The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  The kingdom of Wu’s position was always precarious, and by the 250s it was almost constantly at war in defense of its inland borders. Availing themselves of their overlords’ northern preoccupations, Jiaozhi rebelled, abetted by the kings of Linyi, Funan, and, eventually, the Western Jin. To avoid the disturbances in Jiaozhi, trading ships from the Nanhai began bypassing northern Vietnam to sail directly for Guangzhou. Although this was firmly under Chinese rule, it was remote from the capital and a place “where only the poor officials, who cannot otherwise be independent, seek to be appointed.” The advantage of a posting to a port dependent on exotic goods and beyond the prying eyes of imperial bureaucrats was that corruption was easy and enormously lucrative. By the end of the fourth century, Guangzhou was infamous as “the place of strange and precious things, one bag of which can provide for several generations” if one was willing to accept merchants’ bribes to expedite the handling of their goods, as most governors seem to have been. Jiaozhi eventually recovered its trade, but Guangzhou’s emergence as one of China’s premier ports dates from this period.

  The defeat of the Wu and consolidation of Jin rule in 280 created a boom in the southern trade as buyers and sellers hastened to make up for the long years that northern China had gone without access to southern luxuries. But while the century ended with great promise for the expansion of the Nanhai trade, between 304 and 316 the Xiongnu seized most of northern China, and the Jin court relocated from Luoyang to Nanjing. The rise of non-Han Chinese rulers sparked the flight of perhaps a million northerners that resulted in the first wholesale penetration of the Yue south by ethnic Chinese, who brought with them their core cultural and political institutions, including language and modes of governance. Now, for the first time, the preponderance of China’s foreign trade seems to have been conducted by sea.

  These newcomers vied with each other for supremacy and in Jiaozhi they antagonized the indigenous people and foreign merchants. In the near term, instability led to high tolls and rampant corruption among officials whose avarice had only grown in the hundred years since Guangzhou was described as a plum assignment for impoverished administrators. At the start of the fourth century customs officers in Jiaozhi and Rinan routinely levied taxes of 20 to 30 percent on imports, and one prefect became notorious for undervaluing goods by more than half, and then intimidating the offended merchants “with his ships and war-drums. Because of this, the various countries [from which the traders had come] were furious.” Later still, a popular saying held that “The governor of Guangzhou need only pass through the city gates just once, and he will be enriched by thirty million strings of cash.”e The Jin government exerted no meaningful control over its representatives in Guangzhou, yet while corruption cost the imperial coffers dearly, the merchants of Linyi endured the most immediate losses. After diplomatic overtures to the Jin court failed, Linyi invaded Jiaozhi. Over the next seventy years, the Chinese came to regard the people of Linyi as nothing more than pirates, which in the absence of more legitimate opportunities for trade they may have become. Between 421 and 446, however, they sent six missions to the Liu Song Dynasty (successor to the Eastern Jin), and they are said to have offered tribute of ten thousand catties (six thousand kilograms) of gold, one hundred thousand of silver, and three hundred thousand of copper in 445. Nonetheless, the Liu Song launched a brutal campaign during which the Chinese reportedly executed everyone in Linyi’s port of Khu-tuc before looting the capital’s palaces and Buddhist temples of untold quantities of gold.

  The political situation in and around southern China remained chaotic, but there were periods of stability and even prosperity, which is reflected in the intensification of overseas trade. During the fourth century, the Jin court had received only three missions from the south, all from Linyi, but between 421 and the start of the Sui Dynasty in 589, sixty-four trade missions arrived from various kingdoms across Southeast Asia—as many as would come in the three centuries of the prosperous Tang Dynasty. Yet Linyi never recovered from the sack of 446, and Funan also began an inexorable decline. These changes had less to do with Chinese policy or corruption than with a redirection in the long-distance trade of Southeast Asia: the abandonment of the coastal route between the Malay Peninsula and Funan in favor of an open-water passage across the South China Sea between the Strait of Malacca and southern Vietnam or China.

  Faxian and the Strait of Malacca Route in the Fifth Century

  Although it is possible that some ships had taken this direct route across the South China Sea as early as the first century, if not earlier, it was not the norm for long-distance traders. The first person to write about a direct sea route clearly identifiable as such was Faxian, a Buddhist monk who after a long sojourn in India (which he had reached overland from China) and Sri Lanka, returned home by sea in 413–14. His misadventures on the journey take up much of the last book of his journal, which provides information about the route he followed, navigational practice, how mariners addressed the dangers of seafaring, and travelers’ superstitions. Faxian’s journey was made in two stages interrupted by a five-month stay on an island in Southeast Asia. Both of the ships in which he sailed carried more than two hundred people, but beyond that he does not describe the vessels except to note that en route from Sri Lanka to Yepodi (possibly Borneo or Java) his ship sailed with a smaller vessel in tow, “in case of accidents at sea and destruction of the big vessel.” This was scant provision for the number of lives at stake, and when danger struck the crew seems to have felt that their safety took precedence over that of their passengers. (The idea that the officers and crew of a ship should sacrifice themselves for their passengers in the case of shipwreck is of recent vintage.) During a gale, “The merchants wished to get aboard the smaller vessel; but the men on the latter, fearing that they would be swamped by numbers, quickly cut the tow-rope in two.” Those remaining on the larger vessel began to lighten ship by jettisoning their goods, although Faxian held on to his books and religious articles. The fate of the smaller boat is unknown, but after thirteen days Faxian’s battered ship reached an island, possibly one of the Andamans or Nicobars, in the eastern Bay of Bengal, where the crew fixed the leak before putting back to sea. Normally the captain would have navigated by “observation of the sun, moon, and constellations,” but overcast skies forced him to hug the coast of the Malay Peninsula despite the slower progress and greater risk of encountering pirates. After three months, “they reached a country named [Yepodi] where heresies and Brahmanism were flourishing, while the Faith of Buddha was in a very unsatisfactory condition.” In May 414, Faxian joined another ship bound for Guangzhou at the start of the southwest monsoon. The passage should have taken “exactly fifty days,” but a month out they ran into storms that blew for several weeks during which “the sky was constantly darkened and the captain lost his reckoning” and was unable to find a familiar coast. The ship was driven off course and may have passed through the Luzon Strait between Taiwan and the Philippines and into the Philippine Sea before the captain turned northwest and brought the ship to land finally on the Shandong Peninsula, thirteen hundred miles north of the intended destination.

  If Faxian’s Buddhism went unnoticed in the Bay of Bengal, his shipmates from Yepodi blamed his faith for their troubles: “Having this Buddhist monk on board has been our undoing, causing us to get into this trouble,” they claimed. “We ought to land the religious mendicant on some island; it is not right to endanger all our lives for one man.” He was only spared becoming a castaway when one of the ship’s company threatened to report his defamers to the emperor, “who is,” he reminded his fellow travelers, “a reverent believer in the Buddhist faith and honors the religious mendicants.” It is likely that the merchants who blamed Faxian’s religion for their problems were from Southeast Asia, for Faxian mentions Chinese merchants only obliquely, when he notes that some of his shipmates were returning home to Guangzhou. His silence on this subject, and that of other contemporary sources, suggests that there was littl
e immediate Chinese involvement in the Nanhai trade, or at least that the majority of shipowners were Malays, Indians, Chams, or Funanese. If this was the case, it may have been because the Chinese considered the trade too risky, or because this direct crossing of the South China Sea was relatively new, although the fact that Faxian reports that the passage should have taken “exactly fifty days” implies that the route was well established.

  One reason for the opening of the more direct sea route via the Strait of Malacca may have had to do with the rise of Buddhism in Southeast Asia and China, and the increasing importance that the Chinese attached to maintaining communication with the great centers of Buddhist teaching in Sri Lanka and northern India. Missionaries had introduced Buddhism to China via the silk road in the first century BCE, but the religion did not begin to take root until three hundred years after that, around the same time that Buddhist teachers began reaching Jiaozhi. Merchants and missionaries opened the sea route for the transmission of Buddhism into China in the third century. One of the most prominent was Kang Senghui, son of a merchant of Sogdiana (now Uzbekistan) who reached China by way of India and Jiaozhi, and converted the king of Wu to Buddhism.

  China’s embrace of the new religion led to changes in both the nature and the scope of long-distance sea trade. While merchants continued to traffic in luxuries, there was a new emphasis on religious artifacts from relics to incense and, sailing in Faxian’s wake, scholars and translators. Missions from Sri Lanka began reaching China in 405. On the east coast of the Malay Peninsula south of the Kra Isthmus, Panpan became known especially for its store of religious artifacts and ritual materials. In Southeast and East Asia, as in India, the ecumenical qualities of Buddhism made it accessible for all, not just wealthy elites. This gave merchants a broader consumer base to satisfy, which in turn contributed to their profits and the desirability of engaging in trade. The official history of the Liu Song Dynasty describes the material and spiritual role of the sea-lanes to India, Persia, and the Byzantine Empire when it notes that ships bring “valuable products of the sea and mountains. And also the doctrine of devotion to the lord of the world [i.e., the Buddha]. Thus there is a chain of great and small ships on the route, and the merchants and envoys gather to exchange.” Nor were the only beneficiaries of the growing traffic those at either end of the east–west trade. While the opening of the route across the South China Sea helped doom Funan and other coastal polities unable to compensate for the loss of commerce, it created new opportunities for others. So a king of Kantoli (on either the Malay Peninsula or Sumatra) dreamed that his people “would become rich and happy and merchants and travelers would multiply a hundredfold” were he to engage in trade with China.

  The Sui Dynasty

  Buddhism received its highest official sanction in China during the reign of Emperor Sui Gaozu, founder of the Sui Dynasty (589–618), whose genius lay in his appreciation of the fact that national unification was a function not just of military might but also of cultural cohesion and internal communication, although the latter could serve military ambition, too. Practical as well as devout, Gaozu employed Buddhism to unify China—for the first time in nearly four centuries—by building temples, subsidizing monasteries, and mining its teachings for affirmation of the legitimacy of his own rule. By the end of the century, Buddhism was to all intents and purposes the state religion, although Daoists received a measure of government support and Gaozu’s advisors included many strict Confucianists. While encouraging this spiritual renaissance, Gaozu sought to renew the nation’s infrastructure, and in 584 he ordered his chief engineer, Yuwen Kai, to build a new capital at Chang’an and to refashion the seven-hundred-year-old canal linking the capital, on the shallow and fickle Wei River, with the Yellow River. The new waterway was called the Guangdong Qu, the Canal for Expanded Communication. Even as this work was under way, Gaozu was developing his plans for the conquest of Chen, last of the independent southern dynasties, which fell in 589 in a carefully orchestrated campaign along the Yangzi, its northern border. Gaozu’s forces included two fleets built in the Yangzi and Han River valleys and on the coast south of the Shandong Peninsula. Arrayed against these were the five-decked “Azure” and “Yellow Dragon” ships of Chen, each of which carried eight hundred men, many armed with crossbows. In the event, the Sui commander prudently avoided a fight in the Yangzi gorges, where his men would have been at a disadvantage, and overran the Chen defenses from the land.

  Gaozu’s son and successor, Sui Yangdi, was, like his father, a devout Buddhist, energetic, and harsh. To his Confucianist critics he was extravagant in his construction of a second capital at Luoyang and an extensive network of canals. The latter required the corvée labor of millions of men and women, but it had the undeniable effect of strengthening the internal ties of the newly reunited country. The Sui canals linked Chang’an to the area around modern Beijing in the north and to Hangzhou in the south. The northerly stretch was the longest, covering about 1,350 kilometers. To the south the most heavily trafficked canals during the Sui and Tang Dynasties were the Bian Canal, which ran from the Yellow River near Kaifeng southeast toward the Huai River and the Grand Canal; and the Grand Canal itself, which continued south to Yangzhou, crossed the Yangzi, and then wound its way south for another 435 kilometers to Hangzhou.

  To commemorate the opening of the improved waterway between Luoyang and Yangzhou, Yangdi led a lavish procession of “dragon boats, phoenix vessels, war boats of the ‘Yellow Dragon’ style, red battle cruisers, multi-decked transports, lesser vessels of bamboo slats. Boatmen hired from all the waterways … pulled the vessels by ropes of green silk on the imperial progress to Yangzhou.… The boats followed one another poop to prow for more than 200 leagues [100 kilometers].” The Sui sovereigns proved better canal builders than rulers. Their dynasty lasted less than forty years, but more than five hundred years after Yangdi, when the Song court was forced to relocate to Hangzhou (which they renamed Lin’an), the poet-statesman Lu You wrote “The only reason that our Imperial Court can now stay at [Lin’an] is because we have this canal. Both the Bian [Canal] and this one were made by the Sui dynasty and benefit our Song. Is this predestination?”

  The Sui emperors sought to re-create the China of the Han era by consolidating control over the empire’s territory while defining the Middle Kingdom’s relations with lesser states on the periphery of Chinese culture and beyond. Although both Jiaozhi and Linyi initially recognized Sui suzerainty and sent envoys to the new emperor, in 601 Jiaozhi declared independence. The Chinese responded decisively, but rather than invade by the time-honored route through Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces, the Sui armies marched onto the Yunnan Plateau and attacked from the west down the Red River. Following Jiaozhi’s surrender, the dynasty charged a provincial governor with overseeing the seaborne trade and controlling “the barbarians of all the kingdoms south of the sea … arriving in boats after traveling unknown distances … bringing goods by the Jiaozhi route.” Farther afield, in 607 the Sui exchanged embassies with states in Southeast Asia. Yet the Sui dynasts would not benefit from these productive initiatives thanks in part to their disastrous military campaigns on the Korean Peninsula.

  Northeast Asia

  China and the Chinese have had a long and complex history with the people of Northeast Asia and although the region had only indirect contact with areas west and south of China, the Middle Kingdom proved less a buffer than a filter through which alien ideas and institutions flowed from more remote corners of Eurasia. The Japanese archipelago was first inhabited about thirty thousand years ago, and while some people reached the northern island of Hokkaido by way of the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Kurile Islands, the more important route was across the Korea Strait to the islands of Kyushu and Honshu. Continental influences became especially pronounced from the fourth century BCE, when Chinese states took an increasingly active interest in the Korean Peninsula. At this time, the northern state of Yan (whose capital lies beneath modern Beijing) invaded the peni
nsular state of Gojoseon (Old Choson), which occupied the area between Pyeongyang and Seoul. Refugees from this attack moved down the peninsula and across the Korea Strait in a migration that seems to have been the catalyst for Japan’s transition from the hunter-gatherer Jomon culture to the more sedentary and technologically advanced Yayoi. The ancient story that members of an expedition sent by the Qin emperor to find the Daoist elixir of immortality settled on Kyushu may recall this exodus from the Korean Peninsula to Japan. At this point, Yayoi culture seems to have absorbed a host of Chinese practices already present in Korea, including metallurgy and paddy rice cultivation. And unlike China or Korea, Japan essentially skipped from the Neolithic to the Iron Age and adopted simultaneously bronze-and ironworking technologies imported in the third century BCE.