Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Once again there were advantages to backwardness, and the struggle steadily pulled the West’s center of gravity toward the Atlantic. The cities of northern Italy had long been the most developed part of Europe, but now discovered a disadvantage of forwardness: glorious city-states such as Milan and Venice were too rich and powerful to be bullied into any Italian national state, but not rich or powerful enough to stand alone against genuine national states such as France and Spain. Writers such as Machiavelli rejoiced in this liberty, but its price became crystal clear when a French army invaded Italy in 1494. Italian war-making had declined, as Machiavelli himself conceded, “into such a state of decay that wars were commenced without fear, continued without danger, and concluded without loss.” A few dozen up-to-date French cannons now blew away everything in their path. It took them just eight hours to smash the great stone castle of Monte San Giovanni, killing seven hundred Italians for the loss of ten Frenchmen. Italian cities could not begin to compete with the tax revenues of big states such as France. By 1500 the Western core was being reordered from its Atlantic fringe, and war was leading the way.

  The Eastern core, by contrast, was reordered from its ancient center in China, and commerce and diplomacy ultimately led the way, even though the rise of new empires began in bloodshed as grim as anything in the West. Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty that reunited China, had been born into poverty in 1328 as Mongol power was falling apart. His parents—migrant laborers on the run from tax collectors—sold four of his brothers and sisters because they could not feed them, and abandoned Yuanzhang, their youngest, with a Buddhist grandfather. The old man filled the boy’s head with the messianic visions of the Red Turbans, one of many resistance movements fighting Mongol rule. The end was nigh, the old man insisted, and the Buddha would soon return from Paradise to smite the wicked. Instead, in the locust-and drought-ravaged summer of 1344, disease—quite likely the Black Death—carried off Yuanzhang’s whole family.

  The teenager attached himself to a Buddhist monastery as a servant, but the monks could barely feed themselves and sent him out to beg or steal for his keep. After wandering southern China’s back roads for three or four years he returned to the monastery just in time to see it burned to the ground in the vast, roiling civil wars that accompanied the collapse of Mongol rule. With nowhere else to go, he joined the other monks in hanging around the smoking ruins, starving.

  Yuanzhang was an alarming-looking youth, tall, ugly, lantern-jawed, and pockmarked. But he was also smart, tough, and (thanks to the monks) literate; the kind of man, in short, that any bandit would want in his gang. Recruited by a band of Red Turbans as they passed through the neighborhood, he impressed the other thugs and visionaries, married the chief’s daughter, and eventually took over the gang.

  In a dozen years of grinding warfare Yuanzhang turned his cutthroat crew into a disciplined army and drove the other rebels from the Yangzi Valley. Just as important, he distanced himself from the Red Turbans’ wilder prophecies and organized a bureaucracy that could run an empire. In January 1368, just shy of his fortieth birthday, he renamed himself Hongwu (“Vast Military Power”) and proclaimed the creation of a Ming (“Brilliant”) dynasty.

  Hongwu’s official pronouncements make it sound as if his whole adult life was a reaction against his terrible, rootless, violent youth. He promoted an image of China as a bucolic paradise of stable, peaceful villages, where virtuous elders supervised self-sufficient farmers, traders dealt only in goods that could not be made locally, and—unlike Hongwu’s own family—no one moved around. Hongwu claimed that few people needed to travel more than eight miles from home, and that covering more than thirty-five miles without permission should earn a whipping. Fearing that commerce and coinage would corrode stable relationships, three times he passed laws restricting trade with foreigners to government-approved dealers and even prohibited foreign perfumes lest they seduce the Chinese into illicit exchanges. By 1452 his successors had renewed his laws three more times and had four times banned silver coins out of fear they would make unnecessary commerce too easy.

  “For thirty-one years I labored to discharge Heaven’s mandate,” Hongwu claimed in his will, “tormented by worries and fears, without relaxing for a day.” We have to wonder, though, how much of Hongwu’s struggle was just in his mind. Hongwu was eager to appear—in contrast to his Mongol predecessors—as an ideal Confucian ruler, but never actually banned foreign trade. His son Yongle even expanded it, assiduously importing Korean virgins for sex (because, he claimed, they were good for his health). But Ming monarchs did insist on keeping trade in official hands. This, they repeatedly announced, protected the (theoretically) stable social order and allowed foreigners to show due deference. “I do not care for foreign things,” one ruler explained. “I accept them because they come from far away and show the sincerity of distant peoples.” The fact that “tribute” (as the court called trade beyond the borders) was filling the imperial coffers was not worth mentioning.

  Despite all the talk, trade flourished. In 1488 a shipwrecked Korean observed that “foreign ships stand as thick as the teeth of a comb” in Hangzhou harbor. Underwater archaeologists have found that merchant ships were getting bigger, and the fact that the emperors felt compelled to renew their laws about illicit trade quite as often as they did strongly suggests that people were ignoring them.

  The effects of the commercial boom were far-reaching. Peasant incomes rose once more, families grew, and farmers streamed from their villages to open new lands or work in cities. Local worthies repaired roads, bridges, and canals after the violence of the preceding centuries, merchants carried food along them, and people everywhere rushed to market, selling what they could produce cheaply and buying everything else. By 1487 an official simply took it for granted that people “convert grain into cash, then convert cash into clothing, food, and daily necessities … there aren’t any people throughout the realm of whom this is not true.”

  Commerce was interlinking the enlarged Eastern core just as much as war interlinked the states of the West. Population, agriculture, and finance all expanded rapidly in fourteenth-century Japan, and despite the Ming restrictions, trade with China steadily grew. Dealings with Southeast Asia were even more important: revenues from trade funded the rise of states such as Majapahit on Java, which dominated the spice business. Many local rulers came to depend on Chinese support for their thrones.

  None of this required the kind of relentless violence that cursed the West, and other than a disastrous attempt to prop up a friendly regime in Vietnam, early Ming monarchs limited their fighting to the steppe frontier. The Mongols remained the only real threat to the dynasty. Had Tamerlane not died in 1405 he might well have overthrown the Ming, and in 1449 other Mongol clans actually captured an emperor. To pursue their steppe wars, though, the Ming felt that they needed not advanced guns but conventional armies with vast supply trains. When Yongle invaded the steppes in 1422, for instance, he took 340,000 donkeys, 117,000 carts, and 235,000 cart pullers to drag the twenty thousand tons of grain his army would eat.

  Yongle walked softly but carried a big stick. In 1405 he announced that he was sending ambassadors “to the various foreign countries in the Western [Indian] Ocean to read out the imperial commands and to bestow rewards,” enmeshing commerce in a web of diplomacy, but along with them he also sent the biggest fleet the world had ever seen. To build it he summoned 25,000 craftsmen to add vast new dockyards to his capital at Nanjing. Lumberjacks in Sichuan picked out the best fir trees for masts, elm and cedar for hulls, and oak for tillers, then clear-cut entire forests and floated them down the Yangzi to the shipwrights. Laborers built giant dry docks, hundreds of feet long, to work on the great vessels. No detail was overlooked; even the iron nails got a special waterproof coat.

  This was no war fleet, but it was designed for shock and awe. At its heart were the biggest wooden ships of all time, perhaps 250 feet long and displacing two thousand tons of ocean; and at it
s head was history’s biggest admiral, the Muslim eunuch Zheng He, said to have been seven feet tall and sixty inches around the belly (in some accounts, nine feet tall and ninety inches in girth).*

  More than three hundred vessels set sail, carrying 27,870 men. The plan was to descend on the wealthy cities around the Indian Ocean, whose princes, waking up to find the seas outside their palace windows filled with Chinese sails, would hand over huge “tribute” payments, channeling trade through official channels. But it was also a grand adventure: the sailors seem to have felt they were plunging into a twilight zone, where anything was possible. In Sri Lanka (Figure 8.7) local Muslims showed them the biblical Adam’s footprints, while in Vietnam sailors thought they had to dodge the “corpse-head barbarian,” a kind of banshee that was

  really a woman belonging to a human family, her only peculiarity being that her eyes have no pupils; at night, when she is sleeping, her head flies away and eats the tapering feces of human infants; the infant, affected by the evil influence which invades its abdomen, inevitably dies; and the flying head returns and unites with its body, just as it was before. If people know of this and wait until the moment the head flies away, and then remove the body to another place, the returning head cannot unite with the body, and then the woman dies.

  Other than the threats in their own imaginations, though, the sailors encountered few dangers. The seven Treasure Fleets dispatched between 1405 and 1433 were the grandest projections of state power the world had seen. They did have to fight three times to secure the Straits of Malacca, then as now the world’s busiest waterway and then as now infested by pirates, but otherwise used force only when tricked into taking sides in a Sri Lankan civil war. Chinese sailors walked the streets of Mogadishu, which did not impress them (“If one’s eyes wander one meets only sighs and sulky glances,” one of Zheng’s officers wrote; “Desolation, the entire country nothing but hills!”), and Mecca, which did (even if another officer inexplicably thought Islam’s holiest shrine looked like a pagoda).

  The Treasure Fleets had sailed south and west a good nine thousand miles, but some researchers think this was just the beginning. With their compasses and charts, tankers full of drinking water, and huge stores of food, Zheng’s ships could have gone anywhere they wanted; and that, the former submarine captain Gavin Menzies claims in his bestselling book 1421: The Year China Discovered America, is exactly what they did. Plunging into the uncharted Pacific Ocean, Menzies says, Zheng’s lieutenant Zhou Man made landfall in Oregon in summer 1423, then sailed down America’s west coast. Menzies suggests that despite losing a ship in San Francisco Bay, Zhou persevered, putting in on the Mexican coast and getting all the way to Peru before picking up winds to head back across the Pacific. In October 1423, after a four-month detour, Zhou was safely back in Nanjing.

  Figure 8.7. The fifteenth-century world as seen from China, showing the Ming diplomatic offensive in the Indian Ocean (solid line) and the route Chinese ships could have taken to reach the New World (broken line)

  Conventional historians, Menzies suggests, have overlooked Zhou’s feats (as well as even more astonishing voyages that took Zheng’s subordinates to the Atlantic Ocean, the North Pole, Antarctica, Australia, and Italy) because Zheng’s official records disappeared in the fifteenth century; and because few historians have Menzies’s practical knowledge of navigation, they have failed to understand the clues hidden in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century maps.

  Historians, however, remain unmoved. Menzies, they concede, is quite right that Zheng’s logbooks are lost; but why, the historians ask, does the enormous mass of surviving Ming dynasty literature—including not one but two eyewitness accounts of Zheng’s voyages—never mention any of these discoveries? How, they wonder, did fifteenth-century ships maintain the speeds Menzies’s theory requires? How did Zheng’s sailors map the world’s coasts the way Menzies claims they did? And why does the actual evidence Menzies musters for Chinese globe-trotting hold up so poorly to scholarly scrutiny?

  I have to admit that I am on the side of skeptics; to my mind Menzies’s 1421 is on a par with von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? But like von Däniken’s speculations—or, for that matter, like the Albert-in-Beijing scenario in the introduction to this book—1421 has the merit of forcing us to ask why things didn’t happen this way. It is a critical question, because if they had happened like Menzies says, the West might well not now rule.

  ZHENG IN TENOCHTITLÁN

  Tenochtitlán, August 13, 1431. Zheng He’s head hurt. He was too old for this. And too big. All day he had been sending messengers into the burning city, demanding that his allies stop massacring the Aztecs, but as the sun set through the smoke he had given up. After all, he tried to tell himself, he could not be blamed for the slaughter. These people were savages, indecent, ignorant of the Way or of God. They barely even knew what bronze was. All they seemed to care about was hacking their enemies’ chests open with glassy black stones and tearing out their still-beating hearts.

  Zheng and his men of course knew the stories of China’s ancient Shang dynasty, whose unrighteous rulers so many thousands of years ago had sacrificed humans, and speculation was rife that here beyond the Eastern Ocean was a parallel world—stranger even than the land of corpse-head barbarians—where time had stood still and the Shang still ruled. Heaven, Zheng’s men speculated, must have assigned their expedition the role once played by the virtuous Zhou dynasty of antiquity; Zheng was a new King Wu, come to wrest heaven’s mandate from the wicked kings of this land and usher in a golden age.

  Zheng had not anticipated any of this when the emperor had ordered him into the Eastern Ocean. Sail beyond the Eastern Ocean to the Isles of Penglai, the Son of Heaven had said. Since the Qin First Emperor, men have sought these Isles, where immortals live in palaces of silver and gold, the birds and beasts are pure white, and magic herbs grow. Ten years ago Our admiral Zhou Man set foot in this magical place, and now We command you to bring Us the herbs of immortality.

  Zheng had seen more of the world than anyone who had ever lived. Nothing surprised him anymore, and if he had run into dragons and giant sharks, like the old stories said he would, he would simply have dealt with them. But what he most expected was exactly what he did find at first—nothing. After sailing up the coast of Japan, bestowing titles on its unruly warlords and receiving their tribute, his fleet had run with the wind for two months, chasing an endlessly receding blue horizon where sea and sky merged. And when his nearly mutinous men finally sighted land it was all trees, rain, and mountains, in its way worse even than Africa.

  It took more long weeks of drifting down the coast before they found natives who did not run away—natives who in fact sailed out to meet them, bringing marvelous foods they had never tasted before. These hospitable, half-naked barbarians had no herbs of immortality, although they did have pleasantly intoxicating herbs to smoke. Nor did they have palaces of silver and gold, though they seemed to be saying that these things lay inland. And so with just a few hundred men, a few dozen cavalry, and a smattering of native words, Zheng set off to find the immortals.

  Sometimes he had to fight, but firebombs had a salutary effect and the savages rarely stood their ground. Even after his powder ran low, horses and steel swords were almost as effective. His best weapons, though, were the natives themselves. They treated his men like gods, carrying their supplies and flocking to fight for them. Zheng could follow the wise tradition of using barbarians to fight barbarians, simply helping “his” barbarians, who called themselves the Purépecha, feed some ancient grudge they bore the neighboring barbarians, the Aztecs. Zheng could not work out what the grudge was, but no matter; step by step, the barbarians’ civil war brought him closer to the immortals.

  Only when Zheng joined his allies outside the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán did he finally admit that there were no immortals. Tenochtitlán was grand enough in its own way, with broad, straight streets and stepped pyramids, but there were no pure white animals, no silv
er-and-gold palaces, and certainly no herbs of eternal life. In fact, death was everywhere. Hideous boils and pustules had started carrying the barbarians off by their thousands, their bodies stinking even before they died. Zheng had seen plagues aplenty, but none like this. Barely one in a hundred of his own men caught it, surely a sign of God’s pleasure in Zheng’s task.

  Right up to the last moment it was touch-and-go what the pestilence would do first—leave Zheng’s barbarians too weak to storm Tenochtitlán or the enemy barbarians too weak to defend it. But once again Heaven decided in Zheng’s favor, and under cover of the last bombs and crossbow bolts his horsemen had led the charge across the causeways into Tenochtitlán. After a vicious but one-sided struggle in the streets—Aztec stone blades and cotton padding against Chinese steel swords and chain mail—resistance collapsed and the Purépecha set about torturing, raping, and stealing. Itzcoatl, the last Aztec king, they pierced with many darts as he fought at the gate of his palace, then threw him into a fire, carved out his heart before he died, and—horror of horrors—sliced off and ate chunks of his flesh.