The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  In his fifteenth-century Book of Profitable Things in the Principles of Navigation, the Omani navigator Ahmad ibn Majid explains that navigators should be able to track the courses of the sun and moon, determine “the risings and settings of the stars,” know distances and routes between ports, and how to use various navigational instruments to determine latitude. “It is also desirable that you should know all the coasts and their landfalls and the various guides such as mud, or grass, animals or fish, sea-snakes and winds. You should consider the tides, and the sea currents and the islands on every route, make sure all the instruments are in order, and inspect the protection afforded the ship and its instruments and its men.” Although Ibn Majid’s epitome of navigational practice dates from the fifteenth century, he refers to a number of antecedent navigational manuals, the oldest of which are Persian works from the twelfth century, and his recommendations bear comparison with the advice given in the “Suparaga Jataka,” as well as late-first-millennium practice in the Mediterranean and northern Europe.

  Between the seventh and eleventh centuries, Indian Ocean mariners led the process of integrating the disparate regional markets of the Monsoon Seas between East Africa and the Red Sea in the west, and Southeast Asia and China in the east. In so doing, they laid the foundations for the all but uninterrupted maritime growth of this region that has lasted to the present day. The maritime trade of Monsoon Asia shows many of the hallmarks of what we now call globalization, a process that creates networks of interdependence in which changes in one place can have ripple effects that spread from region to region. The clearest manifestations of this are seen in the rise and shifting fortunes of the Islamic caliphates and the Tang and Song Dynasties, whose wealth exerted powerful forces on the maritime endeavor of the two realms, as well as on other regions from East Africa and India to Southeast Asia and Japan. The resulting interdependency had many positive benefits, facilitating the growth of commerce and its underlying enterprises from agriculture to crafts, and encouraging the spread of religion and technology. At the same time, technological and political change in one place could have a negative impact on another thousands of miles away. Overall, however, the period was one of growth in maritime trade and political consolidation. While much of this resulted from local initiative, these were spurred by the unification and intensifying sea-mindedness of China in the Tang and Song Dynasties.

  a The modern port of Basra was founded on the site of Ubulla in the 1700s.

  b The dirham was a silver coin weighing less than 3 grams; the dinar was a gold coin of 4.25 grams.

  c Malabar is a hybrid of the Dravidian malai (mountain) and Persian bar (land). Al-Idrisi wrote of “Manibar” in the mid-twelfth century, and the geographer Yakut referred to “Manibar” in 1228. Zhao Rugua called the region “Malimo” (1225), while John of Montecorvino (1293) and Marco Polo (1298) both wrote about “Malabar.” The region is known locally as Malayalam or Kerala.

  d Kalah probably referred to the region of Kedah, Malaysia, except in the ninth century when the name also referred to an island in the vicinity of Takuapa, Thailand, to the north.

  Chapter 11

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  China Looks Seaward

  The founding of the Tang Dynasty (618–907) ushered in a golden age of Chinese civilization, when an ecumenical and broad-minded spirit infused the visual, written, and performing arts, gave new life to religious, philosophical, and political discourse, and made China an object of wonder and renown across Asia. The Tang emperors pushed Chinese influence farther west than ever before or since, but by the middle of the ninth century the borders of the Celestial Kingdom had contracted so far that the venerable capital of Chang’an was closer to barbarian lands than to the center of Han China. Between the later Tang and the Song (960–1279) Dynasties, the Chinese capital was displaced ever eastward, to Luoyang, Kaifeng, and ultimately Hangzhou (Lin’an).a The former two are on the Yellow River and closer to the heart of the canal system that knit the empire together while Hangzhou lay on the sea itself.

  These moves by the court bureaucracy were accompanied by a dramatic demographic shift as hundreds of thousands of Chinese fled the western and northern provinces for the relative security found south of the Yellow River and later of the Yangzi. Faced with dramatic reversals on their continental borders and insecurity on the silk road, the government adopted a more flexible approach to overseas trade and traders as it sought to increase its revenue from customs duties and other taxes. Dependent on Korean intermediaries for trade with Korea and Japan in the early Tang, by the tenth century Chinese merchants were plying the sea-lanes of Asia, and their influence was felt from southern India to Japan. While China’s near neighbors adopted policies similar to those of the Middle Kingdom, the states of Southeast Asia tended to be more laissez-faire, largely because they were subject to a far greater number of influences: Chinese, of course; Arabs and Persians (mostly Muslim, but also Zoroastrian, Nestorian Christian, and Jewish); Hindus and Buddhists from India and Sri Lanka; and above all indigenous Malays, Javanese, Burmese, Khmers, and others.

  The Belitung Wreck’s Tang Cargo

  As important as the Belitung wreck is for what it reveals about shipbuilding techniques in the Indian Ocean region, it is equally so for the evidence its so-called Tang cargo yields about the nature of east–west sea trade. Apart from about ten tons of lead ingots that served as ballast, and which could be sold or traded at the ship’s final destination, the overwhelming bulk of the ship’s cargo consisted of Chinese ceramics, sixty thousand pieces in all, many of them still intact. Most were bowls turned out by kilns in Changsha, now the capital of landlocked Hunan Province, south of the Yangzi; but there were also hundreds of mass-produced inkpots, spice jars, and ewers. One of the bowls bears a Chinese date that corresponds to the year 826, which falls squarely within the date ranges suggested by Chinese coins and radiocarbon dating of the ship’s timbers and of a sample of star anise, a spice native to China and Vietnam. When shipped, the Changsha bowls were nested and wrapped in straw or packed in large storage jars from Vietnam. In addition to this mass-market cargo, the Belitung ship also included numerous pieces of silverware, some etched in gold, and the largest gold cup of Tang origin in existence, as well as more refined ceramics with cobalt blue decorations from Zhejiang Province.

  The discovery of a Chinese cargo in a ship almost certainly built in, and manned by sailors from, Southwest Asia and sunk in Southeast Asian waters is in itself indicative of the international nature of trade thirteen hundred years ago. More striking still is the choice of decorative motifs applied by the Chinese potters, which testifies to a keen understanding of their intended markets. Most of the bowls bear geometric designs or inscriptions from the Quran rendered in red and green and were obviously destined for markets in the Abbasid Caliphate. Green-splashed bowls were popular in Persia, while those adorned with lotus symbols were intended for Buddhist customers. The symbiotic relationship between maker and market is obvious from the potters’ design choices, but the striking blue employed in the Zhejiang ware required cobalt, which in the ninth century had to be imported from Persia. While it is not difficult to envision the circumstances under which pieces of exceptional quality would have appealed to elite customers, the Near East did not want for potters of its own. One is forced therefore to wonder about the social dynamic that made a small, inland city in south-central China a producer of everyday goods that would grace the tables of people thousands of miles away by sea. Even if we take this initiative to be a form of early globalization resulting from cheaper labor and other inputs—some of which had to be imported—these would have to have been inexpensive enough to offset the relatively high cost of transportation, the cheapness of which is a defining characteristic of globalization today. Finally, we have to consider the interrelationships among manufacturers, maritime merchants, and an ubiquitous Chinese officialdom, and how these affected long-range trade, and people’s attitudes toward it, during and after the Tang Dynasty.
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  China in the Sui and Tang

  Just as the short-lived Qin Dynasty of the third century BCE laid the groundwork for the prosperity of the Han Dynasty, so the Sui Dynasty anticipated the flowering of Chinese culture under the Tang. In both cases, the earlier dynasty brought a variety of disparate power centers under the rule of a single emperor who imposed order on a diverse population spread across a vast territory. The transitions from one ruling house to the other were not seamless, but the continuities were strong, and the Tang debt to Sui initiatives was considerable, especially for their massive investment in the canal system and their embellishment of Luoyang, at the junction of the Grand Canal and the Yellow River. Despite their conspicuous failures against the kingdom of Goguryeo on the Korean Peninsula, the sheer size of the Sui armies attested to China’s military might, which, coupled with a vigorous diplomacy, ensured a period of unrivaled prosperity and expansion during the Tang’s first century, not only in Central Asia but also on the Korean Peninsula and in northern Vietnam.

  In 618, Li Yuan, duke of Tang, captured the Sui capital of Yangzhou on the Grand Canal near its junction with the Yangzi, and soon thereafter he became the first Tang emperor, known to history as Tang Gaozu. A soldier by profession, Gaozu had a keen administrative sense and he restored political and economic stability to the empire by improving education, reinstating the examination system for government officials, minting a uniform coinage, and enacting new, less punitive laws. By the end of the seventh century Chinese arms had restored peace to China proper, defeated the Eastern and Western Turks to extend Chinese rule from Mongolia to the Amu Darya in Turkmenistan, and made the revived capital at Chang’an probably the most cosmopolitan city in the world. With a population of perhaps one million, Chang’an attracted merchants, envoys, and monks from Japan and Korea, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, India, the caliphates, and the Byzantine Empire. Surrounded by tributaries of the Wei River, itself a tributary of the Yellow River, Chang’an was served by five canals on which came bulk shipments of silk and rice from the Yangzi-Huai area and, from closer by, timber for the city’s prodigious construction needs. Chang’an’s situation was complicated by the canals’ tendency to flood, low water in the Wei River, and the Sanmen Rapids, a treacherous bottleneck on the Yellow River that could be circumvented only by portaging grain and other cargoes overland from Luoyang for about 130 kilometers before loading it back on boats for the final push up the Yellow and Wei Rivers. Chang’an’s closest rivals in size were Luoyang, which served as the dynasty’s eastern capital from the middle of the seventh century, and Yangzhou, which became a major port for ships from the south.

  The Korean Campaigns

  Toward the end of his reign, Gaozu’s successor Tang Taizong resumed the Sui emperors’ efforts to extend Chinese influence onto the Korean Peninsula. Goguryeo had erected massive fortifications along the western bank of the Liao River against a possible Tang attack, but Taizong became increasingly preoccupied with the prospect of bringing the peninsula under his control. His opportunity came when a coup deposed the king of Goguryeo, nominally a Chinese vassal, and the usurper severed the overland route from China to its ally, the kingdom of Silla. In 644, Taizong dispatched more than forty thousand troops to the mouth of the Daedong (Taedong) River below Pyeongyang. The sources reveal little about the outcome of this amphibious expedition, which was supposed to act in concert with an army marching overland from the north, but the invasion as a whole failed and Taizong canceled plans for a new campaign shortly before his death. In 655, his successor, Tang Gaozong, attacked Goguryeo again, this time to avenge an attack on the Khitan, a Mongol-speaking Manchurian tribe that had submitted to the Tang. As before, the conflict involved the three Korean kingdoms, with Silla seeking the Chinese as allies against Baekje, who were supported by the Japanese.

  In assessing their prospects for a Korean campaign, the Chinese had probably not considered the possibility of intervention by the Japanese, who viewed the proceedings on the Korean Peninsula with mixed feelings. Chinese mores had begun to permeate Japanese court society at the end of the sixth century, when they were introduced by Korean traders and migrants. Buddhism was officially recognized in Japan in 587, but at the same time the court embraced Confucian ethical and legal teachings and the promotion of government officials on the basis of merit. The Japanese also absorbed Chinese literary tastes and artistic styles, and Chinese city and temple layouts became models for their own. Emulous though it was of the Middle Kingdom, the Yamato court had a formal alliance with Baekje, whose Prince Pung had lived in Japan for two decades. In 663, a Japanese fleet sailed in support of Prince Pung’s claim to the throne, only to be destroyed by a Tang force at the battle of the Geum River. They lost four hundred ships and “King Pungjang of Baekje with a number of others embarked in a ship and fled to [Goguryeo].” Three years later, Goguryeo was weakened by a succession crisis and, seizing the initiative, the Chinese defeated the kingdom in a land campaign two years after that. At a tactical level, China’s Korean campaign of the 660s succeeded when previous efforts had failed because their alliance with Silla enabled the Chinese to launch an amphibious campaign across the Yellow Sea, and once established on the lower peninsula they were able to fight Goguryeo on two fronts. The southern front was probably easier and less costly to maintain by sea than were the forward bases in Liaodong and northern Goguryeo, which could be reached only by long overland marches.

  Flush with victory, the Chinese divided the entire peninsula into commanderies, effectively reducing their ally, Silla, to the same status as Goguryeo and Baekje. But they failed to keep a grip on the peninsula due to the Koreans’ collective resistance coupled with severe problems at home. Within a decade, Silla quickly gobbled up Baekje and Goguryeo and forced the Chinese to withdraw to Liaodong. Survivors of Goguryeo’s ruling dynasty established the state of Balhae (Parhae in Chinese), which straddled the Yalu River and served as a buffer between Silla, China, and the Khitan from 710 to 934. On the domestic front, Gaozong’s campaigns had been costly and the end of hostilities coincided with droughts and famines that led to massive internal migration to avoid taxation and seek out better land. Further straining the imperial treasury were the swelling bureaucracy and lavish building programs, especially in Luoyang, which Gaozong had formally designated as a second capital, a move that foreshadowed the decline of Chang’an and the northwest provinces. The Chinese were simultaneously engaged in a prolonged struggle with the kingdom of Tibet and tribes of both the Eastern and Western Turks. In the 690s, the Tibetans defeated a Tang army only three hundred kilometers from Chang’an, the Eastern Turks descended on Gansu Province, and Hebei Province was invaded by the same Khitan whose invasion by Goguryeo had prompted the Tang intervention on the Korean Peninsula.

  These varied threats were contained by the start of the new century, and in 712 China enthroned one of its greatest monarchs, Tang Xuanzong. Although his half-century reign ended in calamity, it was under the “Brilliant Monarch” that Tang China reached the apogee of its imperial reach. With China at peace with her continental neighbors, one of Xuanzong’s first priorities was to restore the primacy of Chang’an over Luoyang, where the court had relocated for a total of twenty-three years between 657 and 705. Integral to this project was the renewal of the canal system and improvements to navigation on the Yellow River—most notably by reducing the portage around the Sanmen Rapids to only eight kilometers—to ensure that tax rice originating in the lower Yangzi valley could reach the capital efficiently and reliably. In the seventh century Taizong had allowed tax grain to be converted to silk and copper cash to reduce the cost of transporting imperial taxes to Chang’an (which was borne by the prefectural governments), but rice remained the principal form of payment, and stockpiles provided the court with a hedge against famine in the event of drought, flood, or war.

  China was also resurgent in Central Asia where rulers from Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara requested help against Muslim armies encroaching from the
south. Emperor Tang Xuanzong granted honorific titles of nobility to rulers in the Pamirs, Kashmir, and the Kabul River valley. In connection with this, the Pallava king Narasimhavarman II sent an envoy to China with the monk Vajrabodhi in acknowledgment of which the Tang emperor recognized him as leader of the “Southern Army Which Cherishes Virtue.” The Tang Dynasty was at its peak when it suffered defeats on its western, northern, and southern borders. In 751, Gao Xianzhi, architect of much of China’s success in Central Asia, executed the king of Tashkent for failing to defer to the imperial throne. To avenge his father, the late king’s son enlisted the help of Turks and an army from the newly declared Abbasid Caliphate and in July their combined forces routed Gao at the Talas River near the border between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The same year an army from the newly emerged kingdom of Nanzhao destroyed a Tang army of eighty thousand. This was especially galling because Nanzhao, which occupied the strategic region where the Red River flows closest to the Yangzi, was a creation of the Tang. Humiliating as the losses in Central Asia and Nanzhao were, most decisive was that of a Tang army under An Lushan, a military governor in eastern Manchuria who launched an unprovoked attack on the Khitan.