Steven Solomon
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Even then, the Mongol Yuan dynasty had very limited success exploiting the rich potential of China’s water resources. Despite building an impressive naval fleet, Khubilai was unable to extend the Mongol’s military land prowess to sea power, as exemplified by the unsuccessful large naval invasions against Japan in 1281 and Java in 1293. He failed as well to wrest ocean shipping from the Muslims. Like his predecessors, Khubilai devoted high priority to enhancing the Grand Canal. He restored the connection to the Yellow River, disrupted by the course change of 1194, straightened the canal, and added a northern extension to his new capital, Beijing, on the extreme northeastern frontier. Food security and prosperity increased. Yet his engineers failed to make the crucial canal innovation necessary to supply sufficient water to enable food transport ships to readily pass year-round over the summit level of the hills leading to Beijing. This contributed to the Yuan dynasty’s downfall. Sea convoys temporarily mitigated the vulnerability, but finally piracy and rebellions in the south disrupted reliable food deliveries. The breakthrough “Heaven Well Lock” of the Grand Canal would be made during the restoration by the Ming dynasty, which finally toppled the despised, plague-weakened Mongolian Yuan after 1368.
Like many nativist restorations, the early Ming era was marked by a revival of old traditions, renewed economic and creative vigor, and xenophobia. Water engineering advances played a prominent role, above all in shipping, reconstruction of iron chain suspension bridges, and in major improvements of the Grand Canal. The Ming’s superior command of water resources, in fact, had played a decisive role in driving the Mongols back into the northern steppe. In 1371 the Ming navy, armed with iron prows and firearms, broke through the chains and bridge of boats defending the gorge at Chü-tang, the key to controlling Sichuan.
Once in power, Ming seagoing vessels, meanwhile, reopened a 500-mile-long transport supply line of food, clothing, and weaponry that enabled the reconquest of southern Manchuria. Once victory was secured, this sea convoy from the south, manned by some 80,000 men, rapidly became an indispensable lifeline to supplying rice to Beijing and the Ming’s northern defense lines. When the Ming relocated its own capital seat to Beijing in 1403, it simultaneously launched an enormous, state-run shipbuilding program to secure its control over the vital sea-lanes. Between 1403 and 1419, the shipyards near Nanking alone turned out 2,000 ships. The Ming fleet featured 3,800 ships by 1420, including 250 giant, long-distance “treasure ships,” some up to 440 feet long and 180 feet wide, with square linen sails on four to nine masts towering up to 90 feet high, capable of carrying 450 to 500 sailors and displacing up to 3,000 tons apiece—ten times more than the flagship Vasco da Gama sailed in his historic voyage around the Cape of Africa into the Indian Ocean at the end of the century. The ships incorporated all China’s advanced innovations, making it the supreme naval power of its time.
The Ming soon exercised their new sea power with a series of spectacular maritime expeditions that revealed China’s clear naval superiority in the great age of sail that was just dawning around the world. The most famous of these were the seven expeditions between 1405 and 1433 commanded by Admiral Cheng Ho, a Muslim and court eunuch devoted to the emperor. Cheng Ho’s first fleet had more than twice as many vessels as the Spanish Armada 150 years later, and included 62 giant treasure ships. It far outclassed the Arab dhows and Indian vessels it met in the Indian Ocean. In his seven voyages, Cheng Ho’s 27,000 man fleet easily established control in the Indian Ocean, over the Malacca Strait, Ceylon, and Calicut, India, and became an influential force at Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Cheng Ho also sailed up the Red Sea, where some Muslim crewmembers disembarked to undertake a pilgrimage to Mecca, and south along the East African coast as far as Malindi in modern Kenya, where he obtained a giraffe as a novelty present for the emperor in Beijing. In contrast with the European voyages in the Indian Ocean during the following century which were undertaken to secure treasure, profitable trade routes, and eventual military dominance, Cheng Ho’s primary mission was instead to win homage for the glory and power of the Ming rule. Few dared resist his demands of honor for the “son of heaven” in Beijing when his warships appeared off shore. Gifts were diplomatically bestowed upon those who acquiesced. Resisters were militarily disciplined—but not massacred, as they were by Europeans three-quarters of a century later. When a ruler in Ceylon showed reticence, for instance, Cheng Ho had him seized and shipped back to China’s Imperial Court for proper disciplining.
Then, in 1433, all the expeditions abruptly ended. Edicts from the emperor strictly limited Chinese seafaring and contacts with foreigners, the construction of oceangoing ships, and even the very existence of ships with more than two masts. Cheng Ho’s great warships were left to rot. Naval personnel were redeployed to smaller ships that plied the Grand Canal. Eschewing its power, China turned inward, away from the world.
It was a remarkable moment in history when a great power, possessing all the means to dominate all worlds it encountered and with vessels seaworthy enough to cross all the open oceans, including the Pacific to the New World, suddenly decided not to press its advantage. Historians have mused how world history would likely have been radically different had the Portuguese encountered a powerful Chinese empire controlling the key ports and sea-lanes of the Indian Ocean when they rounded the southern African cape in 1498 to establish the world-changing direct ocean link between Europe and the East. Indeed, one cannot help but further wonder whether Europe itself might have been subordinated and colonized if, instead of cutting off from the world, China had applied its maritime and industrial superiority to press southward around Africa, to master the Atlantic Ocean wind and current systems, and announced itself to Europe and the Americas before Columbus and da Gama ever hoisted sail.
Why did China suddenly turn inward? Xenophobia and angst about the revival of Mongol power in the north, where the modern Great Wall was being built, were motivating factors. But the world-history-shaping about-face in China’s geopolitical strategy was made possible, and also driven, by the successful completion in 1411 of the greatest of all Ming water engineering triumphs—the New Grand Canal. The dredging, repair, and expansion of the entire Grand Canal had become a top priority once the Ming government moved China’s capital back to Beijing in 1403. By providing the means to supply the northern frontier’s fortresses with food and munitions, the Grand Canal became the vital defensive artery for the entire country. The existing sea transport system was not reliable enough to provide the needed food supplies for the northern frontier due to piracy and the inherent natural uncertainties of sea travel. To move supplies along the inland Grand Canal extension to Beijing, however, the Ming had to devise one canal innovation that had stymied the Yuan engineers—how to supply enough water to enable perennial passage, even in the dry season, over the highest point in the hills. Often large cargo ships were sidelined for up to six months until water levels refilled with the seasonal rains. The breakthrough Heaven Well Lock was made in 1411. The new lock split the combined flow of two rivers and allowed managers to regulate seasonal water flows through a network of 15 locks. Heaven Well Locks were introduced along the length of the Grand Canal, which at a stroke became a reliable, all-season inland waterway and all-important supply line of the Ming dynasty. With the government employing 15,000 boats and some 160,000 transport workers, food supplies to the north rapidly quadrupled.
The sea transport supply route became redundant and was shut down. “With the re-construction of the Grand Canal to Peking (Beijing) in 1411, and the abolition of the main sea transport in 1415,” China historian Mark Elvin observes, “the navy became for the first time a luxury rather than a necessity.” After 1415, shipbuilding resources were diverted to the building of canal boats; after 1419 all ocean shipbuilding ceased. The decision to end Cheng Ho’s expeditions after 1433 and rely exclusively on China’s internal resources, therefore, was but another sequential step in the same inward political direction.
The comp
letion of the New Grand Canal proved to be the decisive turning point that enabled China to make its history-changing policy U-turn and cut off from the rest of the world. Moreover, by artificially creating a more self-contained, command-controlled, hydraulic environment, the New Grand Canal also enhanced the centralized authority of the Ming state. The emperor and his conservative neo-Confucian mandarins, in alliance with the landed agricultural interests, used this power to suppress the surviving private merchant class that had been such a vibrant component of the Sung golden age. This contrasted starkly with contemporaneous developments in Europe, where the absence of a unifying inland waterway system and the focus on transport by sea helped produce smaller states, whose competition led to the expansion of unregulated trade and free-market enterprise.
Although economic growth continued after the mid-fourteenth century, China’s inner dynamism and creative inventiveness gradually declined. This also helped illuminate the second historical enigma why it was that industrially advanced medieval China, possessing virtually all the requisite scientific know-how, did not make the next advances to create modern industrialism hundreds of a years before the decisive breakthroughs were finally achieved in the West. A key part of the answer, simply put, was that the reassertion of a strong, isolationist, centralized state inhibited the emergence of a market-driven economic engine that in eighteenth century England ultimately combined the profit motive with innovations in technology to make the breakthroughs that fueled the Industrial Revolution. Another part of China’s failure to achieve early industrial takeoff also stemmed from the chronic surfeit of cheap manpower resulting from the dense populations produced by its rice farming society. This diminished both the political and economic incentives to develop labor-saving technologies, such as the steam engine, whose catalytic synergies with iron were to drive the early industrial age.
China’s isolation lasted almost four centuries. Yet by trying to preserve its ways without engaging the innovative ferment of the outside world, it made itself vulnerable, once again, to external incursions. Just how far China had fallen behind technologically was stunningly demonstrated by mobile British steam gunboats during the first Opium War of 1839 to 1842, which forcibly reopened the helpless empire to the world. China’s foreign trade contacts at the time were restricted to a single port, Canton. Seeking a way to balance a lopsided trade pattern favoring Chinese exports to the West of tea and other luxuries, the British had gradually cultivated a Chinese market for opium grown in its Bengal, India, colony. As Chinese opium addiction, and with it opium imports, mounted, Chinese officials in 1839 resolved to interdict importation of the drug. At first they appealed to England to halt its opium exports. With unimpeachable logic, they noted in a letter to Queen Victoria that opium was banned in England and that the same principle should apply to China. To the British, however, moral or legal consistency was subordinate to its mercantile and colonial interests. The Chinese implorations were rebuffed. In an act reminiscent of America’s Boston Tea Party, Chinese officials seized some 30,000 chests of drugs from British and other European merchants and dumped many into the river. Britain’s response was to dispatch a fleet of cannon-armed, paddle-wheel, steam gunboats to the mouth of the Canton River in June 1840. To the amazement of the Chinese, the steamboats seemed to have the power to fly across the water, regardless of wind or current. It took only half a dozen skirmishes for Britain to win the Opium War. British steamers sailed up Chinese rivers, entering the Yangtze River to take Shanghai and then the strategic choke point where the Grand Canal met the great river. When Nanking was threatened in August 1842, China capitulated to Britain’s unequal and humiliating treaty terms. In addition to indemnities for merchant losses, the Chinese were compelled to cede in perpetuity to Britain the barren island of Hong Kong and to open five port cities to the free trade of low-cost British merchandise, which Britain reasonably expected would help enrich its world-class manufacturers. France and the United States soon demanded and received similar rights; the second Opium War in the late 1850s ended with Anglo-French forces occupying Beijing, more port openings, and the right of foreigners to travel inside China, including having diplomatic representatives dispatched to the emperor’s Forbidden City at Beijing.
The humiliating defeat in the Opium Wars rendered publically visible the extent of the demise of China’s 2,000-year-old empire. It added insult to the widespread disaffection with the ineffectual government and helped stir the rebellions that ultimately toppled it. A telltale sign and fomenter of this internal decay was once again waterworks deterioration. Millions died in three major dike breaks in the Yellow River between 1841 and 1843. In 1849, the worst flood in a century ravaged the lower Yangtze. The major shift of the Yellow River toward its present northern course in the 1850s caused major breeches in the Grand Canal. Northern sections of the canal were left unrepaired and the critical channel supplying Beijing was abandoned altogether following the Taiping Rebellion and other major uprisings in the 1850s and 1860s. Floods worsened in the late nineteenth century due to inadequate diking and waterworks maintenance, hastening the final days of the ruling Manchu dynasty and the long Chinese empire in the 1911–1912 revolution. The revival of the Grand Canal and other major water infrastructure, reminiscent of the restoration of new dynasties, began with the coming to power after a Japanese occupation and long civil war of the post–World War II Mao Zedong–led communist regime.
CHAPTER SIX
Islam, Deserts, and the Destiny of History’s Most Water-Fragile Civilization
Golden age China overlapped and exchanged goods with a young, trading-based civilization that had emerged improbably out of the sparsely populated, parched desert of the Arabian Peninsula under the inspirational organizing banner of a new religion, Islam. During Islam’s brilliant flowering from the ninth through twelfth centuries, its civilization held sway over an extensive domain stretching from Spain in the west, across North Africa, south from Egypt along the East African coast to the Zambezi River near modern Mozambique, east from the Levant to the Indus River, and northeast in central Asia beyond the Oxus River to the western borders of the fabled Silk Roads. The riches underpinning its illustrious civilization came from its control of the Old World hub of long-distance land and sea trading routes linking the civilizations of the Far East, the Near East, the Mediterranean, and sub-Saharan Africa.
From its stunningly rapid rise to its puzzlingly abrupt fall from history’s center stage, the signature characteristics and historical destiny of Islamic civilization were overwhelmingly dictated by the challenges and responses to its scarce natural patrimony of freshwater. Islam’s core habitat was a desert surrounded by two saltwater frontiers, the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. Precious few fresh hydraulic resources watered its interior. Its deserts contained scattered date-palm-shaded oases, underground springs and wells, and some seasonal wadis. Only a few large rivers—such as the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates and to a much lesser degree the Jordan—were capable of sustaining intensive irrigated agriculture and the civilized, urban life that clustered around it. No navigable river or artificial waterway like China’s Grand Canal spanned the long distances of arid emptiness between water sources to unify and centralize the Islamic world’s political, economic, and social centers. Its noted dearth of small, perennial rivers—its so-called stream deficit—additionally made freshwater an omnipresent natural resource challenge for drinking, irrigation, transport, and waterpower that put great stress on the population-resource balances of Islamic society in all but a few privileged locations.
Islamic World & Selected Trade Routes
Constantinople
Freshwater scarcity, in short, effectively rendered Islam a water-fragile civilization, extremely vulnerable to changes in natural and engineered hydrological conditions. As a result, its periods of abundance were temporary and its sufficiency rarely enduring. For centuries, the dearth of freshwater in its original Arabian habitat had been the primary obstacle confining its inhab
itants to bare subsistence lifestyles. The Arab genius in transforming the obstacle of the hot, dry deserts, and subsequently the salty sea frontiers, into near-monopoly highways of trade was the key catalyst that launched Islam’s hallmark rise to greatness as a civilization controlling the long-distance movement and transit between East and West. Its precarious hydrological foundations also ultimately helped explain why its preeminence unraveled so quickly after the twelfth century.
Islamic civilization started with Muhammad, founding prophet of its monotheistic religion and revealer of the Koran, its holy book. Arabians at the time were polytheistic animists with strong tribal social structures. Many were still nomadic pastoralists, raising camels and raiding trade caravans. Settled life at the sporadic oases supported only very small populations. One important settlement, Mecca, was built around a spring with “bitter,” or salty, tasting water, and had only about 20,000 to 25,000 inhabitants. Mecca was located at an important restocking juncture for water and other supplies along the historic camel caravan trade route that carried frankincense, myrrh, and other luxuries between Yemen and the Mediterranean ports of the Levant. It was also specially advantaged because it was a regular destination of Arab pilgrims who came to venerate a black meteorite that had fallen nearby in antiquity and was regarded as divine.
Legend and Muhammad identified the origin of the Semitic Arabs as descendants of Ishmael, Abraham’s son by his maid-concubine, Hagar. From the beginning, water was always highly esteemed in both desert Arab and Islamic society. By tradition, no man or beast can be denied access to drink from a man’s well; the very transliteration of shari’aa, or Islam’s governing religious law, means “the way” or “path to the watering place.” Muhammad himself was born around 570 into a reputable but weaker clan of Mecca’s leading Quraysh tribe. Many Quraysh were merchants who had leveraged the power from the tribe’s control of water rights for the pilgrimage into lucrative participation in the camel caravan trade. Orphaned at a young age, the uneducated Muhammad grew up in the caravan trading business of his uncle and clan elder, Abu-Talib. Historians believe he traveled outside Arabia along the trade routes, where he encountered many new ideas and religions. At age twenty-five, he married a rich older widow with caravan business interests.