The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  Following the merchants’ revolt during the An Lushan rebellion at midcentury, foreigners banned from trading at Guangzhou moved to Annam, the favored entrepôt of traders sailing between Southeast Asia and China. To counter its success the governor of Guangzhou requested an imperial decree depriving Annam of the right to admit traders in 792. This was denied on the grounds that Guangzhou’s problem was, as it had been a century before, corrupt officials:

  The merchants of distant kingdoms only seek profit. If they are treated fairly they will come; if they are troubled, they will go. Formerly, [Guangzhou] was a gathering place for merchant vessels; now, suddenly they have changed to Annam. If there has been oppressive misappropriation over a long period of time, then those who have gone elsewhere must be persuaded to return; this is not a matter of litigation, but of changing the attitudes of officials.

  Content that the Annamese would remain faithful subjects of the empire, in the 780s Tang authorities put Annam under the rule of a local leader named Phung Hung, a move that marked the start of northern Vietnamese control of their own affairs. When the Chinese subsequently attempted to reassert their authority over Annam, a native anti-Tang faction enlisted the support of the kingdom of Nanzhao. Setting their sights down the Red River, Nanzhao armies scored dramatic victories over the Chinese and their Annamese allies. The Chinese withdrew from Annam to Guangdong to await reinforcements, which were supplied by ships from Fujian. Officials requisitioned many of the ships from merchants, whose cargoes they plundered or destroyed to make room for the armies’ supplies, and to add insult to injury they held shipowners liable for any losses resulting from shipwreck. Brutal though these measures were, the armies of Nanzhao were routed in 865 by an army under Gao Pian, who reestablished nominal control over Annam and proved one of the most evenhanded Chinese officials to serve there.

  Well respected even by the Vietnamese, Gao built a new capital in the vicinity of Hanoi, the traditional seat of power in the region, and took other measures to restore Annam’s prosperity. He went to great lengths to promote safe navigation between the capital and the sea as well as in the Gulf of Tonkin, which he regarded as so dangerous that, he claimed, “You must give up hope of coming back alive, as soon as you board a ship [in this area].” According to a stele enumerating his accomplishments in Annam, Gao sought to

  Banish distress by bringing food;

  Prosperity comes riding in boats.

  I devised plans against civil disorder…

  Causing the sea to form a channel,

  Where boats can pass in safety,

  With the deep sea stretching out peacefully,

  A highway of supply for our city.

  For the first thirty years after the end of the Tang, Annam remained an autonomous province under the nominal control of one or another of the kingdoms of China’s tenth-century interregnum. The Vietnamese finally shucked off more than a thousand years of Chinese rule in 939. Unification under a single king took several decades, but later in the century Dinh Bo Linh overcame his rivals through military savvy, diplomacy, and sheer audacity. (When his enemies threatened to execute his child, he asked, “How can a great man compromise a great affair simply because of his son?”) Foreign traders acknowledged the stability achieved during his reign and in 976, according to a Vietnamese history, “merchant boats from different nations beyond the sea arrived and presented the goods of their countries.” Nonetheless, for the first century or more of independence, the rulers of the kingdom of Dai Viet focused on consolidating their authority in the middle and upper reaches of the Red River and they remained somewhat aloof from the deltaic lands of the coast, a region even the Chinese had not bothered to name. There was a modest degree of riverine trade between the coast and the upper Red River, but it was not until the revival of China’s maritime trade under the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279) that the delta port of Van Don became a major destination for Chinese, Javanese, Malay, Khmer, and other merchants. Van Don had ready access to Nanzhao and Yunnan, Cambodian Angkor (which lay across the Annamite Mountains and down the Mekong River), and the local and long-distance trade that skirted the coast of Vietnam from China to the Strait of Malacca. Although Dai Viet bore the unmistakable imprint of Chinese influence in terms of governance and culture, apart from a brief occupation during the fifteenth century Vietnam was never again ruled from China.

  Conducting Maritime Trade

  The kingdoms of Dai Viet, Champa, Java, and Srivijaya owed their prosperity to their participation in an increasingly vibrant and profitable international trade centered on China where their resources were in high demand. The focus of the Sui and Tang emperors was on securing the internal integrity of the empire, but China’s territorial expansion increased the number of tribes and states sending embassies laden with exotic flora, fauna, textiles, slaves, and performing artists. Even from beyond the reach of direct imperial control, tropical rarities excited the senses of the Celestial Kingdom’s elite, whose appetite for the novel and curious animated merchants the length and breadth of the Monsoon Seas. Emperors welcomed exotic gifts while new foods transformed a rather bland Chinese cuisine that previously consisted for the most part of “fish and vegetables mostly uncooked,” as Yijing observed, comparing it to the more lavish culinary arts of India where “All vegetables are to be well cooked and to be eaten after mixing with the asafoetida, clarified butter, oil, or any spice.” Emperor Tang Xuanzong’s taste for exotics from distant lands attracted the censure of a traditionalist advisor who counseled the emperor against accepting gifts from abroad: “His Majesty, having newly ascended the throne, should show the world how he behaves himself abstemiously, by showing examples of frugality to the people, and not indulging in the weakness of being fond of rare and curious foreign trash.” But pious thrift was not a hallmark of the Tang, and disregarding his advisor’s admonition Xuanzong received many gifts from southern emissaries, everything from a troupe of musicians and elephants from Srivijaya and Champa to rare birds from eastern Indonesia.

  Apart from animals, which were incidental to the main cargoes delivered by foreign ships, China’s bulkiest imports were exotic woods, especially sandalwood and aloeswood. Native to India and eastern Indonesia, sandalwood came in the form of finished goods such as carvings, boxes, and furniture, and as raw material for carpentry, sculpture, and incense intended for Buddhist settings. Aloeswood from Champa and Sumatran camphorwood were treasured for their medicinal qualities and burned as incense, and the insect-repellent qualities of camphorwood made it an excellent material for chests. The demand for Buddhist texts and objects of veneration was essential to the revival of China’s southern trade during the Tang, but to a greater degree than in the west, people developed a secular appreciation for scented woods and oils, which were used as perfumes, air fresheners, and aphrodisiacs, and the trade in exotic woods continued even after Buddhism’s decline in China. For the wealthy, woods from overseas undoubtedly had cachet simply by virtue of being foreign, and rosewood from Java and India was used for furniture, including—thanks to a belief in its efficacy in relieving headaches—wooden pillows. China was not merely a consumer of goods and it exported a variety of goods from silks and ceramics to bronze bells and paper. However, it also exercised a powerful political and economic influence on the Asian seaboard from Korea and Japan to Srivijaya.

  During the late Tang and Five Dynasties periods the easing of official attitudes toward private property and commerce was reflected in the gradual relaxation of government control of merchant activity. Increased agricultural output freed farmers to grow more lucrative cash crops, especially in the marginal lands of Zhejiang, or to abandon farming altogether to take up work as artisans or merchants. The expansion of trade also led to China’s experiments with paper currency. In the eighth century, tea merchants faced the prospect of transferring ever greater quantities of copper cash from the capital—where they had to sell the tea—back to their home provinces. At the same time, provincial governments were
required to make monetary gifts to the throne. Rather than absorb the cost and risk of transferring large quantities of copper cash from and to Chang’an, merchants began to deposit their cash with provincial “memorial-presenting courts” in the capital who issued them a letter of credit called “flying money.” These could then be redeemed at the provincial capital, while the provincial gift could be paid from the funds deposited at the memorial-presenting court in Chang’an. In 812, the central government adopted this practice to facilitate the payment of provincial taxes. The system was retained by the Northern Song authorities, and in the eleventh century these transactions amounted to three million strings of cash annually. Although it was technically a government monopoly, merchants used flying money in private trade, and they began printing an early form of paper money called an “exchange medium,” in essence a promissory note backed by a deposit of cash held by an exchange medium shop. The government followed suit and began to issue its own paper currency, but inadequate reserves led to inflation and notes fell to a quarter of their face value.

  Sometime before 715, the Tang court established the first office of maritime affairs—shibosi—to oversee the commerce of Guangzhou and collect the duties on imported goods. Visiting in midcentury, the Buddhist priest Jianzhen found there “argosies of the Brahmans, the Persians and the Malays, their numbers beyond reckoning, all laden with aromatics, drugs, and rare and precious things, their cargoes heaped like hills.” Other shibosi followed at Hangzhou and Mingzhou, near the mouth of the Yangzi. Overseas trade opened up considerably in the tenth century as the coastal kingdoms and dynasties of the Tang-Song interregnum lured merchants to their ports to profit from their commerce and gain the respect of foreign rulers. As the Song consolidated their power, they reinstituted the shibosi, whose officers had a variety of responsibilities: inspecting foreign ships to ensure that the government got to bid first on all imports (which could be purchased only at approved government stores); collecting duties and taxes; welcoming emissaries; and accommodating victims of shipwreck or other misfortunes. Before sailing abroad, Chinese traders had to sail to a port with a shibosi, which upon receipt of an itinerary, crew list, and cargo manifest could issue a pass that would allow them back into the country. Foreigners and Chinese alike were subject to strict export controls on horses and ironware among other things, above all copper, the drain of which was a perpetual concern from the Tang onward.

  Such administrative oversight was not unique to the Chinese, and maritime trade from the Indonesian archipelago and the Korean Peninsula and Japan could not have grown without a corresponding increase in commercial sophistication and government oversight. Rulers capitalized on foreign trade by subjecting imports to duties and taxes, the collection of which required the creation of ever-larger bureaucracies. How such officials operated, and how successfully, varied widely, and while little information about authorized ports survives, even less is known about the innumerable landing places used by local traders, smugglers, and pirates who stalked both coastal and inland waters. As the careers of Jang Bogo, Wang Geon, and others attest, Korean merchants were the leading long-distance carriers of Northeast Asia in the ninth century, and they conducted much of the commerce between Japan and China. To facilitate this trade, the Japanese assigned special interpreters to Tsushima Island, but from the seventh century all foreign trade funneled through the Kyushu Headquarters (Dazaifu) on Hakata Bay, near modern Fukuoka. At first this agency was charged with overseeing official embassies, but starting in the 800s it was responsible for inspecting imports, although no duties were assessed, and for housing and feeding visiting merchants, who were not charged. The Yamato government maintained a strict monopoly of trade, determining not only where foreigners could visit and for how long but also regulating exports and reserving rights of preemption on all imports. The decline in Korean sea trade in the later ninth century was partly responsible for the lack of trade missions from Japan to China between 853 and 926, but the Japanese probably exacerbated the problem by limiting the time that Korean merchants could stay at Hakata for fear they were spies.

  Well into the Tang, most goods reaching the port of Guangzhou were carried to the capital and other northern markets not by sea but either overland or via the network of rivers and canals opened by the construction of the Lingqu Canal in the third century BCE. This situation changed dramatically during the Song, when the ports of Fujian underwent the most spectacular growth of any in China. Located at the mouth of the Min River on the mainland opposite northern Taiwan, Fuzhou flourished and the ninth-century Arab geographer Ibn Khurdadhbih mentioned it as one of the four principal ports visited by Muslim sailors, together with Jiaozhi in Annam, Guangzhou, and Yangzhou. Before this, southern Fujian had been beyond the pale of Chinese settlement, suitable for exiles such as the scholar-official Han Yu, who in 819 was banished to southern Fujian, a region with

  Typhoons for winds, crocodiles for fish—

  Afflictions and misfortunes not to be plumbed!…

  Poisonous fogs and malarial miasmas

  Day and evening flare and form.

  Later in the century, northerners fleeing the collapse of law and order sought refuge in Fujian, and after the Huang Chao rebels sacked Guangzhou, the expatriate community there dispersed, some to the south but a substantial number to the previously insignificant port of Quanzhou in Fujian.

  At the end of the Tang Dynasty, Quanzhou was ruled by Wang Yenpin, of whom it was said that “Whenever the barbarian trading ships were dispatched, there had never been a loss either due to shipwreck or deficit in trade. For this, people called him ‘the secretary who summons Treasures.’ ” Whether Wang was all that successful (or autonomous) is debatable, and Quanzhou’s spectacular growth would have to wait until the Song court lifted restrictions on maritime trade. But when it did so, in the middle of the eleventh century, the results were dramatic, and a government agent could report that “the port was clogged with foreign ships, and their goods were piled like mountains.” Part of Quanzhou’s allure was that while local officials engaged in illicit trade, they charged only 10 percent for the right to trade—a form of private tax that was only two-thirds the official amount levied at Guangzhou. The government eventually recognized Quanzhou’s indisputable primacy as a clearinghouse for foreign trade, and in 1087 established there the site of the fourth shibosi after Guangzhou, Hangzhou, and Mingzhou. The older Fujianese port of Fuzhou had declined in the early Song when there was an exodus of commercial capital and expertise north to Lin’an and south to Quanzhou, and it never received comparable recognition.

  All the coastal kingdoms that emerged from the collapse of the Tang pursued trade with the south, and the rulers of the Song Dynasty made no effort to reverse the trend. Capitalizing on the expertise of the Muslim maritime communities in Yangzhou, which had developed as a result of the trade via Guangzhou, Quanzhou, and elsewhere, by the eleventh century Chinese shippers were carrying their own trade as far as Java. Many of these were Hokkiens, inhabitants of Fujian descended from Arab and Persian Muslims whose far-flung connections were so valuable that foreign traders at Guangzhou preferred to deal with Hokkien middlemen rather than Chinese natives of Guangzhou. A product of the Song’s liberalized approach to foreign trade, the Hokkien would become a lasting force in the commercial world of Southeast Asia.

  Ships of East Asia

  Tang authors divulge little on the subject of ship design or shipbuilding; the oldest detailed illustrations of ships date from after the Tang Dynasty; and archaeological finds are few. Even so, shipping of all kinds was essential to the Chinese way of life, for as one observer noted at the prosperous start of the eighth century, “Great ships in thousands and tens of thousands carry goods back and forth. If they once lay unused it would spell ruin for ten thousand merchants. If these were ruined, then others would have no one on whom to depend for their livelihood.” The number of vessels required to keep the empire afloat, as it were, was astonishing. When the An Lushan rebel
lion ended, among the more urgent needs was to rebuild the devastated canal fleet, and the government established at least ten shipyards on the banks of the Yangzi for the purpose.

  Shipping on inland waterways was generally in the hands of extended families whose lives and livelihoods centered figuratively and literally on their vessels, many of which served as floating homes and workplaces. The author of an eighth-century history recorded that “There is a saying among those who live among the rivers and lakes that ‘water won’t carry ten thousand,’ by which they mean that large vessels do not exceed 8,000 or 9,000 piculs capacity”—between 550 and 650 tons, not including people and their household goods.c Yet a woman known as Aunt Yu had “a huge boat on board of which people were born, married and died.… There was a crew of several hundred.” Every year they made a round trip along the Gan, Yangzi, and Huai Rivers within the modern landlocked provinces of Jiangxi and Anhui, “reaping enormous profits. This was nothing other than ‘carrying ten thousand.’ ” The number of people who lived on boats in the Tang is unknown, but tenth-century Quanzhou was home to “floating boat people” who made their living as fishermen and traders, while in other inland areas as much as half the population was waterbound. The practice of living on houseboats has never died out, and while there are far fewer today, an estimated forty million Chinese lived on the water “in some shape or form” in the mid-twentieth century.