The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (60 page)

Later in the century, northerners fleeing the collapse of law and order sought refuge in Fujian, and after the
Huang Chao rebels sacked Guangzhou, the expatriate community there dispersed, some to the south but a substantial number to the previously insignificant port of Quanzhou in Fujian.

At the end of the
Tang Dynasty, Quanzhou was ruled by
Wang Yenpin, of whom it was said that “
Whenever the barbarian trading ships were dispatched, there had never been a loss either due to
shipwreck or deficit in trade. For this, people called him ‘the secretary who summons Treasures.’ ” Whether Wang was all that successful (or autonomous) is debatable, and Quanzhou’s spectacular growth would have to wait until the Song court lifted restrictions on maritime trade. But when it did so, in the middle of the eleventh century, the results were dramatic, and a government agent could report that “
the port was clogged with foreign ships, and their goods were piled like mountains.” Part of Quanzhou’s allure was that while local officials engaged in illicit trade, they charged only
10 percent for the right to trade—a form of private tax that was only two-thirds the official amount levied at Guangzhou. The government eventually recognized Quanzhou’s indisputable primacy as a clearinghouse for foreign trade, and in 1087 established there the site of the fourth
shibosi
after Guangzhou,
Hangzhou, and
Mingzhou. The older Fujianese port of Fuzhou had declined in the early Song when there was an exodus of commercial capital and expertise north to Lin’an and south to Quanzhou, and it never received comparable recognition.

All the coastal kingdoms that emerged from the collapse of the Tang pursued
trade with the south, and the rulers of the
Song Dynasty made no effort to reverse the trend. Capitalizing on the expertise of the Muslim maritime communities in Yangzhou, which had developed as a result of the trade via Guangzhou, Quanzhou, and elsewhere, by the eleventh century Chinese shippers were carrying their own trade
as far as Java. Many of these were
Hokkiens, inhabitants of Fujian descended from Arab and Persian Muslims whose far-flung connections were so valuable that foreign traders at Guangzhou preferred to deal with Hokkien middlemen rather than Chinese natives of Guangzhou. A product of the Song’s liberalized approach to foreign trade, the Hokkien would become a lasting force in the commercial world of Southeast Asia.

Tang authors divulge little on the subject of ship design or shipbuilding; the oldest detailed illustrations of ships date from after the Tang Dynasty; and archaeological finds are few. Even so, shipping of all kinds was essential to the
Chinese way of life, for as one observer noted at the prosperous start of the eighth century, “
Great ships in thousands and tens of thousands carry goods back and forth. If they once lay unused it would spell ruin for ten thousand merchants. If these were ruined, then others would have no one on whom to depend for their livelihood.” The number of vessels required to keep the empire afloat, as it were, was astonishing. When the
An Lushan rebellion ended, among the more urgent needs was to rebuild the devastated canal fleet, and the government established at least
ten shipyards on the banks of the Yangzi for the purpose.

Shipping on inland waterways was generally in the hands of extended families whose lives and livelihoods centered figuratively and literally on their vessels, many of which served as floating homes and workplaces. The author of an eighth-century history recorded that “
There is a saying among those who live among the rivers and lakes that ‘water won’t carry ten thousand,’ by which they mean that large vessels do not exceed 8,000 or 9,000 piculs capacity”—between 550 and 650 tons, not including people and their household goods.
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Yet a woman known as
Aunt Yu had “a huge boat on board of which people were born, married and died.… There was a crew of several hundred.” Every year they made a round trip along the Gan, Yangzi, and
Huai Rivers within the modern landlocked provinces of Jiangxi and Anhui, “reaping enormous profits. This was nothing other than ‘carrying ten thousand.’ ” The number of people who lived on boats in the Tang is unknown, but tenth-century Quanzhou was home to “
floating boat people” who made their living as fishermen and traders, while in other inland areas as much as half the population was waterbound. The practice of living on houseboats has never died out, and while there are far fewer today, an estimated forty million Chinese lived on the water “
in some shape or form” in the mid-twentieth century.

As was true in antiquity, sails were used on inland waterways, but the primary means of propulsion remained rowing with oars or
yulohs,
while moving against stronger currents or in narrow canals required towing. The monk
Ennin describes how when he traveled from the coast to Yangzhou via canal, “
Two water buffalo were tied to over forty boats, with either two or three of the latter joined to form a single craft and with these connected in a line by
hawsers.” With this configuration, the Japanese embassy covered about thirty kilometers per day. The canal was busy around the clock, and writing of a night passage Ennin describes with wonder how “Boats of the salt bureau laden with salt, with three or four, or again, four or five boats bound side by side, followed one after another without a break for several tens of
li,
” their progress illuminated by blazing torches. (One
li
is about half a kilometer.) On tamer stretches of canal or river, a boat’s crew hauled their own vessel, but
haulers with local knowledge were hired for treacherous stretches such as the Yangzi’s
Three Gorges and the
Sanmen Rapids on the
Yellow River.

The major development in construction technique of this period across China was the
introduction of iron fastenings (nails and clamps) no later than the eighth century. Nonetheless, on the coast of China, the mouth of the Yangzi was the effective dividing line between the shallow waters of the keel-less, shallow-draft, flat-bottomed
“sand ships” (
shachuan
) of the north, which are thought to date from the Tang Dynasty, and the
fuchuan
, with its deep, V-shaped hull intended for blue-water navigation and built along the rockbound and embayed southern coast between
Fujian and
Guangzhou.
Ships typically had no cabins, the passengers being allotted space on deck for their goods and themselves; they carried companies of archers for protection against pirates; and they usually towed a smaller dispatch boat. Even less is known about the
ships of
Korea and Japan, although there is a tendency to see echoes of Chinese tradition in the vessels of the Korean and Japanese kingdoms.

Chinese sources reveal more detail about Southeast Asian ships, which, according to an eighth-century source, were called
kunlun bo:
“
With the fibrous bark of the
coconut tree, they make cords which bind the parts of the ship together.… Nails and clamps are not used, for fear that the heating of the iron would give rise to fire. [The ships] are constructed by assembling [several] thicknesses of side planks, for the boards are thin and they fear they would break.” This explanation for why shipwrights did not employ iron is not unlike the
Yuktikalpataru
’s explanation for why Indian shipwrights did not use iron. Yet Southeast Asian sailors frequented Chinese ports at this time—which is how the author knew about their ships—and they were aware that Chinese hulls were fastened with iron without fear of fire. As Chinese merchant ships began sailing overseas from the tenth century, even sedentary shipwrights in Southeast Asia would have seen for themselves how they were built. Nonetheless, there is no evidence for iron fittings in Southeast Asian ships before the sixteenth century. Instead, they were fastened with a combination of
lashings and dowels inserted into holes drilled into the edges of planks, a method of joinery that allowed for the construction of ships much larger than those in which the Portuguese first reached Southeast Asia in the early 1500s.
Sewn-plank fastening was common throughout all of Southeast Asia and as far north as
Hainan Island and Guangdong Province in southern China. Although the land of the Hundred
Yue had been governed from the north since before the start of the common era, its people had greater cultural affinities with their Southeast
Asian neighbors in northern Vietnam than with their Han overlords. We can perhaps discern a northern influence in the multiple thicknesses of planking in
kunlun bo
of the eighth century, but four hundred years later the seagoing vessels of southern China were still being built with the sewn-plank techniques familiar elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

One of several vessels carved in the bas-reliefs representing scenes of daily life among the Khmers on the Bayon temple at Angkor Thom, Cambodia, around 1185. With its mast-and-batten sails, axial rudder, and anchor winch forward, the ship has been identified as a Chinese merchant junk. But the features of the passengers and crew—including two men playing a board game forward—seem Southeast Asian rather than Chinese. Detail of a photograph by l’Ecole Française d’Extréme-Orient in Jean Yves Claeys,
Angkor
(Saigon: Editions Boy-Landry, 1948).

This period also saw the adoption of
fore-and-aft sails in Chinese ships. All sailing traditions seem to have started with a square sail from which a variety of different fore-and-aft configurations derived. In Southeast Asia, “fore-and-aft
sails of unspecified form set from two or more masts” were in use by the third century ce, and the canted, quadrilateral sails of the eighth-century
Borobudur ships are clearly set fore-and-aft. Assuming a degree of cross-fertilization between Southeast and East
Asian maritime traditions, the former was the source of the Chinese lugsail, a four-sided, battened sail set from a boom and yard that extend forward of the mast. The earliest representation of such a Chinese lugsail on a seagoing ship is on a frieze of the twelfth-century
Bayon temple at Angkor Thom in Cambodia.

A Southeast Asian paddled vessel from a bas-relief in the Bayon temple at Angkor Thom, Cambodia. Carved directly below the junk, this seems to show a riverboat of a type once ubiquitous on the lower reaches of the Mekong River. Above the boat, fishermen can be seen hauling their bulging nets while helmsmen steer their boats and a third member of the crew sorts the fish. Below are scenes from the market ashore. From a photograph in Jean Yves Claeys,
Angkor
(Saigon: Editions Boy-Landry, 1948).

Given the number of rivals for the control of sea trade the potential for naval warfare was considerable, yet written notices are few, brief, and, apart from the
battle of the Geum River between Chinese and Japanese fleets, refer almost exclusively to amphibious operations. Long distances presented no obstacle to determined campaigners. Srivijayan raiders sailed twelve hundred miles across the
South China Sea to attack Kauthara, and even the Chinese campaigns against the Korean kingdoms—one per decade from 644 to 663—involved passages of at least three hundred miles across the Yellow Sea. The sources give few clues about the size or rig of the ships involved in any of these expeditions, but all references suggest that fighting, and even transport, was done in relatively small vessels.

When
Huanwang threatened
Annam in the tenth century, the Chinese governor
built a fleet of thirty-five fast boats carrying only fifty men each—twenty-three oarsmen, twenty-five warriors, and two crossbowmen. The
Southern Han kingdom may have employed similar vessels when they invaded Annam in the 930s. Rather than risk an encounter with them on the water, the Annamese planted massive stakes tipped with iron points in a northern branch of the Red River so that the sharpened ends were covered at high tide. As the Southern Han sailed into the estuary, Vietnamese in smaller craft harassed the invaders in a feint, and when they retreated upstream, the Southern Han followed. As the tide fell, their ships were stuck on the stakes and about half the force was slaughtered in a battle that proved a turning point in Vietnamese history.