Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  TRADE ROUTES AROUND THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

  The first Spaniards in Manila found some three hundred Chinese merchants already there, dealing in silk, iron, and porcelain. Relations started out well, each side sensing that the other might be a profitable trading partner. In fact, the timing was perfect. For the preceding half century, China had closed its borders to maritime trade in order to discourage the rampant piracy along the coast, much of it in Japanese hands. Merchants from the southeastern province of Fujian did dare to sail abroad, following the arc of islands from Taiwan down through the Philippines to the Spice Islands, but they did so at the risk of execution if caught. The Chinese state had no imperial ambition to follow its merchants’ path, much less support their adventures. Its ambition was quite the opposite: to prevent the private wealth and corruption that could only come from foreign trade.

  This was the situation until 1567, when a new emperor came to the throne in Beijing and lifted the ban on maritime commerce. It was a sign that the pressure of foreign demand was having its effect. Overnight, pirates became merchants, contraband goods became export commodities, and clandestine operations became a business network linking ports of Southeast Asia, including Manila, to Fujian’s two major commercial cities, Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. Zhangzhou’s port, Moon Harbor, became the main portal through which the bulk of the commodities going out, and the silver coming in, tied China to the outside world.

  If this was an empire, it was an empire purely of trade, not of conquest. The Spanish imagined their future in East Asia rather differently. Two years after the killing of Soliman, a Spaniard in Manila petitioned the king of Spain for permission to lead eighty men to China to conquer that country. Philip II (after whom the Philippines had been named while he was still crown prince) had the good sense not to be persuaded. A second proposal arrived the following year for an invasion force of sixty men. Three years after that, Francisco Sande, then governor of the Philippines, corrected these estimates and declared that Spain would need four to six thousand soldiers, plus a supporting Japanese armada, to conquer China. Still, he thought conquest possible, given his generally contemptuous view of Chinese. They are “a mean, impudent people, as well as very importunate, ” Governor Sande insisted. “Almost all are pirates, when any occasion arises, so that none are faithful to their king. Moreover, a war could be waged against them because they prohibit people from entering their country. Besides, I do not know, nor have I heard of, any wickedness that they do not practice; for they are idolaters, sodomites, robbers, and pirates, both by land and sea.”

  Nine years later, another proposal to conquer China raised the invasion force to ten to twelve thousand Spaniards, five to six thousand Filipino “Indians,” and as many Japanese as they could muster. This proposal also advised sending an advance force of Jesuit missionaries to infiltrate the country, collect intelligence, and set up networks of collaborators. China held “all that the human mind can aspire or comprehend of riches and eternal fame,” trumpeted the men who presented this proposal, “and likewise all that a Christian heart, desirous of the honour of God and in his faith, can wish for, in the salvation and restoration of myriad souls.” Conquering China was not about “sordid lucre,” the petitioners assured King Philip, but “honorable deeds.” Much was at stake and time was of the essence. “The chance is slipping by, never to return,” they warned. “The Chinese are each day becoming more wary, and more on their guard. They are laying in munitions of war, fortifying themselves and training men—all of which they have learned, and are still learning, from the Portuguese and our people.” The final argument made for invasion is, for us, the oddest one of all: that China was in danger of falling into Muslim hands. Once Muslims controlled China, the petitioners warned, Spain would be cut out of the Chinese market forever. The memory of the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain in 1492 was still strong, and the competition between the Spanish and Ottoman empires was fierce enough that this appeal might have overridden calmer consideration. It didn’t. King Philip not only turned down the proposal; he forbade the governor from forwarding any more such foolish schemes to him. It was not possible for Spain to conquer China as it had conquered South America or the Philippines. The wealth of China would have to be tapped through trade, not conquest.

  THE BASE FROM WHICH THIS trade was carried out was Manila. The Spanish rebuilt the coastal harbor town into a heavily fortified city. The area inside the massive stone walls was an enclave exclusively for “Spaniards,” the term for all Europeans. They were permitted to bring into Manila with them their servants, guards, and slaves (despite a papal decree of 1591 emancipating all slaves in the Philippines), but the Chinese with whom they conducted business should remain outside. Initially, Chinese came seasonally to Manila, arriving with the spring winds and returning to Moon Harbor in the fall. As the volume and complexity of the trade grew, the Chinese agitated for permission to stay through the year, a practice they called “cramming winter.” The Chinese government forbade merchants from staying year-round, but that rule was no match for the business incentive for cramming winter. The Spanish agreed to the request, but set the upper limit on those who crammed winter at six thousand. In 1581, they decided further to restrict Chinese to a ghetto, in imitation of the practice of restricting Jewish residence in European cities.3 The Chinese ghetto consisted of a town surrounded by a wooden palisade, to which all Chinese were to be confined at night. The Spanish called it the Alcaiceria, the Silk Market, from the Arabic word for silk (cer, from the Chinese si). The local Tagals called it the Parián, which in Tagalog means “a place (an) where haggling ( pali) goes on.”

  The Spanish forbade the Chinese from building in stone. That material they considered far too fine for such people, which is why the overcrowded Parián regularly burned down. But it was just as regularly rebuilt, each time on a grander plan, so that by 1637, a Spanish visitor to the Parián could declare his admiration for “the fine order in which they live.” The site was moved several times with each rebuilding, but it always stayed close to the walls of Manila—“under the range of its artillery, ” as a Dominican priest was pleased to report to the king in 1666. The Dominicans were assigned the task in 1594 of converting the Chinese to Christianity, and within the Chinese enclave they built the Church of the Three Kings for their ministry. They were permitted to build in stone, which meant that whenever the Parián burned, the church regularly “escaped from the midst of this fire of Sodom,” as one priest put it when the Parián went up in flames in 1628. (He declared that the fire “was the punishment of Heaven for the so horrible sins by which those heathen Chinese provoke the wrath of God.”) Few Chinese converted, for that meant having to cut their hair in the European style and wear a beaver hat. Most were not prepared to cross that far into Spanish culture. Among those who were, one was selected to be headman of the Parián. After the fire of 1628, however, the governor of Manila replaced the Chinese headman with a Spanish official, known as the Chinese Protector.

  The population of the Parián grew to twenty thousand, according to an official figure, though the actual number of Chinese in and around Manila may have been higher by at least half as much again. The Spanish could not have built their colony without them. The merchants who transported export wares from China were the minority, after all; the rest of the Chinese who came were the people who made it possible for the Spanish to live as they did. They were the grain dealers and vegetable farmers, the tailors and hatters, the bakers and chandlers, the confectioners and apothecaries, the carpenters and silversmiths. They supplied the paper on which the Spanish wrote, caught the fish they ate for supper, and transported the goods they acquired. The Spanish would not have been able to live as officers, priests, and gentlemen without them. They were called the Sangleys, a Spanish corruption of a Chinese term—though which term is under dispute. The standard etymology derives Sangley from shengli, “making profit,” but others have proposed shanglü, “traveling merchants,” or changlai, “come regularly
”—which is what the Chinese did, to the enormous benefit of the Spanish community. “The fact is,” Governor Antonio de Morga conceded in 1609, “without these Sangleys, the City cannot get along or maintain itself, because they are masters of all trades, and good workers who labor for moderate wages.”

  To poor Chinese from Fujian, Manila was Gold Mountain (this name was given, for similar reasons, to cities on the west coast of North America in the nineteenth century; it can also be translated as Money Mountain). They were fearless in going to sea to get a piece of it. Their daring impressed a Chinese coastal official named Zhou Qiyuan writing in 1617. “These petty traders view the huge waves under the open sky as though they were standing at their ease on a high mound, gaze at the topography of strange regions as though they were taking a stroll outside their own homes, and look upon foreign chieftains and warrior princes as though they were dealing with minor officials,” he observes with awe. “They are at their ease on the ocean’s waves and treat their boats as though they were fields”—fields being where wealth should properly come from. Zhou does note that these men are apt to respond violently to any attempt to interfere with trade and are utterly indifferent to the laws and courts that seek to restrain and punish them, but he was in general so impressed with their courage to go to sea and pursue their fortunes that he could not withhold his admiration. “These polers and punters are the sea-leopards of the rolling ocean.”

  In the spring of 1603, an official from the imperial household charged with collecting maritime customs duties in Fujian, an avaricious eunuch by the name of Gao Cai, decided to learn the truth of the rumors about Manila’s gold mountain by sending a delegation to investigate. This was an extraordinary move, as Chinese law forbade its officials from crossing a border or sending a delegation out of the country without express permission. Gao could afford to ignore such rules. He was the emperor’s personal appointee, charged with raising as much silver as he could for the emperor’s private purse. (Zhou Qiyuan and other regional officials finally got Gao recalled for corruption a decade later, though it would take street riots to do it.)

  The delegation’s visit surprised and worried the Spanish colonists. Some feared that the story of fact-finding was a cover, and that the Chinese delegation was actually there to reconnoiter in advance of a military invasion. Others scoffed at the idea, recognizing that China did not aspire to having a Spanish-style colonial empire. One Spanish administrator who took this view thought the idea was being put about by schemers who hoped “to see the peace disturbed, and to have the opportunity to seize something” from the Chinese living in the Parián. The governor formally welcomed the delegation, but stayed on his guard. He worried that something odd was afoot.

  When a fire broke out in the hospital for non-Europeans later that spring and Chinese volunteered to enter the city to fight the fire, the nervous governor turned them down and let the fire burn. The Chinese were offended by Spanish distrust; they were also suspicious as to why the governor allowed the hospital to burn down. The Spanish archbishop, who had recently arrived in Manila and had not yet gotten a feel for the delicacy of the situation, made things worse that summer by delivering an ill-timed sermon accusing the Chinese of sodomy and witchcraft. The tension between the two sides exploded into violence that fall. Twenty thousand Chinese, poorly armed and unprepared for the attack, were massacred by frantic Spanish soldiers and Native warriors. A provincial official in Fujian lodged a protest, only to be told that the Spanish retained the right to quell rebellion, and that he “should consider what he should do, if any similar case happened in China.” The Ming government dropped the case, concluding that the incident occurred outside its jurisdiction and that the Chinese who died had effectively abandoned their status as subjects of the emperor by no longer living within the realm. Trading resumed the next season, yet the memory of the outbreak continued to haunt relations between the two sides for the rest of the century.

  The memory of the 1603 massacre cautioned the Chinese government against opening the door of trade with the outside world too wide, but it did nothing to deter more Chinese from coming. According to a report the Chinese minister of war made to his emperor in 1630, a hundred thousand Fujianese were going to sea every spring, and it was poverty that was driving them—a point he made to argue against closing the border, lest these hundred thousand resort to other, less salubrious ways to make a living. By 1636, according to an agent of the Spanish crown, the Chinese and Japanese living in and around Manila numbered thirty thousand.

  Manila greatly mattered to everyone who traded there. It was the point of commercial contact between the economies of seventeenth-century Europe and China, and once silver was flowing, not even a massacre could break the contact. Each side brought to the table what the other wanted to buy and could afford, and took from it what it could use. Every spring, one great Spanish ship—called the Manila galleon in the Philippines, the China ship in Mexico—crossed the Pacific from Mexico loaded with silver. And every spring from China came thirty to forty junks crammed with “silks, cottons, china-ware, gunpowder, sulphur, iron, steel, quicksilver [mercury], copper, flour, walnuts, chestnuts, biscuits, dates, all sorts of stufs [textiles], writing-desks, and other curiosities.”4 The trade coaxed many Chinese into the business. As Zhou Qiyuan notes, “merchants step onto ships and go out by the western and eastern sea routes to trade.” The western route hugged the coastline from Fujian down to Vietnam, and the eastern ran out to Taiwan and then south to the Philippines. “The cargo they carry is precious and remarkable, the wonderful items are beyond description, and there is no doubt that what they gain in gold and silver runs to the hundreds of thousands.”

  The risks for the Spanish were high. A Manila galleon had to spend two or three months crossing the Pacific to reach the Philippines, then it faced an even longer return. It had to depart for Acapulco before July, lest typhoons catch it in the treacherous channels through the Philippine Islands. So the trade was a fragile arrangement. The loss of one Chinese junk had only modest impact on the exchange, since the commodities were distributed over several dozen vessels, whereas, if one Spanish galleon sank on the voyage out, the entire trading season had to be canceled, producing severe losses on both sides. This happened frequently enough to be a real concern. From the beginning of the trade to 1815, fifteen galleons were lost as they sailed west from Acapulco. Twenty-five went down on the more difficult return voyage.

  A seventeenth-century Italian traveler, Francesco Careri, has recorded the horrors of the eastbound crossing of “almost the one half of the Terraqueous Globe.” A galleon had to battle “the Terrible Tempests that happen there, one upon the back of another.” If storms did not destroy the ship, then there were “the desperate Diseases that seize People, in 7 or 8 Months, lying at Sea sometimes near the Line [the equator], sometimes cold, sometimes temperate, and sometimes hot, which is enough to Destroy a Man of Steel, much more Flesh and Blood, which at Sea had but indifferent Food.” The indifferent food could cause scurvy—Spaniards called it “the Dutch disease”—if it didn’t run out and threaten crews with starvation instead. The crews of two galleons in the 1630s warded off the problem of starvation by throwing 105 people overboard so that the rest might survive. The most chilling case was the San José, found in 1657 after more than a year at sea, drifting southward off the coast below Acapulco, laden with corpses of the starved and the dehydrated, and a cargo hold full of silks.

  For the mountain of treasured goods the Manila galleons carried back to Mexico, the Spanish exchanged their own mountain of silver. The amount of silver that was officially registered for export at Acapulco started at about three tons a year in the 1580s and 1590s, expanded to close to twenty tons a year in the 1620s, then settled at around nine or ten tons a year. In the first half of the seventeenth century, official records suggest that Spanish galleons carried just short of three quarters of a million kilograms of silver to Manila. Add in the smuggled silver and the total at least doubles. Not
all this silver went to Fujian. Some got diverted to Macao and passed through Portuguese hands—recall that the Guía, wrecked on the south China coast in 1625, was carrying silver from Manila to Macao. But the bulk of it went to Fujian and disappeared into the Chinese economy. According to the current best estimate, in the first half of the seventeenth century, China imported five thousand tons of silver, roughly half of it from Japan and the rest from mines of Spanish America. A portion of that came east from Europe via the Indian Ocean, but the bulk of it was shipped directly west across the Pacific.

  The importation of silver on this scale highlighted the awkward distance in China between public policy and private commerce. On the one hand, the Ming court did everything it could to restrict the mining of silver, fearing the corruption and the social instability it believed would arise within mining communities. On the other hand, merchants were importing vast quantities of silver into south China. When the writer Feng Menglong was serving as a county magistrate in northern Fujian in the 1630s, he strengthened the military cordon around the seven silver mines in the county, which had been closed by imperial order a century earlier. How ironic that Feng should be exercising his vigilance to keep vagabonds from digging in the old silver pits, while at the other end of the province merchants were bringing in American silver by the ton. But that was the internally contradictory situation in which China found itself in the first half of the seventeenth century. The government worked to discourage the private accumulation of wealth among the socially marginal for fear that this wealth might feed the forces of rebellion, while private mercantile families amassed vast fortunes by trading abroad.