The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  The Conquest of the Hundred Yue, 221–219 BCE

  In the third century BCE, this traffic was in the hands of the Yue, or Hundred Yue, in Chinese eyes an uncivilized people who occupied the coastal region between the lower Yangzi and northern Vietnam. The Qin Dynasty’s turn to the south was motivated by a drive for territorial expansion and trade, especially in luxury goods and exotics. In 221 BCE, Shihuangdi sent five armies totaling half a million men to seize the coasts of modern Fujian, Guangdong, and Guangxi Provinces, and northern Vietnam. Formidable as this force was, it bogged down in difficult terrain where it was harassed by an elusive foe and suffered from inadequate supply lines. Success was assured only by the construction of the five-kilometer-long Lingqu Canal, an artificial waterway the importance of which is far greater than its length would imply.

  As elsewhere in the ancient world, Chinese canals served for irrigation, transportation, and perhaps above all, flood control. Yet owing to the number, size, and strength of the main rivers, canal building and inland navigation have played a more conspicuous role in the development and sustenance of the Chinese state than elsewhere. The Yangzi (Changjiang) and Yellow Rivers (Huang He) both rise in the Kunlun Mountains of the Tibetan Plateau at altitudes of around 6,100 meters, but they follow very different courses to the sea.b Paralleling the Mekong in its upper reaches, the Yangzi swings south onto the Yunnan Plateau before turning northeast. Below Chongqing it plunges through mountain gorges where before the completion of the Three Gorges Dam in 2006 the difference between high water in the flood season and low water could be as much as sixty meters. Once free of the mountains, the Yangzi winds more sedately through a broad floodplain and passes Nanjing en route to Shanghai where it enters the East China Sea. The Yellow River follows a more northerly course describing a long S shape that brings it into the Ordos Desert near the Mongolian border before it bends south. About 150 kilometers east of the Qin capital at Chang’an, it heads sharply east to Kaifeng where it turns northeast to enter the Bo Hai between the Shandong Peninsula and Tianjin, today the port of Beijing. Though it is shorter than the Yangzi and drains an area only a quarter as large, the Yellow River is vastly more unpredictable in its lower reaches. For much of the last seven hundred kilometers the river is higher than the surrounding land—like the Mississippi as it passes New Orleans—which makes flooding a perennial concern. Between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, and again between 1930 and 1947, the Yellow River leaped its banks to carve out new channels that flowed into the Yellow Sea south of the Shandong Peninsula. Since 1947 its mouth has opened to the Bo Hai 250 miles to the northeast.

  Taming these turbulent streams (the third and fourth longest rivers in the world, respectively) among myriad others has been a major preoccupation throughout their history, and the Chinese became the most accomplished canal builders in the world. Expertise in canal building for flood control and irrigation led to the development of purpose-built navigation canals, the most important of which linked the Yellow River floodplain, which grew chiefly grain and millet, and that of the Yangzi, which was near the northern limit of wet-rice cultivation. The oldest such canals date to no later than the fourth century BCE. The combination of irrigation and transportation canals helped stabilize and integrate the empire by providing reliable harvests and, as crops were the principal form of taxes, a means of transporting them to the capital. In addition, canals eased the way for imperial expansion by facilitating the transportation of armies, a function evident in the Qin’s conquest of the Hundred Yue.

  In 219 BCE, two years after the start of his invasion of the south, Shihuangdi sent “a force of men in towered ships [louchuan] to sail south and attack the hundred tribes of Yue, and ordered the supervisor [Shi] Lu to dig a canal to transport supplies for the men so they could penetrate deep into the region of Yue.” Located in Guangxi Province, the Lingqu (Magic, or Miracle) Canal connects the Xiang River, which flows north to the Yangzi, with the Gui River, a tributary of the Pearl River system, which enters the South China Sea near Guangzhou.c In addition to digging the Lingqu Canal, Shi Lu made improvements to about twentyfive kilometers of the upper Gui. These relatively modest changes made it possible to go via inland waterway from Guangzhou to Chang’an, a distance of more than two thousand kilometers as the crow flies, “a chain of communication altogether extraordinary” for the third century BCE, or any other time, anywhere in the world.

  The Yue campaign lasted ten years, and the fighting and privation proved almost unendurable for the Chinese, many of whom “hanged themselves from the roadside trees in such numbers that one corpse dangled within sight of another.” One cannot ignore the individual sacrifices, but the canal testifies to the ability and farsightedness of the Qin engineers, who with a minimum of collective effort created a network of inland waterways that joined the most southerly and northerly of their country’s major river systems. A twelfth-century author offers a fair assessment of the project and those responsible for it: “The cruelty and suspicion of Shihuangdi I venture to deplore,” he wrote. “But his despotic authority had power to trap the waters permanently, so that vessels could travel overland. For ten thousand generations people have relied upon his canal. But the merit belongs not only to Shihuangdi—[Shi] Lu was also a hero—and on account of all these things it is called the ‘Magic Canal.’ ” Thanks to the subjugation of the Yue facilitated by the Lingqu Canal (still in use after twenty-two hundred years), the Chinese were now said to include a people who “used boats as their carriages and oars as their horses,” a necessity for trade to the south. From this time forward, the southern coastal provinces would remain China’s primary outlet to Southeast Asia and the world beyond.

  The towered warship (louchuan) is attested in Chinese sources as early as the third century BCE. This woodcut is from a sixteenth-century edition of the Collection of the Most Important Military Techniques (Wu Ching Tsung Yao) written in 1044, but it is probably based on earlier drawings and certainly fits written descriptions that are far older than that.

  Shihuangdi died in 210 BCE, and although his empire did not long survive him, the basic institutions and organization of the Qin Dynasty were adopted by the Han Dynasty, which emerged victorious from the ensuing upheaval and governed China for four centuries, from 202 BCE to 220 ce.d The Han initially occupied more or less the same territory as the Qin, except for the territory of the Yue, where the Nanyue Kingdom established by a renegade general eventually accepted a status subsidiary to the Han. This mutually beneficial arrangement ensured the Han a stable southern frontier under Chinese rule, while guaranteeing a steady supply of such exotics as “a pair of white jades, 1,000 kingfishers’ feathers, ten rhinoceros horns [an esteemed aphrodisiac], 500 purple-striped cowries, a vessel of cinnamon-insects [a delicacy when soaked in honey], forty pairs of live kingfishers and two pairs of peacocks” in exchange for iron and silk from the north. The market for these southern rarities, some native to Nanyue, others acquired from farther afield, grew under the Han’s prosperous rule.

  The most important of the southern ports was the capital, Guangzhou (then called Panyu), “the center for trade in pearls, round and otherwise, rhinoceros horns, tortoise shells, fruits … and textiles.” To the west was Hepu, an important pearl fishery on the Gulf of Tonkin. However, the richest of these southern domains were the prefectures of Jiaozhi, along the Red River, and Jiuzhen, whose conquest brought the Dong-Son culture of northern Vietnam within China’s orbit for the first time. The Nanyue court grew increasingly pro-Han, but in 112 BCE the young king and a number of Chinese envoys were massacred. In preparation for a retaliatory invasion, Emperor Han Wudi issued a general amnesty throughout the empire and ordered that convicts so freed “as well as 100,000 sailors of the towered ships who are stationed south of the Huai and [Yangzi] rivers, be sent to attack” the Yue. After the fall of Guangzhou, the Han divided Nanyue lands into prefectures including Nanhai and Hepu in modern Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces, respectively, and Jiaozhi, Jiuzhen,
and Rinan in northern Vietnam. As the primary purpose of the last three prefectures was to maintain the southern trade, the Vietnamese were allowed considerable autonomy.

  Jiaozhi and Funan, First Century BCE–Third Century ce

  No contemporary records shed light on Jiaozhi’s trade in the first century BCE, but later works indicate that traders were in regular communication with other kingdoms in Southeast Asia and India by no later than the death of Han Wudi in 87 BCE. The History of the Former Han includes information on the trading states, routes followed and goods traded, notably “lustrous pearls, glass, rare stones and strange products,” which were exchanged for “gold and various silks.” Ships setting out from Hepu or Rinan hugged the mainland past the mouth of the Chao Phraya River below modern Bangkok to the upper Malay Peninsula. There, according to this source, merchants disembarked to cross the forty-kilometer-wide Kra Isthmus “rather more than ten days’ journey on foot.” When the Chinese reached the shores of the Bay of Bengal, “the trading ships of the barbarians” carried them to Huangzhi, widely believed to be Kanchipuram, capital of the Pallava kingdom in Tamil Nadu. All told, such a venture could take “several years,” provided of course one was spared “the hazards of wind and wave to be encountered and death by drowning” or being looted and killed by the “barbarians” encountered en route. The Annals include a description of another voyage to Huangzhi made around 2 ce, during the interregnum between the Former and Latter Han Dynasties. Accompanied by a live rhinoceros, the envoys returned from Huangzhi to Rinan via Pizong in only ten months. If the identification of Pizong as an island off the southern Malay Peninsula is correct, the faster time may have been due to the merchants’ sailing diagonally across the South China Sea, a more direct route than along the coast although such passages are not otherwise attested until the fifth century.

  In the late 30s CE Jiaozhi was consumed by a revolt led by the sisters Trung Trac and Trung Nhi. After a three-year campaign, the Chinese divided Vietnam into commanderies, provincial units subject to civil and military authority. While the Vietnamese sought independence, the Han resolve to subjugate northern Vietnam was dictated by the need to protect the southern trade and not by concerns over territorial security. In fact, Jiaozhi remained fairly calm for about a century after the Trung sisters’ defeat, but corruption by Chinese officials and their associates was chronic. Matters came to a head in 136 when ethnic Chams from central Vietnam fomented a rebellion in Rinan that quickly spread to Jiaohzi. Domestic problems made it impossible for the government to divert resources to the south and the Han court negotiated away the rebel-held lands. Despite these problems, as Han authority declined at home Jiaozhi was relatively unscathed and it eventually emerged as a place of refuge for many northerners and one with lucrative commercial opportunities for indigenous and foreign merchants alike.

  The state that benefited most from the expansion of trade during the Han was Funan, which flourished between the second and sixth centuries in the lower Mekong basin of what is now southeastern Vietnam and Cambodia. Funan’s success depended on a combination of its location at the junction of the monsoons, where the Gulf of Thailand meets the South China Sea, and its productive agricultural sector. Northbound merchants could reach the port of Oc Eo from the west on one monsoon, and sail from there to China on the next. The Mekong delta port could accommodate these traders for several months at a time because Funan produced enough surplus rice and other food to sustain both its own population and communities of foreign merchants. The timing of the monsoons also meant that Indian and Chinese merchants were rarely at Oc Eo at the same time, for the same wind that brought one group to Funan sent the other home. The name of Funan is known only from Chinese writings, but these show that the strongest foreign influence in the region emanated from South Asia. A foundation story tells how a native princess called Lin-ye led an attack on a passing ship that was repulsed by the passengers and crew. She subsequently married one of the passengers, an Indian Brahman named Kaundinya, and together they inherited the rule of Funan. Whatever the truth of this story, Funan’s subsequent territorial expansion was oriented toward preserving and dominating trade to the west. In the early third century, General Fan Shiman “attacked and conquered the neighboring kingdoms. All recognized themselves [as] his vassals … he took the title of ‘Great King of Funan.’ Then he had great ships built and crossing the immense sea he attacked more than ten kingdoms … including Dunsun,” a small trading state at the top of the Malay Peninsula.

  Around the year 250, the king of Wu, one of several kingdoms that rose from the ashes of the Han Dynasty, dispatched the envoys Zhu Ying and Kang Dai to learn what they could of Funan and the western trade. Their memoirs offer a mixed portrait of a vibrant Funanese culture. The envoys were offended by the nakedness and tattoos of the people but noted appreciatively that they “live in walled cities, palaces, and houses.” Funan’s bureaucracy and economy were robust: “Taxes are paid in gold, silver, pearls, and perfumes.… There are books and depositories of archives and other things. Their characters for writing resemble those of the Hu,” a people whose alphabet was of Indian origin. Indian influence was prominent, and they met a representative from a kingdom on the subcontinent. Kang Dai notes the availability of goods from Da Qin (the Roman Empire), which came via Indian ports, and he describes aspects of the trade between the Malay Peninsula and India and between India and the Roman Empire. A lost work by Kang Dai reportedly tells of a Chinese merchant who sailed between India and China by way of Southeast Asia.

  Funan’s pivotal role in the chain of east–west exchange can be seen in the diversity of goods found throughout its territories. Archaeologists have identified more than 350 riverine and coastal sites associated with the port of Oc Eo, and excavations have yielded artifacts from around Southeast Asia, China, India, Persia, and the Mediterranean. The finds of westernmost origin include a coin and two medallions bearing the images of the second-century Roman emperors Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. A third-century Chinese work entitled The Peoples of the West devotes considerable attention to Da Qin, which can mean either Rome proper, the Roman Empire in general, or the empire’s Asian provinces. This early account of the silk road lists sixty-three products of Da Qin, from gold, silver, and gems to frankincense, myrrh, and “twelve types of aromatic plants.” A section entitled “The Sea Route to Da Qin” explains that “In early times only the maritime routes [to Da Qin] were discussed because they didn’t know there were overland routes.” This is perfectly consonant with the emphasis on sea routes to the east in contemporary western sources. Furthermore, finds in central Thailand, Vietnam, and around the Java Sea show that Funan’s absorption of foreign religions, principles of statecraft, and material artifacts spurred parallel developments throughout Southeast Asia. Despite the greater distances involved, the sea route was probably no more hazardous than the silk road across Central Asia, and it was faster and almost certainly subject to fewer duties because shipboard goods passed through the hands of fewer taxing authorities.

  Four centuries before the Byzantine emperors Justin and Justinian urged the kingdom of Axum to break the Sasanian monopoly on Indian Ocean trade, the Chinese attempted to bypass the Parthian middlemen to open direct trade with Rome. Between 97 and 101 ce, an envoy named Gan Ying crossed Asia to the Persian Gulf port of Charax Spasinou (the Chinese Tiaozhi) in hopes of joining a ship bound for a Roman port on the Red Sea. Possibly alert to his intentions, the Parthians discouraged Gan Ying by telling him that the three-month voyage could take two years and that “all the men who go by sea take stores for three years. The vast ocean urges men to think of their country, and get homesick, and some of them die.” For whatever reason, Gan Ying abandoned his plan. Even had he completed his journey, it is unlikely that the new route would have altered significantly the existing patterns of trade, for similar initiatives undertaken from the west met with comparably lackluster results.

  Among the best known of these took place in 166 when, a
ccording to the History of the Later Han, a merchant (or merchants) claiming to represent the Roman emperor reached the Han court. Elaborating on the relationship between the three major Eurasian powers of the third century, the official history notes that the Romans

  traffic by sea with Anxi [Parthia] and Tian-zhu [India], the profit of which trade is tenfold.… Their kings always desired to send embassies to China, but the Anxi wished to carry on trade with them in Chinese silks, and it is for this reason that they were cut off from communication. This lasted until [166 ce] when the king of Da Qin, An-tun [Marcus Aurelius Antoninus], sent an embassy which, from the frontier of Rinan, offered ivory, rhinoceros horns, and tortoiseshell.

  In fact, the “embassy” may have been something of a fraud. Elephant tusks, rhinoceros horn, and tortoiseshell were not of western provenance but were routinely available in Southeast Asia. In all likelihood, as even the author of the annals hints, these were simply traders passing themselves off as representatives of imperial Rome to improve their standing. There is no hint that their deception was uncovered at the time, but even an imposter’s knowledge of the west would have been of more than passing interest to Chinese officials.

  China and Southeast Asia from the Third to Sixth Centuries

  The Han Dynasty came to an end at the start of the third century under pressure from the Xiongnu, a nomadic people whom the Han had fought since the first century, and China entered a 370-year-long period characterized by militarism and short-lived petty states. In its final decades the Han Dynasty was under the effective control of General Cao Cao, who tried but failed to maintain the integrity of the empire. The deciding moment was at the battle of the Red Cliffs, one of the most romanticized in Chinese history. Fought on the middle Yangzi near modern Wulin in December 208, the battle pit Cao Cao with a fleet of river ships and about two hundred thousand soldiers against the combined forces of Sun Quan and Liu Bei, the future rulers of the kingdoms of Wu and Shu Han, respectively. Cao Cao was defeated, and a dozen years later China was divided among the kingdoms of Wei, founded by Cao Cao’s son, with its capital at Luoyang on the Yellow River; Liu Bei’s Shu Han Dynasty (superseded by the Western Jin in 265) in the upper Yangzi valley to the southwest; and Sun Quan’s Wu Dynasty in the east, with its capital at Jiangkang (Nanjing) on the lower Yangzi. Because the states of Wei and Shu Han blocked Wu’s access to Central Asia, an invaluable source of horses, the kings of Wu turned to maritime trade to circumvent their territories. The Wu invaded Jiaozhi to secure the traditional trade in tropical exotics, and because the Red River valley provided access to the horse pastures of the Yunnan Plateau. Wu rulers sought trade with and recognition from more distant rulers as a means of confirming their legitimacy as Sons of Heaven. Linyi, a kingdom founded in 192 on Jiaozhi’s southern border, Funan, and Tang-Ming, in Cambodia, all sent envoys in return. Of more immediate importance to the future of Chinese maritime trade, Wu encouragement of sinicization south of the Yangzi, a region previously outside the mainstream of Chinese culture, initiated a centuries-long process that paved the way for the massive influx of northern Chinese forced south during the tumult of the fifth and sixth centuries.