The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (68 page)

The Yuan Dynasty made few changes to their predecessors’ maritime revenue-collection system. They increased the number of ports with a
shibosi
to seven and officials went into business themselves by lending ships and capital to foreign merchants and splitting the profits with them seventy-thirty, the government taking the larger share. This practice was implemented during a brief
ban on private overseas trade in the 1280s (there was another in the 1310s), but it continued even after the ban’s repeal. In the 1290s, the emperor issued twenty-one edicts governing the conduct of foreign trade. Most dealt with the duties on imports (one-fifteenth on coarse goods, 10 percent on fine), penalties for evading taxes, and smuggling, particularly by Buddhist, Daoist,
Nestorian, and Muslim clergy who “
in many cases were smuggling commoners who went abroad to trade and secretly sought to avoid the percentage levies.” There were regulations about the arming of merchants, the specific forms that captains needed for their ships and their crew, and which foreign ports ships could visit. The edicts also prohibited trafficking in certain cargoes, partly out of concern for the stability of the economy and partly for strategic considerations:
“No gold, silver,
copper, iron, men, or women were to be sold to foreign countries.”

None of these restrictions had a deleterious effect on China’s maritime sector or the imperial purse. The Venetian merchant-author
Marco Polo visited Quanzhou in the 1270s and noted
“The splendid city of
Zaiton [Quanzhou] is the port for all the ships that arrive from India laden with costly wares and precious stones of great price and big pearls of fine quality.” Comparing Quanzhou with the largest port most of his audience would have known, he continued, “And I assure you that for one spice ship that goes to Alexandria or
elsewhere to pick up pepper for export to Christendom, Zaiton is visited by a hundred. For you must know that it is one of the two ports in the world with the biggest flow of merchandise.” The cost of freight and duties came to half the value of what merchants imported, “yet from the half that falls to their share they make such a profit that they ask nothing better than to return with another cargo. So you may readily believe that [Quanzhou’s] contribution to
Qubilai Khan’s treasury is no small one.” Given the profits of sea trade, it is no wonder that the Great Khan encouraged it.

As always, China’s maritime trade was oriented primarily to the south, but the Yuan took a renewed interest in Japan.
Korea’s withdrawal from the sea had resulted in limited exchanges between southern Korea and Japan from the early eleventh century, and it fell to Song merchants to revive Japan’s foreign trade. At the end of the twelfth century Japan underwent a major transformation that resulted in the ascendancy of the warrior class that would dominate Japanese society until the
Meiji Restoration in the 1860s. Warfare had been endemic for much of the century, but the final showdown came in the
Genpei War (1180–85), a succession struggle that pitted the Taira (
Heike) clan of central Honshu against the Minamoto (
Genji), whose capital was to the east at
Kamakura, near modern
Tokyo.

The conflict ended at the naval
battle of Dan-no-ura, fought in the Strait of Shimonoseki between
Kyushu and Honshu at the western end of the
Inland Sea. According to
The Tales of the Heike,
a fourteenth-century compilation of stories about the war, “
The Genji had more than three thousand boats; the Heike, only a few more than a thousand, including a few large Chinese-type vessels.” The remainder were small craft and a local official is said to have switched sides “with all the men under his command—a total of more than two thousand—and had them board around two hundred boats.” The battle ended with the Genji warriors “boarding the Heike boats, shooting dead the sailors and helmsmen with their arrows or cutting them down with their swords.” The eight-year-old emperor is said to have drowned when his grandmother “
took him in her arms. Comforting him, she said, ‘There’s another capital down there beneath the waves!’ So they plunged to the bottom of the thousand-fathom sea.” The rout of the
Taira clan was absolute, but according to one conjecture, some survivors—including perhaps the emperor last seen leaping into the sea—may have
fled overseas to the
Ryukyu Islands. This theory is suggested by the abundance of Taira names and
Heian court idioms in the Ryukyuan language and the sudden growth of Ryukyuan sea trade in
this period, two primary exports being sulfur for China’s fledgling gunpowder industry and horses.

Following the
battle of Dan-no-ura, power devolved on the
Minamoto clan. Although the Minamoto shoguns gradually usurped many of the emperor’s prerogatives and wielded the real power in the land, the emperor and shogun remained distinct sources of influence, the former based in the capital at
Kyoto, the latter in Kamakura. These multiple centers of authority fostered trade within Japan as well as with Korea and China. So great was the latter that a local Chinese history of 1259 made the exaggerated claim that “
Lined up stern to bow, the Japanese cross the stormy sea and come to sell their merchandise” at Mingzhou. This
commercial revival was fueled in part by the start of a money economy, the medium of which was copper
cash
imported from China; the Japanese did not begin to distribute their own coinage until the late 1500s. The development of financial instruments facilitated the transfer of funds between merchants, while artisans’ guilds—for sake brewers, cotton weavers, and moneylenders, among others—gave tradesmen and merchants a standing previously denied them. By the end of the fifteenth century, it is estimated that the volume of trade on Japan’s Inland Sea was equal to that of the Baltic in the same period, although the Baltic is forty times larger.

The Mongols began seeking Japanese acknowledgment of their hegemony before the final elimination of Song resistance but without success. In 1266, Qubilai Khan sent an emissary to ensure Japan’s recognition of his supreme authority, only to be rebuffed. The obvious springboard for a punitive invasion was the Korean Peninsula, which the Mongols had conquered in the course of six campaigns between 1231 and 1270.
Against the advice of the Koreans, who had no interest in fighting the Japanese, Qubilai ordered the construction of an invasion fleet. Korean resisters appealed for support to the Japanese, who dithered, and the invasion sailed in November 1274. In the traditional telling, the
Mongol invasion included thirty to forty thousand soldiers and sailors; a more conservative estimate is that the Mongol host numbered only two or three thousand, and that they were met by a comparable force of Japanese warriors. The Mongols landed near Hakata on Kyushu, but after several battles they decided to return home. Their withdrawal coincided with a storm, although Chinese and Japanese sources differ as to its significance. The Mongols emphasized the power of the typhoon, thereby shifting the blame for their defeat to divine intervention, but Japanese writers mention the storm only in passing and none attributes it to the gods.

While alarming, the Mongol invasion did not overawe the Japanese, who simultaneously began planning for a retaliatory invasion of Korea and
erecting a coastal wall to forestall any future landings. They abandoned the Korean adventure, but the wall proved its worth when the Mongols invaded a second
time in 1281. Again, tradition tells of an armada that embarked a hundred thousand or more soldiers and sailors, although a force of only ten thousand has also been suggested. Sailing from Korea, the Yuan force quickly overran the islands of
Tsushima and Ike but could find no suitable landing place near Hakata because of the wall. A second fleet arrived from China about two months after the advance force, but the invaders were restricted in their movements and under constant harassment from the Japanese, who attacked them in their ships and on the islands. According to both Japanese and Mongol accounts, the Mongol fleet was partially destroyed by a typhoon as it prepared to sail away. However, the only writers to describe this phenomenon as a
kamikaze
, or “divine wind,” are Japanese courtiers and the term does not appear in accounts by participants in the actual fighting.

Japanese vessels were probably much smaller than their Chinese counterparts and played a commensurately minor role in forestalling the Yuan fleet. At the
battle of Dan-no-ura during the
Genpei War, the
Heike were said to have had “
a few large Chinese-type vessels,” but there is no indication of what that means, and most of their vessels were likely small boats with as few as ten crew. Illustrations in the narrative scrolls of
Takezaki Suenaga, a Japanese veteran of the Yuan invasions, show obvious differences between Chinese and Japanese vessels, as well as between the Korean oarsmen and Mongol warriors. The foreign vessels are decked, with oarports below, while the Japanese have open boats paddled or poled by crew in a standing position. None of the Chinese or Japanese vessels is depicted with masts or sails, but all have squared ends fore and aft, and
centerline rudders. There is no way to judge the actual
size of the vessels shown in the Takezaki scrolls, but it is unlikely that Japanese ships had a capacity of more than thirty tons (about fifteen meters long) before the mid-1300s. According to records of the port of Hyogo, only six of the sixteen hundred ships that called there a century on were greater than a hundred tons, perhaps a third the capacity of thirteenth-century Chinese merchantmen.

Qubilai continued to press for the subjugation of Japan, but his attention soon turned to Southeast Asia, the scene of the Yuan’s most audacious maritime undertaking: an invasion of Java, twenty-five hundred miles from China. As was the case with Japan,
Dai Viet, and other continental neighbors, Qubilai’s intent was to be recognized as overlord. That Java should be singled out for such consideration was an acknowledgment of its having become the primary carrier of the spice trade of the eastern Indonesian archipelago and its potential to threaten ships transiting the
Strait of Malacca. In 1222, a local chief named
Ken Angrok had usurped the throne of the Javanese
kingdom of Kadiri (1045–1222) and founded the
East Java kingdom of Singhasari. Ambitious successors capitalized on his consolidation of power and began an
aggressive policy of overseas expansion, a process that would reach its apogee with the kingdom of Majapahit (1293–1528).

Java was ideally situated to dominate the trade of island Southeast Asia. Its large rice surpluses gave it a valuable crop to trade with the
Spice Islands, which were isolated from foreign traders by the Javanese fleet and commercial policies and by the
monsoons. Java did not exercise effective control over the Strait of Malacca, which was
exposed to attack by raiders from the region between Pagan and the
Khmer Empire. Yet, Yuan officials considered Singhasari’s ambitious King
Kertanagara a grave threat to the free transit of the strait. The Chinese belief that Java had a commanding hold on the trade of Southeast Asia is borne out by
Marco Polo’s description, based on hearsay rather than firsthand observation: “
The treasure in the island is beyond all computation. It is from this island that the merchants of
Zaiton [Quanzhou] and Manzi [southern China] in general have derived and continue to derive a great part of their wealth, and this is the source of most of the spice that comes into the world’s markets.” Although it is unlikely that he sought to govern neighboring
Sumatra, Kertanagara was probably just as eager as the Chinese to prevent the rise of rivals.

In 1289, Yuan envoys sent to Java to discuss these matters returned from Kertanagara’s court with their faces
disfigured and tattooed. In retaliation, Qubilai dispatched an expedition said to number twenty thousand soldiers. Anticipating this, Kertanagara ordered his fleet to intercept the Mongols, which they failed to do. In the meantime, Kertanagara was killed by Kadiri rivals, and when the Yuan forces reached Java, his son-in-law and heir,
Raden Vijaya, promised to make himself a vassal of the Khan in exchange for their help avenging Kertanagara’s death. The combined Mongol-Javanese force conquered Kadiri, whereupon Raden Vijaya turned on his erstwhile allies and expelled them. Raden Vijaya founded the kingdom of Majapahit with his capital at Trowulan, on the
Brantas River about fifty-five kilometers southeast of modern
Surabaya. For the next two and a half centuries, Majapahit remained the dominant maritime trading power in Indonesian waters and exerted some degree of hegemony over much of the archipelago. According to the fourteenth-century
History of the Kings of Pasai,
written in northern Sumatra, “
People in vast numbers thronged [Majapahit]…. There was a ceaseless coming and going of people from the territories overseas which had submitted to the king. From the east they came from the
Banda Islands, from
Seram … bringing their offerings of beeswax, sandalwood, massoia bark, cinnamon, cloves and
nutmeg piled in heaps.”
^b
With almost exclusive access to the Spice
Islands, Majapahit prospered on the strength of expanding demand for spices in East Asia, the Near East, and Europe.

The Yuan may have lost, but the twenty thousand Chinese—a substantial number of whom may have remained in Southeast Asia as prisoners or deserters—
introduced copper
cash
into the Javanese economy. Although the Javanese had struck gold and silver
coins as early as the eighth century, in the years following the Yuan expedition the use of
cash
spread across the archipelago as far as the
Philippines. China exercised considerable influence on political and commercial developments elsewhere in Southeast Asia as well. Yuan campaigns in northern
Myanmar and Vietnam weakened the kingdoms of Pagan, Angkor, and
Dai Viet and facilitated the growth of the Tai states. These in turn attracted the interest of Chinese merchants who became instrumental in the founding of the kingdom of
Ayutthaya (1351–1767) on an island in the
Chao Phraya River above modern Bangkok. Ayutthaya’s prosperity depended on a combination of Tai military ability, the appropriation of Angkorean administrative techniques, control of extensive agricultural and resources from the north, and the commercial advantages that came from easy access to maritime trade.