The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (37 page)

One reason for the opening of the more direct sea route via the Strait of Malacca may have had to do with the rise of
Buddhism in Southeast Asia and China, and the increasing importance that the Chinese attached to maintaining communication with the great centers of Buddhist teaching in Sri Lanka and northern India. Missionaries had introduced Buddhism to China via the silk road in the first century
BCE
, but the religion did not begin to take root until three hundred years after that, around the same time that Buddhist teachers began reaching
Jiaozhi. Merchants and missionaries opened the sea route for the transmission of Buddhism into China in the third century. One of the most prominent was
Kang Senghui, son of a merchant of
Sogdiana (now
Uzbekistan) who reached China by way of India and Jiaozhi, and converted the king of Wu to Buddhism.

China’s embrace of the new religion led to changes in both the nature and the scope of long-distance sea trade. While merchants continued to traffic in luxuries, there was a new emphasis on religious artifacts from relics to incense and, sailing in Faxian’s wake, scholars and translators.
Missions from Sri Lanka began reaching China in 405. On the east coast of the Malay Peninsula south of the
Kra Isthmus,
Panpan became known especially for its store of religious artifacts and ritual materials. In Southeast and East Asia, as in India, the ecumenical qualities of Buddhism made it accessible for all, not just wealthy elites. This gave merchants a broader con
sumer base to satisfy, which in turn contributed to their profits and the desirability of engaging in trade. The official history of the
Liu Song Dynasty describes the material and spiritual role of the sea-lanes to India, Persia, and the Byzantine Empire when it notes that ships bring “
valuable products of the sea and mountains. And also the doctrine of devotion to the lord of the world [i.e., the
Buddha]. Thus there is a chain of great and small ships on the route, and the merchants and envoys gather to exchange.” Nor were the only beneficiaries of the growing traffic those at either end of the east–west trade. While the opening of the route across the South China Sea helped doom Funan and other coastal polities unable to compensate for the loss of commerce, it created new opportunities for others. So a king of
Kantoli (on either the Malay Peninsula or Sumatra) dreamed that his people “
would become rich and happy and merchants and travelers would multiply a hundredfold” were he to engage in trade with China.

Buddhism received its highest official sanction
in
China during the reign of Emperor
Sui Gaozu, founder of the Sui Dynasty (589–618), whose genius lay in his appreciation of the fact that national unification was a function not just of military might but also of cultural cohesion and internal communication, although the latter could serve military ambition, too. Practical as well as devout, Gaozu employed Buddhism to unify China—for the first time in nearly four centuries—by building temples, subsidizing monasteries, and mining its teachings for affirmation of the legitimacy of his own rule. By the end of the century, Buddhism was to all intents and purposes the state religion, although Daoists received a measure of government support and Gaozu’s advisors included many strict Confucianists. While encouraging this spiritual renaissance, Gaozu sought to renew the nation’s infrastructure, and in 584 he ordered his chief engineer,
Yuwen Kai, to build a new capital at Chang’an and to refashion the seven-hundred-year-old canal linking the capital, on the shallow and fickle
Wei River, with the Yellow River. The new waterway was called the
Guangdong Qu, the Canal for Expanded Communication. Even as this work was under way, Gaozu was developing his plans for the conquest of Chen, last of the independent southern dynasties, which fell in 589 in a carefully orchestrated
campaign along the Yangzi, its northern border. Gaozu’s forces included two fleets built in the Yangzi and
Han River valleys and on the coast south of the
Shandong Peninsula. Arrayed against these were the five-decked “Azure” and “Yellow Dragon” ships of Chen, each of which carried eight hundred men, many armed with crossbows. In the event, the Sui commander prudently avoided a fight in the Yangzi gorges, where his men would have been at a disadvantage, and overran the Chen defenses from the land.

Gaozu’s son and successor,
Sui Yangdi, was, like his father, a devout Buddhist, energetic, and harsh. To his Confucianist critics he was extravagant in his construction of a second capital at
Luoyang and an
extensive network of canals. The latter required the corvée labor of millions of men and women, but it had the undeniable effect of strengthening the internal ties of the newly reunited country. The Sui canals linked Chang’an to the area around modern
Beijing in the north and to
Hangzhou in the south. The northerly stretch was the longest, covering about 1,350 kilometers. To the south the most heavily trafficked canals during the Sui and Tang Dynasties were the Bian Canal, which ran from the Yellow River near Kaifeng southeast toward the Huai River and the
Grand Canal; and the Grand Canal itself, which continued south to
Yangzhou, crossed the Yangzi, and then wound its way south for another 435 kilometers to Hangzhou.

To commemorate the opening of the improved waterway between Luoyang and Yangzhou, Yangdi led a lavish procession of “
dragon boats, phoenix vessels, war boats of the ‘Yellow Dragon’ style, red battle cruisers, multi-decked transports, lesser vessels of bamboo slats. Boatmen hired from all the waterways … pulled the vessels by ropes of green silk on the imperial progress to Yangzhou.… The boats followed one another poop to prow for more than 200 leagues [100 kilometers].” The Sui sovereigns proved better canal builders than rulers. Their dynasty lasted less than forty years, but more than five hundred years after Yangdi, when the Song court was forced to relocate to Hangzhou (which they renamed Lin’an), the poet-statesman
Lu You wrote “
The only reason that our Imperial Court can now stay at [Lin’an] is because we have this canal. Both the Bian [Canal] and this one were made by the Sui dynasty and benefit our Song. Is this predestination?”

The Sui emperors sought to re-create the China of the Han era by consolidating control over the empire’s territory while defining the Middle Kingdom’s relations with lesser states on the periphery of Chinese culture and beyond. Although both Jiaozhi and
Linyi initially recognized Sui suzerainty and sent envoys to the new emperor, in 601 Jiaozhi declared independence. The Chinese responded decisively, but rather than invade by the time-honored route through Guangdong and
Guangxi Provinces, the Sui armies marched onto the
Yunnan Plateau and attacked from the west down the Red River. Following Jiaozhi’s surrender, the dynasty charged a provincial governor with overseeing the seaborne trade and controlling “
the barbarians of all the kingdoms south of the sea … arriving in boats after traveling unknown distances … bringing goods by the Jiaozhi route.” Farther afield, in 607 the Sui exchanged embassies with states in Southeast Asia. Yet the Sui dynasts would not benefit from these productive initiatives thanks in part to their disastrous military campaigns on the Korean Peninsula.

China and the Chinese have had a long and complex history with the people of Northeast Asia and although the region had only indirect contact with areas west and south of China, the Middle Kingdom proved less a buffer than a filter through which alien ideas and institutions flowed from more remote corners of Eurasia. The Japanese archipelago was first inhabited about thirty thousand years ago, and while some people reached the northern island of
Hokkaido by way of the
Kamchatka Peninsula and the
Kurile Islands, the more important route was across the
Korea Strait to the islands of
Kyushu and Honshu. Continental influences became especially pronounced from the
fourth century
BCE
, when Chinese states took an increasingly active interest in the Korean Peninsula. At this time, the northern state of Yan (whose capital lies beneath modern Beijing) invaded the peninsular state of
Gojoseon (Old Choson), which occupied the area between
Pyeongyang and
Seoul. Refugees from this attack moved down the peninsula and across the Korea Strait in a migration that seems to have been the catalyst for Japan’s transition from the hunter-gatherer Jomon culture to the more sedentary and technologically advanced
Yayoi. The ancient story that members of an expedition sent by the Qin emperor to find the Daoist elixir of immortality settled on Kyushu may recall this exodus from the Korean Peninsula to Japan. At this point, Yayoi culture seems to have absorbed a host of Chinese practices already present in Korea, including metallurgy and paddy rice cultivation. And unlike China or Korea, Japan essentially skipped from the Neolithic to the
Iron Age and adopted simultaneously
bronze- and ironworking technologies imported in the third century
BCE
.

In the 180s
BCE
, a Yan renegade named
Wiman seized the throne of Gojoseon and barred trade between the smaller states in southern Korea and China. The Han emperors tolerated this arrangement until 109
BCE
, when they conquered Gojoseon and divided the peninsula into three commanderies, the only time the Chinese succeeded in establishing a full colonial presence in Korea. These eventually evolved into the kingdoms of
Goguryeo (Koguryo), Baekje (Paekche), and
Silla. Baekje occupied the southwest part of the Korean Peninsula, and acted as an intermediary between China and Japan. Silla, in the southeast, also traded with Japan. The heart of Goguryeo was astride the
Yalu River, but despite its proximity to the Middle Kingdom it was not until the fourth century that Goguryeo began to emulate Chinese forms of governance, law, writing, and Buddhism. In the fifth century, Goguryeo annexed the
Liaodong Peninsula and eastern
Manchuria and became the dominant power on the Korean Peninsula, with Silla as a junior partner. Fearful of Goguryeo expansion, Baekje recruited soldiers from the Yamato state in Japan, which had emerged in the plains of Honshu Island a century before, possibly under Baekje influence.

Chinese references to Japan are few until well into the common era, but it is known that a Japanese mission reached a Chinese commandery in northern Korea in the first century
BCE
, and that when a Japanese mission arrived at the Han court in 57 ce, the emperor sent the king of Wa (as the Japanese were called) an inscribed gold seal. By the third century, the Chinese appear to have formed a clear picture of the people, government, and customs of “
the mountainous islands located in the middle of the ocean to the southeast” of the Korean Peninsula. Among the more bizarre observances recorded was the
Japanese practice of employing ritual abstainers to ensure the safety of difficult enterprises like seafaring.

People can be quick to blame problems aboard ship on outsiders—foreigners or the religiously compromised like
Faxian or the biblical
Jonah—but if this account is accurate, the practice of embarking a ritual scapegoat to ensure safe passage at sea is apparently unique to the Japanese tradition.

Direct contact between China and Japan was infrequent in the Yamato period, but there was considerable movement of people, commodities, culture, and religion by way of Korea, which bore a strong imprint of Chinese culture. Relations between Yamato and the Korean kingdoms were more intense. After Sillan envoys accidentally destroyed a Japanese fleet in 300, the kingdom sent shipwrights to Yamato to build
replacement ships. A century later, Goguryeo defeated a
Yamato invasion of the peninsula where the Japanese probably intended to frustrate Silla’s expansion at the expense of their ally Baekje, where Japanese merchants congregated in
Mimana, near modern
Busan (Pusan). The Chinese declined the Japanese king’s request to be made supreme commander of an invasion against Goguryeo, and in 512 the Yamato court ceded control of Mimana to Baekje.

Fifteen years later, the Yamato raised a force of sixty thousand troops against Silla, but despite this support for Baekje, Goguryeo’s advance against Baekje continued. By the end of the century it was the most threatening of China’s northern neighbors and frequent raids finally provoked retaliation by Emperor
Sui Gaozu in 598. The land and sea campaign ended with Goguryeo’s perfunctory acknowledgment of Chinese supremacy, but in 612
Sui Yangdi launched a second invasion that included three hundred ships that crossed from the
Shandong Peninsula to Korea for an attack on Pyeongyang. This and two subsequent expeditions failed thanks to the defenses erected against a seaborne attack. Although the presence of Korean ships can be assumed, there is no mention of a sea battle. Yangdi only refrained from a fourth invasion because, thanks to his preference for lavish construction projects and foreign adventures over addressing domestic crises like a disastrous flood of the
Yellow River, China was on the verge of civil war. In 616, he moved his capital to
Yangzhou, where he was murdered two years later. But rough-hewn though its end may have been, the Sui Dynasty laid the foundation from which sprang the unrivaled prosperity of the
Tang Dynasty, the brilliance of which would shimmer across Asia.

Detailed study of shipbuilding in East Asia is hampered by a dearth of archaeological finds and written descriptions. The remains of Dong-Son logboats in northern Vietnam have transverse bulkheads and sides raised by the addition of planks fastened by
lashings and mortise-and-tenon joinery similar to that found in western Eurasia.
Many Dong-Son drums are decorated with bands of paddled warships carrying archers, spearmen, and drums, the latter presumably struck to help the paddlers keep time (as in Greek triremes), for signaling, or for encouragement in battle. In these scenes, the drum is in a deckhouse aft, just forward of where the helmsman stands by a
quarter rudder. The hulls are crescent-shaped, although no hogging trusses to support the ends are visible. On some, the paddlers appear to sit on the deck, which suggests that the vessels might be rafts—perhaps of bamboo, with turned-up ends achieved by steaming, as was the practice in China. Others interpret the vessels as logboats, a view supported by the fact that some of the images appear to show elevated platforms where archers are stationed.