The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  Maritime Aspirations in Southern Song and Yuan China

  At the start of the twelfth century, the principal states in Northeast Asia were those of the Khitan Liao, which occupied northern China and eastern Mongolia, the Xi Xia of north-central China, and the Northern Song. After a century and a half, the balance of power was abruptly overturned by the Jurchen, subjects of the Khitan Liao. After declaring the Jin Dynasty, they seized the Khitan capital of Dadu (Beijing) and in 1127 the Northern Song capital of Kaifeng.a Song Gaozong, brother of the captured emperor, established the capital of what is known as the Southern Song Dynasty at Lin’an (Hangzhou), the first and only seaport capital of a united China. While China’s maritime trade had been growing for centuries, the Southern Song rulers’ embrace of overseas ventures constituted a deliberate effort to compensate for the lack of favorable trading opportunities to the north and west. This openness to the sea had been foreshadowed by the gradual migration of China’s political center to the southeast, but it became imperative following the establishment of the Jurchen Jin Dynasty. Four hundred thousand Chinese fled southward, many of them to the mountainous coastal provinces of Jiangsu and Fujian, where agriculture was difficult—a fact that had accounted for their slow development in the first place. This demographic redistribution fostered continued urbanization and a corresponding growth in manufacturing, especially of ceramics, and trade.

  The decision to make Lin’an the capital reflected the ruling elite’s recognition of the importance of maritime trade to both ordinary citizens and the government, whose predicament can be summarized succinctly. Prior to the fall of Kaifeng, two-thirds of the tribute missions to China arrived by sea. This was already considerably more than in previous centuries, but with the move to Lin’an all tribute came by sea, and in the opening years of the Southern Song Dynasty, maritime trade accounted for up to 20 percent of the government’s revenues. This could never have happened without official sanction at the highest levels, and in a sharp departure from the throne’s traditional posture on overseas commerce, Gaozong observed that “The profit derived from foreign trade is most great. When the management was proper, the income was sometimes counted by millions [of cash]. Is this not far better than taxing the people? It is why we pay much attention to it. We could thus be lenient to the people, and let them be a little more prosperous.”

  This shift in attitude was especially beneficial to the merchants of southern Fujian, many of whom were ethnic Hokkiens who had turned to overseas trade during the tenth-century interregnum. With the Song restoration, they began to attract growing numbers of Muslim and Tamil merchants to Quanzhou, which became China’s leading international port. Of far greater long-term import was the direct participation of Hokkien merchants in the trade with Southeast Asia. Initially they worked under the tutelage of more experienced and well-connected foreigners, but as they honed their navigational skills and knowledge of markets, the Hokkiens became their own masters and for the first time significant numbers of private Chinese traders began venturing overseas on their own account and in their own ships. Although they could be found trading as far as southern India, most Hokkiens generally sailed no farther than the emporia of Java, Sumatra, and the Malay Peninsula, where western goods brought by Indian Ocean merchants were readily available. Focused as they were on relatively nearby markets—it is less than two thousand miles from Quanzhou to the Strait of Malacca—the Chinese came to dominate the routes between Southeast Asia and China, and in the process they established overseas communities that in some cases have endured to this day.

  Western mariners still accounted for a sizable share of China’s foreign trade, however, and Quanzhou was home to a sizable expatriate community. An early-thirteenth-century author writes of “two types of foreigners—one has fair skin and the other dark—living in Quanzhou in the lane for foreigners.” The broad distinction here is probably between Arabs and Persians from Southwest Asia and Indians and Malays from South and Southeast Asia. The modern city boasts numerous remains of Muslim mosques, Hindu temples, and Tamil and Arabic inscriptions. Bilingual Tamil and Chinese inscriptions point to a southern Indian community originating in the Chola port of Nagapattinam, while Zhao Rugua’s thirteenth-century work, On the Chinese and Arab Trade, confirms a direct trade between Quanzhou and Malabar and Gujarat.

  As Chinese merchants gained a greater share of the goods destined for China’s burgeoning consumer market, the old tributary system withered. Southeast Asian rulers no longer had to promote the sale of their goods in China, and with ample revenues from duties and the right to purchase and resell goods at favorable prices the Chinese government had no need to lavish money and effort on visiting dignitaries. Yet open trade was not without negative consequences for China, which experienced such a severe drain on precious metals and copper cash that between 1160 and 1265 a succession of emperors banned their export, “ordered the officers-in-charge to use only silk, rough sewn silk, brocade, patterned silk, porcelain and lacquerware to trade” in their place, and enacted sumptuary laws to curb the import of exotic finery like pearls and feathers. Ceramics remained a staple of China’s export trade, their production being concentrated around the ports of Mingzhou, Wenzhou, Quanzhou, and Guangzhou. Whether they comprised a greater or lesser share of China’s exports by volume or value than silks and other perishables, they have been found in far greater abundance at terrestrial and underwater archaeological sites from Korea and Japan to East Africa and the Levant. Their distribution corroborates the written record. Sulayman the merchant had praised Chinese glazed ceramics in the ninth century, but they are not mentioned as a significant export in Chinese sources until the eleventh century, and two hundred years later Zhao Rugua was able to specify which types of ceramics were exported to which countries, from the Philippines to Zanzibar.

  The Rise of Yuan China

  As much as they opened themselves to the world overseas, many Chinese during the Southern Song hoped to regain the territory lost to the Jurchen Jin and Xi Xia. Eager to support any potential allies, in 1196 the court appointed a Mongol tribal leader named Temüjin “bandit suppression commissioner.” A decade later, Temüjin’s fellow Mongols elected him emperor with the title Chinggis (Genghis) Khan. After consolidating the tribes of the Mongolian plateau, he embarked on a campaign against the Jurchen Jin, the Mongols’ traditional enemies. By 1217, the Mongols had eliminated Jin authority north of the Yellow River, but Jin forces in Henan Province were in an almost impregnable position. Chinggis’s son and successor Ogedei negotiated with the Song for permission to march through their territory to attack the Jin from the south. The Song reluctantly agreed, but when the Jin were defeated they attempted to occupy the land seized by the Mongols, which gave Ogedei ample excuse to strike south of the Yangzi. The Mongol army was probably the best in the world, but the Song withstood them for more than half a century thanks to their greater numbers and the fact that they were defending a territory interlaced with rivers and canals and ill-suited for cavalry, the mainstay of the Mongol military.

  This environmental advantage was enhanced by the fact that since the eleventh century the Song had maintained a standing river fleet whose ships and weaponry were more advanced than those found anywhere else. The principal warship was a human-powered paddleboat, some extreme models of which mounted more than twenty paddle wheels and had complements of two to three hundred men. In time, however, the maximum number of wheels was fixed at seven, the odd wheel being mounted on the centerline of the hull, either amidships or astern. By the 1200s, the Chinese were also manufacturing true explosive bombs, the most lethal of which were called “thunder-crash bombs.” To fight the Song on their own terms, the Mongols built their own paddleboat fleet, with which they opened the way from the Han River to the Yangzi and Lin’an, which Qubilai Khan’s forces took in March 1276. Although the emperor surrendered, Song loyalists spirited two of his young sons to safety first in Fuzhou and then in Guangzhou. The arrival of a Yuan fleet at the Pearl River i
n 1279 forced the Song diehards to sea yet again; and to avoid the boy emperor’s capture, it is said, his tutor took him in his arms and leaped into the sea.

  The vigorous pursuit of the last remnants of Song resistance was a foretaste of Qubilai’s increasingly bold maritime aspirations. Although he was a native of Central Asia and established his capital at Dadu to be nearer the Mongol heartland, no Chinese ruler has ever promoted maritime activity—canal building, coastal trade, and four major overseas expeditions—with the enthusiasm shown by the grandson of Chinggis Khan and founder of the Yuan Dynasty. If the Southern Song had taken to the sea out of necessity, Qubilai seems to have viewed the ocean as an extension of the steppe. The Mongols provided the initiative for these expansionist campaigns, but these were feasible thanks to the Song legacy of shipbuilding, navigation, and commercial organization. The sheer number of vessels available to the Yuan was staggering. In 1257, more than nineteen thousand ships were registered in the prefectures of Mingzhou, Wenzhou, and Taizhou alone, and a fifth of them had a beam of more than three meters. When the Yuan captured Fujian, an estimated seven thousand vessels were operating on the coast and nearly twice that number on the rivers. The defeat of the Song freed huge numbers of these for a variety of uses, but the Yuan embarked on an ambitious construction program of their own and in 1273 ordered two thousand ships from yards around the country. A decade later, the strain on timber resources moved the Buddhist monk Duanhong to despair: “Tens of thousand trees were chopped down [for shipbuilding]; sorrow stroke green mountains.” While the problem of deforestation antedated the Yuan, it has never been reversed in the eight centuries since. By the late fourteenth century, timber shortages made it difficult to sustain domestic shipbuilding operations and during the Ming and Qing Dynasties many merchants contracted for vessels in Siam (Thailand) and on Borneo, where the cost of building ships could be 40 to 70 percent less than in China.

  Yuan officials continued Song efforts to improve navigation through dredging channels, building warehouses, docks, and anchorages, erecting lighthouses and beacons, and developing safer shipping routes. The division of China between the Jurchen Jin and Southern Song had been accompanied by a rise in domestic grain smuggling along the coast between the Yangzi delta and the Shandong Peninsula. With the coming of the new dynasty, the smugglers—many of whom backed the Yuan from the start—began working for the state transporting grain around the Shandong Peninsula and across the Bo Hai to Dadu’s port at Tianjin (then called Zhigu). The time-honored practice of hugging the treacherous sandbanked coast proved costly in ships, time, lives, and money until 1293, when the former pirates Zhu Jing and Zhang Xuan pioneered a deep-sea route that gave a wide berth to the peninsula, and they began to sail earlier in the season. What had been a journey of a month or more with horrendous losses became a journey of about ten days with overall losses of a sustainable one percent. At its height in the early fourteenth century, the sea transportation service regularly carried more than two million piculs of rice a year, the record being three and a half million piculs in 1329, the last year for which records survive.

  Development of this route was necessitated by Qubilai’s establishment of his capital at Dadu, which for the time being was beyond the reach of the Grand Canal. In 1194, the Yellow River had jumped its banks west of Kaifeng to flow into the Huai River and, ultimately, the Yangzi. The main branch of the Yellow River would not reach the sea north of the Shandong Peninsula again until 1855. The redirection of the river’s main channel led to delays in completing the canals that make up the northern end of the Grand Canal. The final section, the Huitong Canal, opened in the 1320s, but the sea route remained the preferred way of shipping grain until 1417, when the Huitong was widened enough that all grain bound for the northern capital could be transported efficiently via inland waters.

  The rapid expansion of long-distance sea trade led to corresponding advances in navigational practice, including the development of an early form of the compass. The Chinese had long known about the properties of a magnetized needle, but their use of the “south pointer” was for centuries limited to geomancy and feng shui. The first accounts of the compass being used for shipboard navigation comes from a work written in 1117 by Zhu Yu, the son of a port official and governor of Guangzhou, a connection that gave the author entrée into the seamen’s world. In the course of describing overseas shipping, Zhu touches briefly on navigational practice: “The ship’s pilots are acquainted with the configuration of the coasts; at night they steer by the stars, and in the day-time by the sun.” Like mariners in the shoal waters of northwest Europe, they used a sounding lead, which they employed in the same way: “They also use a line a hundred feet long with a hook at the end, which they let down to take samples of mud from the sea-bottom; by its [appearance and] smell they can determine their whereabouts.” Zhu also remarks that “In dark weather they look at the south-pointing needle.”

  The Chinese compass consisted of a needle pierced through the stem of a rush so that it would float in a bowl of water. In the “dry compass” devised in the Mediterranean and Europe in the thirteenth century, and introduced into Asia by European mariners in the 1500s, the needle is mounted on a pivot and calibrated to a compass card. The earliest reference to a compass in the Indian Ocean dates to 1232, but compasses east of Suez were of the Chinese wet compass type. Common to both eastern and western traditions, however, is the fact that the compass was used as a substitute for celestial navigation in inclement weather, and that it allowed for a longer sailing season. “During the night it is often not possible to stop [because of wind or current drift], so the pilot has to steer by the stars and the Great Bear. If the night is overcast then he uses the south-pointing needle to determine the south and north.” So wrote the author of an Illustrated Record of an Embassy to Korea in 1124. When published thirty years later, this work included what is believed to be the world’s first printed map. By the fourteenth century, the Chinese were producing “seaway compass charts” showing compass courses and distances. The question of whether knowledge of the compass spread from China to the Mediterranean and Europe has generated more heat than light, but even if the rudiments of the compass originated elsewhere, the refinements that led to the practical dry-card compass developed independently in the west.

  The Yuan Dynasty made few changes to their predecessors’ maritime revenue-collection system. They increased the number of ports with a shibosi to seven and officials went into business themselves by lending ships and capital to foreign merchants and splitting the profits with them seventy-thirty, the government taking the larger share. This practice was implemented during a brief ban on private overseas trade in the 1280s (there was another in the 1310s), but it continued even after the ban’s repeal. In the 1290s, the emperor issued twenty-one edicts governing the conduct of foreign trade. Most dealt with the duties on imports (one-fifteenth on coarse goods, 10 percent on fine), penalties for evading taxes, and smuggling, particularly by Buddhist, Daoist, Nestorian, and Muslim clergy who “in many cases were smuggling commoners who went abroad to trade and secretly sought to avoid the percentage levies.” There were regulations about the arming of merchants, the specific forms that captains needed for their ships and their crew, and which foreign ports ships could visit. The edicts also prohibited trafficking in certain cargoes, partly out of concern for the stability of the economy and partly for strategic considerations: “No gold, silver, copper, iron, men, or women were to be sold to foreign countries.”

  None of these restrictions had a deleterious effect on China’s maritime sector or the imperial purse. The Venetian merchant-author Marco Polo visited Quanzhou in the 1270s and noted “The splendid city of Zaiton [Quanzhou] is the port for all the ships that arrive from India laden with costly wares and precious stones of great price and big pearls of fine quality.” Comparing Quanzhou with the largest port most of his audience would have known, he continued, “And I assure you that for one spice ship that goes to Alexandria or el
sewhere to pick up pepper for export to Christendom, Zaiton is visited by a hundred. For you must know that it is one of the two ports in the world with the biggest flow of merchandise.” The cost of freight and duties came to half the value of what merchants imported, “yet from the half that falls to their share they make such a profit that they ask nothing better than to return with another cargo. So you may readily believe that [Quanzhou’s] contribution to Qubilai Khan’s treasury is no small one.” Given the profits of sea trade, it is no wonder that the Great Khan encouraged it.

  Yuan Campaigns Against Japan and Java

  As always, China’s maritime trade was oriented primarily to the south, but the Yuan took a renewed interest in Japan. Korea’s withdrawal from the sea had resulted in limited exchanges between southern Korea and Japan from the early eleventh century, and it fell to Song merchants to revive Japan’s foreign trade. At the end of the twelfth century Japan underwent a major transformation that resulted in the ascendancy of the warrior class that would dominate Japanese society until the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s. Warfare had been endemic for much of the century, but the final showdown came in the Genpei War (1180–85), a succession struggle that pitted the Taira (Heike) clan of central Honshu against the Minamoto (Genji), whose capital was to the east at Kamakura, near modern Tokyo.

  The conflict ended at the naval battle of Dan-no-ura, fought in the Strait of Shimonoseki between Kyushu and Honshu at the western end of the Inland Sea. According to The Tales of the Heike, a fourteenth-century compilation of stories about the war, “The Genji had more than three thousand boats; the Heike, only a few more than a thousand, including a few large Chinese-type vessels.” The remainder were small craft and a local official is said to have switched sides “with all the men under his command—a total of more than two thousand—and had them board around two hundred boats.” The battle ended with the Genji warriors “boarding the Heike boats, shooting dead the sailors and helmsmen with their arrows or cutting them down with their swords.” The eight-year-old emperor is said to have drowned when his grandmother “took him in her arms. Comforting him, she said, ‘There’s another capital down there beneath the waves!’ So they plunged to the bottom of the thousand-fathom sea.” The rout of the Taira clan was absolute, but according to one conjecture, some survivors—including perhaps the emperor last seen leaping into the sea—may have fled overseas to the Ryukyu Islands. This theory is suggested by the abundance of Taira names and Heian court idioms in the Ryukyuan language and the sudden growth of Ryukyuan sea trade in this period, two primary exports being sulfur for China’s fledgling gunpowder industry and horses.