sound like very much, and the presence of Chinese settlers at Hakata, not to mention the mountains of pottery, suggests that there was much more movement back and forth to China. Some of the settlers were keen to introduce their own artisan skills to Japan, whether in pottery, metalwork or woodwork, and (as the objects in the Shōsō-in depository at Nara reveal) the court collected both objects from distant parts of Asia and local copies of them. Hakata stood at some remove from the centres of power at Nara and Kyoto. Hakata stood even further from the new power base that was created after 1185 at Kamakura, beyond modern Tokyo, following a brief but violent civil war between the Minamoto and Taira clans.21 The bakufu based at Kamakura was less well able to control the day-to-day affairs of Kyushu island; provincial nobles gained greater power in areas far from the centre, and towns and trade and fairs expanded under their patronage.22

  The wreck of a Chinese junk found off the Korean coast, the Sinan wreck, provides eloquent testimony to this commercial expansion. Over the centuries, half the hull had been destroyed by the waves; but the area below decks had become buried in mud, and beneath the hatch, within a hull divided into seven partitions, there survived a treasure trove of Chinese goods, some of which were still neatly packed in the wooden containers in which they had been loaded on board. Twenty-eight metres long and about a quarter of that at maximum width, the ship could carry up to 200 tons of cargo. Eighteen thousand pieces of pottery, predominantly Chinese (including about 2,900 celadon wares), were found on board, along with thin-walled, high-quality porcelain bowls made in China and vases with pedestals that had originated in south-east Asia. The light-green celadons, from the period of Mongol rule in China (the Yuan dynasty) include delightful jars with dragon-shaped handles and with floral relief, as well as the classic plain bowls whose trademark is their sheer simplicity. On the other hand, the lack of the famous blue-and-white porcelain among the finds suggests that these wares were still jealously confined to China itself, on the eve of the great expansion in their production that would make them the favourite product of China, exported all over the known world.23 Another impressive part of the cargo consisted of eighteen tons of Chinese copper coins, generally strung together and carrying a wooden tag with their owner’s name, making a total of more than 8,000,000 coins; this gives some idea of the sheer scale of the drainage of bullion out of China.24 One chest had been packed full of pepper. Very few Korean goods were found in the cargo, so it is unlikely that the ship stopped for any length of time at a Korean port, even though it coasted past Korea itself. The ship was apparently wrecked while it was sailing from Ningbo on the Chinese coast to Japan, on the account of the Tōfuku-ji Zen Buddhist monastery of Kyoto, whose name appears on several of the wooden tags, as does a date corresponding to 1323, which is the probable date of the disaster at sea. This was one of the great monasteries of Kyoto, but it had burned down a few years earlier and was seeking to finance its rebuilding programme by investing in a grand trading expedition.25 K
orean experts think that the ship was actually bound for Okinawa and south-east Asia after it called in at a Japanese port, presumably Hakata.26

  The private trade was increasingly compromised by the activities of the pirates from Tsushima and western Kyushu known as wakō; this became a particularly severe problem from the fourteenth century onwards, and provides further evidence that trade was flourishing, since there was clearly good business to be done by interlopers.27 Once they had seized other people’s cargoes, these pirates would turn into merchants and sell the goods for profit. Surprisingly, since it is such a narrow space that one would have expected it to be easy to supervise, the Inland Sea through which shipping had to pass to reach the outports of Kyoto from Hakata was a particularly pirate-infested area. It had long been a lively zone of exchange where large quantities of goods such as rice were transported from the islands of Shikoku and Kyushu to the province of Kinai, where Nara and Kyoto lay; it has been seen that the Japanese had excellent experience of short-range navigation, but for a long time were hopeless navigators out in the open ocean. However, by the late Middle Ages there is plentiful evidence of lively trade out of one of those outports, Hyogo, in a customs register of 1445, which reveals that nearly 2,000 vessels passed through one tollgate in a year, heading in the direction of Kyoto.28 One historian speaks of the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries as a time of active free trade, culminating in the fifteenth century in a balance of trade that was favourable to the Japanese.

  The end of the Middle Ages saw major political transformations in Japan, Korea and China, as earlier dynasties were supplanted – the Mongol Yuan were replaced by the longlasting, native Ming dynasty in 1368, and an even longer-lasting royal house, the Li, took charge in Koryŏ (Korea). Fourteenth-century Japan was a battleground between rival clans that sought political power, though not the imperial throne, for the emperors had been pushed to one side by the shoguns and had become ciphers. These conflicts within Japan seem actually to have fostered trade; the shoguns encouraged trade since they were keen to raise ever larger sums from taxation, and the land alone could not meet the expense of maintaining the military establishment they required. During this period, the coastal village of Sakai, on Ōsaka Bay, with its ready access by road to Kyoto, grew into a commercial city trading as far afield as China, and enjoyed the support of the Ashikaga shoguns. Sakai grew and grew and in the early sixteenth century it was home to 30,000 people; it retained a degree of autonomy, while remaining dependent on the favours of the warlords who controlled the area around Kyoto that Sakai was well placed to service.29