Unfortunately, this younger brother taught the people to worship a golden ox, saying, “It always excretes gold. The people got the gold, and their hearts rejoiced; and they forgot the way of Heaven; all took the ox to be the true lord.” The prophet Mou-hsieh returns, destroys the ox, and banishes his brother, who “mounted a large elephant and vanished.”56
Whatever his diplomatic and cross-cultural accomplishments, Zheng He earned little economic reward for an effort that consumed most of the nation’s timber, shipbuilding capacity, and much of its military force. The most famous and prized of the fleets’ cargoes produced only evanescent symbolic value: several African giraffes obtained from Arabian and Indian rulers as tribute. The beasts were valued not only because of their exotic and pleasing appearance, but also because they were thought by the Chinese to be an animal known as the qilin. This mythical beast had a unicorn’s horn, horse’s hooves, wolf’s forehead, ox’s tail, and musk deer’s body, and was said to appear only at times of peace and prosperity. Another tribute gift from Malacca that captivated the Chinese were strange clear glass objects which magnified the size of tiny written characters—almost certainly the first eyeglasses, which had recently been invented in Venice.57
Worse, much of both the fleets’ cargoes—outbound, porcelain and silk; and inbound, spices, precious stones, woolens, and carpets—passed through the warehouses of Zheng He’s fellow eunuchs, who controlled most of the nation’s overseas commerce. On the death of Zhu Di in 1424, the eunuchs and the xenophobic Confucian bureaucracy faced off in a power struggle. The Confucians’ victory ended the great age of Chinese exploration. Zheng He died in command of the seventh voyage; after it returned up the Yangtze River in July 1433, none would follow.
Within a few generations, the Chinese allowed their naval and merchant fleets to wither; in 1500, an imperial edict made the construction of vessels with more than two masts a capital offense. In 1525, another decree forbade the building of any oceangoing vessel. Where navies are absent, pirates pillage. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Japanese wako marauders so terrorized China’s coastline that to this day women in Fujian province hide their faces with blue scarves originally designed to shield the wearer from the lecherous gaze of foreign bandits.58
Recently, Zheng He’s voyages have become a subject of revisionist history. In 1421: The Year China Discovered America, the retired English submarine commander Gavin Menzies suggested that a detachment from Zheng He’s sixth expedition visited America (as well as Australia, New Zealand, the Atlantic coast of Brazil, and the Cape Verde Islands); his claims, for the most part, are not taken seriously by maritime historians.59
Today, as China begins to flex its newfound military and economic power, it uses Zheng He’s voyages to illustrate to the outside world the historically benign and nonaggressive nature of Chinese foreign policy. It would do better not to draw too much attention to the details of the missions, which on many occasions kidnapped and slaughtered those who did not pay proper homage to imperial authority. For example, on his first expedition, Zheng He killed over five thousand pirates in the Strait of Malacca; their leader was returned to China, presented to the emperor, and decapitated. On later voyages, Zheng He captured and carried back the rulers of Sri Lanka, Palembang in eastern Sumatra, and Semudera (near modern Banda Aceh), and on numerous occasions led his troops into battle.60
Da Gama and Zheng He missed each other by just sixty-five years; it can only be imagined what might have occurred had the first Europeans to visit the Indian Ocean encountered the treasure fleet, whose smallest support junks would have towered over the puny Portuguese caravels. Fortunately for the Portuguese, the fickle mistress of history spared them this humiliation. When Vasco da Gama breached the Indian Ocean, the playing field had just been vacated by the one force capable of repelling him.
On April 20, 1511, Tomé Pires, an apothecary (and thus knowledgeable about rare spices), shipped out from Lisbon to seek his fortune in India. He never returned to his mother country, for he was sent as the first official European ambassador to the Celestial Empire, where he died in captivity at age seventy. His story might have remained unknown had not a Portuguese researcher visiting the French National Library in the 1930s come across the “Paris Codex.” This volume contained, among other documents, Pires’s Suma Oriental, an account of his travels. He described the Indian Ocean emporium trade just before it disappeared under the boots of the Europeans, and he affords us a detailed and intimate last look at the indigenous world of Asian commerce.
At that time, the primary axis of Asian trade ran from the massive Gujarati port at Cambay (about sixty miles south of the modern western Indian metropolis of Ahmadabad), the marshalling point for Indian textiles and European goods moving east toward Malacca. There, they would be traded for rare spices and Chinese silks and porcelains.
Pires described the broad estuary of the Mahi River, on which Cambay sits, as stretching out “two arms; with her right arm she reaches out towards Aden, and with the other towards Malacca.”61 Although Cambay was ruled by Muslim Mughals, the city’s long-distance commerce was dominated by its Hindu trading castes:
There is no doubt that these people have the cream of the trade. They are men who understand merchandise; they are so properly steeped in the sound and harmony of it, that the Gujaratis say that any offense connected with merchandise is pardonable. There are Gujaratis settled everywhere. . . . They are diligent, quick men in trade. They do their accounts with figures like ours and with our very writing. . . . There are also Cairo merchants settled in Cambay, and many Khorasans and Guilans from Aden and Hormuz, all of whom do a great trade in the seaport towns of Cambay. . . . Those of our people who want to be clerks and factors ought to go there and learn, because the business of trade is a science in itself which does not hinder any other noble exercise, but helps a great deal.62
The Portuguese of the sixteenth century were perhaps the most outrageously chauvinistic of the Western intruders in Asia and the Americas. Pires’s observation that his countrymen had much to learn from the heathen Gujaratis thus spoke volumes about the scope and sophistication of the indigenous Asian trade.
Pires worked no more than nine months in India before Portugal’s master of the East, Afonso de Albuquerque, dispatched him to Malacca, which had just fallen to the Portuguese. At the time of his arrival there, Malacca was a relatively new city, whose indigenous origins predated by little more than a century its conquest by the Portuguese. Sometime around 1400, a Hindu sultan, Parameswara, the local ruler of the Sumatran city of Palembang (which lies about halfway between modern Singapore and Java) defied the Hindu Majapahit ruler of Java and was forced to flee north toward Singapore and the strait. After first conquering Singapore, Parameswara then settled in Malacca, which derives its name from an old Malay word, malaqa, meaning “hidden fugitive.”63
The Hindu Majapahits, under attack from Muslim enclaves in Java and Sumatra and riven internally by strife and corruption, were on the way out. Parameswara proved the right man in the right place at the right time: canny, attuned to commerce, and possessed of innumerable contacts among both local and foreign traders in Palembang and beyond. Further, he was now in control of a fine natural port just out of range of the strife in Java and southern Sumatra, but still commanding the strait. That Parameswara concentrated his efforts on commerce through the strait was no accident—he was one of the last in a line of princes of the seafaring empire of Crivijaya. From its capital in Palembang, this empire had at one point ruled over large parts of Sumatra, Java, and the Malay Peninsula. Its wealth and power derived from its control of the local and long-distance trade through the strait.
Parameswara’s heirs proved just as talented, and Malacca soon became one of the world’s commercial fulcrums. What Singapore is to the modern world—a sprawling entrepôt commanding one of the world’s key maritime choke points—Malacca, which lies 130 miles northwest of modern Singapore, was to the Middle Ages. Just as Singapore does t
oday, medieval Malacca connected India, the Arab world, and Europe to its west with China and the legendary Spice Islands to its east.
Malacca dazzled Pires, and the city’s sights, smells, and activity evoked in him a vision of the promised land. A meticulous observer, Pires possessed both a ready facility with numbers—rare among colonial officials of that era—and an eye for the fine points of government and trade. Although Suma Oriental is no one’s idea of beach reading, the magic of Malacca at the very moment the Portuguese conquered it shines through. Pires counted eighty-four tongues being spoken, in a city as multicultural as London or New York, by the likes of:
Moors from Cairo, Mecca, Aden, Abyssinians, men of Kilwa, Malindi, Hormuz, Parsees, Rumes, Turks, Turkomens, Christian Armenians, Gujaratis, men of Chaul, Dabhol, Goa, of the Kingdom of Deccan, Malabars and Klings, merchants from Orissa, Ceylon, Bengal, Arakan, Pegu, Siamese, men of Kedah, Malays, men of Pahang, Patani, Cambodia, Champa, Cochin China, Chinese, Lequeos, men of Brunei, Luçoes, men of Tamjompura, Laue, Banka, Linga (they have a thousand other islands), Moluccas, Banda, Bima, Timor, Madura, Java, Sunda, Palembang, Jambi, Tongkal, Indragiri, Kappatta, Menangkabau, Siak, Arcat, Aru, Bata, country of the Tomjano, Pase, Pedir, Maldives.64
As pointed out by the historian and sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod, “No single other fact can quite capture the ‘shape’ of the world system by the fifteenth century as this cast of characters.”65 The presence of “Rumes” is especially intriguing, as this term was variously applied to southern Europeans, Turks, or Byzantine Greeks (Constantinople having been conquered sixty years previously by the Turks). Were there Italians already in Malacca before the Portuguese arrived? By 1326, following the enthusiastic reports of Marco Polo, Genoese merchants were a common sight in Zaitun, China’s greatest port, so it would not have been surprising if Pires had found them in Malacca as well. The Genoese were at least as well traveled as the Venetians, but also famously close-mouthed about the particulars of their fabulously profitable trade routes. It is no accident that the first detailed reports of the Far East came from more voluble Venetians such as Marco Polo.66 Even if there were no Italians in Malacca, their signature merchandise, transshipped from Alexandria and brought by Indian traders via the Red Sea and Cambay, abounded there: scarlet dye, colored woolens, beads, glass, and weapons of every type.
The massive flow of goods into the port was overseen by four harbormasters, one each for cargoes from the Arab Middle East and India, from Siam and China, from the local Sumatran ports, and from the rest of Indonesia. Pires observed that the main axis of trade was between Gujarat in western India, particularly its main port of Cambay, and Malacca. The most prized of Indian commodities was cloth, of which he documented thirty types, as well as opium and incense from farther west. More varied goods—mace, nutmeg, cloves, sandalwood, and tin, as well as Chinese silk and porcelain—flowed west, some bound for India, some for the Gulf, and some for Egypt and Europe. Pires mentions that four ships per year came from the smaller ports of Gujarat, each carrying a cargo worth up to thirty thousand cruzados (about $2.4 million in today’s money), whereas just one giant annual shipment came from Cambay, valued at about “seventy or eighty thousand cruzados, without any doubt.”67 And all this from just the western coast of India; vessels to and from India’s east coast likely carried a similar amount of goods as well.
What went right at Malacca? Its prosperity did not flow simply from its favorable location at one of the maritime world’s critical choke points, “at the end of the monsoons.”68 After all, the strait stretches several hundred miles along the Malay and Sumatran coasts and is far easier to control at its narrower Singapore end. Further, both the Malay side and the Sumatran side were studded with trading cities for centuries before Parameswara founded Malacca in 1400.
Rather, the city’s wealth and prominence can be credited to the institutional genius of Parameswara and his heirs. Alone among the many trading cities that lined the strait, Malacca had found the answer to the question of whether to trade, raid, or protect. The Malaccans levied import duties less onerous than those prescribed by traditional Islamic custom, the maximum being just 6 percent (instead of the usual 10 percent), payable on imports from “the West”—that is, those brought by Indians and Arabs. If a Westerner and his wife were both settled in the port, they paid only 3 percent. Easterners —local Malays, Indonesians (including the Moluccans with their precious spices), Siamese, and Chinese—paid no formal import duties at all. From all imports, even from “Easterners,” were subtracted “presents” to the sultan and his lieutenants, estimated by Pires at a cost of 1 or 2 percent of cargo value. No trader, Eastern, Western, or local, paid an export duty.
A reasonably solid, if informal, legal structure seems to have been in place, rivaling even the advanced common law of medieval England. The sultan’s chief civil officer, called the bendara, was a sort of mayor cum chief justice, who oversaw disputes and ensured that business ran smoothly. (He was also one of the recipients of the aforementioned “presents.”) A brother of the bendara was usually appointed tumungam, or customs judge, who together with a panel of local and foreign traders valued the cargo; duties were then collected and the cargo was thrown open to bids from a yet larger group of merchants:
And because time was short and the merchandise considerable, the merchants were cleared [i.e., the cargo fully sold], and then those of Malacca took the merchandise to their ships and sold them at their pleasure; from which the traders received their settlement and gains, and the local merchants made their profits. . . . And that it was thus done orderly, so that they did not favor the merchant from the ship, nor did he go away displeased; for the law and the prices of merchandise in Malacca are well known. (italics added)69
Adam Smith would surely have approved, for here, in fewer than a hundred short words, is the essential recipe for free-market success: an auction process conducted with well-described and well-known rules at a single point in time by a large number of well-informed participants, backed by government institutions considered honest by the participants—a sort of medieval eBay in the tropics, in which good rules attracted good traders, who in turn insisted on even better rules.
Neither did it hurt that Parameswara, in order to fend off the Majapahits of Java, converted to Islam so that he might marry the daughter of the Muslim king of Pase (in northern Sumatra) and thus acquire the king’s badly needed protection against the Hindu enemy. By 1400, the majority of the merchants in the strait were disciples of the Prophet, even if the local population was not. That Muslim commerce proceeded ahead of conversion in Southeast Asia was no accident; whereas theology is the primary driving force behind Christianity and the great Eastern religions, Islam’s backbone is a system of law covering all areas of conduct, including commerce. Thus, the new monotheism from Arabia was especially attractive to those engaged in any organized economic activity that flourished wherever rules were plainly visible and vigorously enforced by disinterested parties—again, as in the more secular English common law.
Even if one was not moved by religious fervor, embracing Islam at least did wonders for one’s credit rating. Only later would the general population, impressed with the wealth and piety of their Muslim merchant neighbors, follow their path.70 The conversion of much of Southeast Asia was accomplished not by conquerors roaring out of Arabia and Persia, but rather by cloth and spice merchants from Cambay and Calicut, who often married native women. Their mixed-race offspring, regardless of their mother’s religion, were almost always raised as Muslims and served to spread the word of the Prophet among their peers and their mothers’ friends and families.71 (When Pires arrived in Malacca, Muslim traders were still actively spreading the word of Muhammad across the Hindu empires of Java, Sumatra, and eastern Indonesia, even as the West was reclaiming Islam’s western domains in Spain and southeastern Europe.)
Like the previous Crivijaya, Parameswara kept open his lines of communication to China, which included Zheng He’s fleets. T
he sultan and the Chinese cultivated each other, partly to keep the Siamese, who were rivals of both the Malaccans and the Chinese, at bay; between 1411 and 1419, Parameswara is thought to have visited China and paid tribute to Zhu Di on many occasions. By the time the Chinese left the Indian Ocean in 1433, the Malaccans were more than capable of filling the vacuum in the strait.
Malacca was certainly not the only Indian Ocean principality to hit on the essential formula for a prosperous coastal trading state—Pires’s memoirs simply highlight the virtues of one of the most successful. The cities and ports between Venice and Canton that blossomed during the Middle Ages must have followed more or less the same precepts. In Calicut a series of hereditary Hindu rulers, the zamorin, maintained the legal, commercial, and maritime military institutions necessary for commercial success. Unfortunately for Calicut, it would be da Gama’s first stop in India.
Alas, as Britons today will attest, even the most vigorous royal lines eventually peter out. Unluckily for Malacca, just as the Portuguese were appearing on the horizon, its leadership fell into the hands of a dissolute sultan, Mahmud Shah, from whom the Europeans plucked the city like a plump avocado. The rules of the game would soon change for the Muslims and other Asians engaged in the ancient trade of the Indian Ocean, and not for the better. In one of history’s most bizarre chains of causation, the brutal, efficient newcomers were driven by a hunger for, of all things, culinary ingredients that today lie largely unused in most Western kitchens.
5
THE TASTE OF TRADE AND THE CAPTIVES OF TRADE
Few European institutions characterize everyday life on the Continent as do the weekly markets of the countryside. These gatherings, which delight both local resident and tourist alike, have their historical roots in the periodic gatherings of traveling merchants in towns too small to support their permanent presence.
Splendid Exchange, A Page 13