The Boundless Sea
Page 35
The very success of Quanzhou resulted in a massive outflow of copper coinage; those figures of millions of strings of cash speak for themselves, since constant demand for Indonesian spices and Indian Ocean jewels percolated down to the urban middle class. By the middle of the twelfth century the Song rulers tried to meet this deficit by taking advantage of their mastery of the printing press, issuing a form of paper money. Marco Polo described the paper money of the Mongol rulers of China, which was used as currency throughout China and completely substituted for cash. But the Song paper money took the form of IOUs, credit notes that could be exchanged at some time in the future for hard cash. Merchants very much wanted to be paid in cash, as copper had a stable value based on the fact that it was a commodity in its own right, and in high demand in Japan and elsewhere; merchants knew perfectly well how to smuggle it to small ports from which it could be collected after their ships had been inspected in Quanzhou to see if they were carrying bullion.44 Meanwhile, the temptation to print more and more notes grew. The result was inflation, which comes as no surprise nowadays, but which crept up on an unsuspecting Song Empire. The imperial court had developed an intelligent economic policy when it improved harbours and cleared rivers; but when it came to the effects of issuing paper money it had no experience of what to expect. The long-term effect was to dampen the enthusiasm of foreign traders. What were they supposed to do with these printed chits that had no value outside China itself? But there were other factors that made life more difficult in Quanzhou. A Mongol attack on Korea at the end of the twelfth century damaged a profitable maritime link. Champa was embroiled in power struggles with its famous neighbour, the Khmer kingdom of Angkor, and disorder there made that part of Indo-China a less attractive destination. Śri Vijaya had passed its peak by the mid-thirteenth century, though there were good business opportunities for spice merchants in Java.45 All this meant a contraction but certainly not a collapse in the maritime network that had been dominated for nearly three centuries by Quanzhou.
One unanswered question is how typical or exceptional Quanzhou was. The Song capital at Hangzhou was a larger and grander city; but everything suggests that Quanzhou was the prime gateway into China for people coming across the sea with the luxury articles that the Song rulers were so eager to obtain. Looked at in a much wider setting, taking one far beyond the shores of China, Quanzhou can be seen as the command centre of a network of trade and navigation that extended right across the South China Sea, the East China Sea and into the Indian Ocean. At the start of the fifteenth century interest at the imperial court in these waters was to revive with results as remarkable as the rise of Quanzhou, though much more temporary.
13
Light over the Western Ocean
I
It has been seen that the Chinese emperors tended to treat Japan as a subordinate nation, while according it more honour than most other kingdoms. The shogun Yoshimitsu was roundly condemned by his son and successor for admitting that he was China’s inferior. When writing to the Ming court at the start of the fifteenth century, Yoshimitsu had described himself as ‘king of Japan’, and the term ‘king’ was understood to mean that he accepted the sovereign authority of the Son of Heaven in China. After all, the Chinese emperor, Jian-wen, wrote to Yoshimitsu:
You have sent envoys to come to the court, crossing over waves and billows … You make tribute of precious swords, fine horses, helmets and armour, paper and inkstones, together with pure gold, with which We are well pleased … Keep your mind on obedience and loyalty and therefore adhere to the basic rules.
And the shogun wrote a letter that, following the overthrow of Jian-wen, was received with gratitude by the new emperor, Yong-le:
Your subject, the king of Japan, submits: your subject has heard that when the sun rises in the sky, there is no dark place not lighted by it; when the timely rain soaks the earth, there is nothing that is not moistened … Thus the ten thousand directions come under his influence, and the four seas adhere to his benevolence.1
This emperor, the third in the Ming dynasty, which ruled China from 1368 to 1644, is a figure of exceptional interest. Earlier known as Zhu Di, he took the regnal name Yong-le (Yung-lo), meaning ‘Perpetual Happiness’; the name of the dynasty, ‘Ming’, meant ‘light’, and had been chosen by his father. Yong-le was a ruthless and extravagant ruler with grandiose plans – not just naval expeditions and land campaigns, but the beautification of Beijing and the active patronage of culture. He rebuilt the Grand Canal linking Beijing to the Chinese rivers and assuring the capital of regular grain supplies.2 His overseas expeditions, led by Admiral Zheng He (Cheng Ho) have attracted attention not just in modern times but under later Ming rulers – a certain Luo Mao-deng wrote a novel about the Ming voyages that was published in 1597 under the title The Grand Director of the Three Treasures Goes Down to the Western Ocean, and, despite its obvious fantasy, including a visit to the Underworld, attempts have been made to use it as a reliable source for all those aspects of these voyages that are not recorded in the official histories and inscriptions that survive.3 Precisely because of the sheer scale of the Ming voyages, Zheng He has attracted most of the attention from historians of Yong-le’s reign: there were 255 ships on the first voyage and 249 on the second, and a total of seven voyages, according to his biographer, Edward Dreyer, who counts 27,550 men on the final voyage, roughly the same as the first. Some of these figures will be questioned later; but, when they read about the voyages, later generations were astonished at the number and size of the ships, the number of those on board and the distances traversed: Chinese ships reached east Africa, Yemen, Hormuz, Ceylon and the lands around the South China Sea, and Zheng He created a spacious Chinese base at Melaka.4
The Ming voyages have attracted comparisons with Christopher Columbus, very much to the detriment of the latter, where the point is made that Columbus’s flagship, the Santa María, was a small fraction of the size of Zheng He’s treasure ships, and his initial fleet consisted of only three ships. That is to assume that Columbus and Zheng He had similar objectives, which was far from being the case. Nonetheless, the failure of the Ming emperors to repeat these very expensive expeditions after 1434 raises that hoary question in Chinese history: if Chinese technology was in many respects so far in advance of that of western Europe in the late Middle Ages, why did China fail to create a world empire, or have an Industrial Revolution, or indeed open up to the world? This question lay at the heart of the Marxist-inspired account of Science and Civilization in China composed by Joseph Needham.5 Needham speculated about visits to South America, Australia and around the Cape of Good Hope towards Brazil in the Ming or some other period; his enthusiasm for things Chinese was literally unbounded. However, the voyages have also been unscrupulously exploited by a sensationalist writer who has woven together a vast narrative in which Zheng He’s ships went much further than Africa and Arabia, and supposedly discovered Antarctica, Alaska, the Atlantic and just about every corner of the world long before the arrival of the Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch or British; in addition Zheng He’s arrival in Italy supposedly kick-started an Italian Renaissance that was already well under way. Needless to say, this ‘research’ is utter nonsense and pure fantasy, and the truth is far more interesting.6 Equally, the claim that Marco Polo knew about, and perhaps even visited, Alaska, making him the first European since the Vikings to set foot in North America (though the other side), is unfounded, this time based on what may be sixteenth-century manuscripts rather than modern-day fancy.7
The first question is why seven massive expeditions were sent out from China between 1405 and 1434, when nothing on that scale had been tried before. Yet there had been some seafaring activity before Zheng He. A Chinese envoy, the eunuch Yin Qing, had visited Melaka in 1404, a year before Zheng He set out; the town’s founder and rajah, Parameśvara, was granted the title of king, legitimizing his position as master of the Malacca Strait and of the trade route linking the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea.
8 Yong-le was as active in securing the submission of his neighbours in central Asia by means of land embassies as he was in winning that of maritime nations on the routes Zheng He followed. Landlocked kingdoms as far away as Samarkand were expected to assimilate into Chinese culture. However, its monarch proved less than happy at being treated as a vassal and sternly insisted that Yong-le would be best advised to stop talking nonsense about being ruler of the world and should instead become a Muslim.
The Middle Kingdom over which Yong-le directly ruled was supposed to be surrounded by a ring of subordinate barbarian states. He was also determined to recover lands that had once been ruled from China and to draw them into the Chinese cultural world. Like the Mongol rulers of China in the thirteenth century, he aimed to gain control of Annam, roughly northern Vietnam, even though his father, the first Ming emperor, had warned against ever trying to achieve this (and he gave the same advice about Japan and the Ryukyu islands).9 Yong-le put together a large fleet, supposedly of at least 8,600 ships, captured from Annam, but he had to face tough resistance that was accentuated by the policies he adopted after victory, such as the requirement to wear Chinese dress.10 Another area best reached by sea that Yong-le eyed was Bengal, where his ambassador intervened to head off a war with the ruler’s neighbour; the king became a fan of the Chinese emperor, sending rare animals such as one which was identified as the qilin known from Chinese mythology, and which was a giraffe, obtained from distant Africa by the ruler of Bengal.11 Yong-le did in fact describe his aims very clearly during the very first year of his reign:
Giving and nourishing lives is the utmost virtue of the Heavens. A humane ruler needs to learn from Heaven; hence, loving the people should become the principle of his rulership. The four seas are too broad to be governed by one person. To rule requires delegation of powers to the wise and the able who can participate in government … My late father Hong-wu received the mandate of heaven and became the master of the world. During the thirty years of his rule, there was peace and tranquillity within the four seas. There was neither catastrophe nor tumult.12
On the one hand, the Chinese emperor was master of the world; on the other, he could not actually rule over the entire world – a difficulty all claimants to universal imperial power have had to face. But that did not mean he should pass by the opportunity to demand from countries right across the world recognition of his superiority. Once again, what comes through powerfully is the insistence of the Chinese on their superiority as a moral force – Confucian ideas blended with those of Yong-le’s Mongol predecessors, with their ruthless demands for recognition of their own ‘Mandate from Heaven’. Ming court culture owed much to the Mongols, including many of the costumes worn at court and the passion the Ming emperors showed for hunting and archery.13
Sending fleets overseas under the command of Admiral Zheng He was, then, a highly conspicuous and extremely expensive way of doing what earlier Chinese emperors had long been trying to do. Some historians have looked for quite different explanations. The most peculiar is that Yong-le was trying to run to ground his predecessor and rival, Jian-wen, who, according to one rumour, had escaped to a remote island across the sea.14 Other arguments that have been advanced include the simple idea that Zheng He’s voyages were motivated by curiosity. In other words, Zheng He was an explorer, even more so than Columbus, who, after all, was certain of his destination (China or Japan) and had read a book (by Marco Polo) that told him what to expect.15 The arrival at court of the giraffe would have prompted questions about the land from which it came, somewhere in the outer reaches of the ‘western sea’.16 The emperor required exotic goods from all over the known world, for tribute was supposed to contain things that could be treasured – rare animals, precious jewels – as well as disposable items such as spices and perfumes. That is not quite the same as curiosity about the human and physical geography of the Indian Ocean. Chinese advances in technology, such as the use of the maritime compass and of woodblock printing, did not form part of a wider scientific endeavour built around the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
Those who went on the voyages did have exciting experiences to remember; and the short books left by two travellers on several expeditions, Ma Huan, an Arabic and Persian interpreter, and the soldier Fei Xin, are rich in details about the customs, religion, products and topography of the lands of the Indian Ocean.17 Although Ma Huan claimed to come from a modest background, describing himself as a ‘mountain woodcutter’, he knew his Chinese classics and had read Buddhist literature. Yet his account of the ‘Western Ocean’ took several years to be printed and published (probably in 1451), and was little read. Fei Xin aroused more interest among sixteenth-century Chinese scholars, which may reflect the continuing interest in Zheng He, about whom Ma Huan said rather less, his main concern being the countries he visited in the Indian Ocean. Fei Xin also paid attention to the lands around the South China Sea, which, as near neighbours and past targets of military campaigns, aroused special interest.18
The argument that the aim of the voyages was to create a trading network is easy to challenge. Yong-le forbade private trade. Earlier attempts to ban private trade had been widely ignored, all the more so when the imperial throne was in contention.19 Yong-le was only interested in the exchange of tribute for gifts, which was a political act in the first place. It is true that a well-established custom existed that when the government had claimed its share, members of a diplomatic mission could trade the remaining goods placed on board ship for local produce, and this made participation in overseas embassies very desirable – there were big profits to be made and some prestige to be gained from bringing, say, Chinese ivory to the court in Japan or Java. But the prestige Yong-le sought was his own prestige, as emperor of the Middle Kingdom; he ‘wanted to display his soldiers in strange lands in order to make manifest the wealth and power of the Middle Kingdom’, and sent his ships ‘to the various foreign countries, proclaiming the edicts of the Son of Heaven and giving gifts to their rulers and chieftains. Those who did not submit were pacified by force.’20 Setting aside Vietnam, which was seen as a borderland within range of Chinese areas of settlement, this ‘pacification’ did not involve the sending of governors or sinicization. Ports would only be visited if they acknowledged Chinese sovereignty, so that those that failed to do so lost out on the chance to obtain Chinese goods and to offload their own products.21 These are by no means the only interpretations of the Ming voyages. Another view of the voyages, which took place around the time of the conversion of the ruler of Melaka to Islam, is that they stimulated the spread of Islam in what are now Malaysia and Indonesia; but this is doubtful, and at best it would have been an accidental effect of the voyages, and obviously not their intention. Buddhist hopes of acquiring a sacred relic in Ceylon have also been brought into play, without any real evidence.22
The role of Islam in Zheng He’s life is an interesting problem. The admiral (though he did not actually hold such a title) was born a Muslim in 1371. He hailed from south-western China, from the province of Yunnan, which had a large Muslim population descended from traders who had been arriving throughout the Middle Ages. His own family had rather distinguished antecedents: they originated in Bukhara, making him more a son of the Silk Road than of the Silk Route of the Sea, and had been in the service of the early Mongol khans. His father and grandfather must have been quite devout Muslims, as they were known as Hajji, ‘the pilgrim’, implying they had both visited Mecca. As a boy, Zheng He was taken prisoner after his father was killed resisting the Ming invasion of Yunnan. He was castrated and sent to the Chinese imperial court; and there he rose among the ranks of the court eunuchs, whose closeness to the emperor was often a great source of irritation to the bureaucrats who expected to gain their ruler’s ear.23 He became head of the Directorate of Palace Servants, a government office heavily involved in building projects, and these, like shipbuilding, required the use of enormous quantities of wood. It was his experience in organizing construction
rather than his experience as a naval commander, which was non-existent, that made him a very suitable choice to take charge of the emperor’s fleet.24