The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (59 page)

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:

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

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.

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