1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

by Charles C. Mann

  There was a related, equally large consequence: the Columbian Exchange.

  1 By convention emperors were referred to not by their personal names, but by the names of their reigns. For example, the usurping uncle, born Zhu Di, chose Yongle (“perpetual happiness”) as his title, and thus became the Yongle emperor: the ruler during the Yongle period.

  2 The Ming dynasty’s predecessors, the Mongol-led Yuan, had tried to do exactly the same thing, forbidding private overseas trade in 1303, 1311, and 1320. In each case the law was soon repealed. The prospect of monopoly was tempting, but the Yuan always found it more profitable—and much less trouble—to tax private trade than to run the trade themselves.

  3 “Families” is a misnomer. The traders were gongsi, which were clan-like groups of related families that often had hundreds of members. I’m reluctant to use the term gongsi, though, because it now means “company”—an indication of the familial roots of many Chinese businesses but a source of potential confusion to readers.

  4 To those accustomed to metal coins, the idea of using shells for money may seem primitive. But they had a signal advantage: unlike the era’s coins, which were often debased or faked, shells could not readily be altered or counterfeited.

  5 Mercury poisoning was not the sole cause of death. Equally lethal were pneumonia, tuberculosis, silicosis (lesions in the lungs caused by inhalation of silica dust), and asphyxiation (breathing carbon dioxide in badly ventilated tunnels). In 1640 a royal inspector saw three Indians fall into a pit so filled with carbon dioxide that candles couldn’t burn (carbon dioxide, which is heavier than air, pools in low areas). Although the pit wasn’t deep, the workers did not get up. Their bodies were not retrieved; descending into the pit was too dangerous.

  6 The tip of the peninsula is Sangley Point, sangley (a Fujianese word for “traveling merchant”) being a pejorative reference to Filipinos of Chinese descent. A typical use of the term is a Manila church official’s complaint in 1628 about the “great danger” posed by the “swarms of abandoned heathen sangleys.”

  7 In practice, the picture is complicated by business’s attempts to manipulate government for their own ends, often to the detriment of state policies, and by groups within the state that use power for private gain. Nevertheless, the distinction between trade as a private exchange between willing parties and trade as a tool of state aggrandizement is useful. Indeed, one reason for the conflict between today’s free traders and anti-globalization activists is that the former regard the first role as paramount whereas the latter think in terms of the second.

  5

  Lovesick Grass, Foreign Tubers, and Jade Rice

  (Silk for Silver, Part Two)

  HIDDEN PASSENGERS

  Trade brought more than silver across the Pacific. Tobacco may have led the parade. Somehow Portuguese ships brought the species across oceans and borders to Guangxi, in southern China, where archaeologists have unearthed locally made tobacco pipes dating back to 1549.1 Little more than two decades later, the plant arrived in the southeast, aboard a silver ship from Manila. Not long after that, it filtered into the northeast, probably from Korea.

  Nicotiana tabacum was as much an object of fascination in Yuegang as in London and Madrid. “You take fire and light one end [of the pipe] and put the other end in your mouth,” explained the seventeenth-century Fujianese poet Yao Lü. “The smoke goes down your throat through the pipe. It can make one tipsy.” Writing not long after the smoking weed arrived in Fujian, Yao was amazed by its rapid spread across the province. “Now there is more here than in the Philippines,” he marveled, “and it is exported and sold to that country.”

  Then as now, smoking was made to order for the boredom and inertia of army life. Tobacco was embraced by Ming soldiers, who disseminated it as they marched around the empire. In the southwestern province of Yunnan, one physician reported, Chinese soldiers “entered miasma-ridden [malarial] lands, and none of them were spared disease except for a single unit, whose members were in perfect health. When asked the reason, the answer was that they all smoked.” (Mosquitoes dislike smoke, so smoking actually may have provided some protective effect against malaria-carrying insects.) From that point, the account continued, “smoking spread … and now in the southwest, whether old or young, they cannot stop smoking from morning until night.” As a child in the 1630s, the writer Wang Pu had never heard of tobacco. When he grew to adulthood, he later recalled, “customs suddenly changed, and all the people, even boys not four feet tall, were smoking.”

  “Tobacco is everywhere,” announced what was apparently China’s first smoking how-to book. Calling the plant “golden-thread smoke” and “lovesick grass”—the latter a nod to its penchant for hooking the user—the Qing dynasty’s legions of smokers may have been the planet’s most enthusiastic nicotine slaves. An ostentatious addiction to tobacco became the hallmark of the fashionable rich. Men boasted of their inability to eat, converse, and even think without a lighted pipe. Women carried special silk tobacco purses with elaborate jeweled fastenings; to protect their delicate feminine essences from the harsh spirit of tobacco, they smoked extra-long pipes, some so big that they had to be lugged around by servants. A new poetic sub-genre emerged among China’s wealthy aesthetes: the hymn to tobacco.

  Puffing fragrance, exhaling the Sage’s vapor;

  Bluish tendrils born from the subtle Smoke.

  The Gentleman’s Companion, it warms my heart

  And leaves my mouth feeling like a divine furnace.

  Late-waking aristocratic women slept with their heads elevated on special blocks so that attendants could do their hair and makeup while they were unconscious—it shortened the time between waking and the first tobacco of the day. “The scene is a little hard to imagine,” remarked Timothy Brook, the Canadian historian whose studies of Chinese tobacco I am drawing upon here.

  Brook found the tale of the sleeping smokers in Chen Cong’s Yancao pu (Tobacco Manual), a learned collection of tobacco-related poetry and prose from 1805. An even more recondite compendium, Lu Yao’s Yan pu (Smoking Manual), appeared around 1774. Lu, a former provincial governor, laid down the rules for nicotine consumption in aristocratic circles. Like a modern etiquette handbook, the manual provided a set of smoking do’s and don’ts:

  Do smoke: after waking up; after a meal; with guests; while writing; when growing tired from reading; while waiting for a good friend who hasn’t shown up yet.

  Don’t smoke: while listening to a zither; feeding cranes; appreciating orchids; observing plum blossoms; making ancestral offerings; attending the morning court assembly; sleeping with a beautiful woman.

  From today’s perspective, the Chinese courtier’s ornate surrender to tobacco seems absurd, but it had many equally odd counterparts abroad. At the same time that Lu Yao was laying out smoking etiquette, wealthy English were taking snuff (finely ground tobacco stems) in public sessions heavy with ritual. Opening their silver or ivory snuffboxes—“a fetish of the eighteenth century,” as the anthropologist Berthold Laufer put it—fashionable young blades scooped out measures of fresh-ground snuff with finger-length ladles made of bone. Parties fell quiet as groups of men in embroidered waistcoats simultaneously inserted tiny pucks of ground tobacco into their noses, then whipped out lace handkerchiefs to muffle the ensuing volley of sneezes. Mastering the arcana of snuff was, for the addict, worth the bother: snorted tobacco delivers nicotine to the bloodstream faster than cigarette smoke. Few were more enraptured by the ritual than the celebrated London dandy Beau Brummell, who claimed to have a different snuffbox for every day of the year. Brummell instructed his fellow gallants in the subtle art of using only one hand to open the box, extract a pinch of snuff, and stick it in a nostril. The injection had to be accomplished with a rakish tilt of the head to avoid unsightly brown drips.

  Snuff mania had few consequences in England other than interrupted party chatter, high laundry bills, and nasopharyngeal cancer. China’s tobacco addiction occurred in an ent
irely different context, and thus had an entirely different impact. N. tabacum was part of an unplanned ecological invasion that shaped, for better and worse, modern China.

  At the time, China had roughly a quarter of the world’s population, which had to provide for itself on roughly a twelfth of the world’s arable land. Both figures are imprecise at best, but there is little dispute that the nation has long had a lot of people and that it always has had relatively little land to grow crops to feed them. In practical terms, China had to harvest huge amounts of food—half or more of the national diet—from areas with enough water to grow rice and wheat. Unluckily, those areas are relatively small. The nation has many deserts, few big lakes, irregular rainfall, and just two major rivers, the Yangzi and the Huang He (Yellow). Both rivers run long, looping courses from the western mountains to the Pacific coast, emptying into the sea scarcely 150 miles from each other. The Yangzi carries mountain runoff into the rice-growing flats near the end of its course. The Huang He takes it into the North China Plain, then as now the center of Chinese wheat production. Both areas are vital to feeding the nation; there are no other places in China like them. And both are prone to catastrophic floods.

  Song and Yuan, Ming and Qing—every dynasty understood both this vulnerability and the concomitant necessity of maintaining China’s agricultural base by controlling the Yangzi and Huang He. So important was water management that European savants like Karl Marx and Max Weber identified it as China’s most important institution. Creating and operating huge, complex irrigation systems, Weber claimed, required organizing masses of laborers, which inevitably created a powerful state bureaucracy and subjugated the individual. In an influential book from 1957, the historian Karl Wittfogel built on Marx to describe China and places with similar water-control needs as “hydraulic societies.” Wittfogel’s view of these societies can be gathered from the title of his book: Oriental Despotism. Europe, to his mind, avoided despotism because farmers didn’t need irrigation. They fended for themselves, which created traditions of individualism, entrepreneurship, and technological progress that China never had. In recent years this thesis has fallen out of favor. Most Sinologists today believe that hydraulic Asia was just as diverse, individualistic, and market oriented as anywhere else, including non-hydraulic Europe. But this image still remains influential, at least in the West, where China is all too often viewed as an undifferentiated mass of workers, moving ant-wise to the directives of the state.

  None of the challenges to past thinkers dispute that China had a relative dearth of land suitable for rice and wheat. From this perspective, the Columbian Exchange was a boon, and China raced to embrace it. “No large group of the human race in the Old World was quicker to adopt American food plants than the Chinese,” Alfred W. Crosby wrote in The Columbian Exchange. Sweet potatoes, maize, peanuts, tobacco, chili peppers, pineapple, cashew, manioc (cassava)—all poured into Fujian (via the galleon trade), Guangdong (the province southwest of Fujian, via Portuguese ships in Macao), and Korea (via Japan, which took them from the Dutch). All became part of the furniture of Chinese life—who can imagine Sichuan (Szechuan) food today without heaps of hot peppers? “While men who stormed Tenochtitlan with Cortés still lived,” Crosby said, “peanuts were swelling in the sandy loams near Shanghai; maize was turning fields green in south China; and the sweet potato was on its way to becoming the poor man’s staple in Fujian.” Today China is the world’s biggest sweet potato grower, producing more than three-quarters of the global harvest; it is also the world’s second-biggest maize producer.

  Epitomizing China’s readiness to experiment was the Yuegang merchant Chen Zhenlong, who came across sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) during a visit to Manila in the early 1590s. Probably native to Central America, I. batatas had been encountered by Colón on his first voyage; Spaniards had brought the species to the Philippines, where it was quickly adopted by Malays, who already grew the tuber crop taro. Liking the taste, Chen decided to take sweet potatoes home with him. “He bribed the barbarians to get segments of their vines several feet in length,” reported his great-great-great-grandson in True Account of the Story of Planting Sweet Potatoes in Qinghai, Henan, and Other Provinces (1768), a book-length essay devoted to bragging about the sweet potato feats of the author’s ancestors. Chen hid the vines by twisting them around ropes and tossing the ropes into a basket. Spanish customs agents noticed nothing. (They weren’t trying to stop the export of sweet potatoes per se, so much as trying to prevent the Chinese from getting their hands on anything from which they might derive commercial advantage.) In this way Chen smuggled sweet potatoes into China. “Even though the vines were withered,” his great-great-great-grandson wrote later, “they flourished after he stuck cuttings in infertile ground.”

  Sweet potatoes in China are often eaten raw, the skin whittled off in a fashion that makes them somewhat resemble ice cream cones. (Photo credit 5.2)

  The 1580s and 1590s, an intense point in the Little Ice Age, were two decades of hard cold rains that flooded Fujianese valleys, washing away rice paddies and drowning the crop. Famine shadowed the rains. Poor families were reduced to eating bark, grass, insects, and even the seeds found in wild-goose excrement. Chen Zhenlong and his friends seem initially to have thought of the fanshu—foreign tubers—as an amusing novelty; they gave them away as presents, a slice or two at a time, neatly wrapped in a box. (Botanically speaking, fanshu is a misnomer; I. batatas actually has a modified root, rather than a proper tuber.) As hunger tightened its grip, Chen’s son, Chen Jinglun, showed the fanshu to the provincial governor, to whom he was an adviser. The younger Chen was asked to conduct a trial planting near his home. Successful results persuaded the governor to distribute cuttings to farmers and instruct farmers how to grow and store them. “It was a great fall harvest; both near and far food was abundant and disaster was no longer a threat,” exulted the great-great-great-grandson. Near Yuegang, as much as 80 percent of the locals were living on sweet potatoes.2

  Governmental promotion of foreign crops was nothing new in Fujian. Sometime before 1000 A.D., Fujianese merchants brought in a novel type of rice—early-ripening Champa rice—from Southeast Asia. Because the new rice matured quickly, it could be planted in areas with shorter growing seasons. After intensive breeding, farmers created varieties that grew quickly enough to let them plant two crops a year in the same field—one of rice, then a second of wheat or millet. Harvesting twice as much from the same amount of land, Chinese farms became more productive than farms elsewhere in the world. The then-ruling Song dynasty actively promoted the new rice, distributing free seeds, publishing illustrated how-to brochures, sending out agents to explain cultivation techniques, and even providing some low-interest loans to help smallholders adapt. This aggressive adaptation and promotion of a new technology was a key reason for the nation’s subsequent prosperity, and its preeminence.

  Still, Fujian was lucky that sweet potatoes arrived when they did. The crop spread through the province just in time for the fall of the Ming dynasty, which ushered in decades of violent chaos. Incoming Manchu forces seized Beijing in 1644, beginning a new dynasty: the Qing. The last Ming emperor hanged himself, and pretenders emerged to lead a rump state. Initially it was based in Fujian. In a disordered interlude, pieces of the Ming military splintered away and became, in effect, wokou. Meanwhile actual wokou took advantage of the confusion. To deny supplies to the Ming/wokou, the Qing army forced the coastal population from Guangdong to Shandong—the entire eastern “bulge” of China, a 2,500-mile stretch of coastline—to move en masse into the interior.

  Beginning in 1652, soldiers marched into seaside villages and burned houses, knocked down walls, and smashed ancestral shrines; families, often given only a few days’ warning, evacuated with nothing but their clothes. All privately owned ships were set afire or sunk. Anyone who stayed behind was slain. “We became vagrants, fleeing and scattering,” one Fujianese family history recalled. People “simply went in one direction until
they halted,” another said. “Those who did not die scattered over distant and nearby localities.” For three decades the shoreline was emptied to a distance inland of as much as fifty miles. It was a scorched-earth policy, except that the Qing scorched the enemy’s earth, not their own.

  For Fujian, the coastal evacuation amounted to a spectacularly harsh version of the Ming dynasty’s ban on overseas trade. In the 1630s, before the political convulsions and the trade bans, twenty or more big junks went to Manila every year, each carrying hundreds of traders. During the evacuation, the number fell to as low as two or three, all illicit. Like the Ming trade bans, the Qing coastal clearance effectively turned over the silver trade to wokou.

  Click here to view a larger image.

  As it happened, the trade was turned over to one pirate in particular: Zheng Chenggong, known in the West as Koxinga (the name is a corruption of a Chinese honorific). Born in Japan to a Japanese mother and a Fujianese Christian father who was a prominent pirate, Zheng had spent his life flouting Ming law. When the Qing came in, he realized that wokou were better off with the lackadaisical, corrupt Ming. He became an admiral in the rump Ming state and led an enormous sea-based assault on the Qing that came close to toppling the new regime. Afterward, he returned to piracy, amassing a fleet that one eyewitness, a Dominican missionary in Fujian, estimated at fifteen to twenty thousand vessels and an army of “a hundred thousand men at arms, all the necessary sailors, and eight thousand horses.” Based in a palace in Amoy (now called Xiamen), a city across the river from Yuegang, Zheng controlled the entire southeast coast—a true pirate king.