The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  The effects of urban growth reached much deeper into Chinese society. As people moved towards the cities and as the balance between urban and rural population changed, demand for foodstuffs in the cities soared. This led to the development of commercial networks in the countryside as well, as farmers produced for the urban market.16 Foreign demand for Chinese goods stimulated the industries for which China was most famous: silk production and the ceramics industry. Other exports to south-east Asia included Chinese metalwork, iron ore (sometimes found in wrecks) and rice wine, contained in ceramic jars.17 But copper, whether as ingots or as cash, was in constant demand.18 One way to ensure that the outflow of copper cash did not drain all the bullion out of coastal China was to dump vast amounts of ceramics in foreign markets (though the term ‘dump’, favoured by economic historians, should not be taken to indicate that what was dumped was rubbish – the ceramics were much appreciated, but the quantities were massive).19 Commercialization proceeded rapidly. The coastline grew in importance as a source of wealth for rulers and ruled. China was being transformed. All this seems uncannily similar to what has been happening in China since the 1980s, even if the scale of economic growth in modern times is immeasurably faster and vaster.

  II

  The great transformation that occurred under the Song was the emergence of a large class of native Chinese merchants willing to brave the open seas. It is important, though, to remember that the term ‘native Chinese’ has to be understood very broadly, for some of the leading businessmen and government agents entrusted with the care of commerce were of non-Han descent. Several were of Muslim descent, of either Arab or Persian origin, like the ruthless Pu Shougeng, who was superintendent of maritime trade at Quanzhou when the city fell to the Mongols in 1276; an eager collaborator with his new masters, he authorized the massacre of 3,000 members of the Song imperial clan.20 As well as the favours shown to Chinese merchants, a policy existed that encouraged foreign merchants to come to China. Early in the twelfth century a Chinese businessman, Cai Jingfang, recruited foreigners to the port of Quanzhou; he brought Quanzhou’s maritime trade office a profit of 980,000 strings of cash over the six-year period from 1128 to 1134. One of his recruits, Pu Luoxin (Abu’l-Hassan), was an Arab merchant specializing in frankincense; he brought incense to the value of 300,000 strings to the port, and around the same time frankincense from Śri Vijaya was imported that was valued at 1,200,000 strings; demand was insatiable. Impressed by Cai’s success, the Song government enthusiastically offered an official rank to Chinese merchants who persuaded foreign merchants to ship large amounts of goods to China.21 Yet what this case shows is that private initiative spurred the government towards the encouragement of yet more private initiative. This was not a setting in which those in power deplored or discouraged trade across the sea.

  The sea had, then, come into focus as never before. Chinese and foreigners worked side by side; China was not simply the passive recipient of goods brought across the South China Sea. Much of the shipping that reached Chinese ports was foreign, but there were also large Chinese junks; and this was a period of technological innovation during which the Chinese developed a type of marine compass using a magnetized needle suspended on a string: ‘the ship’s pilots are acquainted with the configuration of the coasts; at night they steer by the stars, and in the daytime by the sun. In dark weather they look at the south-pointing needle’, to cite a text from the start of the twelfth century.22 Knowledge in China of magnetism and direction-finding went back to around 500 BC, so that this was old knowledge that had taken a very long while to be applied; in earlier centuries the main interest in direction-finding lay in divination and in the doctrines of feng shui, so that a magnetized piece of iron made it possible to align a building properly towards north and south. The late development of the marine compass shows that demand for navigational skills had grown as the Chinese became accustomed to sea voyages. Contrary to the passionate beliefs of the famous scholar of Chinese science, Joseph Needham (who managed to combine Maoism, Daoism and High Anglicanism in his long life), the use of lodestones by Vikings, sailors of Amalfi and others was almost certainly the result of independent discoveries far to the west, and not the diffusion of Chinese technical knowhow through the Islamic lands into Europe.23 Undoubtedly, the use of the compass resolved a longstanding problem in Pacific navigation, for cloudy skies in the rainy seasons meant that it was all too easy to become lost on the open sea. Even then, there is a hint in the passage just cited that the Chinese still preferred to hug shores.

  Many of these foreign merchants gathered in a port whose reputation was to travel all the way to medieval Europe, where it was known under its Arabic name of Zaytun, ‘Olive City’. However that name came into existence, it was known to Chinese-speakers as Quanzhou (in older spelling, Ch’üan-chou), and lies across the strait that divides Taiwan from the Chinese mainland. The rise of Quanzhou was the result of a power vacuum in that corner of China; its sustained role as a great centre of trade was the result of its eventual incorporation into the Song Empire. For Quanzhou first emerged as an alternative port where merchants could hope to escape the supervision of Chinese customs officials, since during the mid-tenth century the region of Quanzhou lay under the rule of an independent warlord. However, as this area was brought forcibly under Song rule and as imperial power in the region grew, so did the ability of the imperial court to supervise what was happening there. This was all to the immense advantage of the central government, which began to receive greater and greater tax income from Quanzhou’s foreign trade: half a million strings of cash around 980, but 1,000,000 at the start of the twelfth century, rising to 2,000,000 by around 1150. Merchants could expect to pay about 40 per cent in taxes and were expected to collect a certificate from the shibo official in charge of customs; but even so they flourished as business boomed.24 Some merchants arrived from as far away as Bahrain, though the majority of ships travelled to Quanzhou from the shores of the South China Sea, including the Philippines, Sumatra, Java and Cambodia, or from Korea, whose traders carried gold, silver, mercury and their own silk cloth.25

  Tamil merchants reached the city, and the Muslim community possessed several mosques, the oldest of which, the Qingjing or Ashab Mosque, was built soon after 1000 and still survives; it is the oldest mosque in China. Tombstones recording visitors from far to the west survive not just in Arabic but in Persian and Turkish.26 Satingpra, a Siamese port on the shores of the South China Sea, enjoyed a brisk trade with Quanzhou, importing masses of porcelain; it lay close to the narrow neck of the Malay peninsula, the Kra Isthmus, thereby giving access to the Indian Ocean as well.27 It is not really surprising that the ambitious rulers of the Khmer Empire in Cambodia should have encouraged maritime trade with Song China; in the first half of the twelfth century, King Sūryavarman II was himself a shipowner, and he was also happy to receive silk and porcelain carried to his realms on Chinese ships; Song pottery has been found at Angkor.28 Ceramics from the towns around Quanzhou turned up in the Ryukyu island chain.29 Encouraged by what they saw happening at Quanzhou, the Song emperors built harbours elsewhere along the long coastline of China, for instance at Shanghai and along the rocky shores between Guangzhou and Hanoi, where underwater reefs were torn away to make the passage of shipping safer. These harbours were also vital refuges when typhoons blew.

  Quanzhou became the unrivalled centre of trade; it became a distribution centre from which goods were transferred along the rivers and canals of eastern China all the way to the great city of Hangzhou, now the Song capital. Public works enabled this great economic boom to gain further momentum: canals and rivers were dredged, breakwaters were built, warehouses were put at the disposal of foreign and native merchants. As more and more traffic crossed the sea, the temptation to pirates grew exponentially, and convoy escorts were sometimes provided to protect merchant ships; a navy came into being, and commanders such as Weng Chao were given the task of clearing pirates from the waters around the Yangtze es
tuary, while the corsair Zhu Cong, defeated in 1135, merged his fleet of fifty ships and 10,000 sailors into the Song navy; he was rewarded with the rank of admiral, and others followed the same course. A brief poem circulated: ‘if you wish to become an official, kill and burn and accept a pardon.’ One early twelfth-century official blamed the government for actually stimulating piracy by offering such generous amnesties: ‘the officials are incompetent and seek to placate the pirates by granting them amnesty and, in more flagrant cases, by conferring on them rank and offices.’ Merchant ships had to register their departure and were expected to travel in small convoys, and the government was careful to control the traffic to different destinations. Officially, only two ships a year were supposed to go to Korea, returning the next year, and the merchants trading there were supposed to be extremely wealthy, possessing 30,000,000 strings of cash (surely a mistake for 30,000 or 300,000); but there were colonies of merchants from Quanzhou in Korea, and in Vietnam too.30

  While 30,000,000 strings seems a gigantic amount, there is the story of Wang Yuanmao from Quanzhou, who vastly enriched himself in the late twelfth century. There were several Buddhist monasteries in the city, and the sons of the well-to-do often took monastic vows. Wang, however, was a servant or handyman, and of low social status. But the monks taught him how to read ‘the books of the southern barbarian lands’, perhaps Indian Buddhist scriptures, as well as Chinese books. He was sent on a mission to the kingdom of Champa, in Indo-China. Champa was an old trading partner of China: as early as 958 the Cham king had sent the Arab merchant Pu Hesan (Abu Hassan or Husain) to the emperor with an explosive gift: flasks of an inflammable weapon similar to Greek fire (in Champa, the expectation was that the elite would be Hindu, the ordinary population Buddhist and the merchants Muslim). Once in Champa, Wang came to the attention of the king, who was so impressed that Wang could read both Chinese and foreign books that he offered him a post at court and even married him to one of his daughters; the trousseau was worth 1,000,000 strings of cash. After ten years in Champa, ‘his lust for gain became still fiercer, and he next went trading as the master of an ocean-going junk’. Before long senior Chinese officials noticed him and married their own children into his family. He sent an agent overseas for ten years between 1178 and 1188 on one of his ships, and when his crew returned ‘they had obtained profits of several thousand per cent’. But then an argument broke out after a sailor tried to cheat Wang of half the profit; the sailor was murdered, though not by Wang, but Wang was blamed and duly disgraced.31

  Stories about Quanzhou merchants stress the extraordinary social mobility that agile businessmen could achieve. Chinese tales from this period emphasize again and again how people described as ‘serfs’ or ‘penniless’ could break free of their humble origins, accumulate great wealth and marry into grand families. This is further testimony to the transformations that took place in the society of the Quanzhou region during the Song period. And one significant effect of this economic expansion was what has been called ‘the generalisation of the consumption of luxury items’, as those who rose up the social ladder became somewhat contemptuous of the simple life their grandparents had led:

  I would rather say that after three generations of holding government office, the sons and grandsons are bound to be extravagant, and given to the utmost indulgence. They will be unwilling to wear coarse cotton, coarse silk, coarse padded garments, worn-out hemp quilting or any clothes that have been laundered or patched, insisting on openwork silk, thin silk, damask silk, crêpe silk, figured silk, natural silk and fresh, fine and luxurious linens and silks … They will be unwilling to eat vegetables and will look on greens and broth as coarse fare, finding beans, wheat and millet meagre and tasteless, and insisting on the best polished rice and the finest roasts to satisfy their greedy appetites, with the products of the water and the land, and the confections of human artifice, set out neatly before them in ornamentally carved dishes and trays. This is what is meant by ‘being able to dress up and dine’!32

  Rice, tea and pepper, previously upmarket items, were increasingly seen as three of the ‘seven necessities’ of life, along with more obvious items such as firewood and salt.33

  Yet Quanzhou did not lie in a particularly fertile or wealthy part of China. Although some high-quality products such as lychees and oranges were cultivated, the lack of extensive arable land and poor returns from the soil made the region depend on imported supplies of rice and grain.34 Lack of good local resources has often been a stimulus to commercial expansion, for obvious reasons – in exactly the same period Genoa and Venice were becoming great centres of trade, but relied on imported food as supplies nearby were restricted. The parallels between the ‘commercial revolution’ in Song China and in the medieval Mediterranean are quite striking.35 Trade through its harbour created the Quanzhou phenomenon; but as the city grew, so did its role in the most famous Chinese industries. Notwithstanding the arrival of silk from Korea and Japan, Quanzhou became a centre of silk production, but nothing compared in scale with the export of fine porcelain, produced in the smaller towns in the hinterland behind Quanzhou and exported en masse to clients as far away as the Middle East: beautiful celadon wares carrying floral decorations in light relief, many produced in Dehua, a town that lay just across the mountains to the north of Quanzhou.36

  III

  Shipbuilding was another industry that kept Quanzhou prosperous – many of the ships built for Khubilai Khan came from there.37 A wreck found in the approaches to the harbour of Quanzhou has been identified as a Chinese junk and can be securely dated to 1277. Its cargo consisted in large part of precious woods, but there were also ceramics on board that carried inscriptions identifying the owners as the ‘Southern Family’, that is, the branch of the Song imperial clan that governed this part of China on behalf of the emperor.38 There was no evidence that anyone on board had drowned, and its sinking remains a mystery. A reasonably cogent theory about this ship is that it reached Quanzhou just as the Mongol armies overwhelmed the city, and that its crew scuttled the junk rather than allowing it to fall into the hands of the new masters of China or the bloodthirsty superintendent of trade, Pu Shougeng. It was more than twenty-four metres long and more than nine metres wide, and the hull contained thirteen cabins.39 Chinese junks did not possess a pointed bow, and the stern too consisted of a flat end.40

  The interest of this wreck lies not just in its physical remains but in its similarity to what Marco Polo described in his book of travels in a chapter that follows directly after his account of Zaytun/Quanzhou. There he spoke of ships with as many as sixty cabins and two or three hundred sailors, capable of loading up to 6,000 baskets of pepper; by contrast, the Quanzhou boat was only of middle size, and could be an example of one of the ‘large barks or tenders’ that he said travelled alongside the bigger ships. But in some versions of his book he mentioned ships constructed around thirteen compartments stacked with cargo, with the aim of affording greater strength to the hull and of reducing the danger of sinking if the hull were pierced ‘by the blow of a hungry whale’ or by a rock (a similar technique used on the Titanic did not work). Other medieval travellers such as the Arab explorer ibn Battuta, of the fourteenth century, offered very similar descriptions of these large Chinese ships.41 But Marco Polo is helpful in other ways too. His description of Zaytun does not match in enthusiasm his account of Hangzhou, known in medieval Europe as Quinsay, but it does match quite neatly the evidence from Chinese writers and from archaeology. Zaytun is ‘frequented by all the ships of India, which bring thither spicery and all other kinds of costly wares’; but the inhabitants of Manzi (that is, southern China) also flock to the city, in search of precious stones and pearls, ‘and I assure you that for one shipload of pepper that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere, destined for Christendom, there come a hundred such, yes, and more too, to this haven of Zaytun; for it is one of the two greatest havens in the world for commerce’ – maybe he thought the other one was his native Venice. He knew
that the porcelain produced in a town nearby was not merely of superlative quality, but very inexpensive. And he described a lucrative system of taxation obviously inherited by the Mongols from that of the Song emperors.42

  Even so, Quanzhou had reached its peak by the time the Mongols overwhelmed the city in 1277. Khubilai Khan was not responsible for its relative decline, though it remained a place of note under his Yuan dynasty as well. Nor was this decline the result of pirate raids on the all-too-successful merchant fleets of Quanzhou and other ports. War with the Chin or Jin dynasty in northern China was certainly a factor, but not so much because of the military outcome; it was more a question of the strain this constant conflict, renewed in 1160, placed on state finances. The commercial policies of the Mongol rulers of China may also carry some blame. In 1284 the Yuan court tried to ban private foreign trade, reverting to the classic position whereby contact with the outside world was carried out under state auspices. But the ban, despite strict penalties, only lasted ten years; and then twenty years later it was reimposed, only to be followed by its relaxation, reinstatement and final relaxation (1323) – all of this generated great uncertainty. Following the ban, Quanzhou did become the headquarters of the Mercantile Shipping and Transportation Bureau, which oversaw government-sponsored expeditions across the seas, but the freedom of Quanzhou merchants to come and go as they pleased had been curtailed. Another development was the creation of the Bureau of Ortaq Affairs, the Ortaqs being a guild of traders from central Asia who were actively patronized by the Mongol rulers, but who then, in the early fourteenth century, found themselves challenged by factions at court that resented their tight hold on Chinese trade. The Ortaqs hoped to create a shipping monopoly, but they had no experience of the sea, and therefore relied to a significant degree on the Arab and Persian merchants they encountered in Chinese ports. These developments do suggest that the trading community of Quanzhou lay under increasing pressure by 1300.43 However, most explanations of the decline of Quanzhou stress the fiscal legacy of the Song dynasty, which had never managed to ensure that revenues matched expenditure. In part this was because the trading system they had helped to create contained some fundamental flaws.