The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (34 page)

Farther west mountains hug the coast of western
Cambodia and eastern
Thailand, while the head of the Bight of Bangkok is dominated by the swamps of the Chao Phraya delta. The Malay Peninsula is about 1,500 kilometers from north to south, is nowhere wider than 300 kilometers, and narrows to only 40 kilometers at the
Kra Isthmus. However, apart from an account of Chinese merchants crossing the upper peninsula during the first century
BCE
, there is virtually no written or archaeological evidence of traffic across the peninsula’s heavily forested and all but uninhabited mountains. With its broader alluvial plains, the east coast was home to relatively sophisticated states, while the western coast, though protected from the southwest monsoon by the mass of Sumatra as far north as 5°N, is fringed with dense mangrove swamps some of which extend inland as much as twenty kilometers, and the mountains come much closer to the sea.

Between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra lies the 500-mile-long Strait of Malacca, the most important thoroughfare between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. The northwest opening to the strait is about 175 miles across, but its southeast end is a complicated maze of channels—some less than 2 miles wide—through the Riau Archipelago and
Singapore islands. As on the peninsula, the mountainous terrain of the islands of Sumatra and coastal Java to the east makes agriculture and territorial consolidation difficult, and rival states tended to emerge along compact river valleys. Communication between these realms was relatively easy by sea, but the topography made it difficult to unify or exert direct control over terrestrial neighbors. Ruling authority depended largely on treaties and threats rather than territorial control and military force, and was made manifest by the flow of tribute from the periphery to the center of the kingdom.

The waters of Southeast Asia are sometimes referred to as an
Asian Mediterranean, a shorthand that implies a degree of regional coherence misleading on both geographic and cultural grounds. The people of the archipelagoes that
comprise modern
Indonesia, East Timor, the
Philippines, and
Malaysia have a common ancestry and speak related languages; yet while the Mediterranean is a virtually enclosed sea, only the northwest part of the South China Sea faces a continental shore, including the Malay Peninsula, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and China. The South China Sea and the smaller seas of eastern Indonesia open to the Pacific and are separated from the Indian Ocean to the south and west by straits that perforate Indonesia’s southern islands at intervals of scores to hundreds of miles. The islands of the Mediterranean number in the hundreds, but there are
more than twenty-six thousand in Southeast Asia, from Sumatra in the southwest to
New Guinea in the east and
Taiwan and the Philippines in the north. This diffusion inhibited the development of political units on a par with those of China, South Asia, the Near East, or the Mediterranean basin. Island empires only became possible after farmers and sailors had achieved significant improvements in agriculture and nautical technology starting in the seventh century ce.

Another way to consider the complexity of this region is by reference to its linguistic diversity. The maritime realm between Indonesia and Japan is home to five language families, linguistic divisions on a genealogical par with Indo-European, which is found (interspersed with Afro-Asiatic and Altaic) from India to
Ireland.
Austronesian languages—twelve hundred of them—are found throughout island Southeast Asia from the Philippines to Indonesia, on the southern Malay Peninsula, and in central Vietnam.
Tai
languages are spoken on the northern Malay Peninsula and in Thailand, and
Austro-Asiatic in Vietnam and Cambodia. Sino-Tibetan includes the Chinese languages and Korean, while Japanese is a language unto itself. This translates into a multiplicity of individual languages, which resulted in predictable problems, as explained by a third-century Chinese prefect stationed in
Jiaozhi (northern Vietnam). “
Customs are not uniform,” he wrote of this commercial hub between China and Southeast Asia, “and languages are mutually unintelligible so that several interpreters are needed to communicate.” Equally important, the region has never known a lingua franca comparable to
Latin or
Arabic, which were shared by the educated and merchant coreligionists of the west.

Tracing the distribution of these languages is one way of determining patterns of early migration through the region. Ancestors of the Austronesian speakers originated in southern China and spread east and south via Taiwan and the Philippines through island Southeast Asia over the course of tens of thousands of years. The first Austronesian settlers in mainland Southeast Asia were probably islanders who migrated via the Philippines and
Borneo at the end of the second millennium
BCE
. Their descendants’
Sa Huynh culture (named for a coastal village in central Vietnam) emerged around 600
BCE
and spun webs of trade across island and mainland Southeast Asia, with links even
to India. Judging from the distribution of artifacts found in modern times,
Sa Huyhn trade reached no farther north than central Vietnam, beyond which lay the
Dong-Son culture area. Centered on the Red River valley near
Hanoi from the seventh century
BCE
to the first century ce, the Dong-Son culture was that of an Austro-Asiatic-speaking people who had migrated overland from southern China. According to
a local tradition that reflects their melding with
Austronesian seafarers, the inhabitants of northern Vietnam were descendants of
Lac Long Quan, a lord from the sea, and
Au Co, the wife of a
Chinese invader he kidnapped as insurance against attack from the north.

The Dong-Son are perhaps best known for their massive
cast bronze drums. Weighing up to one hundred kilograms and standing one meter high, more than two hundred drums have been found across Southeast Asia as far east as the spiceries of the
Banda Islands. The seaward orientation of Dong-Son culture is apparent from the maritime subjects depicted on them as well as in the drums’ widespread distribution. Only two drums are known from southern Vietnam and none has been found in
Borneo, the Philippines, or northeast Indonesia, which reinforces the idea of a firm demarcation between Austro-Asiatic- and Austronesian-speaking people. Whether the Sa Huynh simply chose not to trade with the Dong-Son or actively blocked their way to the south is difficult to say. Drums have been excavated from burial sites in western Indonesia and mainland Southeast Asia, but they may have been carried out of northern Vietnam by river trade to the
Gulf of Thailand before being transported via short-range networks to the south and east.

While the seafaring Austronesian-speakers of Southeast Asia originated in what is now southern China, the maritime ambitions of the Chinese of the northern plains were primarily riverine. The ancient heartland of Chinese culture centered on the great bend of the flood-prone Yellow River in the modern provinces of Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Henan, southwest of Beijing and a thousand kilometers from the sea. The proximity of this region to the nomadic tribes of Central and northern Asia made maintaining the integrity of continental borders a primary concern. Inhabited mostly by agrarian or maritime-oriented
Yue people, the mountainous coastal provinces of southern China—
Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong—were comparatively quiet: northern Chinese expansion into these regions was a gradual and opportunistic process geared as much to securing the trade in exotic tropical goods as to territorial aggrandizement.

The tension between the need for security and the quest for novelties
complicated China’s evolving relationship to maritime trade. While most dynastic governments sought to insulate the country against invasion from the north and west through such projects as the construction of the
Great Wall, the Chinese simultaneously perceived themselves as the kingdom at the middle of the world. The maritime frontier to the east and south was at once a porous border through which alien ideas might flow, and a gateway through which foreigners could send trade goods in the form of tribute. The gist of tribute trade was that as China theoretically produced or grew everything it needed, it had no need of foreign trade. Goods acquired were taken as a material symbol of the giver’s acknowledgment of Chinese supremacy, while gifts bestowed by the Chinese were a manifestation of the emperor’s benevolence. By and large, “
tribute” was an elaborate fiction designed to inflate the Chinese court’s sense of its own importance and the Chinese were as often as not purchasing peace or, especially in the case of overseas countries, recognition. Historically the coasts of China were seldom regarded as an avenue of attack.

In China, there has been at different times considerable official opposition to overseas ventures and its by-product, the wanton consumption of luxury goods, the pursuit of which was considered detrimental to the empire’s security, economic stability, and morals, as it was in Rome. This was particularly true when Confucian traditionalists had the emperor’s ear. With their emphasis on filial obligation and belief in virtuous, paternalistic government, Confucianists tended to scorn commerce. Their essential view is found in two aphorisms in
The Analects of Confucius
compiled in the century of the master’s death in 479
BCE
: “
The gentleman is conversant with righteousness; the small man is conversant with profit” and “When your parents are alive, do not travel far. If you do travel, be sure to have a regular destination.” A standard interpretation of the latter injunction is that one must always be available to help, or in the worst case to bury appropriately, one’s parents. To be absent in pursuit of trade and unable to fulfill one’s obligations was ignoble in the extreme.

Representative of the Confucianists’ arguments were those of minister
Chao Cuo, who in the 170s
BCE
urged the emperor to focus his subjects’ attention on agriculture and silk cultivation, activities that would tie people to the land and their families. Chao Cuo regarded merchants as guilty of hoarding, profiteering, ostentation, and rising above their station. He maintained that “
an enlightened ruler esteems the ‘five grains’ and despises gold and jade,” the stock-in-trade of merchants who “travel all around within the sea without the hardships of hunger or cold.” Such disdain for merchants was not unique to China—one imagines Chao Cuo would have gotten a good hearing from a
Tiberius or Pliny, or from antiglobalization activists today—but as elsewhere it reflected an ideal rather than reality. Moreover, to the extent that official policy has rejected or embraced interaction with the world beyond the
borders of the Middle Kingdom, China’s actions have been determined more by strategic imperatives rather than by cultural predilections.

Confucius flourished around the start of the sixth century
BCE
, when a number of states occupied the area of what is now north-central and eastern China. The earliest recorded sea trade between north and south China dates from the sixth and fifth centuries
BCE
, when the state of Qi (in Hebei and Shandong Provinces) traded bronze, iron, and silk with the more southerly states of Wu and
Yue. In addition to trade, there was a considerable amount of sea-based military activity. Nearly twenty-five
naval or amphibious operations are known to have taken place between 549 and 476
BCE
, the most important of which, in 482
BCE
, was a Yue invasion of Wu that foreshadowed the latter’s fall a decade later. The Yue fell to the Chu (centered in
Hebei Province) in 334
BCE
, who were in turn absorbed by the short-lived but enormously influential
Qin Dynasty, the first Chinese empire (221–206
BCE
).

The ultimate victory of Qin over its rival states and its subsequent expansion to the south gave it a territory with a coastline longer than that of modern China, from central
Korea to northern Vietnam. Nonetheless, overseas enterprise during the Qin focused officially on the singular Daoist quest for the elixir of immortality.
Shihuangdi, the first Qin emperor, dispatched two expeditions to search for the immortals, whom Daoists believed to inhabit an island in the
Bo Hai (Gulf of Chilhi) enclosed by the Shandong and
Liaodong Peninsulas. Just as
Nearchus noted that Alexander the Great was apprehensive about sailing from India to the Persian Gulf, the Chinese annals relate, “
As the emperor considered that if he himself went to sea he would probably not be successful, he ordered a certain person to embark with a crew of young boys and girls, and to search for [the immortals].” Although they claimed to have seen the islands, contrary winds kept them from reaching their intended destination and they returned to China. A second expedition of several thousand people is said to have reached the Japanese island of
Kyushu, a story that may have some truth to it, as we shall see. But during the Qin and Han Dynasties, and even later, the primary orientation of Chinese sea trade was on the
Nanhai, or
South China Sea.

In the third century
BCE
, this traffic was in the hands of the Yue, or Hundred Yue, in Chinese eyes an uncivilized people who occupied the coastal region between the lower Yangzi and northern Vietnam. The Qin Dynasty’s turn to the south was motivated by a drive for territorial expansion and trade, especially in luxury goods and exotics. In 221
BCE
, Shihuangdi sent five armies totaling half a million men to seize the coasts of modern Fujian, Guangdong,
and
Guangxi Provinces, and northern Vietnam. Formidable as this force was, it bogged down in difficult terrain where it was harassed by an elusive foe and suffered from inadequate supply lines. Success was assured only by the construction of the five-kilometer-long Lingqu Canal, an artificial waterway the importance of which is far greater than its length would imply.