The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (67 page)

At the start of the twelfth century, the principal states in Northeast Asia were those of the
Khitan Liao, which occupied northern China and eastern
Mongolia, the
Xi Xia of north-central China, and the Northern Song. After a century and a half, the balance of power was abruptly overturned by the Jurchen, subjects of the Khitan Liao. After declaring the
Jin Dynasty, they seized the Khitan capital of
Dadu (Beijing) and in 1127 the Northern Song capital of Kaifeng.
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Song Gaozong, brother of the captured emperor, established the capital of what is known as the
Southern
Song Dynasty at Lin’an (Hangzhou), the first and only seaport capital of a united China. While China’s maritime trade had been growing for centuries, the Southern Song rulers’ embrace of overseas ventures constituted a deliberate effort to compensate for the lack of favorable trading opportunities to the north and west. This openness to the sea had been foreshadowed by the gradual migration of China’s political center to the southeast, but it became imperative following the establishment of the
Jurchen Jin Dynasty. Four hundred thousand
Chinese fled southward, many of them to the mountainous coastal provinces of Jiangsu and Fujian, where agriculture was difficult—a fact that had accounted for their slow development in the first place. This demographic redistribution fostered continued urbanization and a corresponding growth in manufacturing, especially of ceramics, and trade.

The decision to make Lin’an the capital reflected the ruling elite’s recognition of the importance of maritime trade to both ordinary citizens and the government, whose predicament can be summarized succinctly. Prior to the fall of Kaifeng, two-thirds of the tribute missions to China arrived by sea. This was already considerably more than in previous centuries, but with the move to Lin’an all tribute came by sea, and in the opening years of the
Southern Song Dynasty, maritime trade accounted for up to 20 percent of the government’s revenues. This could never have happened without official sanction at the highest levels, and in a sharp departure from the throne’s traditional posture on overseas commerce, Gaozong observed that “
The profit derived from foreign trade is most great. When the management was proper, the income was sometimes counted by millions [of
cash
]. Is this not far better than taxing the people? It is why we pay much attention to it. We could thus be lenient to the people, and let them be a little more prosperous.”

This shift in attitude was especially beneficial to the merchants of southern Fujian, many of whom were ethnic
Hokkiens who had turned to overseas trade during the tenth-century interregnum. With the Song restoration, they began to attract growing numbers of Muslim and Tamil merchants to
Quanzhou, which became China’s leading international port. Of far greater long-term import was the direct participation of Hokkien merchants in the trade with
Southeast Asia. Initially they worked under the tutelage of more experienced and
well-connected foreigners, but as they honed their navigational skills and knowledge of markets, the Hokkiens became their own masters and for the first time significant numbers of private Chinese traders began venturing overseas on their own account and in their own ships. Although they could be found trading as far as southern India, most Hokkiens generally sailed no farther than the emporia of Java, Sumatra, and the Malay Peninsula, where western goods brought by Indian Ocean merchants were readily available. Focused as they were on relatively nearby markets—it is less than two thousand miles from Quanzhou to the Strait of Malacca—the Chinese came to dominate the routes between
Southeast Asia and China, and in the process they established overseas communities that in some cases have endured to this day.

Western mariners still accounted for a sizable share of China’s foreign trade, however, and Quanzhou was home to a sizable expatriate community. An early-thirteenth-century author writes of “
two types of foreigners—one has fair skin and the other dark—living in Quanzhou in the lane for foreigners.” The broad distinction here is probably between Arabs and Persians from Southwest Asia and Indians and
Malays from South and Southeast Asia. The modern city boasts numerous remains of Muslim
mosques, Hindu temples, and Tamil and Arabic inscriptions. Bilingual Tamil and Chinese inscriptions point to a southern Indian community originating in the Chola port of
Nagapattinam, while
Zhao Rugua’s thirteenth-century work,
On the Chinese and Arab Trade,
confirms a
direct trade between Quanzhou and Malabar and
Gujarat.

As Chinese merchants gained a greater share of the goods destined for China’s burgeoning consumer market, the old tributary system withered. Southeast Asian rulers no longer had to promote the sale of their goods
in China, and with ample revenues from duties and the right to purchase and resell goods at favorable prices the Chinese government had no need to lavish money and effort on visiting dignitaries. Yet open trade was not without negative consequences for China, which experienced such a severe drain on precious metals and copper
cash
that between 1160 and 1265 a succession of emperors banned their export, “
ordered the officers-in-charge to use only silk, rough sewn silk, brocade, patterned silk, porcelain and lacquerware to trade” in their place, and enacted
sumptuary laws to curb the import of exotic finery like pearls and feathers. Ceramics remained a staple of China’s export trade, their production being concentrated around the ports of
Mingzhou,
Wenzhou, Quanzhou, and Guangzhou. Whether they comprised a greater or lesser share of China’s exports by volume or value than silks and other perishables, they have been found in far greater abundance at terrestrial and underwater archaeological
sites from Korea and Japan to
East Africa and the Levant. Their distribution corroborates the written record. Sulayman the merchant had praised
Chinese glazed ceramics in the ninth century, but they are not mentioned as a significant export in Chinese sources until the eleventh century, and two hundred years later
Zhao Rugua was able to
specify which types of ceramics were exported to which countries, from the
Philippines to
Zanzibar.

As much as they opened themselves to the world overseas, many Chinese during the
Southern Song hoped to regain the territory lost to the
Jurchen Jin and
Xi Xia.
Eager to support any potential allies, in 1196 the court appointed a Mongol tribal leader named
Temüjin “bandit suppression commissioner.” A decade later, Temüjin’s fellow Mongols elected him emperor with the title
Chinggis (Genghis) Khan. After consolidating the tribes of the Mongolian plateau, he embarked on a campaign against the Jurchen Jin, the Mongols’ traditional enemies. By 1217, the Mongols had eliminated Jin authority north of the
Yellow River, but Jin forces in
Henan Province were in an almost impregnable position. Chinggis’s son and successor
Ogedei negotiated with the Song for permission to march through their territory to attack the Jin from the south. The Song reluctantly agreed, but when the Jin were defeated they attempted to occupy the land seized by the Mongols, which gave Ogedei ample excuse to strike south of the Yangzi. The Mongol army was probably the best in the world, but the Song withstood them for more than half a century thanks to their greater numbers and the fact that they were defending a territory interlaced with rivers and canals and ill-suited for cavalry, the mainstay of the Mongol military.

This environmental advantage was enhanced by the fact that since the eleventh century the Song had maintained a standing river fleet whose ships and weaponry were more advanced than those found anywhere else. The principal warship was a human-powered paddleboat, some extreme models of which mounted more than twenty paddle wheels and had complements of two to three hundred men. In time, however, the maximum number of wheels was fixed at seven, the odd wheel being mounted on the centerline of the hull, either amidships or astern. By the 1200s, the Chinese were also manufacturing true explosive bombs, the most lethal of which were called “
thunder-crash bombs.” To fight the Song on their own terms, the Mongols built their own paddleboat fleet, with which they opened the way from the
Han River to the Yangzi and Lin’an, which
Qubilai Khan’s forces took in March 1276. Although the emperor surrendered, Song loyalists spirited two of his young
sons to safety first in
Fuzhou and then in
Guangzhou. The arrival of a
Yuan fleet at the
Pearl River in 1279 forced the Song diehards to sea yet again; and to avoid the boy emperor’s capture, it is said, his tutor took him in his arms and leaped into the sea.

The vigorous pursuit of the last remnants of Song resistance was a foretaste of Qubilai’s increasingly bold maritime aspirations. Although he was a native of
Central Asia and established his capital at
Dadu to be nearer the Mongol heartland, no Chinese ruler has ever promoted maritime activity—canal building, coastal trade, and four major overseas expeditions—with the enthusiasm shown by the grandson of Chinggis Khan and founder of the Yuan Dynasty. If the Southern Song had taken to the sea out of necessity, Qubilai seems to have viewed the ocean as an extension of the steppe. The Mongols provided the initiative for these expansionist campaigns, but these were feasible thanks to the Song legacy of shipbuilding, navigation, and commercial organization. The sheer number of vessels available to the Yuan was staggering. In 1257,
more than nineteen thousand ships were registered in the prefectures of
Mingzhou,
Wenzhou, and Taizhou alone, and a fifth of them had a beam of more than three meters. When the Yuan captured
Fujian, an estimated seven thousand vessels were operating on the coast and nearly twice that number on the rivers. The defeat of the Song freed huge numbers of these for a variety of uses, but the Yuan embarked on an ambitious construction program of their own and in 1273 ordered two thousand ships from yards around the country. A decade later, the strain on timber resources moved the Buddhist
monk
Duanhong to despair: “
Tens of thousand trees were chopped down [for shipbuilding]; sorrow stroke green mountains.” While the problem of deforestation antedated the Yuan, it has never been reversed in the eight centuries since. By the late fourteenth century, timber shortages made it difficult to sustain domestic shipbuilding operations and during the Ming and Qing Dynasties many merchants contracted for vessels in Siam (
Thailand) and on Borneo, where the
cost of building ships could be 40 to 70 percent less than in China.

Yuan officials continued Song efforts to improve navigation through dredging channels, building warehouses, docks, and anchorages, erecting lighthouses and beacons, and developing safer shipping routes. The division of China between the
Jurchen Jin and Southern Song had been accompanied by a rise in domestic grain smuggling along the coast between the Yangzi delta and the
Shandong Peninsula. With the coming of the new dynasty, the smugglers—many of whom backed the Yuan from the start—began working for the state
transporting grain around the Shandong Peninsula and across the
Bo Hai to Dadu’s port at
Tianjin (then called Zhigu). The time-honored practice of hugging the treacherous sand-banked coast proved costly in ships,
time, lives, and money until 1293, when the former pirates
Zhu Jing and
Zhang Xuan pioneered a deep-sea route that gave a wide berth to the peninsula, and they began to sail earlier in the season. What had been a journey of a month or more with horrendous losses became a journey of about ten days with overall losses of a sustainable one percent. At its height in the early fourteenth century, the sea transportation service regularly carried more than two million piculs of rice a year, the record being three and a half million piculs in 1329, the last year for which records survive.

Development of this route was necessitated by Qubilai’s establishment of his capital at Dadu, which for the time being was beyond the reach of the
Grand Canal. In 1194, the Yellow River had jumped its banks west of
Kaifeng to flow into the
Huai River and, ultimately, the Yangzi. The main branch of the Yellow River would not reach the sea north of the Shandong Peninsula again until 1855. The redirection of the river’s main channel led to delays in completing the canals that make up the northern end of the Grand Canal. The final section, the
Huitong Canal, opened in the 1320s, but the sea route remained the preferred way of shipping grain until 1417, when the Huitong was widened enough that all grain bound for the northern capital could be transported efficiently via inland waters.

The rapid expansion of long-distance sea trade led to corresponding
advances in navigational practice, including the development of an early form of the compass. The Chinese had long known about the properties of a magnetized needle, but their use of the “south pointer” was for centuries limited to geomancy and feng shui. The first accounts of the compass being used for shipboard navigation comes from a work written in 1117 by
Zhu Yu, the son of a port official and governor of Guangzhou, a connection that gave the author entrée into the seamen’s world. In the course of describing overseas shipping, Zhu touches briefly on navigational practice:
“The ship’s
pilots are acquainted with the configuration of the coasts; at night they steer by the stars, and in the day-time by the sun.” Like mariners in the shoal waters of northwest Europe, they used a sounding lead, which they employed in the same way: “They also use a line a hundred feet long with a hook at the end, which they let down to take samples of mud from the sea-bottom; by its [appearance and] smell they can determine their whereabouts.” Zhu also remarks that “In dark weather they look at the south-pointing needle.”

The Chinese compass consisted of a needle pierced through the stem of a rush so that it would float in a bowl of water. In the “dry compass” devised in the Mediterranean and Europe in the thirteenth century, and introduced into Asia by European mariners in the 1500s, the needle is mounted on a pivot and calibrated to a compass card. The earliest reference to a compass in the
Indian Ocean dates to 1232, but compasses east of
Suez were of the
Chinese wet compass type. Common to both eastern and western traditions, however, is the fact that the
compass was used as a substitute for celestial navigation in inclement weather, and that it allowed for a longer sailing season. “
During the night it is often not possible to stop [because of wind or current drift], so the pilot has to steer by the stars and the Great Bear. If the night is overcast then he uses the south-pointing needle to determine the south and north.” So wrote the author of an
Illustrated Record of an Embassy to Korea
in 1124. When published thirty years later, this work included what is believed to be the
world’s first printed map. By the fourteenth century, the Chinese were producing “
seaway compass charts” showing compass courses and distances. The question of whether knowledge of the compass spread from China to the Mediterranean and Europe has generated more heat than light, but even if the rudiments of the compass originated elsewhere, the refinements that led to the practical dry-card compass developed independently in the west.