The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (71 page)

A Chinese postage stamp commemorating the six hundredth anniversary of the first of seven Ming Dynasty expeditions to the Indian Ocean under Zheng He. The design, size, and rig of the largest “treasure ships” in the fleets are disputed, but the number and variety of ships that sailed is not. Courtesy of China Post.

If the primary purpose of these voyages was to seek recognition and trade, they were a success. In all, thirty states including Egypt and Mecca sent ambassadors to the Ming emperor. While these are known from Ma Huan’s account, the
Chronicle of the Rasulid Dynasty
of
Yemen also notes “
the arrival of the vessels of the junk at the ‘protected port’ [of Aden], accompanied by a messenger from the Lord of China with a magnificent gift for our Lord the sultan
al-Malik al-Nasir … the present of the Lord of China was conducted to him in procession. It was a splendid present consisting of all manner of rarities, splendid
Chinese silk cloth woven with gold, top quality musk, storax, and many kinds of china-ware vessels, the present being valued at twenty thousand
mithqals
.” A later Yemeni historian adds that the emissary

Such exchanges were probably typical of those conducted in the many ports visited by the Chinese fleet.

While many have accentuated the commercial and
generally pacific nature of Zheng He’s expeditions, especially in comparison with the blatantly coercive and ideologically driven conduct of the Portuguese in the following century, the military aspect of the expeditions was not insignificant. On his first voyage, Zheng He defeated a band of several thousand pirates led by
a Chinese renegade based in
Palembang who was tried and executed in Nanjing. Zheng He also defeated the king of the Rayigama kingdom on Sri Lanka, who was pardoned, and a pretender to the throne of
Samudra-Pasai. Such military actions helped ensure the free flow of trade, but these expensive, government-sponsored expeditions were not without their critics, and the flowering of China-based maritime commerce shriveled abruptly. The last voyage took place in the reign of
Ming Xuanzong, who is said to have resumed them out of nostalgia for the exotics so common in his youth; but the revival did not survive him. The reasons for this renunciation of the sea were many.
Domestically, the empire endured a succession of river floods, hundreds of thousands of people died from epidemics (some possibly started by sailors from the returning fleets), the currency depreciated, and the army was preoccupied with resistance to their occupation of Vietnam and
Mongol raids in the north. Partly in response to the last, Chengzu had relocated the capital north from Nanjing to Beijing in 1421, a move that all but guaranteed a decline in official interest in maritime affairs even as he promoted Zheng He’s voyages.

The renewed preoccupation with China’s north and west had a demographic component as well, and between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, migration to the north of the
Yellow River caused the population of
the coastal provinces of Zhejiang,
Fujian, and Guangdong to fall by more than half. In time, there was no memory of Zheng He’s voyages, although it is unknown whether official documents were simply lost or, as some believe, hidden or burned because they were “
deceitful exaggerations of bizarre things far removed from the testimony of people’s ears and eyes.” The second Ming embargo on maritime trade in the 1430s was vastly more severe than that enacted by
Ming
Taizu. Chinese ships and sailors were prohibited from going abroad; no ships could be built for overseas voyages; the construction of warships and related armaments was sharply curtailed; and the coastal defense system created by Taizu and Chengzu was abandoned. As drastic, the government prohibited private foreign traders from visiting China. This ban on maritime trade lasted until the mid-1500s, when the Portuguese were allowed to trade at Macau, and in 1567 Chinese merchants were finally allowed to trade overseas. The loss of maritime initiative had far-reaching implications, and certainly the world would be an unimaginably different place today had large numbers of Chinese been actively engaged in the trade of the Indian Ocean when the Portuguese arrived seventy-five years later.

Zheng He’s expeditions had an enormous impact on the region’s economy, its political alignments, and even its religious development, and the impetus they gave to the region’s commercial expansion was partly responsible for the attraction the Monsoon Seas held for European merchants. A major influence on the growth of the Southeast Asian economy was the introduction of coinage. The Chinese facilitated the transition to a more money-oriented economy through the steady infusion of huge amounts of copper
cash,
the impact of which was felt especially in the trading states of the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Java, and
Sulawesi. After the last of the treasure ship expeditions, local rulers began to mint their own coins, generally from tin rather than copper; but irrespective of medium the increased circulation of a currency that could be used for even small payments helped lubricate the wheels of commerce, facilitated the payment of taxes, and gave rulers more disposable wealth.

Sailors who quit the fleets swelled the population of overseas Chinese traders, whose numbers had already increased as merchants who defied Ming Taizu’s ban on overseas shipping were forced to settle abroad.
Ma Huan wrote of three distinct communities in northern Java: native Javanese, western Muslims, and Chinese “
from Guangdong [Province] and Zhangzhou and
Quanzhou and other such places, who fled away and now live in this country … many of them follow the Muslim religion doing penance and fasting.” The fact that Zheng He and other prominent members of the expeditions were Muslim had an especially profound effect on Melaka, whose formative years coincided with the first two decades of the Zheng He expeditions.
Paramesvara welcomed the Chinese enthusiastically and he himself bore tribute to the Ming court in 1411, and the city’s tributary relationship with China insulated the city-state from interference by either
Ayutthaya or Majapahit. By the time of the renewed ban on overseas Chinese trade in the 1430s, Melaka’s population was between one hundred and two hundred thousand and the port’s position was assured, at least until the coming of the Portuguese in 1511. Six centuries later, Malayan Chinese still revere Zheng He and incense burns in his memory at the
Sam Poh Kong
Temple in Melaka to this day. It is a mark of the truly adaptive nature of Southeast Asian culture that a Chinese Muslim admiral should be commemorated in a Buddhist shrine in a city founded by a Hindu-Buddhist prince whose successors embraced Islam and that quickly became a center of Islamic teaching, was subsequently ruled by Portuguese Catholics followed in turn by Dutch and English Protestants, and that is now the fourth largest city in the largest Muslim nation in the world.

Notwithstanding the importance of spices, aromatics, medicinals, and other high-value, low-volume goods, the focus of the monsoon trades was on bulk goods—the Indian iron, wood, mangoes, and coconuts ordered by
Madmun ben Hasan-Japheth; the flax, cotton, hemp, worked wool, wheat, barley, millet, and rye seen by
Benjamin of Tudela at
Hormuz; Chinese porcelain, lacquerware, and silk; cotton from Bengal and the
Coromandel Coast; or from the Maldives, “
cowrie shells and
qanbar
…[which] is made into cords for sewing ships together. These cords are exported
to India, China, and al-Yaman, and are better than hemp.” And then there was the horse trade carried in the
ships of the Arabian Sea.

Indian rulers began importing horses overland from
Central Asia by the sixth century
BCE
. Inscriptions prove that horses were being imported to
Sri Lanka five hundred years later, and in the third century the Chinese envoy
Kang Dai learned that merchants from northern India routinely exported horses by sea to the Malay Peninsula or Sumatra where the king paid half price for any that died in transit. Kang Dai’s testimony is corroborated by a contemporary sealing showing a ship and a horse, while the fourth-century
Pattinappalai
refers to the “swift, prancing steeds” brought by ship to
Kaveripattinam in
Tamil Nadu. The Arabian Sea horse trade boomed following the foundation of the
Delhi sultanate, whose rulers banned the sale of horses to Hindu kingdoms. Shortly thereafter,
Zhao Rugua wrote that “
in the mountains [of Oman] horse raising is carried on on a large scale. The other countries which
trade here purchase horses, pearls and dates which they get in exchange for cloves, cardamom seeds and camphor.”
Abdullah Wassaf, a Persian contemporary of
Marco Polo’s, related the story of a horse trader who contracted to supply the king of
Pandya in southern India with fourteen hundred horses every year and reported (secondhand) that “
ten thousand horses were annually exported” from the Persian Gulf to the Malabar and Coromandel Coasts of India. According to Marco Polo, “
the merchants of Hormuz and Kais, of Dhofar and
Shihr and Aden … buy up the best horses and load them
on ships and export them to this king [of Maabar, on the Coromandel Coast] and his four brother kings. Some of them are sold for … more than 100 marks of silver. And I assure you that this king buys 2,000 of them and more every year, and his brothers as many. And by the end of the year not 100 of them survive.” These sources attribute the Indians’ profligate importation of horse to their mistreatment, but except in the northwest, the subcontinent is a difficult place to raise horses. Pasturage was limited, the grasses unsuitable for horses, and the climate too hot to produce herds adequate for military needs. Even an eighteenth-century attempt by the
East India Company to establish a stud farm manned by English experts in the state of
Bihar failed.

This testimony about the horse trade is critical to a proper understanding of the nature of
Indian Ocean ships, about which there is so little quantifiable information. A succession of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century writers from across Eurasia—Venetian, Persian,
Arabic, Turkish, and Chinese—maintain that the sewn boats of the Indian Ocean were poorly built. This bias may be attributed to the fact that the authors were more familiar and comfortable with the rigid construction techniques of their homelands or simply leery of going to sea at all. Yet there is no clearer indication of these vessels’ robust construction than the explicit references to horse transports, although how these differed from ordinary ships, if at all, is not known. Describing military operations at Goa in 1342, Ibn Battuta reports that “
We had two tarides, open at the stern, carrying horses; they are so constructed that the horseman mounts his horse inside the vessel, puts on his armour and comes out.”
Wang Dayuan’s
Record of Overseas Countries and People
(1349) relates that in India

The claim that these ships carried hundreds of horses is impossible; Mediterranean ships probably carried
no more than forty horses, if that. Nonetheless this is a considerable cargo, especially when taking into consideration the enormous requirements for food and water at sea in a hot climate. The water alone for one horse for one month—the normal time for a direct passage from
Oman to the Malabar Coast—would weigh more than one metric ton. Where the horses were carried is another question. For the sake of stability and sanitation, it would make sense to carry them lower in the ship; but if horses were stowed belowdecks, it would be imperative to guarantee adequate air circulation. Nor would frankincense benefit much from being stowed beneath a horse, even one on short rations. These disparate sources seem to exaggerate the tendency of these stitched-plank hulls to leak—all ships leak—and apart from Ibn Battuta they ignore entirely the pronounced advantages of sewn-plank construction. Despite the concurrence of opinion, none of these writers was a mariner by trade, and the last word on the sewn ships of the Indian Ocean should go to
Vasco da Gama, who pioneered the sea route between Europe and India in 1497–99 and was disinclined to flatter Muslim shipwrights. Yet the stitching of sewn boats at
Malindi, he observed, “
endures all the strain of sailing” and the coir-stitched planks were “as secure as if they are nailed.”