a The northeast monsoon rarely exceeds Force 4 (11–16 knots) in the Indian Ocean, and between the equator and 5ºN and north of 20ºN the winds are variable. The southwest monsoon averages Force 6 (22–27 knots) in the western Arabian Sea and Force 4–5 in the northern and eastern Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal, but reaches Force 7 (28–33 knots) across all regions in July and August.
b In the imperial period, a sesterce was a bronze coin weighing about twentyfive grams. One hundred million sesterces was a considerable amount, but the wealth of many Romans has been calculated at many times that. The philosopher Seneca was worth three hundred million sesterces and Pliny the Elder at least four hundred thousand; imperial grants of half a million sesterces to impoverished senators were not uncommon. By way of comparison, slaves were reckoned at about two thousand sesterces per head, and needy children received monthly subsidies of twelve to sixteen sesterces in the early second century.
Chapter 7
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Continent and Archipelagoes in the East
That China should have exercised an attraction on the maritime merchants of the Indian Ocean is not surprising, for it was home to one of the world’s oldest and richest cultures. Traders from India to Rome knew of and traded with China (at least indirectly) in antiquity via the silk roads of Central Asia. With their continental origins, the Chinese approached the maritime world more circumspectly than did their contemporaries, but approach it they did. First they harnessed their webs of elaborately branching rivers through feats of hydraulic engineering that protected the land from flooding, improved agricultural capacity, and facilitated inland communication. They then began their annexation of southern China, the Land of the Hundred Yue whose Austronesian-speaking ancestors had launched themselves into Southeast Asia in the second millennium BCE. As a result of these efforts, before the start of the common era it was possible to travel via river and canal from Guangzhou in the southeast to the ancient capital of Chang’an in the northwest.
Although the exploitation and development of reliable water routes through the interior was crucial to the formation and maintenance of the Chinese state, the cultivation of domestic and foreign sea trade helped assure China’s primacy among its maritime neighbors. If, as some claim, the catalyst for sea trade was the desire to circumvent the Parthian Empire, centered in modern Iran, and trade directly with Rome, it fell far short of expectations. But the effort brought riches to China and effected cultural and political change in Southeast Asia. Merchant mariners chasing the monsoons helped spur the development of agriculture—to generate food surpluses adequate to attract and feed these sojourners—and gave rise to the earliest recognizable states in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and Java. Foreign sailors and their ships dominated long-distance trade, but China was the unmoved mover of maritime commerce and contributed directly to the diffusion of tangible and intangible goods. Buddhism first reached China overland from India, but seafaring monks reinforced it there and established it from Sumatra and Vietnam to Korea and Japan.
The Maritime Geography of East and Southeast Asia
The geography of the contiguous waters of the South China and East China Seas; the continental landmass from the Malay Peninsula to Korea; and the Indonesian, Philippine, and Japanese archipelagoes is far more complex than that of either the Mediterranean or Indian Ocean. The Indonesian archipelago extends about two thousand miles from east to west, about the length of the Mediterranean; but the contiguous seas of East and Southeast Asia extend over two thousand miles from south to north, across fifty degrees of latitude from Java to Korea (roughly 10ºS to 40ºN)—the same span of latitude as from Tanzania to Turkey, Angola to Portugal, or Peru to New York. The region’s physical environments range from the equatorial rain forests of coastal Indonesia to the cooler and drier continental climates of northern China, Korea, and Japan. This geographical diversity had enormous implications for the types of commodities and manufactured goods found there. The rhythm of trade was dictated by the monsoons, the seasons and severity of which differ slightly from those of the Indian Ocean, although the general pattern is similar. In the words of a thirteenth-century Chinese authority, seagoing ships “take advantage of the reliability of the seasonal winds. They go south in the winter and come north in the summer, never the other way around.”a
The Japanese archipelago consists of four main islands—Kyushu, Shikoku, Honshu, and Hokkaido—and nearly four thousand smaller ones, including offshore chains like the Ryukyus. Japan’s mountainous terrain makes overland transportation and agriculture difficult, and the Japanese have always relied on coastwise navigation for transportation. A hundred miles across the Korea Strait from Kyushu lies the mountainous Korean Peninsula, the ragged coasts of which are fringed with hundreds of islands, especially on the Korea Strait and Yellow Sea. China’s coast wends more than 7,500 miles from the Yalu River to the Gulf of Tonkin. North of Hangzhou Bay and the mouth of the Yangzi River, the coast is generally lowlying and sandy, while the rockier southern coast is more heavily islanded and indented. The coast of Vietnam is divided into three topographically distinct regions. The Red (Hong) River of the north flows off the Yunnan Plateau to create a broad alluvial floodplain flanked by mountains. To the north of the delta is Halong Bay, which is distinguished by thousands of limestone islets that thrust up from the sea and are capped by lush, junglelike vegetation. To the south, the Truong Son Mountains spill down to the coast as far as Hue, where forest gives way to long beaches and a broader coastal plain that abuts the dense swamps and mangrove jungle of the Mekong delta.
Farther west mountains hug the coast of western Cambodia and eastern Thailand, while the head of the Bight of Bangkok is dominated by the swamps of the Chao Phraya delta. The Malay Peninsula is about 1,500 kilometers from north to south, is nowhere wider than 300 kilometers, and narrows to only 40 kilometers at the Kra Isthmus. However, apart from an account of Chinese merchants crossing the upper peninsula during the first century BCE, there is virtually no written or archaeological evidence of traffic across the peninsula’s heavily forested and all but uninhabited mountains. With its broader alluvial plains, the east coast was home to relatively sophisticated states, while the western coast, though protected from the southwest monsoon by the mass of Sumatra as far north as 5°N, is fringed with dense mangrove swamps some of which extend inland as much as twenty kilometers, and the mountains come much closer to the sea.
Between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra lies the 500-mile-long Strait of Malacca, the most important thoroughfare between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. The northwest opening to the strait is about 175 miles across, but its southeast end is a complicated maze of channels—some less than 2 miles wide—through the Riau Archipelago and Singapore islands. As on the peninsula, the mountainous terrain of the islands of Sumatra and coastal Java to the east makes agriculture and territorial consolidation difficult, and rival states tended to emerge along compact river valleys. Communication between these realms was relatively easy by sea, but the topography made it difficult to unify or exert direct control over terrestrial neighbors. Ruling authority depended largely on treaties and threats rather than territorial control and military force, and was made manifest by the flow of tribute from the periphery to the center of the kingdom.
The waters of Southeast Asia are sometimes referred to as an Asian Mediterranean, a shorthand that implies a degree of regional coherence misleading on both geographic and cultural grounds. The people of the archipelagoes that comprise modern Indonesia, East Timor, the Philippines, and Malaysia have a common ancestry and speak related languages; yet while the Mediterranean is a virtually enclosed sea, only the northwest part of the South China Sea faces a continental shore, including the Malay Peninsula, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and China. The South China Sea and the smaller seas of eastern Indonesia open to the Pacific and are separated from the Indian Ocean to the south and west by straits that perforate Indonesia’s southern islands at inter
vals of scores to hundreds of miles. The islands of the Mediterranean number in the hundreds, but there are more than twenty-six thousand in Southeast Asia, from Sumatra in the southwest to New Guinea in the east and Taiwan and the Philippines in the north. This diffusion inhibited the development of political units on a par with those of China, South Asia, the Near East, or the Mediterranean basin. Island empires only became possible after farmers and sailors had achieved significant improvements in agriculture and nautical technology starting in the seventh century ce.
Another way to consider the complexity of this region is by reference to its linguistic diversity. The maritime realm between Indonesia and Japan is home to five language families, linguistic divisions on a genealogical par with Indo-European, which is found (interspersed with Afro-Asiatic and Altaic) from India to Ireland. Austronesian languages—twelve hundred of them—are found throughout island Southeast Asia from the Philippines to Indonesia, on the southern Malay Peninsula, and in central Vietnam. Tai languages are spoken on the northern Malay Peninsula and in Thailand, and Austro-Asiatic in Vietnam and Cambodia. Sino-Tibetan includes the Chinese languages and Korean, while Japanese is a language unto itself. This translates into a multiplicity of individual languages, which resulted in predictable problems, as explained by a third-century Chinese prefect stationed in Jiaozhi (northern Vietnam). “Customs are not uniform,” he wrote of this commercial hub between China and Southeast Asia, “and languages are mutually unintelligible so that several interpreters are needed to communicate.” Equally important, the region has never known a lingua franca comparable to Latin or Arabic, which were shared by the educated and merchant coreligionists of the west.
Tracing the distribution of these languages is one way of determining patterns of early migration through the region. Ancestors of the Austronesian speakers originated in southern China and spread east and south via Taiwan and the Philippines through island Southeast Asia over the course of tens of thousands of years. The first Austronesian settlers in mainland Southeast Asia were probably islanders who migrated via the Philippines and Borneo at the end of the second millennium BCE. Their descendants’ Sa Huynh culture (named for a coastal village in central Vietnam) emerged around 600 BCE and spun webs of trade across island and mainland Southeast Asia, with links even to India. Judging from the distribution of artifacts found in modern times, Sa Huyhn trade reached no farther north than central Vietnam, beyond which lay the Dong-Son culture area. Centered on the Red River valley near Hanoi from the seventh century BCE to the first century ce, the Dong-Son culture was that of an Austro-Asiatic-speaking people who had migrated overland from southern China. According to a local tradition that reflects their melding with Austronesian seafarers, the inhabitants of northern Vietnam were descendants of Lac Long Quan, a lord from the sea, and Au Co, the wife of a Chinese invader he kidnapped as insurance against attack from the north.
The Dong-Son are perhaps best known for their massive cast bronze drums. Weighing up to one hundred kilograms and standing one meter high, more than two hundred drums have been found across Southeast Asia as far east as the spiceries of the Banda Islands. The seaward orientation of Dong-Son culture is apparent from the maritime subjects depicted on them as well as in the drums’ widespread distribution. Only two drums are known from southern Vietnam and none has been found in Borneo, the Philippines, or northeast Indonesia, which reinforces the idea of a firm demarcation between Austro-Asiatic- and Austronesian-speaking people. Whether the Sa Huynh simply chose not to trade with the Dong-Son or actively blocked their way to the south is difficult to say. Drums have been excavated from burial sites in western Indonesia and mainland Southeast Asia, but they may have been carried out of northern Vietnam by river trade to the Gulf of Thailand before being transported via short-range networks to the south and east.
The Chinese State from the Eighth to Third Centuries BCE
While the seafaring Austronesian-speakers of Southeast Asia originated in what is now southern China, the maritime ambitions of the Chinese of the northern plains were primarily riverine. The ancient heartland of Chinese culture centered on the great bend of the flood-prone Yellow River in the modern provinces of Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Henan, southwest of Beijing and a thousand kilometers from the sea. The proximity of this region to the nomadic tribes of Central and northern Asia made maintaining the integrity of continental borders a primary concern. Inhabited mostly by agrarian or maritime-oriented Yue people, the mountainous coastal provinces of southern China—Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong—were comparatively quiet: northern Chinese expansion into these regions was a gradual and opportunistic process geared as much to securing the trade in exotic tropical goods as to territorial aggrandizement.
The tension between the need for security and the quest for novelties complicated China’s evolving relationship to maritime trade. While most dynastic governments sought to insulate the country against invasion from the north and west through such projects as the construction of the Great Wall, the Chinese simultaneously perceived themselves as the kingdom at the middle of the world. The maritime frontier to the east and south was at once a porous border through which alien ideas might flow, and a gateway through which foreigners could send trade goods in the form of tribute. The gist of tribute trade was that as China theoretically produced or grew everything it needed, it had no need of foreign trade. Goods acquired were taken as a material symbol of the giver’s acknowledgment of Chinese supremacy, while gifts bestowed by the Chinese were a manifestation of the emperor’s benevolence. By and large, “tribute” was an elaborate fiction designed to inflate the Chinese court’s sense of its own importance and the Chinese were as often as not purchasing peace or, especially in the case of overseas countries, recognition. Historically the coasts of China were seldom regarded as an avenue of attack.
In China, there has been at different times considerable official opposition to overseas ventures and its by-product, the wanton consumption of luxury goods, the pursuit of which was considered detrimental to the empire’s security, economic stability, and morals, as it was in Rome. This was particularly true when Confucian traditionalists had the emperor’s ear. With their emphasis on filial obligation and belief in virtuous, paternalistic government, Confucianists tended to scorn commerce. Their essential view is found in two aphorisms in The Analects of Confucius compiled in the century of the master’s death in 479 BCE: “The gentleman is conversant with righteousness; the small man is conversant with profit” and “When your parents are alive, do not travel far. If you do travel, be sure to have a regular destination.” A standard interpretation of the latter injunction is that one must always be available to help, or in the worst case to bury appropriately, one’s parents. To be absent in pursuit of trade and unable to fulfill one’s obligations was ignoble in the extreme.
Representative of the Confucianists’ arguments were those of minister Chao Cuo, who in the 170s BCE urged the emperor to focus his subjects’ attention on agriculture and silk cultivation, activities that would tie people to the land and their families. Chao Cuo regarded merchants as guilty of hoarding, profiteering, ostentation, and rising above their station. He maintained that “an enlightened ruler esteems the ‘five grains’ and despises gold and jade,” the stock-in-trade of merchants who “travel all around within the sea without the hardships of hunger or cold.” Such disdain for merchants was not unique to China—one imagines Chao Cuo would have gotten a good hearing from a Tiberius or Pliny, or from antiglobalization activists today—but as elsewhere it reflected an ideal rather than reality. Moreover, to the extent that official policy has rejected or embraced interaction with the world beyond the borders of the Middle Kingdom, China’s actions have been determined more by strategic imperatives rather than by cultural predilections.
Confucius flourished around the start of the sixth century BCE, when a number of states occupied the area of what is now north-central and eastern China. The earliest recorded sea trade between north and south Chin
a dates from the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, when the state of Qi (in Hebei and Shandong Provinces) traded bronze, iron, and silk with the more southerly states of Wu and Yue. In addition to trade, there was a considerable amount of sea-based military activity. Nearly twentyfive naval or amphibious operations are known to have taken place between 549 and 476 BCE, the most important of which, in 482 BCE, was a Yue invasion of Wu that foreshadowed the latter’s fall a decade later. The Yue fell to the Chu (centered in Hebei Province) in 334 BCE, who were in turn absorbed by the short-lived but enormously influential Qin Dynasty, the first Chinese empire (221–206 BCE).
The ultimate victory of Qin over its rival states and its subsequent expansion to the south gave it a territory with a coastline longer than that of modern China, from central Korea to northern Vietnam. Nonetheless, overseas enterprise during the Qin focused officially on the singular Daoist quest for the elixir of immortality. Shihuangdi, the first Qin emperor, dispatched two expeditions to search for the immortals, whom Daoists believed to inhabit an island in the Bo Hai (Gulf of Chilhi) enclosed by the Shandong and Liaodong Peninsulas. Just as Nearchus noted that Alexander the Great was apprehensive about sailing from India to the Persian Gulf, the Chinese annals relate, “As the emperor considered that if he himself went to sea he would probably not be successful, he ordered a certain person to embark with a crew of young boys and girls, and to search for [the immortals].” Although they claimed to have seen the islands, contrary winds kept them from reaching their intended destination and they returned to China. A second expedition of several thousand people is said to have reached the Japanese island of Kyushu, a story that may have some truth to it, as we shall see. But during the Qin and Han Dynasties, and even later, the primary orientation of Chinese sea trade was on the Nanhai, or South China Sea.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 24
