The Boundless Sea
Page 38
Song liberalization of trade had allowed a hundred flowers to bloom: there were now Chinese as well as south-east Asian competitors to Śri Vijaya’s dominance of the sea routes. Among those who benefited from this were sundry petty kings who had previously operated in the shadow of Śri Vijaya, notably the rulers of Semudera – Pasai on the Indian Ocean tip of Sumatra, with which, as has been seen, Zheng He had a sometimes difficult relationship. According to legend, its first ruler chose the site of his new town at Semudera when he saw one of his hunting dogs being attacked by a mouse deer – apparently a good augury. However, similar tales explain the choice of other city sites in virgin territory, notably Melaka; deer, lions and what may be an orang-utan all appear in these stories.
Semudera – Pasai, founded late in the thirteenth century, was a double entity, with a port on the coast and a capital at Pasai a little way inland, but it had developed in an area that once had fallen under the sway of Palembang. Now, however, elaborate court ceremonials at an increasingly magnificent court expressed the power of the ruler over subject tribes in the Sumatran interior; and they were also intended to show that the sultan of Semudera – Pasai could hold a candle to other petty kings in south-east Asia who might have liked to gobble up his territories. The Malay Annals relate that the chief minister of Pasai built a ship, bought ‘Arabian merchandise’, dressed in Arab clothing ‘since at that time all the people of Pasai knew Arabic’, and went on a visit to another kingdom on a secret mission; this says something about the intensity of Pasai’s relations with lands at the other end of the Indian Ocean.4 Its rulers may already have adopted Islam by 1300, although there is no evidence that the rest of the population followed suit.
Semudera was a staging post for ships on their way deeper into the Spice Islands, but it also provided pepper from its own hinterland as well as other spices which it acquired from lands around the South China Sea; and it lay in just the right position to provide basic supplies to ships bound through the Malacca Strait or around the southern shores of Sumatra. Rice and grain for sailors and their passengers, as well as fresh water, were as much the foundation of its wealth as luxurious spices.5
II
There were plenty of rivals both to Śri Vijaya and to Semudera. A major city emerged in the middle of the fourteenth century a little inland from Bangkok. Ayutthaya, or Ayudhya, was formally founded by the king of Siam in about 1350 and for more than four centuries it was the capital of Siam, not just its political capital but also a great centre of trade, well protected because it stood in the midst of a river complex that ensured access to the sea but made access difficult for raiders from the sea. Sometimes, admittedly, the maze of waterways that led to Ayutthaya was itself the hazard – in the mid-sixteenth century the ship on which the Portuguese poet Camões was sailing entered the wrong river mouth when its captain tried to make headway towards Ayutthaya; the ship then ran aground and broke up, so that Camões was lucky to escape on some driftwood, all the time supposedly holding on to the manuscript of the Lusiads.6 The flood plain on which it was constructed had only risen out of the sea during recent centuries, so when the rivers were in full flood the area around the city became completely waterlogged; but this was exactly what the rice fields needed, since the heads of grain kept above the level of the flood and the grain itself could be conveniently reaped from boats. Villagers round about lived in houses built on stilts so that they would be safe whenever the waters rose.
The town was not brand new – a massive golden Buddha was installed in the area a quarter of a century before the city was founded, as a thank-offering for the prosperity brought to the area by Siamese trade with China. As with its neighbours, how it was founded soon became the stuff of legend. In one version, the site had been visited by Buddha himself before it was founded by Prince U Thong, who displayed his talents by eating iron and by revealing that he was the reincarnation of a famous ant that had lived at the time of the Buddha and had been praised by Buddha for carrying a single grain of rice; that was all he could possibly do, whereas if a horse carried one grain of rice this was a worthless act involving no effort. In another version, recorded by a Dutch visitor, Ayutthaya was created by Prince U Thong, who was really Chinese, and who had been disgraced at home after he seduced the wives of the emperor’s courtiers. He turned up in Siam, where he also supposedly founded Bangkok, a rather smaller settlement downriver from Ayutthaya. But when he discovered the magnificent but empty site that was to become Ayutthaya he was nonplussed. Why was it empty? He learned of a great dragon that breathed noxious fumes and lived in the marshes; all the inhabitants of an earlier settlement had been suffocated. Of course, U Thong killed the dragon and drained the marshes, on which he built his city.7
This was a different sort of city to the great Chinese ports of Hangzhou, Quanzhou and Guangzhou that hummed with officials and merchants. Ayutthaya was vast, but it was also surprisingly empty: the perimeter of the city was over eleven kilometres long. Much of the capital was given over to temples and pavilions, with a few streets of merchants, and there were plenty of open spaces, some still swampy.8 Ayutthaya was a seat of government and the base from which the fourteenth-century rulers of Siam extended their control over lands to east and west – as far to the east as Angkor, for the great Khmer civilization had fallen on hard times. The Siamese kings were keen to show the surrounding world that they were the masters, and they expected those who came to trade with them, such as the inhabitants of the Ryukyu islands south of Japan, to bring gifts which they saw as tribute. Like many rulers in the region, they exercised close control over trade, imposing monopolies on the most desirable items such as pepper and sapanwood. By the seventeenth century, when the Dutch were active at Ayutthaya, Siam was exporting formidable quantities of elephant ivory: in sixty years, the Dutch sold 53,000 pounds of ivory to the Japanese, and the volume sent to Taiwan was much the same. An exotic perfume was made from Thai ‘eaglewood’, a type of aloe-wood that was scraped from rotting trees. Not surprisingly, given its use in Chinese medicine, rhinoceros horn was another favourite export, while millions of deer hides were also carried away by the Dutch. Tiger skins and shagreen, that is, shark-skin, also had a place in this trade.9
It may sound anachronistic to make use of much later evidence from a time when Dutch capital was being injected into the region, but the evidence for close links to China is not simply the product of foundation legends. Lacking a maritime tradition of their own, the Siamese kings were happy to employ Chinese merchants and sailors, so that ‘Siamese’ ships were not actually crewed by Siamese sailors. The readiness of the Chinese to serve is easy to explain. So long as the Ming government in China itself forbade its Chinese subjects to trade overseas, those who wished to do so ended up living in settlements away from home, and away from the everyday interference of the Ming government. So there were plenty of Chinese merchants in Siam, not to mention neighbouring lands.10 In the 1370s the king of Siam sent several embassies to China, loaded with remarkable gifts, such as six-legged turtles and elephants. The Siamese king was not simply motivated by awe at the might of the Ming, nor by the lustre that would accrue to him when the Chinese emperor recognized him as a legitimate king; he also had commercial instincts of his own since he would expect to receive silk cloth and fine ceramics, and his agents would be able to pick up plenty of desirable goods in the marketplace of Guangzhou as they made their way home. Some of these were sold on to private traders for a handsome profit. Embassies were sent year in, year out with only a few exceptions, during the last years of the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth, and ties were strengthened further when the large fleets of Chinese junks commanded by the eunuch Zheng He made their appearance in the South China Sea at the start of the fifteenth century.11
Ayutthaya would remain a centre of power and a focal point for the trade of the South China Sea until it was sacked by the Burmese in 1767. Although the documents tend to record the movement of exotic goods back and forth to China a
nd other western Pacific lands, its strength also lay in local resources, notably its rice, which Thai boats (not this time manned by Chinese sailors) carried up and down the coasts of Malaya and Indo-China. This too helped to integrate Ayutthaya into a network of maritime routes that stretched towards the Strait of Malacca in one direction, towards the East Indies in another direction, and upwards towards southern China and even beyond – to Okinawa and Japan.
III
Java was always a rival to Śri Vijaya, whether the kingdom’s capital lay at Palembang or Jambi. In 1275 the ruler of Singhasari, a kingdom in eastern Java, sent his forces against Jambi, which was sacked.12 Meanwhile, with the Mongol conquest of the Song Empire, an outside power began to take an unhealthy interest in the little states of south-east Asia. Even before the Mongols launched their naval expedition against Java in 1292, they had been issuing commands to the rulers of states such as Semudera, which were told to send tribute to the Yuan emperor; the Mongols did not wait for their rajahs to volunteer. Jambi, rebuilt after its sacking, sent three missions to the Mongol emperor between 1281 and 1301, this time anticipating the demand for tribute, rather than awaiting the command to deliver it; but if the Śri Vijayans hoped to gain favour at the Yuan court there is no evidence that they succeeded, for the Mongols, unlike the Śri Vijayans, were not as interested in trade as they were in proclaiming the universal authority of the Mongol khan. Mongol rule brought no obvious advantages to Jambi, Semudera or any other towns around the inner edges of the South China Sea.13 Another potent threat emerged in Siam, whose Thai rulers extended their influence by land and sea as far south as an island that will feature prominently later in this chapter: Temasek, soon to be known as Singapore. A Sumatran tradition tells how a Thai army led by a renegade Śri Vijayan prince sacked Jambi, while Sumatra’s own chroniclers praised the ports of Semudera–Pasai for their efforts in repelling Thai attacks. The impression that all this disorder conveys is of rampant piracy and of the fragmentation of the Śri Vijayan political network. The Strait of Malacca was particularly dangerous, according to an early fourteenth-century Chinese writer named Wang Dayuan.14 Getting spices out into the Indian Ocean was therefore not at all straightforward, and this was where the authority of the sultans of Semudera was of some help. In the longer term, the answer would have to be the foundation of a control centre within the strait itself.
The beneficiary from all this chaos was the rajah of Java. The Javanese kingdom of Majapahit came into existence in the thirteenth century, around the same time as Semudera. While Semudera’s success, though impressive, was rooted in control of its own local area, Majapahit sought to replicate the trading empire of Śri Vijaya. At its peak, its network of vassals extended as far as Singapore.15 Its rulers favoured Hinduism and Buddhism, and they liked to portray themselves to their awed subjects as semi-divine beings. But they were also very pragmatic: untouched by the Confucian dislike for trade, they enthusiastically fostered trade, as a means to support themselves and to pay for their ambitious building programmes. For, although the great temple complex at Borobodur had been built around AD 800 and had been abandoned to the jungle a couple of centuries later, the royal passion for large-scale building did not fade, particularly in eastern Java.16 Ports, markets and roads carried the lifeblood of their kingdom, so much so that a Javan epic poem of the fifteenth century celebrated the sacred character of a set of crossroads that lay close to the royal palace.17 Among the documents that survive from this kingdom is the ‘Canggu Ferry Charter’, dated 1358, which was a royal privilege inscribed on metal plates; it offered protection to those carrying goods up the River Brantas to the town of Canggu, which would later be mentioned as a place of note in Ma Huan’s account of Zheng He’s visit to Java. With this decree, the royal court detached the ferrymen of Canggu from the noble lords on whom they had earlier depended, and placed them under the direct protection of the royal court, which – of course – wanted to gain special access to the goods they carried from the coast to the king’s palace.18 These road and river networks within Java are the key to the success of the Majapahit kingdom. From the interior, rice was humped down to the ports along the coast, loaded on boats and transported to other ports, often beyond Java itself, in the easternmost Spice Islands such as Sulawesi, Bali and Irian. There, it was exchanged for pepper, cloves and other exotic products, which were carried back to what Marco Polo had called ‘Great Java’ and put on sale in the ports along its north coast. In other words, the commercial system of the Majapahit kingdom was very well integrated; and the ruler was well aware of the advantages – some of the other royal charters preserved on metal plates dealt with taxes payable to the crown, and royal interest in business initiatives even included part-ownership of a fish farm.19
The kingdom of Majapahit was, then, wealthy; during much of the fourteenth century it also remained quite stable. As with the Chinese rulers, its success depended on the devolution of power in the provinces to local nobles, often members of the royal family. But the internal tensions were obvious when Zheng He visited the island during his first and second voyages. At the start of the fifteenth century civil war broke out between a nephew and a son of King Hayam Wuruk of Majapahit (d. 1389), who had divided Majapahit between them, and several hundred Chinese merchants were killed. During his first voyage, Zheng He had not even tried to intervene in the conflict, though he had noted the rudeness of one of the kings towards the Ming emperor.20 After one of the two Javanese kings had been captured and beheaded by the other, Yong-le demanded 60,000 ounces of gold in satisfaction from the victor.21 In fact, the king was hardly in a position to make this massive payment.
Along the coast, merchant communities took advantage of the contest for power to take charge of their own affairs. The faster these towns detached themselves from the central government, the more royal revenues, which had been so heavily based on trade, began to shrink, and royal troubles were magnified still further when local nobles also exploited the chaos to insist on their own independence; sometimes they worked with the towns, assuring them of vital food supplies in return for help fighting their rivals, but just as often the port cities waged war against the nobles in order to conquer the land they needed for rice cultivation.22 What all this meant was that Java’s brief ascendancy came to an end in the early fifteenth century. The authority of the semi-divine kings was further eroded by the spread of Islam in Indonesia. As disorder increased, the Chinese court began to wonder how it could secure peace in the South China Sea. This attempt to bring stability helps explain Zheng He’s voyages, and in particular the close connection that the Ming court developed with the new town of Melaka. But before looking at the rapid rise of Melaka it is necessary to examine its antecedents in Singapore, which have been exposed to view by archaeological discoveries that have transformed knowledge of the ‘Silk Route of the Sea’.
IV
Fort Canning Park consists of a hill in the middle of the colonial heart of Singapore, rising above what one might imagine to be the buildings of old Singapore – the Armenian Church, the synagogue, Raffles Hotel, and what remains of the creeks and river that once connected this part of Singapore island to the sea. From its paths one can look across at the cluster of giant office buildings and hotels that delineate the skyline of new Singapore, located next to land reclaimed from the sea. The history of this city is commonly assumed to have begun in the early nineteenth century, when Sir Stamford Raffles chose it from a shortlist as the site for a British trading station commanding the entrance to the Strait of Malacca. Yet his motive for settling on this site was not simply its convenient location; he was deeply interested in the history of south-east Asia, and the fact that a trading city had once stood here fascinated him, even though little or nothing remained of medieval Singapore.23 Raffles acquired a copy of the most important chronicle of the early history of Malaya, the Sĕjarah Mĕlayu; generally known as the Malay Annals, the title should really be translated as The Malay Genealogical Tree. Amid legends about the foun
dation of Singapore and then Melaka, this chronicle wove together fact and fancy so as to extol the dynasty that had brought both cities into existence. It has also served as a key text for those in Malaysia who have, since the country’s independence, insisted upon its predominantly Malay (rather than Indian or Chinese) identity, and on the special place of Islam in Malaysian history. A constant theme is how the resourceful and crafty Malays were able to outwit their rivals in Java and Siam, and even in China. Although the text we have was written at the start of the seventeenth century, the Sĕjarah Mĕlayu incorporated a great amount of much older material, going back centuries – or indeed well over a millennium, if one believes the claims the book makes.24