1492

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  Europeans did not know much about China, but they knew it was the biggest, richest market, the most productive economy, and the most powerful empire in the world. Beyond that, their detailed information was all out-of-date. Until about a hundred years before, contact with China had been fairly extensive. Merchants and missionaries shuttled back and forth along the Silk Roads that crossed the mountains and deserts of central Asia, spreading commodities and ideas through the continent and the world. For a while, in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, it had even been possible to take a fast-track route on horseback across the Eurasian steppe—the great, arid, windswept prairie that arcs from the Hungarian plain, almost without interruption, across Mongolia to the Gobi and the threshold of China. Mongol imperialists united the entire route, conquered China, policed the Silk Roads, and facilitated communications throughout the breadth of the lands they ruled.

  But in 1368 a revolution in China expelled the heirs of the Mongols and ruptured the roads. The last recorded European mission to China had made its way through in 1390. Since then, silence had enshrouded the distant empire. The only detailed description still available in Europe was even more antiquated—compiled toward the end of the thirteenth century by Marco Polo. As we have seen, Columbus and his contemporaries still thought of the emperor of China as the Great Khan—a Mongol title no Chinese ruler had borne since the revolution of 1368. Much as they longed for Chinese goods, they knew virtually nothing—yet—of porcelain or tea, the Chinese exports that would transform European taste in succeeding centuries.

  They were right, however, about one thing: contact with China could provide unprecedented opportunities for Europeans to get rich. Ever since Roman times, Europeans had longed to break into the world’s wealthiest arena of exchange but had always labored under apparently insuperable disadvantages. Even when they could get to China, or to the other fabulously opulent markets around the Indian Ocean and on the shores of maritime Asia, they had nothing to sell. Their remote, peripheral corner of Eurasia was too poor. As a fourteenth-century Italian guide to the China trade complained, European merchants bound for China had to take silver with them—at the risk of impoverishing Europe further by draining bullion eastward—because the Chinese would accept nothing else. At the frontier, they had to hand the silver over to imperial customs officials and accept paper money in exchange. This, for the backward Europeans, was a novelty that demanded explanation and reassurance.

  By the fifteenth century, although Europeans did not yet know it, changes in the economic situation in China, and in East Asia generally, were creating new opportunities, for silver was rising spectacularly in value in China relative to other Asian markets as people’s confidence in paper and copper currency wavered. Anyone who could shift silver from India and Japan, where it was relative cheap, to China, where it could be exchanged for gold or goods on favorable terms, stood to make a fortune. If Europeans could get their ships to Eastern ports, they could profit from the differentials.

  These new circumstances created conditions in which the history of the world could unfold in new, unprecedented ways. Columbus’s scheme for reaching China was part of a potentially world-transforming outreach that would, eventually, put the economies of East and West in touch and integrate them into a single, global system. Access to Eastern markets would unlock riches Westerners had formerly only dreamed of and enable them to begin to catch up with the richer economies and more powerful states that, previously, had dominated the world.

  Columbus, however, never made it to China. On his first voyage, he stumbled on Caribbean islands where he warped the locals’ name, “Caniba,” into “people of the khan” and fantasized about his presumed proximity to the Orient. When he got home, engravers illustrated his reports of the poor, naked people he encountered with pictures of Chinese traders doing business offshore. When Columbus returned in 1493, he sailed around part of Cuba and made his crew swear that it was no island but a promontory of the Chinese mainland. On subsequent voyages, though he realized he was in “another world,” he continued to hope that China was nearby—through an undiscovered strait, or around some cape that lay just beyond his reach.

  If he had got to his objective, what would he have found?

  China was the nearest thing to a global superpower the world then knew: bigger and richer than all its possible competitors combined. The disparity of population was decisive. The statistics accumulated at the time were fragmentary and delusive, as millions of people successfully concealed themselves from the state in order to avoid taxes and forced labor. China had the most sophisticated census-making methods in the world, but the figure of less than sixty million people reported by the empire’s statisticians in 1491 is certainly a serious underestimate. China had perhaps one hundred million people, whereas the whole of Europe mustered only about half that number. The size of the market and the scale of production matched the level of population. China’s giant economy dwarfed that of every other state in the world. The empire’s huge surplus of wealth distorted the economies of all the lands that looked to China to generate trade, from Europe, across Asia and the Indian Ocean, to Japan. China produced so much of everything that there was little demand for imported goods. The luxuries China did import, however, especially spices, aromatics, silver, and (more problematically) the warhorses of which China could never get enough, commanded prices that left buyers from elsewhere in the world marginalized.

  A snapshot view of China at the time is available—but not, of course, from Western sources. A Korean official shipwrecked on the Chinese coast in 1488, and detained in the country while state officials investigated his status, wrote up his experiences and observations. Contemporaries in Korea disbelieved his account, which he was obliged to defend at court in 1492. His education in the Confucian classics and admiration for Chinese culture certainly influenced him. Still, the diary Ch’oe Pu compiled on his long journey by canal from the coast to the capital, and back to Korea by road, is a unique and vivid record by a keen observer, describing—as a sixteenth-century editor put it—“the ever-changing ocean, mountains, rivers, products, people, and customs all along the way.” 3 The Chinese, he found, recognized Korea as “a land of protocol and morality” 4—a land like theirs, producing people they could deal with. But the unfamiliarity of strangers evoked surprise and suspicion. In almost every encounter Ch’oe Pu had, his hosts began by thinking evil of him: he was, they assumed, a Japanese pirate or a foreign spy. At times during his struggles to prove his identity, “it would have been easier to die at sea.” 5 He clearly did not speak Chinese, but he made himself understood by writing everything down in the characters the Korean language had borrowed from China. Even learned interlocutors found his strangeness puzzling. “Why,” asked one of them in a typical conversation, “when your carriages have the same axle-width and your books the same writings as those of China, is your speech not the same?” 6

  Even so, Ch’oe Pu was disposed to admire China and found plenty to justify his admiration. He encountered robbers mild enough to return his saddle. When he displayed his certificates, officials showed due respect for the high place he had attained in Korea’s civil-service examinations.7 As his party trekked northward from the remote spot on the Chekiang coast where his ship came to grief, Chinese officials hustled and hurried them along with extraordinary efficiency, even a touch of officiousness. In eight sedan chairs at first, and then by boat along China’s great network of rivers and canals, with a military escort, they struggled through, regardless of weather. “The laws of China are strict,” the guard commander told Ch’oe Pu, who wanted to halt in the teeth of a storm. “If there is the slightest delay, we will be punished”—and he was right. When they arrived at Hangchow, after less than a fortnight on the road and with only one day’s rest, his zeal was rewarded with a flogging for having made poor time. It was unjust, but it was law. In China, laws served as deterrents, to fulfill a Confucian principle: punishments should be so severely deterrent tha
t they need never be enforced.

  Ch’oe Pu approved of this principle, and, in general, of the well-regulated nature of the state. Western historians have long engaged in pointless conflict in an attempt to identify the “first modern state”—some locating it in England, others in France or the Spanish empire, or the Netherlands or even Lithuania. China had already exhibited the key characteristics for centuries: internal sovereignty; central government; centrally appointed administrators; a uniform system of administration; uniform laws, currency, weights, and measures; rapid internal communications; and a bureaucracy, chosen by merit, that made it unnecessary to devolve power locally or regionally into aristocratic hands. Candidates for provincial magistracies—the officials who represented the emperor and dispensed justice, enforced law, collected taxes, and supervised security measures—were selected by examination in knowledge of the Confucian classics, writing essays that tested their powers of marshaling arguments for and against various propositions and choosing between them on moral and practical grounds. In the late fifteenth century, officials had to send in self-evaluations every six years, and the lower ranks were winnowed by inspection by their superiors, who collected complaints from any subject who claimed to have been unfairly treated.

  Above all, the wealth of China impressed Ch’oe Pu. Even in the jungly, malarial region he first had to cross, he found that “the people were thriving and the houses splendid.” His description of Suzhou exudes the envy of a goggle-eyed window-shopper, awed by “all the treasures of the land and sea, such as thin silks, gauzes, gold, silver, jewels, crafts, arts, and great and rich merchants.” Markets multiplied like stars; ships billowed like clouds. Life was luxurious. South of the Yangtze, where “towers look out on other towers, and boats ply stem to stern,” Ch’oe Pu found incomparable wealth and a model civilization, where “even village children, ferrymen, and sailors can read.”8 Parts of the north and west of the country seemed less prosperous, with many low, thatched dwellings and thinner settlement. To Ch’oe Pu’s prejudiced eyes, there was more barbarian influence in those zones, detectable in the violent dispositions of some of the inhabitants. Overall, however, China fulfilled the visitor’s hopes: his picture is of a land prospering under the benign rule of an altruistic Confucian elite.

  He was right about the power of the bureaucracy. China was already a modern state, with an official class recruited—in theory—from all ranks of society, on merit tested by examination in knowledge of the Confucian classics. The emperor could not do without them. At intervals in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, emperors tried to dispense with them, ignore them, or replace them with rival elites: eunuch courtiers, for instance; army top brass; or Buddhist or Taoist clergy. But the mandarins won every contest for power. Sometimes they went on strike; sometimes they intimidated emperors with their sheer intellectual superiority. They emerged from every crisis with a reinforced sense of their own indispensability.

  Despite the power of the bureaucracy, other sources show that the state was not easily able to tax China’s wealth efficiently or turn that wealth into effective military power. No province ever fulfilled its tax quota. In the late fifteenth century, some provinces could not raise enough revenue to pay their garrisons. From 1490 a series of famines struck the tea-producing region of Xenzi, and the farmers devoted their wares to the purchase of grain. By the 1490s, many military units were at less than 15 percent of their nominal strength. While the army wilted for lack of money, shortage of horses rendered it relatively immobile.

  By long-standing custom, the state traded tea for horses with herdsmen in central Asia. The finest specimens came from beyond the deserts and mountains, from the land of Fergana, now spread across Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan beyond the deserts and mountains. Meanwhile, wars in central Asia for control of Fergana interrupted the horse trade and threatened the security of China itself. In 1492 the Chinese thought they had brokered peace between the warring states, but the Chinese-nominated candidate for Fergana’s disputed throne was kidnapped en route to take up his position. Laboriously, China had to muster strength for a punitive expedition. By 1497 they had installed their candidate, but the warfare rumbled on, and China’s capacity for effective intervention slowly dwindled.

  On the southern frontier, too, Ming imperialism faltered: early in the history of the dynasty, China had not hesitated to intervene in the politics of southeastern Asian states to ensure that power stayed in the hands of regimes the Chinese approved of. But in the 1480s, when the ruler of Vietnam launched an effort to turn Southeast Asia into an empire of his own, China did no more than issue a mild admonition to uphold Confucian values, respect countries that paid tribute to China, care for his own people, and “act righteously.” Military show played an important role in compensating for real strength. Ch’oe Pu was treated to “thousands of arms and shields” lining the walls of Yueh-ch’i (Xunjiang) with “masses of pennants” and the rumble of gongs and drums.9

  Reading between the lines, moreover, we see that the political system Ch’oe Pu described had glaring imperfections. On the face of it, China looked like an exemplary modern state, with a bureaucracy and judiciary selected by merit, qualified by education and examination, and appointed and salaried by the government. In practice, there was never enough money to finance the system. The imperial family was a terrible burden on the exchequer. Every living descendant of the founder of the dynasty, by wives and official concubines who were often numerous, lived on a pension from the state, and the first Ming emperor had twenty-six sons. The numbers of imperial dependants grew exponentially. One prince had ninety-four children. Officials were paid in grain, and by the time shortfalls and conversion costs turned their appropriations into cash, they rarely received more than a tiny proportion—sometimes as little as 5 percent of their nominal entitlement. Not that the salaries were fixed at generous rates anyway. In practice, officials had to be rich or corrupt or both. Ch’oe Pu sometimes had to bribe his way out of police custody. His diary shows how officials manipulated the reports they transmitted to court in order to spare the emperor from bad news. Data on piracy, banditry, and rural unrest and bureaucratic negligence were all edited out of documents the Korean saw compiled. Some officials deliberately misrepresented castaways as Japanese pirates in order to get the bounty money.

  So the Chinese ideal of keeping political power out of the hands of the rich was unrealized in practice. Moreover, although the Confucian elite was supposedly a meritocracy, it had many of the pockmarks with which vices scar aristocracies. The examination system ensured that officials shared the same formation and outlook. The fact that most of them had to ascend through the same categories of service to the throne gave them a strong esprit de corps. They were united in veneration of Confucian values. They shared a conviction that the conduct of state business was their privilege as well as their responsibility. They joined in defense of their traditional social and economic advantages, which the emperors periodically tried to limit—especially exemption for themselves and their families from some forms of taxation. They formed a class, ten thousand strong, with a remarkably uniform set of self-perceptions and a profound jealousy of any outsiders who presumed to contend for power. They particularly resented the religious minorities who contended for power and influence at court: Buddhists, whom they suspected of amassing wealth in order to seize power, and Taoists, whose ancient religion they despised as magical mumbo-jumbo.

  There were philosophical issues at stake: For Confucians, the gods were a remote and unintrusive influence, as long as the emperor performed the rites that supposedly kept heaven and earth in harmony. Buddhists and Taoists did not believe that the universe was so easily manageable, struggling for virtue and even for survival against a natural world that teemed with contentious spirits. Islam, which had arrived in China soon after the death of the prophet Muhammad, was still numerically insignificant, but it had a relatively large following among the court eunuchs. Eunuchs rivaled the bureauc
ratic mandarins for powerful posts at court, because they were dependants of the emperor and had none of the conflicts of interest that posterity brings.

  Although eunuchs, Buddhists, and Taoists remained at loggerheads with the Confucian establishment, other parts of the elite were collaborating in exceptional ways. In the past, merchants and mandarins had often been at odds because of the scholars’ contempt for commercial values. Now, however, there were signs of rapprochement. Strictly speaking, merchants were not allowed commemorative inscriptions on their tombs, because they constituted the lowest class of society, below peasants and artisans. “The gentry,” according to a maxim of the early sixteenth century, “know how to orient themselves to study, the peasantry know to devote themselves to agriculture, and the merchants, while adept at trading, do not go beyond their station.” 10

  But wealth circumvents conventions, as the case of Wang Zheng shows. He was one of the richest men in China, who inherited a fortune and made another of his own in the grain business. He had the privilege of a long and adulatory—but still informative—epitaph when he died, seventy years old, in 1495. To designate him as a merchant would be opprobrious, so he went down as “unemployed scholar,” since he had studious habits from childhood. “His most cherished matters of heart,” said the tombstone, “were ancient and contemporary calligraphy and paintings in ink.” Though he claimed to detest his calling, and to have deserted it when he could for altruistic duties—philanthropic work or official employment as a magistrate’s clerk—he was deft enough in business to acquire an art collection in which “the top paintings were truly priceless.” His aspirations were focused on his sons, all of whom took civil-service examinations and pursued official careers.11 Similar cases are known among salt merchants in Yangzhou. When one of the most successful of them, Fan Yenfu, retired in the mid-1490s, local officials presented him with a collection of scholarly writings—a sign of equality of eminence in the values that they all thought stamped the elite.