Yongle was so satisfied with her that he appointed her father chief minister of the Court of Imperial Entertainment (rank 3a). Chuan died at Lincheng, in what is now Hebei, and was accorded a royal burial.41 Clearly, Yongle’s appetite for Korean women remained unabated, as he selected two more in 1417 and another twenty-eight in 1424, the last group being chosen to also serve his son and grandsons.42
While Yi Korea used horses, castrated courtiers, and beautiful women to cement her relationship with Ming China, Japan sent wave after wave of pirates to plunder China’s coastal towns, from the Liaodong peninsula all the way to Guangdong. The Ming government first labeled these raiders “dwarf pirates”
( wokou) but soon realized that some of them were renegade Chinese who had joined with Japanese masterless samurai ( ronin) against the Ming regime. The cosmopolitan group included Chinese, Korean, and other Asian traders and sailors masquerading as Japanese pirates. They smuggled contraband goods to and from mainland China and stored them on desert islands, particularly those o¤ the shore of Kyushu. During the early Ming period, Emperor Hongwu adopted a three-pronged attack against the pirates and smugglers by: (1) building a navy of 110,000 to defend coastal provinces, (2) engaging Japanese authorities to curtail the raiders, and (3) regulating maritime trade so as to control contraband activities.43 To facilitate its maritime trade, the Ming government established three maritime superintendencies at Ningbo at the northeastern tip of Zhejiang; Quanzhou, Fujian; and Guangzhou, Guangdong. It specified the frequency and number of ships, goods, and personnel of tribute missions allotted to each vassal state, including Japan.44
For operational control, the Ming government prepared a series of numbered paper passport tallies, usually two hundred for each vassal state. They were torn from four stub books and sent to each vassal-state ruler, while the eunuch superintendent in the port of entry retained the stub books and the provincial administration o‹ce kept a duplicate copy. Such passport tallies and 193
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stub books were always replaced with new issues when a new emperor was enthroned. When a tribute mission arrived at the designated port, its envoy and sta¤ members were quartered in the governmental hostel. Guangzhou, for instance, had a facility with 120 rooms, Quanzhou had 63, and Ningbo had 36.
The envoy first presented his king’s o‹cial message, and the eunuch superintendent meticulously recorded the numbered tallies against the stub books in his o‹ce. After a satisfactory verification, the eunuch superintendent entertained his guests and immediately reported the arrival of the tribute mission to the Ming court. Tribute goods generally consisted of both “o‹cial tribute,”
which was sent to the emperor, and “private cargo,” a portion of which, after a 6 percent commission was paid by foreign traders to Chinese o‹cials, could be sold or bartered at the port of entry. The eunuch superintendent always bartered the best 60 percent of the cargo on behalf of the Ming government and let the foreign traders sell the rest to licensed Chinese merchants.45 The tribute mission was then required to send part of its mission and a portion of its cargo to the Ming capital. As in the case of Central Asian missions who arrived via the land route, the Ming government paid all the travel expenses within China for Japanese missions that arrived by sea and also provided horses, boats, and other means of transportation. When the mission arrived in Nanjing, it was housed at the International Inn. Japan could trade only through the port of Ningbo and, at the outset, was allowed only one trade mission every ten years; each mission was limited to two ships and two hundred persons, with no one allowed to bear arms while visiting China. Since a trade mission to China could easily reap a profit of five or six times the value of the tribute goods presented, many Japanese warlords competed for the prized market. As a consequence, by 1406 the Ming court agreed to increase the frequency of Japanese trade missions to once a year and to allow three ships and three hundred persons per mission.46
Japan sent its first tribute trade mission to the Ming court in 1401, and two years later the Japanese shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408) dispatched the monk Kenchu Keimi when Yongle was already enthroned as the new emperor.
Among the tribute items Yongle received were 20 horses, 10,000 catties of sulfur (used for the manufacture of explosives), 32 pieces of agate, three gold screens, 1,000 spears, 100 large sabers, one complete set of samurai armor, one set of stationery, and 100 folding fans. But better still, in his letter to the Ming emperor, Yoshimitsu called himself “your subject, the king of Japan.”47 Yoshimitsu’s motives for ingratiating himself to the new emperor in China have been the subject of various interpretations, but one thing seems certain: like Yongle, he was trying to legitimize his new power at home and to win friends 194
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abroad. After constructing the sumptuous Golden Pavilion on the northern edge of Kyoto, Yoshimitsu used it as a retreat facility for attracting leading Zen monks, who had by this time become Japan’s dominant artists, scholars, and writers. For this endeavor, he desired Chinese imports such as paintings and books on religion, philosophy, and secular literature. Many of his top counselors were Zen Buddhists who were eager to make contact with their Chinese counterparts. Yongle, wishing to underscore his concern about the Sino-Japanese relationship, quickly reciprocated Japan’s tribute mission by dispatching his senior transmission commissioner Zhao Juren and the monk Dao Cheng to the Ashikaga court in Kyoto in 1404.48
The glory-seeking Yongle also sensed that the time was ripe for winning the new shogun to his orbit. He followed up the first embassy by sending the eunuch Wang Jin to Kyoto in 1405 and the censor Yu Shiji in 1406. On his part, Yoshimitsu dutifully sent an annual tribute mission, often with more than three hundred persons, to the Ming court. Partly because of these embassies, the pirates’ pillage subsided during the first decade of the Yongle reign. In his message to the “king of Japan,” dated the twenty-fifth day of the fifth lunar month, 1407, Yongle praised Yoshimitsu for his loyalty and his unfailing e¤orts to control Japanese pirates. According to a Japanese source, Yongle awarded Yoshimitsu, on this occasion, one thousand taels of floral silver (80 percent of which was sterling), fifteen thousand copper coins (cash), fifty bolts of brocade, fifty bolts of bast fibers, thirty bolts of gauze, twenty bolts of satin, and three hundred bolts of flowered and colored silk. Ashikaga Yoshimitsu was so intoxicated with Yongle’s magnificent gifts that during his autumnal hunting, he put on Ming robes, rode a Chinese carriage, and proudly showed o¤ his Mandarin cachet.
Unfortunately, the fifty-year-old shogun died a few months later, during the summer of 1408. By custom Yongle dispatched a eunuch-envoy, Zhou Quan, to express his condolence and, according to the Ming o‹cial account, also to invest Yoshimitsu’s son, Yoshimochi, as the new “king of Japan.”49
However, two years after Yoshimochi’s accession, his most influential counselors felt that it was a disgrace to acknowledge Yongle as an overlord of the Japanese and advised the new shogun to discontinue his father’s humiliating diplomacy. Meanwhile, the temporary order created by Yoshimitsu had begun to disintegrate, and Yoshimochi was preoccupied with Japan’s domestic problems. In the spring of 1411, when Yongle’s eunuch-envoy Wang Jin arrived in Japan, Yoshimochi not only refused to receive him but had Wang detained at the port of Hyogo (present-day Kobe). Wang was fortunately able to enlist the assistance of smugglers to get back to China. After one last futile attempt in 1419 to contact Yoshimochi, Yongle heard no more from his Japanese vassal.50
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In the meantime, Japanese pirates resumed their attacks, and the Ming government was forced to evacuate its inhabitants from coastal towns and to deploy more forces to ward o¤ the raiders. In 1419 several thousand pirates, sailing in thirty-one boats, plundered the Liaodong peninsula. The Ming commander Liu Rong was well prepared for the assault, as his troops killed 742 pirates and captured 857.51
Nevertheless, Japanese piracy and smuggling never cease
d completely, partly because contraband smuggling was so lucrative and partly because the pirates and smugglers had established a network of Chinese accomplices on the mainland, such as ship owners, merchants, gentry, and even government o‹cials. Consequently, smuggling went on all along the China coast, a case in point being the port of Haicheng (near Amoy), where Chinese accomplices operated a clandestine trading network with Japan, the Ryukyu Islands, Malacca, and other Southeast Asian states.52 It is obvious that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, trading with mainland China, whether legal or otherwise, was vitally important to the economy of many of China’s neighboring states. And, indeed, economic reality and commercial interests induced even such a small maritime state as the Ryukyu Islands to repeatedly beseech the Ming court to allow its tribute missions to visit Nanjing. In fact, the kingdom of Ryukyu was among the earliest states to acknowledge Ming suzerainty, and during Hongwu’s reign several Ryukyu princes came to study in China.
Ryukyu rulers, like the Korean kings, periodically sent young girls and castrated boys to the Ming court, while the Ming emperor commissioned court eunuchs to invest new Ryukyu kings, and so on.53
It is interesting to note that most of the Ryukyu delegates were ethnic Chinese who sojourned in the island kingdom and rendered their service to the Ryukyu rulers. Even before the establishment of the Ming dynasty, Chinese traders bearing o‹cial titles of the Ryukyu kingdom, coming and going in trading junks, had stayed at ports of call for several months or even years. The o‹cial writings of the Ryukyu kingdom reveal that since the early fifteenth century a substantial number of Chinese had settled in or near the Naha port.54 They became familiar with the nuances of the East China Sea and the maritime trade in the West Pacific and were employed by the Ryukyu authorities to help build a seafaring economy for the island kingdom. As a matter of fact, Yongle granted the request from the Ryukyu kingdom to recruit thirty-six families from Fujian to man its maritime fleet. In 1411 a Ryukyu o‹cial by the name of Cheng Fu petitioned Yongle, during a tribute mission, to allow him to stay in China. Cheng told His Majesty that he had left China more than forty years before to serve the Ryukyu kingdom and now, at age eight-one, he wished to retire to his native 196
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home in Jiangxi. Cheng’s request was granted.55 As mentioned before, Ryukyuan tribute missions were required to conduct trade at the port Quanzhou in Fujian only; they generally exchanged sulfur and local products for Chinese porcelainware and metal tools.
In securing recognition of the power and prestige of his empire, Yongle communicated not only with rulers such as Shahrukh in Transoxiana, Sejong of Korea, and Ashikaga Yoshimitsu of Japan but also lured rulers from such Southeast Asian states as Borneo, Malacca, and Sulu to come to his court in person. Throughout most of its history, Southeast Asia has been oriented toward China and India, and its vast but vacant rice-growing lands and highly lucrative spice trade have acted as a magnet, attracting hundreds of thousands of Chinese settlers. Of all the di¤erent spices, pepper was most highly valued by the Chinese for medicinal purposes and for seasoning. Marco Polo observed that for each shipload of pepper that went from Southeast Asia to the West, a hundred went to the Quanzhou port. In the 1340s the Arabian traveler Ibn Battuta described in detail the Chinese junks plying between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.56 Thus, long before the establishment of the Ming dynasty, Chinese court eunuchs, traders, sojourners, and adventurers of all breeds had frequented such Southeast Asian states as Champa, Cambodia, Siam, Malacca, Java, Palembang, Patani, Brunei, and Sulu.57 In 1394, two-and-a-half decades into his reign, Emperor Hongwu announced that seventeen maritime states regularly sent tribute missions to his court. Three years later the number had increased to thirty.58 Although Yongle’s active trade and diplomacy with Southeast Asia were a continuation of his father’s expansionism, the scale and manner in which he conducted this expansion was unprecedented (some may even say nefarious) as he greatly expanded overseas navigation and employed a large number of eunuchs to execute his foreign policy.
Scarcely had Yongle ascended the dragon throne than he dispatched eunuch-envoys abroad to announce his new mandate and to invite various Southeast Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern states to establish relations with the Ming court.59 The upshot was that during his reign of twenty-two years, among the tribute missions Yongle received were twenty-two from Champa; twenty-one from Java; nineteen from Siam; fifteen from Malacca; twelve from Sumatra; nine each from Borneo and Lambri; eight from Calicut; seven from Cambodia; six from Sulu; five from Cochin; four each from Bengal and Hormuz; three missions each from Mogadishu and Zeila (both in Somalia), Aden, Sri Lanka, Brava, and the Maldive Islands. Cambodia was among the first states to respond to Yongle’s announcement by sending a delegation, in 1403, to rea‹rm its loyalty to Ming overlordship. One year later Yongle dispatched an investi-197
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ture mission to Cambodia, but three members of the mission deserted soon after their arrival. To make up the loss, the king of Cambodia ordered three natives to join the Chinese delegation when it returned to China. Yongle was outraged by such trickery and demanded that the Chinese escapees be found and punished. In 1407 Cambodia sent white elephants and local products to Yongle, who reciprocated by dispatching the eunuch Wang Guitong to award the Cambodian king with silver ingots. In 1408 and 1411 Admiral Zheng He visited Cambodia. Cambodia was believed to have provided shelter for Annamese guerrillas during the Annamese war, and on a few occasions Yongle reprimanded its king for this. In 1418 the Cambodian king sent his grandson to Nanjing for a rapprochement, and Yongle selected his eunuch Lin Gui to escort the Cambodian royal prince home.60 However, after the death of Yongle, tribute from Cambodia gradually dwindled and ceased entirely after 1460.
Like Champa and Cambodia, Siam also gravitated toward the Ming empire.
The advanced maritime technology applied by Chinese sailors had made maritime journeys relatively safe and reliable. Sailing with the wind, a Chinese junk took only ten days to sail from Fuzhou to Champa, three days from Champa to Cambodia, and ten more days to Siam. As in the case of the Ryukyu kingdom, the king of Siam often commissioned ethnic Chinese to lead his tribute delegations to the Ming Court. When Yongle established the College of Translators in 1407, he made sure to hire Chinese interpreters who could speak the Siamese language. He also routinely appointed his eunuchs as envoys to Siam, including Li Xing (fl. 1403–30) in 1403, Zhang Yuan in 1408 and 1409, Hong Bao in 1412, Guo Wen in 1416, and Yang Min in 1419. These eunuch-envoys repeatedly confirmed and reconfirmed Yongle’s commitment as the Siamese overlord. Routine missions and special assignments generally included investing new Siamese kings and attending Siamese royal funerals. Ming records show that the king of Siam sent elephants, turtles, black bears, white monkeys, incense, and highly prized pepper and sappanwood to Yongle and received silk, fabrics, silver, and paper money in return. Like all other tribute missions from Southeast Asia, the Siamese were required to go to Guangzhou to conduct their trade.61
At the height of Siam’s power, its territory included Malacca, at the southern tip of the Malay peninsula. For decades the chieftain of Malacca paid an annual sum of forty ounces of gold to the king of Siam so that he could maintain autonomy. In 1403 Yongle dispatched the eunuch Yin Qing to Malacca, and two years later the chieftain of Malacca requested and received the title
“King of Malacca” from Yongle. In the next three decades Admiral Zheng He visited Malacca at least five times and left lively memories in that small sea-198
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port state. He was later deified by the Malaccans, and his cult remains popular even today in Singapore. (It took less than two days for Zheng He’s ships to sail from Singapore to Malacca.) By the fall of 1411 the king and the queen of Malacca were visiting Nanjing with an entourage of some 540 people. Yongle asked the court eunuch Hai Shou and the director of the Bureau of Protocol in the Ministry of Rites, Huang Shang, to a
ccommodate the Malaccan tribute mission at the International Inn. After going through the tribute protocol, Yongle awarded his Malayan vassal two embroidered dragon robes, one unicorn robe, one hundred gold coins, five hundred silver coins, countless pieces of silk fabric, and a large quantity of metalware, among other gifts. On the day of their departure, the o‹cials from the Ministry of Rites gave the Malaccan delegation a farewell banquet at the Longjiang Naval Arsenal. The incentive for coming to China and kowtowing to Yongle was such that subsequent Malaccan kings and princes loved to float their boats across the South China Sea and visit the Ming capital. To please their lord Yongle, the Malaccans brought such tribute items as golden cranes, Malayan cloth, agate, black bears, black monkeys, coral trees, turtle shells, parrots, rose perfume, incense, and rhinoceros horn.62
But the reason Yongle was willing to spend so profligately on such a small vassal was that Malacca was strategically located between the West Pacific and the Indian Ocean. In the Ming network of maritime trade, Champa’s Xinzhou (Qui Nhon) and Malay’s Malacca had become the two most vital entrepôts.
While Xinzhou was the point of departure for trips to Cambodia, Siam, Borneo, Sulu, and the Philippines, Malacca served as the staging post from which Yongle could launch his naval expeditions to Sumatra, Java, Sri Lanka, and the states in the Indian Ocean. Moreover, the Chinese built large warehouses and supply depots there for their trade missions to the Indian Ocean and the Arab world.63 It is to be noted that the Ming government not only monopolized the tribute trade but also provided trade junks and Chinese sailors to its vassal states.
During the reign of Yongle, Chinese ships, Chinese sailors, and Chinese maritime technology dominated not only Asian waters but also the Indian and Arabic sea lanes. Such phenomena ultimately inspired Louise Levathes to write When China Ruled the Seas, a lively account of Ming naval reconnaissance.
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