VAST, SPLENDID FLEETS OF SHIPS SAILED FORTH from China between 1405 and 1433. Ordered by the emperor of the Ming dynasty, and commanded by an admiral named Zheng He, the fleets passed among the islands and along the coasts of Southeast Asia. They crossed the Indian Ocean all the way to southern Africa. Enormous wide-bellied ships by the hundreds, encrusted with precious metals, banners snapping atop their forests of masts—the fleets inspired wonder and also scared the wits out of every foreign leader who saw them.
Zheng’s ships featured new technical developments that European shipbuilders would not discover for a century, including rust-proof nails and watertight compartments. His flagship was more than three hundred feet long and one hundred fifty feet wide, the biggest wooden vessel ever built. His grandest expedition had 317 ships, more than twice as many as the Spanish Armada, which was the largest European fleet up to that time. Yet Zheng He’s voyages became a target in the political infighting of the Chinese court. One faction supported them; a rival faction opposed them. The emperor’s son and successor sided with the group that opposed the voyages. He ended the grand naval ventures the day he took the imperial throne. China didn’t again send ships so far outside its borders until the nineteenth century.
China could have continued its voyages. It could easily have sent a fleet around Africa and north to Europe. Why didn’t it?
Some modern scholars have seen China’s failure to continue its sea voyages as a sign that Chinese society was fatally turned in on itself, lacking in curiosity and drive, determined to keep itself apart from the rest of the world. They have painted a picture of imperial China as static and unchanging, “a reluctant improver and a bad learner,” in the words of one historian. Others, though, argue that Zheng He never encountered a nation richer or more advanced than his own. Technologically speaking, China was so far ahead of the rest of Eurasia that foreign lands had little to offer except raw materials, which China could get without the expense and trouble of sending gigantic fleets on long journeys. According to political scientist Jack Goldstone of George Mason University, the Chinese empire stopped long-range exploration “for the same reason the United States stopped sending men to the moon—there was nothing there to justify the costs of such voyages.”
Whatever the reasons for starting the sea ventures and then stopping them, Zheng He’s voyages were a break in China’s history. During most of the Ming dynasty, which lasted from 1368 to 1644, China’s rulers banned private sea trade. The emperors did conduct their own trade; they just wouldn’t let others do it, too. A few rulers opened up trade, but they were exceptions. As a rule, the Ming dynasty clamped down on international exploration and trade. The ban was so strict that in 1525 the royal court ordered coastal officials to destroy all private seagoing vessels.
Fifty years later, a new emperor changed course once again. With the reluctant blessing of the imperial court, a new generation of Chinese ships went on the waters. Soon the Ming dynasty had been drawn into a worldwide network of exchange. The Chinese economy became enmeshed with Europe (a place China had previously seen as too poor to be worth bothering with) and the Americas (a place the emperors hadn’t known existed).
Why did China lower its barriers to trade and let in this flood of change? One reason was political: the desire of the Ming to strengthen the power of the imperial government by increasing the income it gained from trade. Another reason was economic: China had severe money woes. The empire had lost control of its own coinage. Merchants were buying and selling goods with little lumps of silver. China desperately needed more silver. To get that silver, it lifted its trade ban and opened itself to the world. Soon the great ships of Spain’s galleon trade were carrying silver to China and returning with silk. These were the final links in the global economic and ecological network begun by Columbus in the Caribbean and by Legazpi in the Philippines.
The Ming court had long feared that open trade would lead to chaos. Trade did have catastrophic effects on China, although not the ones imperial officials predicted. As the Columbian Exchange reached across the Pacific, it first took economic form: trade and money, and their effects on politics. Later would come the ecological exchange, with dire consequences for China.
While China’s bans on foreign trade were in place, they did not stop all foreign contact. Foreigners were allowed to stay in certain government residences and to offer gifts to the throne, called “tribute payments.” Then the emperor would, out of politeness, give them Chinese goods in return. He also allowed them to sell any of their gifts that he didn’t want, which was often quite a lot. In 1403–1404, at the height of the supposed ban on foreign merchants, the Ming court hosted “tribute delegations” from no fewer than thirty-eight nations.
Merchants along the Chinese coast recognized this system for what it was: a way for the government to control international commerce. The Ming wanted the profits from trade, but not the foreign traders themselves. With few exceptions, all contact with the outside world was supposed to be supervised by government officials in Beijing, the capital. The court reasoned that because oceangoing trade was outlawed, the nation did not need a navy to police such trade. China reduced its navy to a few vessels, not enough to patrol the nation’s long coastline. The unsurprising result was a dizzying outbreak of smuggling, or illegal commerce.
Wokou swarmed on the southeastern coast. The Chinese term means “Japanese pirates,” but most weren’t Japanese and many were smugglers rather than true pirates. The majority of wokou groups were led by Chinese traders. Their ships were crewed by a crazy quilt of citizens in trouble: scholars who had failed to get government jobs, bankrupt businesspeople, draft dodgers who had fled rather than perform required military service, fired clerks, starving farmers, disgraced monks, escaped convicts, and of course actual professional smugglers. Scattered among them were a few skilled sailors lured into piracy by the promise of wealth. When officials tried to stop these people, violence followed. Every now and then the wokou took over a city. The merchant-pirates would trade peacefully if they could, not so peacefully if they couldn’t.
China’s efforts to control piracy were hampered by a string of incompetent emperors. Worst affected by piracy was Fujian, a poor province on the southeastern coast that couldn’t grow enough food to feed itself. Half of Fujian’s rice had to be imported—not easy, because Fujian is separated from the rest of China by mountains. The province does, however, have fine harbors along its stony coast. Fujian depended on the sea, and when international trade was officially banned, the Fujianese found themselves in an uncomfortable position.
In 1547 a pirate-smuggler-merchant group of Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch hustlers set up a base on Wu Island, near the Fujianese port city Yuegang. Chinese and Japanese wokou happily sent ships to trade with them. So did businesspeople from Yuegang. A busy, multilingual market sprang up in Wu Island’s harbor. Zhu Wan, the governor of Fujian, sent soldiers to drive out the foreigners. The merchant-pirate group held the soldiers off, so the governor, as an example to others, beheaded ninety Fujianese merchants who had traded at Wu Island. Without local merchants willing to trade with them, the foreigners abandoned the island and gave up their attempt to trade openly.
Zhu Wan was not satisfied. He assaulted another major smuggling base and sank more than twelve hundred illegal vessels. A wokou leader known as “Baldy” Li led followers by the hundreds to a new base in southern Fujian. Zhu’s men hunted them down, killing some and capturing others. Many of Li’s gang turned out to be from important merchant families in Yuegang. Angered by this evidence of illegal ties between leading local families and foreign smugglers, Zhu executed his captives.
The executions united Zhu’s enemies against him. The wealthy families of Yuegang complained to the emperor. Zhu found himself demoted, then fired, and then under investigation. He killed himself with poison in 1550. Made bold by his absence, pirate gangs seized entire towns and ran wild. In one city north of Yuegang, twenty thousand people died after a pirate assault. The wokou terrorized the region. Yet even as they attacked Yuegang, twenty-four of the city’s merchants pooled their resources and built a fleet to work with the pirates in an interconnecting business network. The merchants had access to markets within China. The smugglers had access to foreign goods to sell to those markets. Business boomed.
Soon other, similar networks sprang up. The region became a violent, bewildering tangle of overlapping loyalties and betrayals, as business gangs and pirate gangs fought over the smuggling trade. Local officials were powerless to put an end to the trade or the violence. The world’s richest, most technologically advanced nation had lost control of its borders. In 1567 a new Ming emperor gave in and lifted the ban on private trade.
Yet the Chinese government did not change course simply because it could not stop the smuggling. It had come to realize how desperately Beijing needed the most important thing that the merchants had to offer: silver. China needed silver so badly because its money supply was in terrible shape, and had been that way for a long time.
Several hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Chinese government began to issue round coins made of bronze, a blend of copper and tin. Each coin had a square hole in its center. Bronze was not especially valuable, and the coins weren’t worth much. To create units of larger value, people strung the bronze coins together into groups of a hundred or a thousand. The strings were heavy, bulky, and still not worth much. Asking large-scale Chinese traders to use them was like asking today’s big bankers to buy whole companies with rolls of quarters. Worse, the Chinese government did not have enough copper to keep up with the demand for coins.
Starting in 1161, the imperial government issued paper currency. It printed various denominations of banknotes called huizi, worth between two hundred and three thousand bronze coins. (The first European banknotes appeared in 1661, five centuries later.) The banknotes and bronze coins were examples of two different kinds of money: fiat money and commodity money. Fiat money, such as the huizi or today’s U.S. dollar and European euro, has no value in itself. It is worth something only because a government says it is. Commodity money, such as China’s bronze coins or the silver pesos that circulated in the Spanish Empire, has value because it is made of a substance that is worth something in its own right—even if its value is not high, as in the case of the bronze Chinese coins.
With commodity money, governments cannot completely control the money supply. The currency is at the risk of random shocks, such as a sudden shortage or surplus of whatever the money is made of, which may change its value. If silver becomes scarce, for example, its price may rise so much that the silver in a coin becomes more valuable than the denomination of the coin itself. People begin melting down the coins, leading to a shortage of money.
With fiat money, in contrast, the government has near-complete control over the money supply. It decides how many banknotes are needed, and it controls the mints that produce them. This is also a weakness, however, because governments can print so much money that the economy is flooded with banknotes. When this happens, the purchasing power of the money goes down, and the price of goods and services goes up—a process known as inflation. Runaway inflation can make a currency practically worthless. Before the Ming dynasty came to power in China, two earlier dynasties had suffered from high inflation of their paper money.
The first Ming emperor ordered that new bronze coins be issued in his name—no more worthless paper bills! Unfortunately, he discovered that the empire had nearly exhausted its copper mines. Because copper was scarce, its price rose so high that the coins cost more to make than they were supposed to be worth. It was as if every penny cost two pennies to manufacture. For this reason not many coins were issued. Ming coins were so rare, in fact, that businesspeople did not want to accept them. Merchants had too little experience with the new coins to know whether they were genuine or counterfeit. Yet China needed new money. What could be done?
Once again the government turned to the printing presses and issued paper money—and once again, inflation exploded. The value of the new banknotes dropped by 75 percent in just ten years. At the same time, the value of old, pre-Ming coins (which people trusted and understood) increased. So did the practice of counterfeiting, or manufacturing fake coins. Businesspeople were so desperate for some way for their customers to pay them that they accepted the counterfeits anyway, although they charged more for their use. As people snatched up all the old and counterfeit coins they could find, the value of paper bills continued to fall.
In an attempt to gain control of the nation’s currency, the Ming dynasty periodically outlawed the use of coins, hoping to force people to use the paper bills. Each time, the ban failed, and the government would again allow coins to circulate—until the next ban. Meanwhile, the Ming kept printing paper money, fueling inflation. The nation’s currency had become unpredictable. Each new emperor produced coins with his name stamped on the face. When he died, his successor would quickly declare that the last emperor’s coins were worthless and that only coins minted by the new emperor could be used as currency. Merchants could see their entire wealth wiped out in a single day by the death of an emperor.
Silver had long been seen as a commodity of value, too rare and costly to be used for ordinary, small-scale businesses. Yet the uncertainty over bronze coins and paper money reached the point where merchants took to carrying around little silver ingots, or pieces of metal. When traders met, they used these ingots to buy and sell, weighing them with jeweler’s scales and clipping off needed sums with special shears. Awkward as it was, this system was better than using coins that might lose their value at any time. One writer complained in 1570 that everyone was paying bills with splinters of silver. Grudgingly and gradually the Ming emperors adopted the silver system, too. Beijing ordered citizens to pay more and more of their taxes in silver instead of turning over a portion of their harvest, as had been done for eight hundred years. By the 1570s, more than 90 percent of the taxes collected by Beijing arrived as lumps of shiny metal. There was just one problem.
China was the world’s biggest economy. The “silverization” of that economy meant that tens of millions of wealthy Chinese needed chunks of silver to pay taxes and run businesses. Demand for silver soared. Inconveniently, China’s silver mines were just as played out as its copper mines. People had trouble laying their hands on enough silver to pay for anything, including taxes. The only close source of silver was Japan, but China and Japan were not friendly. (They would soon fight a war in Korea.) So, to get the silver they needed, China’s merchants turned to wokou. They sold silk and porcelain to brutal men for silver, and then turned around and used the silver to pay their taxes, which in turn paid for military campaigns against the brutal men. The Ming government was at war with its own money supply.
Then Beijing finally allowed the merchants of Fujian to trade overseas without fear of punishment. The merchants sent thousands of people throughout Asia to establish trading posts. Even a backwater such as the village of Manila in the Philippines might have had as many as one hundred fifty Chinese residents in 1571, when the Spanish adventurer Legazpi arrived (as described in chapter 1). Hundreds more Chinese lived in other parts of the Philippines. The unexpected discovery of silver-bearing Spaniards from the Americas in the Philippines was, from the Chinese point of view, a miracle. The galleons that carried Spanish silver were ships full of money.
How did the silver get onto those galleons? Stories say that it began with a man looking for a lost llama in 1545. The llama, a relative of the camel, is one of the few animals comfortable at thirteen thousand feet above sea level on a plateau in the Andes Mountains, at the southern tip of Bolivia. On a bare, dome-shaped hill clawed by wind and snow and surrounded by taller mountains splashed with ice, the man stumbled. He steadied himself by seizing a shrub, which came out of the shallow soil. In the hole made by its roots the man saw a metallic sparkle. As others would soon discover, the man was standing on a ledge of silver three hundred feet long, three hundred feet deep, and thirteen feet wide—and he had just made the biggest silver strike in history.
Typical silver ores contain at most a few percent of silver. That ledge in the Andes was as much as 20 percent silver. The discovery led to a boomtown known formally as the Imperial Village of Potosí. Two decades after the strike, Potosí had a population of as much as fifty thousand. It would have had even more if Spain had not done everything in its power to keep people out so that the government could control the exploitation of the riches. Despite these efforts, the population of Potosí grew to one hundred sixty thousand by 1611. The city was as big as London or Amsterdam. Cold, crowded, and violent, it was the highest, richest city in the world.
Lawless, luxurious Potosí set a pattern that many boomtowns later followed. Miners who had struck it rich gave fortunes to beggars and spent extravagant sums on swords and clothes. In one bidding war at a market stall, two men drove the price for a single fish to five thousand pesos, many years’ income for most Europeans. At one celebration, a city street was paved with silver bars. “I am rich Potosí,” boasted the city’s coat of arms, “the treasure of the world, the king of the mountains, the envy of kings.”
At first the Spaniards depended on the local Indians’ knowledge of metalworking. Indians knew how to build low-temperature smelters, or ovens, that purified the rich ore without boiling away the silver, a technique unknown to the Spaniards. Later, however, the Spaniards learned a method of using the liquid metal mercury to get silver from the ore. After seeing a demonstration of this method, the Spanish governor of Peru and Bolivia seized control of a mountain eight hundred miles northwest of Potosí that had mercury deposits. A supply of mercury meant that the Spaniards no longer needed the Indians’ smelters to purify their silver ore. They began treating the native people solely as a source of labor, forcing them to deliver a set number of men each week to the silver and mercury mines.
At the start, roughly four thousand Indians were set to work each week at each mountain. Mine owners also imported several hundred African slaves each year. Conditions in the mines were appalling and inhumane. Exposure to mercury, a slow-acting poison, crippled or killed so many people that some Indian parents maimed their children to protect them from having to serve in the mercury pits. At Potosí, Indians carried hundred-pound loads of ore up and down dangling rope-and-leather ladders in almost complete darkness. When miners hit a patch of low-quality ore, they were forced to work harder to make their quota of silver. Failure to meet the quota meant punishment by whips, clubs, and stones. “If twenty healthy Indians enter on Monday,” wrote an outraged priest to the Spanish royal secretary, “half come out on Saturday as cripples.” How, he asked, could Christian leaders allow this?
One reason the law broke down underground was that it had broken down on the surface. Violence of every kind flourished in Potosí. The permanent European population of the city consisted almost entirely of young men trying to make their fortunes. According to one chronicler at the time, “killing and hurting each other was the sole entertainment.” Construction workers found murder victims stuffed into walls or shoved under rocks. City council members wore protective chain mail to meetings and carried swords and pistols. Political disputes were sometimes settled by duels fought right in the council meeting room.
Over time the city’s violence changed from face-offs between individuals to full-fledged battles between gangs from different ethnic groups. One gang war pitted people from different parts of Spain against one another: Spaniards from the southeast fought Basques, who came from a mountainous region on Spain’s northern coast, spoke their own language, and were culturally separate from Spain.
Incredibly, gang violence had almost no effect on the flow of silver. Even as Basques and Spaniards fought in the streets, they cooperated in mining and refining the silver, and then shipping it from Potosí. Shipping was a huge task. One account tells how a shipment of 7,771 silver bars left Potosí in 1549, four years after the lode was discovered. Each bar was about 99 percent silver and weighed about eighty pounds. All were stamped with serial numbers and marked by the owner, the tax man, and the assayer (who tested the purity of the metal). The bars were loaded onto llamas, three or four bars for each animal. The shipment required more than two thousand llamas, which were guarded by more than a thousand Indians, who were overseen by squads of armed Spaniards. Despite these obstacles, the Americas produced a river of silver. That silver flow would change the economy of the entire planet.
Between the sixteenth century and the eighteenth century, more than one hundred fifty thousand tons of silver came out of mines in Spain’s American colonies. It doubled or even tripled the world’s supply of precious metals. Spanish silver washed around the planet, overwhelming governments and financial institutions such as banks. The Spanish silver peso became a universal currency, linking European nations much as the euro does today. Pesos were the main currency in the Portuguese, Dutch, and British empires, and they were widely used in France and the German states.
The money supply across Europe was silver, and the addition of a lot of new silver created an explosion in that money supply. This led to inflation and financial instability. After sixty years of frenzied silver production in the Americas, the world had so much silver that the metal’s value began to fall. A million pesos in 1640 was worth about a third of what a million pesos had been worth in 1540.
As the price of silver slid downward, so did the profits from silver mining, the financial backbone of the Spanish empire. The king collected the same amount of taxes in silver as before, but silver’s value plunged, throwing the government into crisis. Spain’s economy turned to ash. Then, one after another, like a string of firecrackers, the economies of a dozen other countries that were equally dependent on Spanish silver blew up. The wealthy felt reduced to beggars. The beggars felt desperate. With nothing to lose, they picked up stones from the streets and looked for targets. Ruin was followed by riot and revolution: uprisings against Spanish rule in the Netherlands and Portugal, a ruinous civil war in France, and the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which involved most of Europe.
American silver was not the only cause of the upheavals in Europe, but threads of silver did link the various troubles. Still, as devastating as it was, the uproar in Europe was only “a kind of sideshow,” in the words of two historians of the silver trade. Most of the American silver went to Asia. A large share of it ended up in the Chinese province of Fujian, in the port of Yuegang, with its history of both trade and piracy.
Fujian was the Chinese end of the galleon trade, in which Spanish ships sailed back and forth across the Pacific, carrying silver from Mexico and returning with goods from China. The actual trading took place in the Philippines, where the Spanish colonizers had first encountered Chinese traders in 1571. By the mid-1580s, Yuegang was sending twenty or more big junks to the Philippines every spring. As many as five hundred merchants crammed into each ship with every imaginable commodity to sell. Silk and porcelain were big parts of the trade, but the merchants also brought cotton, sugar, chestnuts, ivory, gems, furniture, cattle and horses, oranges, flour, and sugar—whatever they thought Europeans might want. The voyage was dangerous. Pirates routinely ambushed the junks.
When the junks arrived in the Philippines, the merchants docked across the bay from Manila. In the Parián the merchants met local Chinese sales agents, who knew how much silver the most recent galleons had brought, and who helped the sellers set their prices. It was a Chinese ghetto that the Spaniards had established outside Manila’s walls. The Parián consisted of large warehouses surrounded by a maze of shopping areas crammed with stores, teahouses, and restaurants. The narrow streets were jammed at all hours with men in long, floppy-sleeved robes, embroidered silk shoes, and high round caps.
By 1591, twenty years after Legazpi entered Manila, the Parián had several thousand inhabitants. It dwarfed the official city of Manila, which had only a few hundred European colonists. For the Chinese, the arrangement was convenient. They had created a Chinese city outside China, far from the watchful eyes of Ming officials. For the Spaniards, the ghetto was alarming, alien, and unwelcome. It was also necessary. The Chinese would pay twice as much for Spanish silver as the rest of the world, and Chinese merchants were willing to sell silk and porcelain amazingly cheaply.
The Spanish court was dismayed by the size of the galleon trade. Too much silver was going out, and too many silks and porcelains were coming in. Somewhere between a third and half of the silver mined in the Americas went to China. Some of it went directly, through the galleon trade. Some went indirectly, when Europeans bought Chinese goods that had been carried overland from Asia by traders or shipped around Africa by the Dutch and Portuguese. Either way, the result was that a lot of silver ended up in China. The Spanish monarchy was furious because the king wanted that silver to buy supplies and pay troops in Spain’s many wars.
To cut back the galleon trade, officials announced that only two galleons would be allowed to cross the Pacific each year. The result was that merchants built bigger ships. The new galleons were enormous castles of the sea that could carry more than fifty tons of silver.
Much or most of that silver was illegal, meaning that it had not been officially registered for export. Worried Mexican officials informed the monarchy in 1602 that the galleons that year had exported almost four hundred tons of silver, eight times the amount that had been declared. In 1654 a galleon named the San Francisco Javier sank near Manila Bay. Official records claimed that it carried 418,323 pesos. Centuries later, divers found 1,180,865 aboard.
Authorities were unable to stop the smuggling of Mexican silver to China. It was too profitable. In an attempt to limit the trade at the other end, Spanish officials set a cap on the amount of silk and porcelain that could be bought at Manila. Anything above that quota was supposed to be sent back to China. That didn’t work, either. The Chinese and their sales agents simply unloaded the excess merchandise into waiting boats before they entered Manila Bay. The goods were then smuggled into the marketplace.
Spain had its own cloth-producing industry, and so did its colony in Mexico. Yet the Chinese silk industry was so large that Europeans couldn’t compete. The Ming dynasty forced farmers to plant mulberry trees, which produce leaves that are the food for the silkworms from whose cocoons silk is made. Working in a frenzy, farmers up the river from Yuegang harvested silk five times a year. Other Chinese villages became hives of silk factories. Even though the Chinese merchants who sold the silk made huge profits, the Spanish merchants who bought it could resell it in the Americas for less than the cost of cloth made in Spain and still make their own profits. Amazingly, silk from China sold in Spain (after crossing both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans) for less than silk made in Spain.
Alarmed Europeans saw their textile mills threatened. European governments passed laws and regulations to limit the amount of Chinese silk or clothing that could be imported, but the Chinese merchants found a way around every barrier, often with the help of the Spaniards in Manila. When the Spanish monarchy declared that silk could be imported only in chests of a certain size, the silk merchants designed special presses to mash huge quantities of cloth into each chest. The chests were packed so tightly that it took six men to carry one.
SPANISH COLONISTS IN MANILA FLOCKED TO THE Chinese ghetto in the Parián, outside the city walls, to buy items made by the craftspeople there. Chinese-made goods available in the shops of the Parián included everything from roof tiles to clothing in the latest European styles to marble statues of the Baby Jesus. These goods were “much prettier articles than are made in Spain, and sometimes so cheap that I am ashamed to mention it,” wrote the bishop of the Philippines. European merchants griped about the competition. The monarchy ordered the shops moved farther away, but the Spaniards kept coming to them, attracted by the low prices.
The bishop noted that the trades once followed by the Spaniards had died out because people were now buying their clothes and shoes from the Parián. As a warning, he told the story of what happened to one Spanish bookbinder, a man who practiced the trade of binding pages in leather covers to create books. He took a Chinese apprentice to help him with his work. After carefully watching the master bookbinder, the apprentice set up his own shop in the Parián and drove his master out of business. “His work is so good,” wrote the bishop, “there is no need of the Spanish tradesman.”
Not every Chinese business was successful. One shopkeeper sold a wooden nose to a Spanish man who had lost his nose in a duel. This inspired the shopkeeper to import “a fine boatload of wooden noses.” Oddly enough, sales were poor.
Business and politics constantly collided in the Spanish Philippines. On the business side, both the Spaniards in Manila and the Chinese in the Parián profited from the galleon trade and wanted it to continue. On the political side, however, the trade did not line up with the goals of the Spanish monarchy, which wanted to seize Asian lands, convert Asians to Christianity, and prevent the Dutch and Portuguese from expanding their power in Asia. The monarchy also wanted to limit the galleon trade and have as much silver as possible come to Spain instead of China, so it could pay for wars in Europe.
As a trading post, Manila benefited from having as few Spaniards as possible. It was expensive to send them there, and they kept dying of disease. Better to let the Chinese do all the work. Yet in political terms, Manila was an outpost of the Spanish empire. It made political sense for all important civic functions to remain in Spanish hands, and for the number and influence of the Chinese to be kept as low as possible. Every step in favor of commerce was against Spain’s political interests, and every step in support of its political interests was against commerce. The tension is clear in the bloody saga of the magic mountain of Cavite.
The 1590s had seen several violent clashes between the Spaniards and the Chinese in Manila. A Spanish governor had forced hundreds of Chinese to serve as galley slaves, rowing ships with which he planned to conquer another island group. He mistreated them, and they mutinied, killing the governor and his crew. After that, the colony’s leaders saw the Chinese as untrustworthy and dangerous. In 1596 the Manila government deported twelve thousand Chinese, forcing them out of the colony. In a few years they were as numerous as before, and the government was planning more deportations. Into this festering situation sailed three high Chinese officials in 1603. The three had been sent by the emperor of China to deliver a letter to the governor of Manila. According to the letter, rumors in China told of a magic mountain in Cavite, a long, skinny finger of land five miles from Manila, on the south side of the great bay. This mountain, said the letter, was full of gold and silver, all free for the taking. The three visitors had been sent to find out if it actually existed.
The expedition seems to have originated in some kind of daffy con job that bubbled through the Chinese court—not the only time such a thing happened during the Ming dynasty. Yet to the Spanish officials in Manila, who watched the three Chinese mandarins comb the colony for gold and silver, the expedition looked like a scouting party for an invasion. Surely these people could not be the pack of bumblers they appeared to be! They must be part of a sinister plot. While the governor debated whether to kill the three visitors, the visitors apologized for the mix-up and suddenly left.
Fearing that their departure was the signal for an invasion, the governor ordered his forces to destroy Chinese houses that were too close to Manila’s defensive wall, to register every Chinese person in the Parián, and to get hold of every Chinese weapon. What happened next is hard to sort out, because the Spanish and Chinese accounts of events are wildly different.
In the Spanish version, angry Chinese mobs attacked a small band of the governor’s soldiers, fled to the hills, and treacherously killed a representative of the governor who had come to negotiate for peace. To protect the Spanish citizens, the government sent troops into the hills. The Chinese rioters resisted, but they had few weapons and suffered heavy losses.
In the Chinese version of the story, there was no mob and no attack on soldiers. Instead, the government began a systematic massacre, killing the unarmed inhabitants of the Parián. Thousands of Chinese fled to the hills. They did kill the peace emissary, fearing his arrival was a trick, but when they went back to Manila for food, they were ambushed by the Spaniards. In the battle that followed, three hundred Spaniards and more than twenty-five thousand Chinese lost their lives.
Incredibly, just months later, the city leaders in Manila welcomed new Chinese immigrants. Spanish merchants were begging the trade junks to return because they wanted to buy cheap Chinese silk. Within two years the galleon trade and the Parián were almost back to normal. Yet the Spaniards in Manila were as few in numbers, as dependent on the Chinese, and as scared as before. Eventually they again tightened the limits on the Chinese. Rebellions flowered in the Parián, followed by deportations and massacres. The cycle repeated itself in 1639, 1662, 1686, 1709, 1755, 1763, and 1820, each time with an awful death toll.
Why would the Chinese keep returning? As much as the Spaniards craved silk, the Chinese craved silver. Yet the Ming court, like the Spanish monarchy, struggled with the conflict between trade as commerce and trade as a political tool of the state.
On one hand, silver from the silk trade became a source of imperial wealth and power. It paid for huge military projects, including much of the rebuilding of the Great Wall of China. It fueled an economic boom within China. On the other hand, the money that allowed business to grow also set off inflation, which had its worst impact on the poor. Also silver was a political threat because the dynasty did not control the source of the silver or the silver trade. The emperors could not limit the flow of silver into Fujian province, even if they wanted to, because of rampant smuggling. In the eyes of the court, the Fujianese merchants were people of doubtful loyalty who had created the Parián, a Chinese city that was outside imperial supervision. They were becoming wealthy and powerful in a way that was hard for the court to control.
The Chinese court does not seem to have foreseen the worst effect of the silver trade, however. As in Europe, so much silver flooded into China that its value eventually dropped. By about 1640, silver was worth no more in China than it was in the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the Ming dynasty required citizens to pay their taxes in a given weight of silver, not a given value. When the value dropped, people paid the same amount of silver they had always paid, but it was worth less. The Ming dynasty was suddenly short of money and couldn’t pay for national defense. It was a bad time for the military to run out of money—China was under assault by northern groups now known as the Manchus. Over the course of decades, the Manchus gained control of China and became the Qing dynasty.
Dependence on foreign silver was not the only reason for the fall of the Ming dynasty, but the galleon trade played a part. Also, although the trade had brought China into the worldwide economic network of trade and commerce, the ecological part of the Columbian Exchange would have an equally large, equally unexpected effect on China.
