The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  One of the most fascinating accounts of the Mongol invasion was provided by the Venetian Marco Polo. He was only aware of one attack on Japan, the second one – he knew the name of one of the commanders of the second invasion force, Abacan; Chinese whispers apparently transformed the name of the other, Fan Wenhu, into Vonsainchin.55 According to Marco Polo, these two ‘barons’ in charge of the expedition deeply disliked one another. They were ‘able and valiant men’, and they set out as ordered from the ports of Zaytun (Quanzhou) and Quinsay (Hangzhou), important centres of trade towards south-east Asia. They landed in Japan, and Polo tells a vivid atrocity story in which eight Japanese men were sent for execution, but it proved impossible to cut off their heads or to inflict any wound whatsoever, as they possessed a magic stone inserted under their skin; and as a result the cruel Mongols beat them to death instead. Before long, however, a very great wind came and the Mongols were forced to leave; many ships sank, but 30,000 men under the command of one of the barons took refuge on an uninhabited desert island, hoping that the remaining fleet, which was under the command of the other baron, would come and rescue them. They could see the fleet moving ahead under full sail, but ‘the baron who escaped never showed the slightest desire to return to his colleague who was left on the island’. Thereupon the Japanese sent their own fleet to this island; the shipwrecked army fled into the hills and, while the Japanese sought them out, the Mongols crept down to the Japanese ships and commandeered them; they then sailed with Japanese banners flying to what he calls ‘the Great Island’, where they were greeted as returning Japanese heroes. So they landed and marched on the Japanese capital, which they seized. The Japanese counterattacked and besieged the capital, and after seven months the Mongols agreed to surrender, ‘on condition that their lives should be spared’. Meanwhile, the fate of the two barons was much grimmer: they did manage to reach home, but they were sent off to be executed, because one had fled and the other ‘had never behaved as a good soldier ought to do’.56

  It is obvious that Marco Polo’s stories of Japan are a mixture of truth and fiction, as are his stories of other parts of east Asia. At some points in his account of the Mongol attack he seems to inhabit the world of fairy tales, with magic stones and a non-existent occupation of Kyoto or another city. Polo’s account of the rivalry between the commanders is certainly credible; and the Japanese chronicle mentions their disappearance, presumed lost at sea. In the Japanese version a commander fell ill and the other did not quite know what to do; the impression is of chaotic lack of leadership rather than a falling-out between rivals. Polo should not be ignored, then, but the best evidence for what happened comes from the physical remains of the Mongol fleet and army. One clue was a bronze Mongol seal dating from 1277, the property of an army commander, that was found on the island of Takashima, visited by the second wave of Mongols en route to Japan. This seemed to confirm that the anchors, catapult balls, pottery and other equipment discovered offshore by a team of divers were the residue of the shattered Mongol fleet. When pieces of wood were raised from the deep, it proved possible to date them to the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, and the presence of white porcelain from southern China also seemed to confirm that this was the fleet the Great Khan had sent from there against Japan. These were very large ships, as much as 200 feet long, and they were largely constructed out of camphor wood. As proof that the archaeologists had not simply found the shipwreck of a merchant vessel carrying fine ceramics, there were the swords, arrows, crossbow bolts and bombs made of baked earth and packed with shrapnel – and even part of the skeleton of a warrior surrounded by his helmet and the remains of his leather armour. There were the anchors of ships that had broken their cables, which pointed towards the shore, suggesting that the ships had been hurled by the wind towards the coast, where those that had survived so far had been smashed into pieces. The decision to lash the ships together and to create a floating wall had proved utterly disastrous. As one ship was picked up by the surging seas, it carried along its neighbours.57 But the most telling evidence of all came from analysis of the wooden fragments of the ships themselves. Rust marks showed that the planks had been nailed together in a rather haphazard way. Either the ships had been poorly repaired after previous outings, or they had been incompetently constructed from the start. Preparing a vast fleet against a deadline had an inevitable consequence: ships were approved for service when they had not been properly checked (even though one piece of wood found underwater was an inspection certificate issued after something, very probably a ship, had been repaired). Many pots taken on board were poorly made, as if they had been rushed through the kilns, and there are doubts about the efficiency of a large stone anchor made in two pieces, again in apparent haste.58 The conclusion is that the Mongol fleet may well have been overwhelmed by a storm, but that the ships had much less chance of surviving a typhoon because they had been so poorly constructed, and they fell apart under stress. The discovery of part of the remains of the Great Khan’s fleet is one of the major achievements of marine archaeology, and fits well with the narrative accounts.

  When the second attack failed, Khubilai Khan turned his main attention to Vietnam and Java, with no more success. Marco Polo knew that Khubilai’s efforts to conquer Java had failed. Here again Khubilai’s interest was surely prompted by the wealth of the island and its close trading links to China, which Polo particularly stressed. In the case of Vietnam, his excuse for conquest was that the kingdom of Đại Việt had offered refuge to leading members of the Song government, while another Indo-Chinese kingdom, Champa, was an important centre of trade and piracy. The defenders of Đại Việt also witnessed the destruction of a Mongol fleet, during the battle of Bạch Đằng, which was fought in a river mouth against tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of invaders in 1287; but this time the destruction of the fleet was accomplished by human efforts, after the Vietnamese attacked the fleet with blazing arrows and then sent burning bamboo rafts towards the ships.59

  The Yuan dynasty not surprisingly played down the embarrassment of its defeats at sea, in Japan, Vietnam and Java. Relations between China and Japan recovered remarkably quickly after 1281. Trading ships moved back and forth between the two countries as if nothing much had happened; the Yuan government licensed regular visits to China by Japanese ships. However, their victories against the odds became the subject of great pride for the Japanese, who were convinced that their prayers to the gods had been answered; at the imperial court in Kyoto, it was argued that the prayers of the Shintō priests at the great shrine of Ise had persuaded the gods to send the great black cloud that emerged out of a clear sky; out of it sped the arrow of the gods that roared like a typhoon, while the sea rose up in a great mountain of a tsunami and crushed the invasion fleet into splinters.60 The victory not merely brought prestige to the imperial court and the Shintō establishment, but confirmed the wisdom of the warrior bakufu in Kamakura, with their links to the Zen Buddhists. Both sides in the complex system of rule therefore benefited. More than that, continuing mobilization, made necessary by the threat of a third invasion, justified the extension of Kamakuran authority over larger areas of Japan, including tracts of the islands of Shikoku and Kyushu. It has been argued that ‘the bakufu became a truly national power only after this war’.61 And the ‘divine wind’ would be invoked nearly seven centuries later by the kami-kaze pilots of the Japanese imperial air force.

  III

  The chain of the Ryukyu islands, of which the best-known is Okinawa, is a perfect example of a small and apparently insignificant archipelago that profited from its middle position to acquire wealth and influence. Its rulers insisted that they lived on poor and barren islands, which was precisely the reason that their subjects learned to make money by acting as intermediaries with the rest of the west Pacific rim. In 1433 the king of Chuzan in the Ryukyu islands wrote to the king of Siam: ‘this country is deficient in articles of tribute’, and proceeded to send a ship to Siam loaded not with local goods but with
Chinese porcelain.62 There were a few local products that were admired overseas: horses, mother-of-pearl and red dye, but the products of Chinese and Japanese craftsmanship took priority when loading a cargo.63 What was distinctive about the people of the Ryukyu islands was that the inhabitants took the initiative themselves, seizing the opportunity created by the withdrawal from the sea of their mighty neighbour Ming China. The Ryukyu islands were colonized from many directions in the very remote past, but links to Japan have always been especially strong; one can sail in good weather from the island chain towards Kyushu without losing sight of land, and over the centuries settlers arrived in the islands from southern Japan. Early in the seventh century AD the Chinese emperor, perhaps seduced by the idea that these islands were the Land of Happy Immortals, sent an expedition in this direction and carried off many prisoners, and Chinese coins from this period prove that there was indeed contact with the mainland at this stage.64 Even so, it was only at the end of the seventh century that Japanese officials began to take serious notice of their southern neighbours. No doubt a particular reason for doing so was that the Japanese emperor was keen to show that he, like the emperor of China, received tribute from subordinate peoples.65

  Bitter strife between the great noble clans of Taira and Minamoto in Japan in the middle of the twelfth century spilled over into the Ryukyu island chain. A keen opponent of the Taira named Tamemoto no Minamoto was a skilled archer; he had been brought up on Kyushu and he joined a Minamoto assault on Kyoto, only to be captured. He was lucky to escape execution, but his punishment was still cruel: the sinews of his bow-arm were severed, and he was sent to the Izu islands off the tip of Kyushu, where he spent fourteen years of dull exile. From there, in one tradition, he is said to have been blown across to Onigashima, ‘Devil’s Island’, which may be Okinawa, after his boat was caught in a storm. He had only intended to travel the small distance between two Izu islands, but now he seized the opportunity to make friends with the king, and ended up marrying his daughter. A child, Shunten, was born who would later rule the Ryukyus; but Tamemoto was always keen to return to the fray, and so, leaving behind his wife and child, he sailed back to Japan, where the Deputy Governor of Izu smashed his little army to pieces. Rather than submitting, Tamemoto committed seppuku, better known as hara-kiri, a ceremony that was coming into fashion about now. That, at least, is the story, but it probably elaborates a less dramatic history of wandering warriors who offered their services to the chieftains of Okinawa, of whom the partly Japanese Shunten was one.

  Japanese influence grew on the islands, marked by the arrival of a writing system based on the syllabic signs of Japanese script. However, the Ryukyuans did not adopt the additional and complex Chinese characters that had become locked into Japanese script, and relied on the plain syllables only – something most people staring at Japanese writing would consider a very wise decision.66 The Japanese port of Sakai entertained very close trading ties with Ryukyu in the fifteenth century, and contact was stimulated by tea-drinking – this generated a passion for tea bowls and other tea equipment that passed into the islands, while Zen vegetarianism seems to have brought new fashions in food and new types of shredding bowl suitable for ascetic Zen menus. In return, the Japanese could acquire Chinese paintings, pottery and metalware, which also passed through the islands.67 Once again one has to rely on late traditions, but Buddhism is said to have spread within these islands only after a monk named Zenkan was shipwrecked there around 1270.68 Uniting the islands, which stretch over hundreds of miles, was beyond the capacity of the chieftains of Okinawa, much the largest island, which stands two thirds of the way down the chain and lies closer to Taiwan than to Kyushu.

  Further fragmentation of power in fourteenth-century Japan had serious consequences in the Ryukyus. The Ashikaga shoguns recognized a noble family from Kyushu as ‘Lords of the Twelve Southern Islands’, though they had already been holding that office for a while. This did nothing to solve internal problems in Okinawa (the ‘kingdom of Chuzan’), for Chuzan, like Japan itself, was divided among competing warlords. One of these, Satto, had seized power after the death of the king in 1349, and was dazzled by a Chinese embassy that arrived in 1372 with the intention of asserting the imperial authority of the Ming dynasty, which had launched a coup against the Mongols four years earlier. Satto was evidently impressed with the gifts he received, along with those that arrived following a trip to the Ming court by his brother, who returned with a seal of investiture, as if the Chinese had conferred the crown that Satto had usurped nearly twenty years before the Ming revolution had even succeeded. The Okinawan ambassadors won praise for their punctilious observance of the exacting rituals that tributary embassies had to undergo, including the nine ritual prostrations known as koutou (kowtow); they were the first people to accept Ming claims, before the Vietnamese, Siamese and others, and they continued to pay tribute for many centuries without complaint.69 Not for nothing did the king of Choson in Korea write to the king of Chuzan in Ryukyu: ‘we reaffirm that every nation washed by the oceans is under the influence of China.’70

  The pay-off was the lively trade conducted through official channels, as well as a certain amount of surreptitious trade: in 1381 the interpreter attached to the Ryukyu mission was discovered attempting to smuggle a sizeable cargo of spices out of China. Other prized products were porcelain and silk.71 Yet the Okinawans did not simply look towards China; they could offer little from their own resources, so the answer was to create a much wider network that tapped into the supplies available in Korea and Japan to the north, and the South China Sea to the south. The creation of this network was deliberate; these words were inscribed on a bell which in 1458 was deposited in a temple on the islands:

  The kingdom of Ryukyu is a place of pure beauty set in the southern seas. Gathered together there, the treasures from three countries, Korea, the Ming Empire and Japan, are to be found. It is a fabled island, which arose from the seas between China and Japan. Its ships are a bridge between 10,000 nations.72

  To cast this bell, metal had to be imported and the techniques of bronze-casting to be learned. On the other hand, at the start of the sixteenth century, when he was about to send off an expedition to Melaka, the king of Chuzan reflected on the fundamental problem the Ryukyu islands faced:

  This country’s products are meagre and inadequate as articles of tribute, causing great inconvenience. For that reason, we are now despatching Chief Envoy Kamadu, Interpreter Kao Hsien, and others aboard a seagoing ship … with a cargo of porcelain and other goods, to proceed to the productive land of Melaka in order to purchase such products as sapanwood and pepper through mutually satisfactory arrangements, and then to return to this country to make preparations for the presentation of tribute to the Ming Celestial Court in a subsequent year.73

  The capital of Okinawa, Naha, became a flourishing and cosmopolitan centre of trade, comparable to Hakata and Melaka, with a significant immigrant population from Japan, though many Chinese preferred to live in their own town, Kunemura, a little way off, and included mariners and scribes, who were always chosen to compose diplomatic correspondence with China and south-east Asia. Coins, copied from Ming examples, were produced as Chinese metal flowed into the island, so that the economy was increasingly monetized, rather as was the case in medieval Japan.74 Excavations on ten sites in the islands have revealed a great variety of ceramics that arrived from all directions: among the finest pieces there are pale green celadons, blue-and-white pottery and whiteware, all from China, as well as Imari blue-and-white from Japan, Korean celadon, and both Thai and Vietnamese pottery.75 At the northern end of the island chain, a base was created for commerce with the Inland Sea in Japan; Ryukyuans brought the spices and other luxuries of south-east Asia to Nagasaki in western Kyushu, obtaining a range of delicacies for home consumption, some of which sound not very appetizing – sea slugs, shark fins, abalone and seaweed – and also weapons and Japanese gold.76

  Meanwhile, the king of Chuzan was
corresponding with neighbours in Siam, Melaka, Indonesia (including Palembang) and Korea; the oldest known letter in the Ryukyu archives dates from 1425 and reports an embassy to Siam in 1419, though there is other evidence that links went back at least as far as the reign of Satto.77 The Ryukyu archives once contained an extraordinarily rich collection of correspondence, conducted in Chinese, between the kings of Ryukyu and their neighbours; however, the letters were destroyed in the Second World War during the American assault on Okinawa before they had been closely studied. The patient reconstruction of the documents from decaying photostats and scattered transcriptions has brought to light a lively network of political and commercial contacts in which Ryukyu functioned as a centre of princely demand and a hub for redistribution.78 Porcelain, raw silk, Indian cloth and perfumed sapanwood all reached Ryukyu, while gifts sent by the king of Ryukyu to the ruler of Korea in 1470 included peacock feathers, glass vases, ivory, ebony, cloves, nutmeg and one mynah bird.79 Siam was particularly attractive, since it offered spices, perfumes, ivory and tin. The letter of 1425 told how the Ryukyuans were chided by the Siamese for attempting to conduct private trade in sapanwood and porcelain, which the king of Siam regarded as royal monopolies. The affronted king of Chuzan requested that his merchants and mariners should be treated equably: he hoped that ‘you will offer sympathy to the men from afar who have to undergo the hardships of the voyage’, for ‘it is enough of a difficulty to go through the winds and the waves’, before discovering on arrival that they have to follow the strict instruction of Siamese government officials.80 It was a dangerous route, as the Siamese discovered when the Ryukyuans sent an embassy to Siam in 1478, losing their ship, whereupon the next year the king of Siam ordered a new ship to be prepared at his end: ‘when the ship approached Ryukyu, it again encountered a storm and sank into the ocean, its men being lost and its property scattered … Such is the will of Heaven.’81