Chapter Thirteen

CHASING THE MONSOON

SEABOARD CIVILIZATIONS

OF MARITIME ASIA

Japan—Maritime Arabia—Southeast Asia—Coromandel and Gujarat—Fukien

The sky was black, the sea white. Foaming like champagne it surged over the road to within a few feet of where we stood. Blown spume stung our faces. It was not hard to imagine why medieval Arabs thought winds came from the ocean floor, surging upwards and making the surface waters boil as they burst into the atmosphere.

We stood rocking in the blast, clinging to each other amid scenes of great merriment. A tall, pale-skinned man next to me shouted, “Sir, where are you from?”

“England!” I yelled.

The information became a small diminishing chord as, snatched and abbreviated by the elements, it was passed on to his neighbours.

“And what brings you here?”

“This!”

—ALEXANDERFRATER,Chasing the Monsoon
(New York,1991),p.60

Riders of the Typhoon: Maritime Japan

Even today, most Japanese still live where they have always lived: crammed into narrow shores by the mountains at their backs. The sea around which they huddle is there to be used and feared—a sea without a name, the system of bays and channels between islands that washes the Pacific shore of Japan from TokyoBay to Kyushu. Edmund Blunden, whose poems show an uncanny understanding of Japan by Westerners’ standards, sensed the symbiosis of earth and ocean. One of his eccentric sonnets, written in 1953 , is open before me as I write:

“O ship, the winds once more will bear you

Down into the deep sea.”

So the ancient poet addressed a nation

In antiquity. And now observing Japan each old admirer

May recall his line;

The new-lit ship is about to leave the moorings—

See how she shines!

And still the ocean, wave and current,

Have mystery.

No captain knows all answers or all soundings;

It’s a strange sea.

Blessings upon this ship and all she carries,

Fair winds attend her and her brave company.¹

Though not always classified as such, the Japanese are genuinely a maritime people, who throughout their history have depended on capricious, often hostile seas for communications and for a vital part of their diet: rice cultivation in the hinterland was a traditionally laborious business, evoked in an earlytenthcentury code of “heavenly offences”: breaking down the ridges, filling in the ditches, overplanting, wasting the water in the sluices.²Kensai Jochin’s bird’seye view of Japan, painted in 1820 , brings out the great paradox of Japanese history: a maritime people isolated for many centuries at a time. The landscape is defined by sailors’ landmarks: conspicuous castles, temples, high peaks, and useful harbors. The islands curl round the bay and seem to reach to embrace the sea, emphasizing the ships that bob offshore.

In one of Japan’s earliest legends, the sea god’s daughter gives Prince Fire Fade fishhooks, riches, and victories but she turns into a dragon in his dreams: a writhing serpent, easily recognizable in the typhoon-coiled ocean Japanese navigators faced.³During the medieval shogunate, the political axis of Japan was known as the “Seacoast Road,” linking the imperial court at Kyoto with the shogun’s headquarters in Kamakura.⁴On this shore, in famous verses, the waves wetted the sleeve of the pilgrim Jubutsu while he was asleep.⁵A Chinese satirist from the end of the third century A.D. made fun of the Japanese custom of insuring a voyage by taking a holy man aboard:

When they travel across the sea to China, they always select a man who does not cut his hair, does not rid himself of fleas, keeps hisclothes soiled with dirt, does not eat meat and does not lie with women. . . . If the voyage is concluded with good fortune, everyone lavishes on him slaves and treasures. If someone gets ill or if there is a mishap, they kill him immediately, saying that he was not conscientious in observing the taboos.⁶

In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, the proto-Japanese state of Yamatoexpanded by sea beyond Kansai, into neighboring bays and islands. Japanese fleets took part in Korean wars.⁷In the seventh century, Japan is said to have had a navy four hundred ships strong.⁸The sea was also the place culture came from: rice cultivation, metallurgy, writing, coinage, Buddhism, the model of a bureaucratic, self-consciously imperial state all came from China and Korea. The earth of the rocky woodlands around the shrine of Okino-shima, the sacred “floating mountain” on the sea route to Korea, is full of votive offerings from both shores, forming a fragmentary record of Japan’s contact with the world from the fourth to the ninth century.⁹The traditional New Year ship regularly “awakens the world from night.”¹⁰The art of ukiyo-e is full of ships tortured by sea ghosts or surviving storms or enduring calms. To this day, perhaps the bestknown Japanese work of art depicts a wave, captured in a moment of menace, just before it crashes into dissolving foam: Hokusai’s Great Wave Off Kanagawa of about 1805 .¹¹

The needs and perils of the sea were the subject of a diary ascribed in the text to an anonymous lady on a homeward voyage more than a thousand years ago. She tells the story of a journey by sea in 936 from Kochi Prefecture, on southern Shikoku Island, to Osaka Bay. On the map the distance seems short, but in the context of the Japanese empire of the day it was a crossing from a far frontier—a link between the capital and a remote island outpost. The author is identified as the wife of the returning governor of the province. “Diaries are things written by men, I am told,” she says. “Nevertheless I am writing one, to see what a woman can do.”¹²

The author’s self-description has often been questioned on the grounds that the work cannot really be by a woman; yet women were among some of the most distinguished Japanese writers of the time, and Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon dominated the literary scene a couple of generations later. The use of the Japanese language, rather than the Chinese favored by men, places the diary in the category known in Japan as “women’s writing.” Scholars who prefer to award it to a male author use two further arguments. The first is that there is no comparable literature by a woman of the time. That argument cuts both ways, for there is little strictly contemporary surviving work of any sort in the genre, and none in which a man writes in Japanese or represents himself as a woman. Second, some of the humor of The Tosa Diary is said to be unconvincing from a woman’s pen—especially a scene where the wind gets up women’s skirts withembarrassing results¹³ —but the resonances of irony are always hard to detect across time and gulfs of culture; the jokey way in which the diarist combines learned allusions to Chinese verse with protestations of her incompetence in Chinese could be bluff or double bluff. It is surely at least as funny in a woman as a man. The Tosa Diary has the ring of truth.

The excitement of being caught up in a fine piece of writing can blind a reader to the difference between literal narration and literary artifice—but even the embellishments in this work convincingly reflect genuine experience of Japan’s home waters, though one may suspect that not all the incidents can have happened quite as recounted.

The pages of the diary are full of the fear of the sea. At the journey’s beginning, amid farewells that “lasted all day and into the night,” the travelers prayed “for a calm and peaceful crossing” and performed rites of propitiation, tossing charms and rich gifts into the water: jewels, mirrors, libations of rice wine. The ship pulled out, rowers straining at the oars. “Bad winds kept us yearning for home for many days. . . . We cower in a harbor. When the clouds clear we leave before dawn. Our oars pierce the moon.” After seven days’ sailing, they were delayed by adverse winds at Ominato, where they waited for nine days, composing poems and yearning decorously for the capital. On the next leg, they rowed ominously out of the comforting sight of the shore, “further and further out to sea. At every stroke, the watchers slip into the distance.”

As fear mounts and the mountains and sea grow dark, the pilot and boatmen-sing to rouse their spirits. At Muroto, bad weather brings another five days’ delay. When, at last, they set out with “oars piercing the moon,” a sudden dark cloud alarms the pilot. “It will blow: I’m turning back.” A dramatic double reversal of mood follows. A day dawns brightly, and “the master anxiously scans the seas. Pirates? Terror! . . . All of us have grown white-haired.” Professing terror, the lady manages a literary prayer: “‘Tell us, Lord of the Islands, which is whiter—the surf on the rocks or the snow on our heads?’”

The pirates are eluded by a variety of techniques: prayers are intoned “to gods and buddhas”; more paper charms are cast overboard in the direction of danger, while “As the offerings drift,” runs the prayer, “vouchsafe the vessel may speed.” Finally, the crew resort to rowing by night—an expedient so dangerous that only a much greater danger can have driven them to it. They skim the dreaded whirlpool of Awa off Naruto with more prayers. A few days into the third month of the journey, they are prevented from making headway by a persistent wind. “There is something on board the god of Sumiyoshi wants,” the pilot murmurs darkly. They try paper charms without success. Amid increasing desperation, the master announces, “I offer the God my precious mirror!” He flings it into the sea. The wind changes. The vessel glides into Osaka the following day. “There are many things which we cannot forget, and which give us pain,” concludes the writer, “but I cannot write them all down.”¹⁴

The journal form makes it possible to be precise about the length of the voyage as described. It began on the twenty-second day of the twelfth moon and ended on the sixth day of the third moon of the new year. For a journey which cannot have much exceeded four hundred miles, the expedition therefore appears to have spent sixty-nine days at sea or in intermediate harbors waiting for a favorable wind. There are all sorts of reasons why this may have been an exceptionally slow journey. The rank of the passengers may have enjoined a stately pace. Reluctance to travel at night may have been greater, in this company, than normal. The presumably large galley may have been compelled to keep inshore, to afford access to supplies and fresh water, at the sacrifice of open-sea shortcuts. The diarist may have stretched the time scale for dramatic purposes, to distribute incidents most effectively through the narrative. But even so, sixty-nine days seems dauntingly long, particularly since the order of magnitude must have been reasonable or the realistic impact of the work would be lost.

The laborious and time-consuming effort of navigating Japanese waters explains, better than any myth of ingrained isolationism, why Japan’s imperialism never got very far until the steamship age. Besides her home islands and those closest to them, Korea and China were also objects of sporadic cupidity to Japanese imperial visionaries, but they could only be approached through zones of terrible typhoons which crush ships against lee shores or cleave them with rocks in the Gulf of Tonkin, as navigators approach continental Asia from the east. Those typhoons— tai feng, Mandarin for “great wind”—were a deterrent to long-range Japanese navigation, an inducement to navigators farther west along Asia’s shore. Occasional Japanese voyagers into the Indian Ocean—like the protagonist of the tenth-century “Tale of the Hollow Tree,” which describes a freak, wind-driven voyage to Persia—were therefore surprised by the amazing rapidity with which communications could be established over vast distances with the aid of the monsoon.

Thanks to the monsoon system, which guaranteed a wind at one’s back, some seaboard civilizations of the Indian Ocean attained an extraordinary length of outreach in the Middle Ages, when none but the Norse crossed the Atlantic, and the Pacific was still an untraversible ocean. The most remarkable example is provided by the history of the Arabs.

Caravans of the Monsoon: The Arabs and Their Seas

Western writers and filmmakers have steeped our image of Arab peoples in the romance and ruthlessness of the desert. Even the Arabs’ image of themselves shimmers with the same miragelike effects: they idealize the supposed natural nobility of the desert-dwelling Bedouin and the life of the tent and the camp.

In reality, however, genuine desert-dwellers have never been numerous.The heartlands of the civilization that Arabs created and spread across vast areas of the world were in narrow but fertile coastal strips which fringe parts of the Arabian peninsula, between sand and sea. Especially in Oman, the Hadramaut, and Yemen, coastal Arabia has all the common geographical conditions for the creation of a seaboard civilization: lands good to sustain life but with no scope to expand to landward and no space, except by sea, to enlarge the base of available resources.

Arab civilization, indeed, was in origin a seaboard civilization in a double sense. For the desert is a kind of sea—a trackless, uninhabited, apparently routeless expanse, ever coiling and reshaping with the wind. It has its islandlike oases, and its exploitable resources—though these are generally even sparser than those of the sea—but it remains above all an obstacle to be crossed. In some ways, sea and desert functioned alike in early Arabian history. The Red Sea, for example, is harder to navigate than the western Arabian Desert. According to Ibn Majid, the greatest medieval Arab writer on navigation, it “conceals many unknown places and things.” Its reputation as late as the sixteenth century A.D. was for “hazards greater than those of the great ocean.”¹⁵It was precisely because it was so hostile to shipping that ancient travelers who did brave it did so with much pride—like the sailors of the spice-buying expedition sent by Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt and recorded on the walls of her mortuary temple in about 1500
B.C. Therefore, for most of the time—and, indeed, overwhelmingly until the fourth century B.C. —goods arriving in the Yemen from farther east would be transferred to camel caravan en route for Egypt or Syria.

Even on its more favored coasts, Arabia is not an easy place from which to found a maritime civilization. It has never produced much wood to build ships with. It has no navigable rivers and, relative to the length of the coast, few firstclass anchorages. Along the Persian Gulf, suitable harbors where fresh water can be taken aboard have always been few and far between. Even the monsoon system—the regular wind-pattern which is nature’s great gift to seagoing peoples lucky enough to live on the coasts it serves—was hard for the early Arab navigators to exploit. North of the equator in the Indian Ocean, northeast winds prevail in the winter. For most of the rest of the year, they blow steadily from the south and west. By timing voyages to take advantage of the monsoons, traders and explorers could set out confident of a fair wind out and a fair wind home. As a bonus, the currents follow the wind faithfully. In consequence, the Indian Ocean was the scene of the world’s earliest long-range navigation on the open sea. But the Arabian Sea—the arm of the ocean which the Arabs had to cross—is racked by storms throughout the year, and the monsoon is dangerously fierce; techniques of robust shipbuilding were essential to cope with these conditions.

Arabia’s early archaeological record is still sketchy, though new work is adding to it all the time. The beginnings of a settled, farming way of life in whatis now Oman can be traced back to the fifth millennium B.C., when sorghum was cultivated. Animals were domesticated: dogs, camels, donkeys, cattle, perhaps the humpbacked zebu. The inhabitants left heaps of date stones. In the third millennium, Oman and perhaps Bahrain began to grow in importance as avenues of trade between India and Mesopotamia. Early in the third millennium, the name “Dilmun”—of disputed location but certainly somewhere in the region—began to become common in cuneiform texts. In the last three centuries of the millennium, the name “Kingdom of Magan,” generally identified as Oman, was added.¹⁶

Meanwhile, Oman acquired stone buildings, seals decorated in the Indus Valley manner, and a reputation for copper-smelting. Archaeologists have made a persuasive case for the theory that Omani forges worked with imported metals and ores in addition to locally mined metal. By the end of the third millennium, however, the region’s role as an entrepOt became concentrated in Bahrain, and the name “Dilmun” became associated with that island in particular. The results of prosperity are evident in the dressed-limestone temples erected in the first half of the second millennium. In the same period, Yemen—the fertile southwest corner of the peninsula—was developing complex irrigation systems and an export trade in the rich aromatics, such as frankincense and myrrh, for which the region was renowned. Goods from Ethiopia, Somalia, and India passed through the hands of Yemeni middlemen on their way to the Middle East, or generated tolls which enriched local states or tribes.

The collapse of the Indus Valley civilization, however, had a depressing effect-on the Arabian economy; civilization in Arabia seems to have marked time until late in the last millennium B.C., when trade across the Indian Ocean recovered a high level of prosperity. Alexander the Great’s desire, expressed before his death, to launch a campaign of conquest by sea against eastern Arabia was not capricious: at the time, the region contained the impressive walled city of Thaj, with a circuit of dressed stone, more than a mile and a half in circumference and of an average depth of nearly fifteen feet.¹⁷The coastal city of Gerrha, probably in the vicinity of the modern Al Jubayl, was an emporium for Arabian aromatics and Indian manufactures. Large numbers of inscriptions in Hasaitic script are still being unearthed. The opportunities for trade in the region are suggested by the apparent wealth of the island staging-post of Failaka, occupied successively by Persian and Greek colonists in the third and second centuries B.C.¹⁸

Omani emporia had a glowing reputation among Roman and Greek writersin the two centuries around the birth of Christ. Yemen was regarded as a land where men “burn cassia and cinnamon for their everyday needs.” The author of a Greek guide to Indian Ocean trade of the second century A.D. believed: “No nation seems to be wealthier than the Sabaeans and Gerrhaeans, who are the agents for everything that falls under the name of transport from Asia and europe.It is they who have made Syria rich in gold and who have provided profitable trade and thousands of other things to Phoenician enterprise.”¹⁹

The history of Arabian seafaring seems, however, to have been interrupted again—or, at least, almost to have disappeared from surviving sources—during the “dark age” which, according to traditional historiography, preceded the career of the prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century A.D.²⁰

Muhammad’s impact was revolutionary on every aspect of life it touched. Islam, which he created, was not only a religion but also a way of life and a blueprint for society, complete with a demanding but unusually practical moral code, a set of precepts of personal discipline, and the outline of a code of civil law.

The inspiration of Islam combined elements borrowed from Judaism and Christianity with a measure of respect for some of the traditional rites and teachings of pagan traditions in the region. A tradition dear to Islamic scholars represents Muhammad as God’s mouthpiece and, therefore, in human terms, utterly original. Unindebted to earlier religions, his teachings crackle and snap with the noise of a break with the past. His earliest followers, however, seem to have regarded themselves as descendants of Abraham through Hagar and Ishmael, and to have picked up from Arab merchant communities living in Palestine the concepts of monotheism and of election by God to fulfill a sacred history.²¹In secular terms, Muhammad, like so many prophets before and since, seems to have been fired up by moral indignation with the waste, inequality, and chaos of the society that surrounded him.

He claimed, however, to have received his teaching from God, through an angel who dictated the divine words into his ear. The resulting writings, the Quran, were so persuasive and so powerful that hundreds of millions of people believe him to this day. By the time of his death, he had equipped his followers with a dynamic form of social organization, a sense of their own unique access, through the revelations claimed by Muhammad, to the truth of God, and a conviction that war against nonbelievers was not only justified but also sanctified. Warriors were promised an afterlife in a paradise where pleasures were analogous to those of this world. Muhammad’s legacy gave Muslims administrative and ideological advantages against potential enemies. Within a hundred years of his death, his designated successors as “commanders of the faithful” had built up an empire bigger than any yet seen in the Western world.

Islam was spread beyond the reach of armies by more insidious vectors of culture: Arab traders. Trade shunted living examples of Muslim devotion between cities and installed Muslims as port supervisors, customs officials, and agents to despotic monopolists. Missionaries followed along the trade routes: scholars in search of patronage discharging the Muslim’s obligation to proselytize on the way; spiritual athletes in search of exercise, anxious to challenge native shamans in contests of ascetic ostentation and supernatural power. In someareas, crucial contributions were made by the appeal of Sufis—Islamic mystics who could empathize with the sort of popular animism and pantheism that “finds Him closer than the veins of one’s neck.” Conveyed by the monsoons, Sufis congregated in Malacca, after a dynastic alliance introduced Islam there in the early fifteenth century. A hundred years later, after the city fell to Portuguese, they fanned out along sea routes through Java and Sumatra. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Aceh, in northwestern Sumatra, was pre-eminent in the incubation of Sufi missionaries. When they emerged, or when their writings circulated, they disseminated fervent mysticism of sometimes dubious orthodoxy, like that of the millenarian Shams al-Din, who saw himself as a prophet of the last age, and whose books were burned after his death in 1630 . They were outposts of Islam, which continued to spread eastwards all along their waters.

Naturally, Arab civilization, having been transformed by Muhammad, was again modified by this experience of expansion. Most of the conquests were at Roman and Persian expense. The rich traditions of art and learning conserved in the Greek, Roman, and Persian worlds fell into Muslim hands, enriching the legacy transmitted from Arabia. Arabs remained a prestigious elite within Islam, but the scale of the empire meant that rank and power had to be shared with other peoples. Though, thanks to the Quran, the Arabic language has always been a unifying force within Islam, further expansion from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries A.D. turned Islam into a community of speakers of different tongues. Iranian, Turkish, Urdu, Malay, and—to a lesser extent—Mongol and other Central Asian languages achieved imperial status alongside Arabic in parts of the Islamic world. Meanwhile, by almost imperceptible degrees, the spread of conquests and converts along the coasts turned the Indian Ocean into an Islamic lake.

Even Arab identity was transformed inside expanding Islam. Today, Arabic is spoken as a first language by scores of millions of people who consider themselves Arabs without any ancestors from the Arabian peninsula. The seaboard communities who forged the first Arab civilization are now just a few Arabs among many. Islam became more than a seaboard civilization, incorporating large numbers of land nomads and other inhabitants of landward environments deep in continental interiors. But a glance at the map of the Islamic world today shows how much Islam, throughout its centuries of expansion, continued to be transmitted across sea and desert routes, like those that linked the first Arab civilization to the outside world. After the rise of Islam, Arab culture was so successful in communication and catching on that its limits seem more surprising than its reach. Those limits, too, were fixed by the sea and the wind. If the western Indian Ocean became an Islamic lake, and Islam came to preponderate in maritime Asia as far east as the Straits and the Spice Islands, it was not only or chiefly because of the appeal or adaptability of the culture. Rather, it was becausethe winds dragged eastwards. From the Yemen, in the age of sail, India and Indonesia were more accessible than Suez, which lay thirty days’ voyaging away, beyond the rocks and shoals and treacherously variable winds of the northern half of the Red Sea. Around parts of the remoter rim of the Indian Ocean world, in Africa and India, Islam has remained a markedly maritime culture, with only patchy penetration inland, where vast, almost untouched hinterlands have stayed hostile or indifferent. Meanwhile, though Islam could conquer the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean by land-based campaigns, it was extremely hard to get any further without command of the sea: on the Mediterranean maritime fronts, the winds favored the resisters on the northern and western shores, from where the winds blow in the traditional sailing season, giving defenders the weather gauge.²²Of the great peninsulas of the northern Mediterranean, three were conquered laboriously, by means of huge investments of manpower and naval effort, at different times; ultimately, however, Spain, Greece, and the Balkans could not be retained, whereas Italy was vulnerable only to sporadic attacks. Islamic culture proved almost as hard to spread against the wind as Islamic conquest.

The Ring of the Snake: The Seas of Southeast Asia

At its eastern extremities, where it spread by sea, across the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, Islam met other seaboard civilizations of great antiquity, more of which proved more responsive, at least in patches, to Muslim proselytization. This was the area depicted in Buddhist cosmography as the serpentine rim of the world.²³

Many if not most of the great Southeast Asian civilizations originated far from the sea and sometimes, even in their maturity, had little or nothing to do with it. Angkor remained throughout its history an essentially inland, agrarian state. So did the almost equally glittering urban world of Pagan on the Middle Irawaddy, though it maintained collaborative or, at times—especially in the eleventh century—hegemonic relationships with trading communities on the Burmese coast, which were treated as raid victims or disposable fiefs “ downstream.”²⁴The imperial states of medieval—and, if Mataram is included, earlymodern—Java tended to take to the sea, but their strength was often in warrior aristocracies from upland interiors, and their great shrines and capitals were built inland. When Vietnamese states looked to the sea, they did so from a base in the ricelands of the Red River. Indeed, behind every instance of large-scale maritime endeavor in trade or imperialism in South and Southeast Asia was an agricultural hinterland that grew plenty of rice. Compared with most of the examples already reviewed—Phoenicia, Scandinavia, the Dutch, the maritime Arabs, and, in their way, the Japanese—the seaboards of the region had anabundance of options and a generous landward outlook as well as a seaward view. To some extent, this even applies to Fukien, which we shall turn to in a moment.

The first resolutely seaward-looking state we know about was Funan, a fairly short-lived coastbound stretch of territory, wrapped around the Gulf of Thailand. Chinese officials singled it out as a possible tributary or trading partner during a surge of interest in the potential of the region in the third century
A.D. Its culture was almost certainly borrowed from India; by Chinese reports, it was a repository of learning, rich enough to levy taxes in “gold, silver, pearls and perfumes.”²⁵Its success depended on its role as a mediator of Chinese trade with Indonesia and the Bay of Bengal, but these destinations could be more economically reached by direct trade. The sea voyages of Buddhist pilgrims back from India demonstrated the possibilities. The most vivid writer among them, Fahsien, left an impassioned account of his early-fifth-century odyssey in a leaky vessel through a pirate-infested sea, which seems to have put nobody off.²⁶Funan was ultimately absorbed by the Khmer, and the axis of maritime statebuilding shifted outwards, towards the Indonesian islands.

Here, the realm of Srivijaya, on the Sumatran coast, was already an impressive place when Chinese sources began to take notice of it in the seventh century. When the pilgrim I-Ching stopped there in 671, the capital had a community of Buddhist monks, said to number a thousand. It was a realm of harbor tolls and privateers’ nests, with a river-linked landlubbers’ realm to back it and supply it with soldiers and rice. A tradition of pagan magic—fascinating to Muslim observers—for the propitiation and control of the sea persisted alongside a sophisticated court culture, employing Hindu and Buddhist scholars. The “ Maharajah” was said to have enchanted crocodiles to guard his river estuary and to buy the goodwill of the sea with annual gifts of gold bricks.²⁷This is not, perhaps, any more profligate than the analogous rites practiced in Venice.

The magic worked, and the capital at Palembang became a place of resort for merchants, where even the parrots spoke four languages.²⁸The maritime strength of Srivijaya was concentrated—and its potential to be a seaboard civilization manifest—in the ragged east coast of Sumatra, with its fringe of islands and mangrove swamps, its deep bays and shelters for shipping, its natural coralreef defenses, its abundant larder of fish and turtles. Its greatness and survival—for it was “invariably described as great,” according to a Cantonese administrator of its trade at the beginning of the eleventh century—depended on Chinese custom, especially for the sandalwood and frankincense in which it established a dominant trading position, and on maritime security.²⁹

In the eighth century, Srivijaya had a Javanese rival, known as the Kingdom of the Mountain and the Empire of the Southern Seas. In 767, Javanese invaders were driven from Sontay in Tonkin by Chinese forces. In 774, they ravaged the south coast of Annam: Cham inscriptions shudder over “men born in foreignlands, living on a diet even more horrible than human corpses, frightening, very black and thin, terrible and dangerous as death, who came in boats.” More inscriptions, from 778, record invasions by “armies of Java who landed in boats.” The recollections of the trader Sulayman, recorded in 916 , include a story about a Khmer king, “young and hot-blooded,” who tactlessly expressed a wish to see the head of the emperor of the Southern Seas “on a platter before me.” The emperor led a swift and secret expedition “directly for Cambodia. He had no trouble in sailing up the river to the capital, entering the palace and seizing the king. . . . ‘I will be content to give you the treatment you wished to try on me, and to return to your own country without molesting yours.’” He proclaimed a new king and gave him the dead king’s head as a present and a warning. “From that time on the Khmer turned their faces in the direction of the emperor’s country every morning and bowed down to the ground in homage to him.”³⁰

One of the great paradoxes of the period is that Sumatra has left records of its trade and imperialism, but no great monuments, Java has left monuments, but no records of trade. Yet there is other, stronger evidence of the maritime vocations which reached outward from Java: not in written texts but in pictures carved in stone. If civilization is judged by the standards proposed in this book, some spells of Javanese history must be reckoned among its periods of most spectacular attainment, and none more so than the building era of the Sailendra dynasty in the eighth and ninth centuries. With no apparent need to develop maritime strategies of their own, Javanese rulers in the period of Srivijaya’s greatness could concentrate enough wealth and labor to build Buddhist temples unsurpassed even in India: cosmic diagrams in crushing dimensions that seemed to proclaim their patrons’ privileged access to heaven and right to rule the world.

The most awe-inspiring site is Borobudur—the founding glory of the Sailendras, built of half a million blocks of stone in the first flush of their splendor, between about 780 and 830 A.D. It was not only an act of self-assertion by a new dynasty, but also the embodiment of a Buddhist view of the world. Buddhism was then a relative newcomer to the highest levels of power in Java: the site of Borobudur was evidently intended for a Hindu temple when the ruling ideology was abruptly changed.³¹Imitating and, from some angles, dwarfing the hills behind it, it was the product of a unique design: not a temple, for it encloses no inner spaces, but a pattern of terraces leading the pilgrim upwards, by analogy with a mystical ascent, towards the pinnacle of experience, a representation of the central world-mountain of Buddhist cosmology.³²More than a stupendous weight of masonry, Borobudur is a stone book, carved with reminders of the stages of the preparation of the soul. The most explicit of these are the reliefs which depict moral tales from Buddhist scriptures. And it is here where the merchants and shippers, who have left no surviving written archives, can be encountered.

One of the most famous reliefs depicts the voyage of Hiru to his promised land. This faithful minister of the legendary monk-king, Rudrayana, earned the goodwill of heaven by intervening with the king’s wicked son and successor, who proposed, among other iniquities, to bury his father’s spiritual counselor alive. Miraculously advised to flee in advance of a sandstorm which would smother the court, Hiru was carried to a land shown in the reliefs as a happy shore, lined with granaries, peacocks, varied trees, and hospitable inhabitants. In the Borobudur relief, he arrives on a windborne ship, equipped with outriggers, with teeming decks and raked sails billowing on two mainmasts and a bowsprit.³³The artist had seen such scenes. He knew every detail of what a ship looked like and how it worked.

The same sculptor carved another scene nearby which is even more expressive of the values of a maritime people. It depicts a shipwreck—the crew hauling down the sails, the passengers piling into a tender fitted with its own mast. The episode belongs to the story of the virtuous merchant Maitrakanyoka. He was the son of a merchant from Benares who died at sea. The boy wanted to follow his father’s vocation, but his mother tried to protect him by a pious lie. Maitrakanyoka was told first that his father was a shopkeeper, then a perfumier, then a goldsmith. He tried each of these callings in turn, doubling his earnings each time and giving all to the poor. To get rid of him, other merchants told him the truth about his father. The carvers of Borobudur showed him taking a cruelly brusque leave of his mother. He departs on a merchant’s travels; at each city he visits, lovely asparas—Hindu nymphs, mistresses to the air gods—greet him, doubling in number each time, until the last, when, instead of his usual welcome, he is lashed to a wheel of torture in punishment for mistreating his mother. He is told that his punishment will last for sixty-six thousand years, until a successor replaces him; but Maitrakanyoka begs never to be released rather than allow a fellow man to experience the same pain. He is immediately freed and translated to eternal bliss.³⁴This is a kind of art—evidence, too, of a kind of spirituality—which could only come from a commercial world. It displays a mercantile ethos, in which the merchant can be saint and hero, in which commerce is akin to pilgrimage, and in which the righteousness of alms-giving is preceded by success in trade.

It remains true, however, that, whereas Java later became home to an advanced maritime technology and seagoing tradition, there is no evidence of initiatives in long-range commerce to rival Srivijaya’s in the era of the builders. An inscription of 927 suggests that thoughts may have been turning seawards: the visits of Sinhalese, Indians, and Mons are celebrated;³⁵but nothing came of it. No sources disclose a coherent story or an exact account of the relationship between the patrons of this architecture—the Sailendra dynasty in eastern Java—and their Sumatran neighbors. At different times, warfare, dynastic alliance,rival claims, and possible mutual conquests are recorded in inscriptions or hinted in texts.

Throughout the rest of what we think of as the Middle Ages, Java remained a land of commercial achievement and maritime potential. “Of all the wealthy foreign lands that have great store of precious and varied goods, none surpasses the realm of the Arabs. Next to them comes Java, while Srivijaya is third. Many others come in the next rank,” according to Chu’u-fei’s report of 1178 .³⁶ The nearest approach to an imperial revival was launched in the mid-fourteenth century, from Majapahit, an inland stronghold well to the east of the Sailendra center of power.

Here, in 1365, Winada-Propañca, a Buddhist scholar of the royal chancery, addressed a poem to his childhood playmate King Hayan Wuruk. The Nagara-Kertagama was a panegyric in praise of the ruler, an exercise in the intimidation of neighbors, and a manifesto of dynamic and aggressive policy. It lovingly described the wonders of the royal compound at Majapahit, with its gates of iron and its “diamond-plastered” watchtower. Whereas Majapahit was said to be like the moon and sun, the rest of the towns of the kingdom “in great numbers” were “of the aspect of stars.” Hayan Wuruk traveled on progress “in numberless carts” or was borne on his lion-throne palanquin to receive tributes in Sanskrit verse from foreign courts. His realm, which, according to the poet, was incomparable for renown in all the world, except to India, actually occupied little more than half the island of Java; and its potential—spent by the forced pace of Hayan Wuruk’s impatient politics—was never realized. Yet its ambitions were brazen. The poet’s list of tributaries was scattered through Sumatra, Borneo, southern Malaya, Siam, Cambodia, and Annam. The poet even made China and India subservient to his lord, and “already the other continents,” he boasted, “are getting ready to show obedience to the Illustrious Prince.”³⁷Java’s imperial scope hardly matched such vast pretensions. Nonetheless, the aggressive spirit expressed in court poetry was already sustaining Majapahit in wars of extermination against commercial rival-realms in Sumatra; and the technical equipment for longrange expansion—in shipbuilding, mapmaking, navigation—was probably as well developed there as anywhere else in the world.³⁸At this period, Java was still as heavily timbered for shipbuilding as neighboring islands. The present landscape was produced by massive deforestation much later, from the seventeenth century onwards.³⁹

Meanwhile, cultures bordering the South China Sea had been gradually transformed by the proximity of rich shipping lanes to their coasts. The Vietnamese in the north and the Cham in the south had been inward-oriented, ricegrowing peoples for centuries or millennia; but in the seventh and eighth centuries, their coastal communities experienced a transformation already familiar to us from the Dutch pattern: from fishing to piracy, and from piracy to commerce. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, both countries were formidablenaval powers, exchanging raids deadly enough to threaten each other with extinction and bidding for Chinese help with tributes of rose water, flasks of Greek fire, precious gems, sandalwood, ivory, camphor, peacocks, and Arab vases.⁴⁰These were all emporium products. Neither state could generate much in the way of exportable commodities of its own, except for the slaves the two states grabbed from each other in war.

The Seas of Milk and Butter: Maritime India

The traditional Indian perspective of the world looks like the product of stay-at-home minds. Four, then—from the second century B.C. onwards—seven continents radiate from a mountainous core, the Meru or Sineru. Around concentric rings of rock flow seven seas, respectively of salt, sugar-cane juice, wine, ghee, curds, milk, and water. In most surviving pictured cosmographies, these lap the earth in perfect circles, ever farther removed from the recognizable core of Tibet and the triangular, petallike form of India, with Sri Lanka falling from it like a dewdrop. Yet this schematic picture and titillating imagery conceal real observations, of a world grouped around the great Himalaya and an ocean divisible into discrete seas, each of which represents a route to a “continent,” or at least to a commercial opportunity: to Persia, for instance, by way of the sea of milk; to Ethiopia across clarified butter; and so on.⁴¹One should no more suppose, from their sacred cosmography, that Indians were disabled as mariners than infer, on the basis of the Underground map, that Londoners could not build railways.

The strength and antiquity of Indian seafaring is suggested by stories from the end of the first millennium B.C. or soon thereafter, collected among the Jataka or tales of Buddahood. The fact that Buddhahood is in these stories occasionally incarnate in merchants and pilots is itself a corrective to the notion that “Oriental religion” is hostile to commercial, capitalist, or nautical vocations. Pilotage “by knowledge of the stars” is depicted as a godlike gift. The bodhisattva intervenes to save sailors from the wiles of cannibalistic goblinseductresses in Sri Lanka. He extemporizes an unsinkable vessel for a pious explorer. A merchant of Benares, following a Buddha’s advice, buys a ship on credit and sells the cargo at a profit of two hundred thousand gold pieces. At the same time, spiritual values are urged in these stories along with the profit motive. In one of them, a Brahman called Sankha, impoverished by his own generosity in alms-giving, resolves to “take ship for the gold country, whence I will bring back wealth.” He is saved from wreck by a deity, Mani-mekhala, who is responsible for shipwreck victims who have combined commerce with pilgrimage “or are endowed with virtue or worship their parents.”⁴²

While Srivijaya stagnated, Java fragmented, and Champa and Vietnam establisheda system of uneasy equipoise, the naval and commercial power-vacuum might have been filled, at different times, from China, Sri Lanka, or even Pagan. But China was uninterested, Sri Lanka vulnerable to invaders of its own, and Pagan—though a tradition of scholarship seeks to edge its core seawards in this period, into the shores once occupied by Funan—was ultimately too far from the sea. Instead, a loose hegemony, which its historians have sometimes called an empire, was established for a spell in the eleventh century by a state in Southern India.

The strength of the Chola kingdom lay inland, in the rice fields of the Kaveri Valley and the pastures above. The kings almost invariably attached more importance to landward security and expansion than to the sea. A raid that touched the Ganges did more for the prestige of the monarchy than the remotest seaborne adventure: in this respect, they contrasted with contemporaries in Christendom, for whom “deeds beyond the sea” added renown and sanctity in a crusading era. The Chola realm’s potential as the mother country of something like a seaborne empire arose from the fusion of the power, wealth, and ambitions of its kings with those of merchant communities on the Coromandel Coast. At Nagapattinam, Kaverippumppattinam, and Mamallapuram, the grandest ports, pearls, coral, betel nuts, cardamom, loudly dyed cottons, ebony, amber, incense, ivory, rhinoceros horn, and even shipborne elephants were palatially warehoused, stamped with the royal tiger emblem, and exchanged for gold.⁴³

Like their counterparts in temperate-forest environments in the same period,-the Chola kings were tree-fellers on a gigantic scale and builders of cities in an imperial style. The founding myth of the dynasty concerns King Cola, who was out hunting antelope when, lured deep into the forest by a demon, he came to a place where there were no Brahmans to receive alms. So he cleared the forest and planted temples.⁴⁴His successors followed his pattern.

The merchants’ vocation blended with the pirates’; Chola merchants had private armies and a reputation “like the lion’s” for “springing to kill.”⁴⁵The imperial itch naturally seemed strongest in kings whose relations with merchants were closest. Kulottunga I ( 1070-1122), who relaxed tolls paid to the crown, imagined himself—there is a pillar inscription to prove it—the hero of songs “sung on the further shore of the ocean by the young women of Persia.”⁴⁶Most Chola seaborne “imperialism” was probably just raiding, though there were footholds and garrisons in Sri Lanka and the Maldives and perhaps in Malaya. Its impact, however, was enough to cripple Srivijaya and enrich the temples of Southern India. Temples were the allies and support of the kings in managing the state, and the biggest beneficiaries of victories in war. Their investments in land and in the revenues of improving cultivators, whom they supplied with capital, may have contributed, in the long term, to the weakening of Chola maritime imperialism—an enfeeblement which became marked in the thirteenth century. While the seaward drive lasted, however, the registers of gifts inscribed on templewalls show its effects: a shift from livestock and produce of the soil to dazzling bestowals of exotica and cash, especially in the period from about 1000 to 1070 . The treasures of Tanjore included a crown with enough gold to buy enough oil to keep forty lamps alight in perpetuity, 859 diamonds, 309 rubies, 669 pearls, bracelets, earrings, garlands molded in gold, parasols, lampstands, fly whisks, salvers, and vessels.⁴⁷

Over a longer period, from the mid-ninth to the mid-thirteenth century, arts of subtlety, majesty, and flair expressed the values which raised Chola statecraft above plunder and exploitation. Even by the standards of Hindu tradition, the architecture of Chola temples was irresistibly sensual. The dynasty’s arrival in Tanjore, the first capital, was like a ravishment; according to the inscription which commemorated the event, the monuments of the city were like the adornments of a girl with “beautiful eyes, graceful curls, a cloth covering her body and sandal paste as white as lime.”⁴⁸The same aesthetic animated all Chola art. When Rajendra (reigned 1012 – 44 ) built a new capital to commemorate his campaign on the Ganges, he gave the very temples the concave, sinuous forms of the supple queens and goddesses who shimmied and sashayed in the bronzes commissioned by preceding kings. The city was conceived on a scale suggestive of monstrous ambitions. Into its artificial lake, sixteen miles long and three miles wide, Rajendra poured water drawn from the sacred river. The sight of the building, according to a twelfth-century poet, could overwhelm with joy “all fourteen worlds encircled by the billowing ocean.” It embodied the essence of the civilizing ambition, for “the very landscape around was made invisible.”⁴⁹

The Coromandel Coast was uniquely privileged in Eastern India as a nursery-of emporia. On the west coast, a long strip of trading states, useful harbors, and maritime communities stretched, with intervals, from Bijapur to Malabar. But an exemplary seaboard world lies at the northern extremity of the coast, in Gujarat. What the Dutch were to Europe and the Fukienese to China, the Gujaratis were in Indian history: the most committed, single-minded, and wideranging navigators. Before anything like a distinctive Gujarati identity took shape, their coast was the site of the great port of the Harappan era, Lothal, which traded with Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf and imported copper mined in the Carnatic. The successors of the mariners of Lothal were the subjects of the sea stories recorded in the Jataka in the middle of the first millennium B.C. and the carriers of the trade mentioned in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. One Jataka (number 360 ) concerns a king who sent a minstrel-turned-explorer called Sagga “over every sea” to find an abducted queen. Another (number 463 ) is the tale of a blind pilot from Bharuch who discovered unknown seas and lucrative trades because he “knew by the signs of the ocean that in the ocean such and such a jewel was hid.”⁵⁰A blind pilot may seem a feature so fantastic as to disqualify the tale; it seems clearly related to the topos of the blind desert guide, who is genuinely at no disadvantage amid indistinguishable, shifting dunes (seepage 68 ). But the waves have some real points of similarity with the sands, and many a tale crafted for its moral is rooted in real experience.

Gujarat’s precocious maritime vocation is intelligible on the map: the Gulf of Cambay is surrounded by a world of bays, deltas, estuaries, and islands; it is a water world backed by plateaus, mountains, deserts, swamps. Hence, the Gujaratis’ “sole profit,” according to Hsuan-tsang, who traveled among them on his quest for pure texts of Buddhist scriptures in the seventh century A.D., “is from the sea.” It was an exaggeration, but a pardonable one. Contrary to the claims of Weberian social theory—which says that the value systems of some religions, including Hinduism, are incompatible with capitalism—Hindu merchants pursued their trade and their calling with equal commitment. This was partly because Hinduism, like all religions, set standards in theory which were ignored as a matter of course; and partly because the merchants commonly embarked on their professions at a young age, before departures from the contemplative life incurred degradation. It was possible—as claimed by a merchant who leapt caste bounds to fight battles—to trade blows “in the shop of the battlefield.”⁵¹In later, decisively documented periods, wealth conferred status on merchants among their coreligionists and was often spent on religious foundations and pious works. The strict limitations which caste imposed on merchants’ freedom in the nineteenth century were peculiar to the time, when the grinding structures of economic change had anyway diminished the role of commerce and industry in the economy.⁵²

In any case, Gujarat had an exceptionally large and enduring Jain community, to which merchants were drawn precisely because of the unfastidious assurances of Jainism’s founding sage, Mahavira, about the accessibility of enlightenment and ascent through reincarnation for all castes. Only a life of monastic self-abnegation could be truly meritorious by Mahavira’s standards, which demanded abstention from cruelty to every form of life, which was held to encompass earth, rocks, fire, and water. At least, however, what is now called “wealth creation” was morally neutral, as long as the wealthy man relieved the need of his neighbors and “labor that many may enjoy what he earns.” “High birth and low” were “mere words with no real meaning.”⁵³Merchant endowments helped to make Jain temples a feature of the Gujarati skyline, and merchants became the subjects of monkish eulogies in return—praised for industry, frugality, and generosity.⁵⁴Those of Satrunjaya, where a legendary precursor of Mahavira was said to have descended to worship, form the biggest Jain holy site in India, crowning two hilltops with domes and spires that shimmer like a confectioner’s creations and seem to have been spooned out of the sky in creamy peaks. The Jain influence in Gujarat was apparent to Portuguese visitors in the sixteenth century. Jo„o de Barros, who thought the Jains derived their doctrines from Pythagoras, reported the extraordinary evidence of piety which made thembuy any creature a Muslim might be about to kill “even if it a cobra . . . so as not to see it die, and they think they are doing a great service to God.”⁵⁵

The seaward history of Gujarat in the later Middle Ages might be told through the stories of sultans who called themselves “Lords of the Sea”—a title which suggests a claim to sovereignty like those disputed between European maritime states in the same period.⁵⁶Or it may be seen through the eyes of pirates, whom Marco Polo observed thronging the sea with fleets twenty or thirty sails strong “so that they cover something like a hundred miles of sea, and no merchant ship can escape them . . . and after they have plundered them they let them go, saying, ‘Go along with you and get more gain, and mayhap that will fall to us also.’”⁵⁷Or the same history can be recounted through the lives of pilots like the individual known from Portuguese sources as “Molemo Canaqua”—which just means “Muslim Pilot”—who showed Vasco da Gama the way across the Indian Ocean from Mlindi to Calicut; there is no credible basis for the legend that Ibn Majid, the era’s greatest authority on open-sea navigation, was personally responsible for that fateful act.⁵⁸But, for want of time and space to do it justice, the seaward face of Gujarat can be appreciated best, or at least sampled most representatively, in the story of the founder of its fabled port of Diu.

Malik Ayaz came to Gujarat in the 1480 s as a Russian slave famous for his valor and archery in the entourage of a master who presented him to the sultan. Freed for gallantry in battle—or, in another version of the story, for killing a hawk which had besmirched the sultan’s head with its droppings—he was given the captaincy of an area which contained the ancient site of a harborside settlement, just re-emerging—thanks to the patronage of Malik’s immediate predecessors—from centuries of accumulated jungle. By the time the Portuguese arrived in the Indian Ocean, he had turned Diu into an impressively fortified emporium and had induced shippers from the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, Malacca, China, and Arabia to use it as their gateway to Northern India. His style of life reflected the value of the trade. When he visited the sultan, he had nine hundred horses in his train. He employed a thousand water-carriers and served Indian, Persian, and Turkish cuisine to his guests off china plates.

In addition to entrepreneurial flair, he displayed extraordinary diplomatic subtlety. When the Portuguese destroyed the Gujarati fleet in 1509 , Malik made the most favorable terms he could with the victors. His harbor was to be open to them, and his own clients would withdraw from the pepper trade, in which the Portuguese intended to specialize. But he resisted Portuguese demands for a fort on his land, and eluded his sultan’s inclination to give the entire fief away to the Portuguese—who appeared to be remoter and more malleable intermediaries than an overrich and overmighty subject like Malik. In future years, after 1534 , when Diu became a Portuguese stronghold, his time was recalled as a golden age of resistance to the Christians; in reality, it was nothing of the sort, just a typicalstory of a well-contrived balance by local interests who absorbed the newcomers without conceding power to them.

As interlopers and would-be imperialists, the Portuguese were succeeded by Dutch and English counterparts, but the seaward life of Gujarat went on, virtually undisturbed. Indeed, merchants’ opportunities for enrichment grew, and shippers’ business increased. Virji Vora—the great merchant prince of Gujarat, who dominated every regional market place from the first to the last decades of the seventeenth century—was able to play Dutch and English buyers off against one another to his own enrichment and the impoverishment of both. At various times, he imposed his own prices on the markets in pepper, cloves, copper, coral, and quicksilver, while also acting as the Europeans’ principal banker and lender and—in the words of an exasperated English factor in 1643 —“the usual merchant and . . . sole monopolist of all European commodities.”⁵⁹His was an outstanding but not unrepresentative case of the durability of indigenous capitalism in an era of European infiltration.

Gujarat was part of a peripheral, coastal India that was always different from the India within—the vast inland cores of the Ganges Valley and the Deccan, where the preponderant states and civilizations were located. The difference made by a limited coastline was even greater in China, which, in relation to the vastness of its dimensions, bulging into inner Asia, has a relatively short coastline. China has, in the eyes of the rest of the world, an introspective reputation. Yet there is a part of China where the maritime outlook has had a permanent, formative influence on the culture; the same province has provided much of China’s longest-ranging merchant marine and a disproportionate share of the colonists who have become today’s “overseas Chinese”—the most prolific and, perhaps, the most widespread maritime colonial people in the world. That province is Fukien, which may be said to have, within the encompassing unity of China, a distinctive seaboard civilization of its own.

China’s Frontier to the Sea: Fukien

For Marco Polo, it was the coast with the greatest ports in the world, and by any standards it housed for centuries the world’s richest merchant communities; yet, before its elevation by commerce, the country which became Fukien had long borne an evil reputation as a fatally inhospitable land: a narrow malarial shore, backed by mountains full of savages. How and when it was settled by Chinese are unknown: the early history of the place was too obscure and peripheral to attract chroniclers’ attention; it was too poor to feature in tax records until the fourth century A.D. In other words—when one thinks of places like Phoenicia and Greece, or Portugal and the Netherlands, it is just the kind of coast onwhich great commercial and perhaps imperial endeavors might be expected to arise.

Opportunities to seaward, however risky, are more inviting than those on land. The first sign that those opportunities were being exploited is the rapid expansion of population indicated by censuses of the late seventh and the eighth centuries. It may have been caused by refugees, attracted by the very inaccessibility of the region, and content to farm as best they could on marginal and reclaimed lands. But by the ninth century, documents record numerous references to the “trade of the South Sea” on the Fukien coast. It was an intermediate and presumably small-scale trade in luxury goods, which were transmitted to the Yangtze estuary and the north. The projection of the area into international trade on a large scale was the work of warlords and landowners searching for new forms of wealth during the period of imperial dissolution in the late ninth and the tenth centuries. Wang Yan-bin, who seems to have contemplated an effectively independent state centered on Chuan-chow in the 890 s, was known locally as “the Secretary who summons treasure” because not a year went by during his supremacy without the arrival of a ship from the South Sea.⁶⁰

The tribute paid by the province when China was reunited under the Sung dynasty, from the 960 s, reflected the oceanic contacts developed in this period: camphor, frankincense, sandal asafetida, myrrh, “spices and medicinals.” A century later, the port of Chuan-chow “was clogged with foreign ships and their goods were piled like mountains.”⁶¹The life of an official from whom this line comes makes it clear that part of the region’s advantage was as an entrepOt of contraband. The handlers specialized in controlled and prohibited goods and made pacts with corruptible officials to keep the true values even of lawful products concealed. Fortunately, the governments’ efforts to oblige traders to ensure accurate registration by going via Hwangchow were never successful, though repeatedly essayed in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries.

Merchants from Fukien figure in records of foreign trade from the 990 s; over the succeeding century, their activities embraced Java, Champa, Vietnam, Hainan, Borneo, and Korea. The coast acquired a reputation for natural and perhaps mystical advantages which more than compensated for its inaccessibility by land. Currents assisted the onward passage of goods northwards. Whereas “wind and waves have created dangers that restricted the profits they could make in other districts,” the locally born merchant Zhou Wei, according to a temple inscription of 1138 , was able to outface terrors thanks to the invocation of the temple spirit of his home port.

This linkage of trade and devotion should not be sniffed at: Chinese economists of the time anticipated a Weberian theory connecting religion and capitalism, linking the prosperity of Fukien to the prevailing religion of “Buddhist purity.”⁶²If this sounds reminiscent of the innerweltliche Askese, which Weberfamously ascribed to Protestants and Jews, the analogy may have something in it, for Buddhism was a merchant-friendly way of looking at the world: it exonerated tradesmen from the derogation with which they were threatened in a Confucian environment and from the pollution of caste which kept some Hindus on shore. In the twelfth century, stupendous labors were expended on the infrastructure of trade: dikes, moles, and bridges, celebrated in inscriptions, to “terrify fish and dragons” and make the sea “like a palace.”⁶³Fed by imported food—as much as 50 percent by the late twelfth century—Chuan-chow became, or at least bade fair to become, the major port of China.⁶⁴

Merchants became the pioneers of a form of business imperialism, escaping-into seafaring lives and overseas “sojourning” from the landward priorities of the Mandarin elite. In the latters’ eyes, the wealth of a Confucian utopia would be supplied by a peaceful, prolific peasantry. Seaborne venturing was suspect, in the value system of scholar-bureaucrats, because it diverted resources outside the realm and invited potentially violent barbarians home. Writings in Fukien during what we think of as the Middle Ages therefore tended to be evasive about the achievements of merchants; the triumphs of Fukienese examination candidates was a more prestigious and therefore a more popular subject. But the triumphs of business accumulated unsung. When, in the late thirteenth century, Kublai Khan dreamed of extending to the sea the Mongol traditions of warborne imperialism, Fukien supplied most of the ships and marine manpower. The project “to spread out over the four seas” was a failure, but the attempts to conquer Java and Japan represented an extraordinary triumph for expansionist strategies over the prudent policies of Confucian tradition. They also helped to enlarge the Chinese world-view, to encourage the accumulation of geographical and ethnographic data from far afield, and to inaugurate an era—which lasted at least until the late fourteenth century—in which overseas venturing was nicely balanced with traditional Chinese isolationism.

To judge from a wreck in the harbor, Chuan-chow in this era received cargoes-of aromatic woods, spices, condiments, and incense from Java, Khmer, Arabia, and East Africa.⁶⁵The city had foreigners’ quarters modeled on the reception centers of overland merchants in Tang and Sung capitals. Overseas communities elected their leaders, traded from their appointed markets, and worshipped in their own mosques and temples. Fukienese communities throve abroad, though they remained undocumented until the late fourteenth century, when a change of dynasty and of policy brought them into the light: after 1368 , Ming prohibitions on overseas travel obliged the Chinese of Palembang, for instance, to stay there and take to piracy and smuggling.

For a brief spell in the early fifteenth century, overseas enterprise looked as if it might become a state venture, in which Fukienese were prominent as technicians and participants.⁶⁶The Yung-lo emperor was one of the most aggressive and maritime-minded rulers in Chinese history. The chosen instrument of hisnaval ambitions was the eunuch-admiral Cheng Ho, who commanded the first oceangoing task force of “treasure ships” in 1405 . The expedition was calculated to snub the scholarly elite in favor of rival lobbies: the eunuch establishment, who craved administrative power; the merchants, who wanted to mobilize naval support for overseas trade; the imperialists, who wanted to renew the program of conquest of the time of Kublai Khan; the religious establishments, which wanted to keep funds out of the hands of the scholar-skeptics by encouraging new enterprises.

The series of voyages—which lasted, with interruptions, until 1433 —ranged the Indian Ocean as far as Jiddah, Hormuz, and Zanzibar. They adorned the court with exotic tribute and surrounded it with a fantastic menagerie of supposedly auspicious beasts: giraffes, ostriches, lions, leopards, zebras, antelopes, rhinoceri, and a creature represented as resembling a white tiger with black spots, who would not eat meat or tread on grass. They stimulated scholars to contemplate the mystery of “dissimilarities” in the world. They displayed Chinese power to the barbarians, overturning a dynasty in Sri Lanka and a tyrant in Sumatra, punishing pirates, and elevating Malacca from a fishing village to a great kingdom and emporium. A stela Cheng Ho erected in Fukien in 1432 summed up the coincidence of science and empire:

In the unifying of the seas and continents the Ming dynasty even goes beyond the Han and the Tang. . . . The countries beyond the horizon and from the ends of the earth have become subjects. . . . However far they may be, their distances and routes may be calculated.⁶⁷

The urge to stretch imperial power across the ocean did not long survive the Yung-lo emperor. The return of scholar-ministers and Confucian ideals to supremacy at court left the merchants of Fukien confined to a frustrating legitimate role as carriers of China’s coastal trade; but they took advantages of lapses of official vigilance to maintain and expand expatriate communities in Malacca, Borneo, and Japan. Fukienese undercover colonialism was ready to leap into conspicuousness when restrictions were lifted in 1567 . By the 1580 s, twenty ships a year from Fukien were visiting Manila, which had twenty-five thousand Chinese residents by 1603 . In that year, the first of many massacres wrecked the Chinese quarter, but the numbers had recovered within a couple of decades. Here, where the nominal sovereign power was Spain, and in the Dutch emporium of Batavia, the real colonists were Fukienese, who settled in large numbers, exploited the economy on a grand scale, and enriched their home economies with remittances. In a popular eighteenth-century joke, Manila was “home town number two” to the Fukienese.⁶⁸Along with the official “tribute,” which arrived regularly in Fukien from the Ryukyu Islands—thirty kinds of gold rings, fiftyseven raw materials for different perfumes, creatures of seventeen rare species,including white monkeys and Formosan lovebirds—merchants conducted private trade, which was somewhat less exotic: imports included straw mats, paper, glass bottles, coarse textiles, diced shrimps.⁶⁹

Driven by misery or drawn by profit, Fukienese merchants spread in their thousands into Korea, Japan, and the archipelagoes of Southeast Asia. Among them were big capitalists, such as village headmen, with concentrations of investors’ capital at their disposal, and desperate small traders, like Li Chang, who told Korean authorities in 1544 that he was a fugitive from a countryside ruined by drought. “How could we have the joy even of simple fare? We had no choice but to go into commerce, build a boat and start trading for a small profit. For some moments of happiness for my family I boarded a small and fragile boat to cross the wide and unknown ocean. On the immense waves, scorched by the sun, one may easily die. . . . Enormous waves reach to the sky but we take these risks and must go on.”⁷⁰This was surely the disingenuously exaggerated protest of an illegal trader pleading for his livelihood. By the end of the century, venture capital cost less than 2 percent in interest, and the profits of trade created a huge class of nouveaux riches.

There were moments when a form of explicit Chinese imperialism threatened to seize power in the Chinese overseas world. In the early seventeenth century, swashbucklers whose activities blended trade with piracy created states, or something very like them: Li Tan was said to have three mountains of silver—one in Japan, one in Fukien, and one in Manila—with which he maintained his own armed fleets; Cheng Chih-lung, his successor, ruled a dynastic and diplomatic network from Amoy and was called “the Great King of the Sea”; he became a “cosmopolitan” figure but remained rooted in the tradition he exemplified—of Fukienese seaborne imperialism and of the “symbiotic relationship” between the province and the sea.⁷¹His son, Coxinga, established what was effectively a rival Chinese empire with its center in Taiwan. Generally, however, without a metropolitan government of their own to support them, Chinese merchants wisely preferred to use Western empire-builders as surrogates to protect and promote their activities.⁷²Fukienese had a persistent maritime tradition but never a sustained imperial vocation. They remained “merchants without empire,” or at least with only an informal empire.⁷³They were scattered in selfconscious, self-contained—sometimes autonomous—communities, concentrations of wealth and skills. They influenced and exploited their host societies, pioneered new activities, sustained their own networks, pursued inconspicuous ambitions, and served their own interests with calculated discretion.