Between the years 629 and 645, during the Tang dynasty (618–907), a Chinese monk named Xuanzang traveled to India in search of Buddhist scriptures. On his return he translated more than a thousand rolls of text from the Sanskrit and wrote an account of his journey that remains an invaluable description of Central Asia at that time. Xuanzang’s epic journey, soon dramatized for stage performance and recounted by storytellers all over China, became a standard theme of popular literature. In the sixteenth century it formed the centerpiece of the great Chinese novel Journey to the West, in English sometimes known as Monkey after the adventures of the magical monkey-king who in the novel accompanies Xuanzang on his travels and protects him from peril. As the saga of Xuanzang’s journey was told and retold, it embedded the idea of international exchange into the Chinese tradition from a very early period.
In the early twentieth century Xuanzang unwittingly played a part in illuminating once more some early links between China and the civilizations to its west. In 1907 a Hungarian-British explorer, Aurel Stein, traveled across Central Asia as far as the west China oasis of Dunhuang. Dunhuang was an important staging post on the old Silk Road, along which, since time immemorial, traders and religious believers had traveled between China and points west. Nearby was a huge temple complex whose walls had been lavishly decorated over the centuries with frescoes depicting Buddhist paradises. Within the complex also were thousands of ancient manuscripts and decorated textiles, concealed in a side room walled up almost nine hundred years earlier. Wishing to persuade the priest in charge to allow him access to these ancient texts, Stein described how he had retraced Xuanzang’s footsteps across Asia. His evident familiarity with and admiration for this popular figure of the Chinese past successfully established a bond with the priest, who that same night showed the explorer a small sampling of the treasures under his care. The first texts to emerge from the walled-up library in this way turned out to be none other than some of the scriptures Xuanzang had brought back from India and translated into Chinese so long before. These documents were followed by many more. Most, like the frescoes, were Buddhist, but there were also Confucian, Daoist, Zoroastrian, and Nestorian Christian materials showing links to Persia, Tocharia (in modern Afghanistan) and Sogdiana (in modern Uzbekistan), as well as to China, and still other texts that had little connection to religion. Some were in languages never before encountered. Paintings on silk from Dunhuang also testified to an abundant blending of cultures. They depicted figures whose faces showed traces of the so-called Greco-Buddhist tradition—that is, in an Indian style known to have been influenced by Hellenistic art—while the drapes of their clothes and the landscapes they dwelt in were done in distinctly Chinese style. Probably these paintings were done by several different artists. Thus the heritage of the Tang priest Xuanzang, himself a representative of the rich interchange between China and the rest of Asia, helped in this century to expose to the light the cultural diversity these exchanges brought about more than a thousand years ago.
Early Chinese contact with other civilizations occurred in three broad overlapping categories of equal importance: politics, including both diplomacy and warfare; religion and intellectual exchange; and trade, in which Chinese silk and later porcelain figured prominently. Chinese diplomacy and warfare usually involved programs of national security and expansion, which often created trade opportunities. At the same time, peaceful commercial exchange often resulted in expansion without any fighting or negotiation—for instance, when Chinese merchants involved in long-distance trade settled permanently in outlying areas and founded new communities. Trade was further linked to politics because of the preferred Chinese method of conducting foreign relations; since this involved the formal exchange of goods with foreigners, it was in effect a politicized form of international trade.
Similarly, international trade was tightly interwoven with the flow of ideas into and out of China. Buddhism, for instance, an originally Indian religion, entered China both with priests and missionaries and with merchants who came across Central Asia. Other religions, including Islam and Christianity, followed in Buddhism’s wake, but none proved able to match its tenacity. In this realm of intellectual transmission too, much more than religion crossed the world with the caravans and carracks of international trade. Many travelers carried with them news of the latest breakthroughs in astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, and technology. Nor was China simply the passive recipient of imported goods and ideas. Over time countless elements of Chinese culture, both material and spiritual, and including such originally foreign aspects as Buddhism, found their way to other parts of Asia, notably Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.
The final overlap between categories of early contact with other civilizations was between the realms of religion and politics. In China, as in Europe, these were sometimes associated in the realm of early foreign policy—for instance, when missionaries doubled as ambassadors to other countries—but unlike in Europe, wars of religion were virtually unknown. This was because there was no single established state religion and because those religions that at different times were prevalent in China lacked Christianity’s strong evangelical element. Nor was the emperor considered divine in China, as was his counterpart in Japan, but his position as the Son of Heaven gave him special qualities that contributed in important ways to the environment of international trade, as we shall see in the next section.
THE IDEALIZED CHINESE WORLDVIEW
Ancient Chinese, as represented by their monarch, claimed to hold a Mandate of Heaven according to which they had a valid claim to preside over everyone else by virtue of their unequivocal political, cultural, and moral authority. That principle remained intact even under an alien ruler; it was moral integrity and benevolent leadership rather than ethnic origins that were important. Originally this cultural self-confidence had perhaps been in some degree justified by the relatively high level of ancient Chinese civilization and its sophisticated political organization, in comparison with the peoples surrounding it. For at least in antiquity China’s neighbors were in most cases unsettled tribes; many were nomads rather than sedentary farmers like the Chinese. Their culture was not well developed—for example, few had written scripts of their own—and their political organization was unstable enough that none could describe itself as a state.
By the time of the early empire (second century B.C. to second century A.D.), the premises underlying this worldview had been many centuries in the making. They envisaged a universe divided into an inner and an outer zone, sometimes conceived of more specifically as a series of graduated concentric circles. Within this universe one’s degree of civilization depended on one’s relationship to the center of the inner zone. In common with many other societies, China placed itself at the center; in other words, it regarded itself as the most civilized and regarded those farthest away as the most barbarous. At least in theory, the assumption was that most outsiders aspired to be “more like Chinese” and would eventually become assimilated to a greater or lesser extent. There was a fatal weakness in this argument, however, for taken to its logical conclusion, it implied that most, if not all, Chinese were descended from outsiders who had previously undergone the process of acculturation.
Han China (206 B.C.– A.D. 220) established an ideal formula for dealing with outsiders that, it hoped, would overcome the disagreeable reality that some of them showed no particular inclination to assimilate or to abandon their own cultures. The formula became known to historians as the tributary system. This was in effect a bundle of practices intended to symbolize outsiders’ submission to Chinese overlordship. Its most important features were as follows. First, the tributary ruler or his representative had to go to China to pay homage. In particular the envoy had to prostrate himself before the Chinese emperor, in ritual acknowledgment of his vassal status. Second, the tributary state had to send a significant hostage, such as its crown prince, to the Chinese court. Third, the tributary state had to send gifts of native goods, always described as the payment of tribute, to the Chinese emperor.
The system functioned reciprocally. In return for the tributary’s symbolic submission, China guaranteed its security, although actual military intervention tended to depend on China’s stake in the tributary’s stability. China also bestowed extravagant gifts, together with elaborate honors and titles. These were intended to buy off the tributary, and although often cripplingly expensive, they still cost less than raising and maintaining a standing army that could compel submission. Finally, the foreigners were permitted to engage in carefully controlled trade for a few days before being conducted back to the frontier and sent on their way.
This formula was, however, optimistic, for although China claimed that the ritual homage and the offering of local goods demonstrated submission to Chinese political overlordship, the tributary did not necessarily see it that way. Rather, for tributary states the entire process primarily represented a peaceful way to acquire essential Chinese goods without having to steal them in border raids. The question of relative status did not much concern them, although in some cases recognition by the Chinese emperor may have enhanced a leader’s prestige in local disputes.
Moreover, a fundamental paradox flawed the tributary framework. For it functioned properly only when others acquiesced in it or at least agreed not openly to dispute the Chinese version. Such acquiescence was possible only when China was strong enough to compel compliance. When, as frequently happened, this was not the case, China simply adapted to reality. Indeed, Chinese leaders were well aware from early times that their empire and its environs formed only a small part of the civilized world and that other comparable cultures existed. For instance, the Han accorded the easternmost territories of the Roman Empire, in contemporary Syria, the respectful title of Great Qin, dispensing altogether with the patronizing vocabulary that they preferred to use in all their dealings with other states.
Many of the preconditions of China’s assumed superiority over its neighbors simply withered away over time. Particularly after the fall of the Han in 220, China itself often was politically divided into a number of small states, none of which had sufficient power to demand deference from any other. Moreover, although it claimed that foreigners longed to revolve in China’s political and cultural orbit, the reality suggested otherwise. This was not least because the surrounding states were becoming much stronger and more stable, with highly literate elites whom it was no longer feasible for China to patronize.
In short, while the ideals embodied in the tributary system have endured down to the present century, China has necessarily, and often, departed from that ideal since very early times. That is, China’s approach to relations with other states and civilizations has been highly pragmatic, whatever its theoretical underpinnings and however firmly it may have asserted its superiority in public.
THE EARLY IMPERIAL AGE
206 B.C.–A.D. 581
Traffic between China, Southeast Asia, the kingdoms of Central Asia, and India, if not farther afield, certainly began informally in the preimperial age. But our story begins with the Han empire, which about the year 200 B.C. established its capital at the eastern terminus of the Silk Road, located at Chang’an (on the site of which contemporary Xi’an stands) in northwest China. This was around the same time that both Rome and Alexandria were rising to political and cultural prominence, respectively, in the Mediterranean world.
Han China was distinctly interested in establishing political and commercial relationships with other states, through diplomatic missions and both official and unofficial trade. In the latter part of the second century B.C. the expansion-minded emperor Wudi (r. 141–87) twice sent his emissary Zhang Qian (fl. ca. 125 B.C.) to explore the diplomatic and commercial prospects to the west. Zhang Qian spent some years in captivity among China’s longtime enemies, the Xiongnu confederation of nomads, who rightly regarded him as a spy. Eventually he returned home, bringing a great deal of information about living conditions in Central Asia and in places farther to the west that he either visited himself or sent his agents to investigate. Partly as a result of his journeys and those of later Han emissaries to the “Western Regions,” China began trading with Central Asia on a regular basis.
Han China’s primary exports were silk and gold. In return China imported spices, woolen fabrics, and the horses essential to its military projects. On occasion, inevitably, foreign germs sneaked in with foreign commodities; smallpox, for example, is thought to have reached China from India sometime in the first century.
Warfare and trade fed on each other in a variety of ways. For one thing, Han armies sometimes recruited Central Asian merchants to join their forces as they advanced westward. For another, ordinary soldiers stationed on the frontier certainly exchanged some of their government issue clothing for cash; probably they also smuggled arms and other goods across the frontiers between China and its hostile neighbors, but we do not know about these activities in any detail. Knowledge of the distant regions in which these far-flung campaigns took place also inspired, in at least one instance, the urge to acquire exotic foreign luxuries, as we know from an exchange between the Ban twins, one an eminent historian and the other a senior general campaigning in Central Asia. The historian urged his brother to get him some of those fine local rugs and send them on home.
It was sometimes hard to distinguish diplomatic from commercial missions, for the exchange of goods formed an important part of Han relationships with other states, and the roles of merchant and official envoy could be interchangeable. Several delegations came to China from Parthia in northern Persia, which the Chinese called Anxi. One such embassy, which appeared in A.D. 10, was renowned for having presented an ostrich to the Chinese emperor; it followed a seaborne mission from an unidentified state eight years earlier that had brought the no less remarkable gift of a rhinoceros. Later that century a Chinese envoy was said to have been prevented from reaching Rome by the Parthians, who, according to Chinese tradition, tried hard to maintain their role as middlemen between the two great empires by luridly painting the difficulties of the journey to any who sought to make it himself. The Roman upper classes greatly desired Chinese silk and referred to China as Seres, the “land of silk,” while the Chinese valued Mediterranean glass and coral.
Although the Parthians seem to have been largely successful in their efforts to discourage direct contact between the Chinese and Roman empires, in 166 a famous embassy did reach Han China from “Antun,” who has been identified as the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180). The envoys brought gifts of ivory, rhinoceros horn, and tortoiseshell, perhaps acquired in North African ports they passed through on their long voyage.
By the end of the Han, China had begun to consolidate its earlier sporadic connections to those states accessible by sea. This development derived both from the growing uncertainty of the overland route (the Silk Road) as the Han empire retracted and from the fact that after the Han collapse the reconstituted states in southern China were, in any case, cut off altogether from direct access to the Silk Road, so they had to find some other way to reach the source of the imported luxuries they wanted. For these reasons, by no later than the third century Canton (Guangzhou) had become a flourishing port for overseas trade. At the same time, Chinese started to migrate overseas, especially to Japan and Southeast Asia, as well as along the overland trade routes. From this period, as the result of migrations, commercial exchange, military expeditions, and the growing numbers of Buddhist priests and pilgrims journeying between China and India, a considerable literature about foreign countries and their cultures began to appear, making it possible for those at home to learn more about the world.
Buddhism was first recorded in China in the first century, although Chinese may have been aware of it earlier. It came by way of Dunhuang on the Silk Road, home of the frescoed temples with which this chapter opens. At first it had few Chinese converts and primarily served the foreign community of merchants and others, but as the Han empire began to disintegrate toward the end of the second century, a Buddhist establishment had been set up in the capital at Luoyang, systematic translation of texts into Chinese had begun, and the foreign religion was steadily becoming more widely accepted.
The central tenet of Buddhism was that the world was neither fixed nor real and that the self did not exist. Buddhism held that such illusions lay at the root of human suffering, causing people to be mired in such worldly emotions as envy, lust, hate, and pride. This led them to carry out those evil actions that caused suffering to others, which in turn condemned them to an endless cycle of rebirths into horrendous misery. Claiming to offer a path to salvation from this inexorable process, Buddhism called for people to renounce this world of illusion and adopt a monastic existence given over to devotion, spiritual purification, and good works.
Many of Buddhism’s tenets, originating in the profoundly different culture of India, were incompatible with traditional beliefs associated with Confucianism concerning the harmonious functioning of the family and society. These beliefs, already prevalent in China, later became permanently incorporated into the predominant state ideology. For instance, Buddhism’s call for a monastic existence and for celibacy ran directly counter to Confucian requirements of filial piety within a family-oriented social structure, including the important obligation to perpetuate one’s family line. Just as important was the fact that Confucianism focused on this world, not the next; compellingly the sage had asked: “You are not even able to serve man; how can you serve the spirits . . . you do not understand even life; how can you understand death?”1 By contrast, one of Buddhism’s central concerns was the endless cycle of life, death, and reincarnation to which humans were committed; it taught that what one did in this life directly affected what happened to one in the next. For some Chinese, the subordination of the here and now to a theoretical future existence was unacceptable, while the notion of perpetual reincarnation was profoundly subversive because it implied that a person’s position in life, as a monarch or a beggar, a human or an ant, was not fixed.
Early Buddhist missionaries tried, with some success, to persuade Chinese that Buddhism was akin to the indigenous Chinese religion of Daoism, which similarly called for spiritual purification as a means to transcend the evils of the world and attain a golden age. Thus they used certain Daoist ideas and vocabulary to introduce Buddhist notions. This strategy of “grafting the alien onto native roots” was fairly successful in that it helped Buddhism spread among existing Daoist communities, which in turn probably helped spread Buddhist symbols and ideas farther afield. In time Buddhism established an independent existence and became one of China’s major religions. Its particular attraction was precisely that it filled a gaping vacuum of spiritual support left both by this-worldly Confucianism and by Daoism, which for a time became increasingly abstract.
Buddhism was especially successful in making inroads into China after the fall of the Han in 220. The profound social dislocations of the ensuing civil wars indirectly promoted Buddhism’s growth by securing the monasteries’ position in local communities as agencies of social welfare, making it possible to refute the criticisms of those who questioned Buddhism’s social utility. For instance, many women widowed in the fighting resorted for protection to religious life in Buddhist nunneries. Numerous other needy people availed themselves of the programs Buddhist establishments began increasingly to operate, providing food and shelter for the destitute. In short, women and the lowly, to whom traditional Chinese society offered little in the way of material or spiritual benefit, often found that Buddhism and the monastic life could offer greater opportunities for self-fulfillment than life within a Confucian framework.
Buddhist monasteries also began to play an important economic role. For example, they held religious festivals for which Buddhist paraphernalia were in demand. Many such commodities could be obtained only abroad, so that fragrant plants for incense, jewels, and precious metals came to form an important sector of the long-distance trade. In other words, Buddhism helped bolster trade and raise prices. The monasteries also operated pawnshops and mutual financing associations and actively boosted handicrafts industries by, for example, sponsoring the production of thousands of statues. These multiple roles served both to integrate the Buddhist establishments in Chinese society and, almost imperceptibly at first, to strengthen their political significance.
Buddhism’s growing influence in China spread to the world of art and architecture. Gradually the distinctively Indian artistic forms and styles of the earliest Chinese Buddhist temples, with the place of worship focused in a central tower, began to undergo a long process of adaptation to China. For example, what in India was a Buddhist stupa eventually transmuted into the multistory Chinese pagoda that came to epitomize a classic Chinese landscape.2 Along with the new architecture came monumental stone sculptures and highly elaborate paintings and murals, often incorporating Buddhist motifs. In the earliest of these representations the features of Buddha and his disciples and the statuary style show traces of Indian, Persian, and even Greco-Roman influence, but in the course of time this evidence of foreign origin dwindled away. The Dunhuang murals, painted over a period of centuries, offer one illustration of this tendency.
The Buddhist religion benefited in other ways from the post-Han political division of China. The southern kingdoms, which regarded themselves as more “purely” Chinese, used it as a tool in the assimilation of “wild natives” previously little exposed to Chinese culture. The northern kingdoms, often dominated by alien groups, found Buddhism a convenient alternative to existing Chinese ideologies to which they were often hostile. In general, rulers openly employed Buddhism to bolster their claims to legitimacy because Buddhist legend offered highly appealing models of kingly behavior, in which devotion to the religion ensured earthly success as a ruler while generous donations to its institutions purchased semidivine status. Such models neatly complemented ancient Chinese theories of universal rulership.
In practical terms, monarchs struck deals whereby in return for their investment in religious institutions and for letting the Buddhist establishments operate more or less without restriction, they arranged for prominent clergymen to declare them incarnations of the Buddha. They hoped of course that this assumption of divine status would make them politically unassailable as rulers, while the Buddhists hoped that the imperial imprimatur would make them unassailable by Daoist and Confucian competitors. To a considerable extent, these strategies worked for both sides. This political co-optation of the Buddhist religion made it extremely difficult for rulers to restrain the growth of Buddhism on any level. In sum, the foreign religion became both widespread as a belief system and extremely powerful as an institution, and it spread into China simultaneously among members of the ruling classes and a wide range of ordinary people.
THE MULTICULTURAL AMBIENCE
OF TANG CHINA, 618–907
Historians describe the Tang empire as a “native” empire, to align it with the Han and distinguish it from some of the “non-native” kingdoms of the preceding centuries of division and from the later Mongol and Manchu dynasties. Yet such a description is deceptive partly because it implies the existence of a fixed “Chineseness” unsullied by foreign influence and partly because of the complex origins and habits of the Tang imperial family itself. Descended from the Tuoba Xianbei, a Turco-Mongol group that had ruled much of north China a century earlier as the Northern Wei dynasty, Tang emperors preferred to speak the language of their forefathers among themselves, rather than Chinese, and their matrimonial and clan practices and social customs differed from the indigenous Chinese tradition. They shunned close association with the native aristocracy, which in turn for some time resisted forming any imperial connections. Anxious to demonstrate their legitimacy, Tang rulers successfully established their credentials as a thoroughly Chinese house and suppressed evidence to the contrary. They were also highly receptive to foreign influence, appreciating imported goods and freely making use of foreigners’ services.
For example, foreigners abounded in the Tang military. Imperial expansion in the seventh century, an important component of Tang China’s power and prestige, owed much to the destruction of China’s external enemies by the great emperor Taizong (r. 627–649), under whom China imposed political control over the numerous kingdoms along the Silk Road almost as far west as the Persian frontier. Among other foreigners in Taizong’s armies, for instance, were several thousand Nepalese and Tibetan troops serving under a Chinese commander in northern India. A century later a Tang general of Korean origin defeated a Tibetan army on the frontier at about the same time as, in the heartland, another multinational Tang army under a Khitan general from the northeast defeated a major rebellion led by a Tang military governor named An Lushan (703–757). An himself was part Sogdian and part Turkish; his armies included numbers of non-Chinese frontier forces. One of the major problems with which the shattered Tang had to contend after suppressing the rebellion was the restlessness of many of these foreign troops.
At its height in the decades before An Lushan’s rebellion, the Tang capital at Chang’an was the largest, most sophisticated, and most cosmopolitan city in the world, with a taxable population of nearly two million people. Only Baghdad and Constantinople even remotely approached it. Chang’an’s population came from all over the world. There were western and eastern Turks from Central Asia (sometimes called Turkestan); Persians from the collapsing Sassanian empire; Uighurs from China’s northwest frontiers; and Sogdians from the Samarkand area, whose language was the lingua franca of the Silk Road. There were also Arabs and Jews; Indians, both Hindu and Buddhist; Koreans; Tibetans; Malays; Japanese; and a host of other foreigners of sometimes uncertain origin. With them they brought their merchandise, religions, languages, customs, and cultures. When they returned to their own countries, they took back with them Chinese artifacts, institutions, and systems of belief.
Many journeyed overland, from Syria and Persia along the various routes of the Silk Road through Central Asia. These well-beaten tracks went either north, by way of Samarkand in Sogdiana and Kokand in Ferghana, or farther to the south, by way of Bactria, to the edges of contemporary Xinjiang. From there it was again possible to take a northern or southern route. The northern route skirted the great Taklamakan desert and ran along the edges of the Tianshan mountain range, onward to the oases of Turfan and Hami. The southern route went from the Pamirs via Khotan along the foothills of the Kunlun Mountains and intersected with the northern route at the Dunhuang oasis. There were other, less traveled routes. One went much farther south, from India through Burma to Yunnan in southwest China, at least until the rise of the hostile kingdom of Nanzhao in the eighth century made this route too dangerous. Another, especially favored by Buddhist pilgrims, went by way of Nepal and Tibet.
Others came by sea, from Siraf and Ubullah in the Persian Gulf and from southern India and Ceylon, going by way of Malaya, Java, and other Southeast Asian entrepôts. Still others sailed south from Korea and Japan. Canton continued to be the major port for overseas trade, but foreign merchant communities sprang into existence all up and down China’s eastern seaboard.
As in Chang’an, Tang Canton’s foreign population ran into the tens of thousands. There were Khmers from present-day Cambodia, Javanese from modern Indonesia, Singhalese and Tamils from what is today Sri Lanka, Chams from what is now Vietnam, Indians, Arabs, and Persians. Canton could claim with some justification to be a truly multicultural city, with a veritable babel of languages, among which Persian, the sailors’ common language, probably came second only to Chinese.
From Canton it was possible to travel all over China by an extensive network of roads and waterways, many newly built to accommodate the burgeoning traffic. Most proceeded to Yangzhou, a thriving commercial center at the intersection of the Yangzi River and the Grand Canal connecting north and south China, through which almost all seaborne imports passed. From Yangzhou they went on to the great political centers of north China. As in towns such as Turfan and Dunhuang along the Silk Road and in the seaports, settlements of foreigners plied their wares in many of the towns along the way. These communities played a considerable role in the spread of towns and cities beyond the old administrative centers, and helped disseminate foreign objects and ideas throughout the land.
Tang Chinese, for all their cosmopolitanism, seem to have felt some ambivalence about foreigners. They were fascinated and enthused by what the strangers brought, whether intellectual excitement or material culture, but they did not always like or trust the messenger. Sometimes, like so many others, they took refuge in stereotypes. Thus they tended to characterize Persians as “wealthy (and therefore enviable),” Malays as “black (and therefore ugly),” and Chams as “naked (and therefore immoral).”
For the literate it was possible to gain some considerable sense of the world beyond China from the accounts of soldiers, merchants, and religious travelers. Such works—still only in manuscript in this preprinting age—must have been available in the bookstores of large Tang cities, along with multilingual dictionaries and imported books in translation. Some accounts were of course more well informed and less fanciful than others. For example, the imperial archivist and collector Duan Chengshi (d. 863), who delighted in learning about strange and wonderful matters, reported about the people of East Africa that they “do not eat the Five Grains, but only meat. They are given to sticking a needle into the veins of their cattle and drawing out the blood, which they mix with milk and consume raw. They wear no clothes, but merely use goatskins to cover the parts below their waists. Their women are clean and of proper behavior.”3
Although Duan’s work was grounded in reality, others produced imaginative works that included the names of actual places or events to lend an air of veracity. Duan himself wrote fiction as well as descriptive geographies. His fairy story “The King of Persia’s Daughter” was set in a foreign place and reflected his sense of the magical potential of the outside world.
Tang poetry abounded in references to foreigners, foreign styles, and foreign ways. Some poets were neutral but others condemned the apparently wholesale embracing of foreign cultures:
Ever since the alien horsemen began raising smut and dust,
Fur and fleece, rank and rancid, have filled Xian and Luo.
Women make themselves alien matrons by the study of alien makeup,
Entertainers present alien tunes, in their devotion to alien music.4
In this poem by Yuan Zhen (799–831) the term “alien” (hu) was used in the pejorative sense of “uncivilized.” Xian and Luo referred to the two Tang capitals, Chang’an (anciently Xianyang) and Luoyang. “Alien music” refers to a type of music called faqu introduced during the Sui (581–607) and extremely popular during the Tang. Another poem, by Yuan Zhen’s contemporary Bai Juyi (Po Chü-i), explicitly blames Xuanzong’s passion for this type of music for the decline of the Tang.
Foreign residents in Tang China lived and conducted business in specially designated areas. They were somewhat independent of local authority. They had their own community heads, and they enjoyed some degree of extraterritoriality, applying their own rather than Chinese laws in cases that affected only members of their own community. They were allowed to worship their own gods, as we shall see. But so far as commerce was concerned, they were given far less latitude.
TRADE AND INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGE
UNDER THE TANG
By Tang times China was beginning to build ships capable of undertaking long journeys. Their vessels excited admiring comment in southern India and the Persian Gulf and may even have traveled as far as the Americas. Tang coins and fragments of porcelain have been found on the north and east coasts of Africa, although we cannot tell if they got there on Chinese ships. Other Chinese goods, especially written texts and artifacts connected to Buddhism, found their way to Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia in great quantity with the steady trickle of migrants and with the envoys and merchants who traveled to and fro.
Trade expanded enormously, for a number of reasons. The first was simply the magnetism of the prosperous and cosmopolitan Tang court and society. The second was an increase in seafaring skill and adventurousness on the part of the Arabs, who still dominated the maritime trade. The third was a change in the goods China was exporting. Silks had once been China’s most wanted product, but ceramics now began to compete as a leading category of exports, to compensate for China’s loss of the world monopoly on silk production. This loss had occurred when silkworm cocoons were smuggled out to Syria, where Damascus provided the English name for the fine-quality fabric known as damask; sericulture had soon spread across Asia Minor and parts of southern Europe, and from the seventh century the silk industry, centered in Constantinople, had become a mainstay of the Byzantine economy. Although fine Chinese silks remained in great demand and were still traded around the world, both the need for diversification and technical advances leading to the development of a true porcelain that was much finer than earlier products greatly boosted the trade in ceramics. Because of their bulk and weight, it was much more practical to transport them by sea than by the well-worn camel route overland. As a result, by the latter part of the Tang, China’s entire orientation had begun to shift from the plains of the northwest and the continental routes across the Silk Road toward the southeastern seaboard. Increasingly, maritime trade became as important as that carried overland.
Tang China regulated foreign commerce strictly. In Canton all foreign imports and all Chinese goods destined for sale abroad were supposed to pass through a Bureau of Merchant Shipping (shibosi), headed by a customs inspector. This system enabled the government to maintain its lucrative monopolies on such expensive imports as pearls, gold, fine silks, and tapestries; to collect customs duties, which sometimes ran as high as 30 percent, and hence were a major source of revenue; and to limit smuggling of such valuable commodities as gold and fancy silks or iron, which alien states could use to forge weapons they might one day use against China.
The numerous restrictions and controls on foreigners sometimes provoked protest and even on occasion led to violence. In the late seventh century, for instance, a foreign shipowner murdered a Canton official whose depredations, thinly disguised as government regulation, had become intolerable. But for most foreign merchants the vast profits of the China trade apparently outweighed the expenses and inconveniences of doing business in China on Chinese terms.
Under the Tang, imported objects became so fully absorbed into Chinese material culture that their foreign origins were sometimes forgotten. One example of such incorporation was the chair, adopted from Central Asia and by Tang times regarded as quintessentially Chinese as well as something of a status symbol. Its use was thought to distinguish Chinese from those who continued to sit on mats on the floor—for instance, Koreans, Thai, Vietnamese, and Japanese.
The most elaborate of all imported objects were those presented by visiting dignitaries to the emperor. These included peacocks from India; ostriches from Tocharia; goshawks, sables, and leopard skins from the northeast, brought by Koreans and Mongolians; elephants from Indochina; hunting mastiffs from Tibet; and the reputedly blood-sweating horses of Ferghana. These last China coveted mainly for military use, for it had no breed to match them.
Within the cities, especially Chang’an, specialized bazaars sold exotica of all kinds. There were aromatics, such as Arabian or African myrrh and frankincense; pigments and dyes, such as indigo and henna; weapons, in which there was a considerable clandestine commerce; and jewels, such as pearls and corals, lapis lazuli and malachite, jade and cornelian, sold by Persian merchants. There were new foods: such plants as spinach, and sesame buns similar to those that Muslim restaurants now serve in Beijing. There were peach trees from Samarkand; date palms from Persia, whose fruits were not only savored but also used to enhance the complexion; grapes for wine, a pleasure newly learned or relearned from abroad; Indian cotton, still something of a luxury in China; cloves for toothache; aloe for salves; and saffron, a highly valued import used as a perfume, as a dye, and for medicinal purposes.
Foreigners themselves came into the category of exotic imports, though this was controversial. A few foreign slaves, Africans, Turks, and Malays traded by Arabs or Southeast Asians, appeared in the major cities and at court. Dwarfs of uncertain origin titillated the court’s passion for curiosities. Foreign prostitutes were quite widespread, including young Korean women in the imperial harem and boys from the “Western Regions,” perhaps Sogdiana or Tocharia:
The Western boy with curly hair and green-irised eyes
In the high tower, when the night is quiet, blows the transverse bamboo.5
Surviving pottery figurines of the period include many foreigners—soldiers, grooms, magicians, exorcists, musicians, dancers, and so on—with the bushy hair or large, hooked noses of western Asians. Their draperies reveal Persian or Turkish influences, including lapels; leopard-skin hats; tight-sleeved tunics; close-fitting dresses; long scarves; long, pleated skirts; boots, for women as well as for soldiers in the field; headdresses shaped like the characteristic Turkish onion domes; small Turkish-type caps; and piled-up hairstyles and “Uighur chignons.” Soon imported styles became quite fashionable in Chinese high society.
This trend aroused some objections. Conservatives accused modish Chinese of both sexes of an unseemly lack of decorum, especially deploring the tendency of some women to show themselves bare-headed in public, and in general they criticized the trend away from traditional Chinese modes of dress and decoration. The renowned ninth-century poet Bai Juyi condemned the fashion, popular among contemporary women, of applying orange beauty spots in the style of the Turfan oasis. Yet Bai himself was not immune from the allure of foreign exotica and had a Turkish-style blue felt tent erected for a garden party.
Chinese enjoyed foreign dance styles, often highly erotic, accompanied by unfamiliar melodies with strange musical notations. They watched performances by all-female orchestras and troupes from the “Western Regions.” They acquired a taste for the Persian game of polo, played on horseback by men and women alike, and sent it on to Japan and Korea. Even those who could not afford to purchase luxury goods for themselves were able to see and hear people from other cultures and to gain a sense of the world beyond their own civilization.
THE EXCHANGE OF IDEAS
UNDER THE TANG
Buddhist monks were one major conduit of ideas; often they were men of immense learning. In addition to transmitting their religion, they acted as an important vehicle for the transfer of ideas and of scientific knowledge between China and elsewhere. Those from India were especially renowned for their medical skills. More than once Tang emperors commissioned Indian monks to lead expeditions to such distant places as Java and Sumatra, to collect rare medicinal herbs and resins known to be efficacious remedies. Many upper-class Chinese were attracted not only to those who professed knowledge of mainstream medicine—ophthalmology for instance—but also to gurus, hypnotists, yoga masters, ascetics, and other would-be miracle workers, including the spellbinders associated with the magical branch of Buddhism known as Tantrism, introduced from India in the eighth century.
Some Indian wise men found that the quest for longevity, something long associated in China with Daoist alchemists, especially appealed to their Chinese patrons. Thus in 648 a Chinese diplomat-general brought back from engagements in India not only a defeated king come to pay homage but a magician who claimed that he was two hundred years old and knew how to make an elixir of long life. Emperor Taizong provided him with space in the palace in which to brew his alchemical concoctions and assigned a senior official to attend to his every need. Although the emperor’s health did in fact improve after he took the elixir, he eventually decided that the improvement was due to his pious works, not to the medicine. He dismissed the monk, whose death soon afterward brought him total discredit.
Foreign influence in the realm of ideas extended to philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. Around this time China adopted foreign notions of logic and trigonometry, although for the time being they rejected the use of zero, another foreign import. In particular Indian knowledge of astronomy—itself influenced by Persian and Hellenistic ideas—became dominant in China. One of the greatest of early Chinese astronomers was the Tantric Buddhist monk Yixing (fl. 720s), who organized teams to map the constellations and measure the altitude of the stars. Astronomy was politically important beyond its considerable significance as a science because the ability to predict such phenomena as eclipses and control over the calendar were imperial prerogatives, so that accurate knowledge of the heavens amounted to a tool of government. During most of the eighth century Chinese official astronomy was dominated by three Indian families, but in the long term Indian influence in the field of Chinese astronomy was relatively inconsequential.
Foreign monks also helped China develop gunpowder, one of its most famous “inventions.” China had used smoke both in warfare and for purposes of fumigation or disinfection at least as early as the fourth century B.C., but the refinement of the mixture of ingredients needed to make explosives seems to have developed toward the end of the Tang. It was, ironically, a side effect of the chemical experiments of Daoists seeking an elixir of immortality. Tang period Daoist texts indicate that Chinese knowledge of the chemical properties of saltpeter, one of gunpowder’s key components, was indebted to information garnered from monks who hailed from Sogdiana. Like much else, then, gunpowder did not simply appear in isolation but was instead a product of China’s contact with the Middle East.
Foreign dignitaries visiting Tang China were treated differently from foreign residents. They came under the aegis of the Court of State Ceremonial (honglusi), located in Chang’an and operated under the general supervision of the Board of Rites, one of the six main ministries of state. This agency took overall charge of official foreign visitors and their needs. In cooperation with military personnel, honglusi officials interviewed all official foreign delegates immediately upon their arrival, interrogating them about the geography, living conditions, and customs of their countries. They then had maps drawn on the basis of what they had learned and presented them to the emperor, with copies to the Bureau of Operations (zhifang) of the Board of War. These maps often included very extensive annotation in addition to simply expressing measurements. Along with local products, some embassies offered maps of their own territories as gifts to the Tang court, as a mark of their submission.
In exchange they took home Chinese goods to present to their rulers or to sell on the home market; with those goods, inevitably, went some of the culture that had produced them. This was particularly marked in the case of Japan. In the fifth century Japan had adopted China’s writing system, and during the Tang it took on many more of the distinctive features of Chinese civilization, including its centralized political structure, its city planning—the Japanese capitals at Nara and later Heian were modeled on Tang Chang’an—and its system of land tenure. Several of the frequent Japanese embassies to Tang China took with them large numbers of Buddhist monks as well as political envoys, for by this time Buddhism, accompanied by elements of Confucianism and Chinese culture, had spread to Japan, by way of Korea, and to Vietnam. Just as Chinese Buddhists traveled to India in search of texts and learned masters, so Japanese Buddhists journeyed to China. Thus the network of international contacts forged in the Tang did not merely draw foreign imports into China but also spawned the outward extension of Chinese influence into much of East Asia.
Embassies thus were an instrument of both trade and intellectual exchange. They were also major sources of information about the outside world. Jia Dan (730–805), reputedly Tang China’s greatest cartographer, including of marine routes, was famous for his extensive geographical knowledge. Jia headed the honglusi for several years in the late eighth century and produced a number of maps that incorporated information he gained while interviewing visiting dignitaries in his professional capacity. Unfortunately none of his work, nor other contemporary work known to have been written about foreign lands and civilizations, has survived. We do, however, still have a few paintings done by such court artists as Yan Liben—probably commissioned to display Tang power—depicting such subjects as the presentation of “tribute” by foreign emissaries and the newly conquered “Western Regions.”
Just as incoming embassies were carefully interrogated, so Chinese missions sent abroad were specifically expected to gather geographic and other information about the places they visited, on both land and sea. For example, the seventh-century emperor Gaozong (r. 650–683) sent emissaries to Sogdiana and Tocharia to collect information on local customs and products and to draw detailed maps. The resulting work in sixty scrolls, entitled “Illustrated Treatise on the Western Regions,” written up by the Court Historiographical Office, was presented to the throne in 658.
Diplomacy thus included a strong element of espionage. Chinese leaders had no illusions that such practices could work both ways. Well aware of their own envoys’ reconnaissance activities, they often worried that tributary missions and other visitors from abroad might use for hostile purposes what they learned while in China. They regarded with the utmost suspicion any foreigner found asking too many questions or, worse, drawing maps.
There were other ways to learn about the world beyond China. For example, some of those who fought in the far-flung Tang military campaigns traveled even farther from home. One Tang officer captured near Samarkand in 751 eventually found his way back to China by way of what are now Eritrea and Iraq, bringing with him firsthand tales of these distant lands and their ways of life.
The fairly regular traffic of religious pilgrims between China and India at this time provided another major source of information. When Xuanzang, with whose epic journey in search of Buddhist scriptures this chapter opens, returned after a journey of several years, Emperor Taizong personally debriefed him in two audiences. Appreciating the advantages of obtaining a firsthand account, the emperor questioned Xuanzang closely about Indian history, customs, geography, climate, and products and later built an Indian-style brick tower in Chang’an—the Wild Goose Pagoda, successors of which can still be visited today in Xi’an—to house the texts brought back. Complete freedom of movement was, however, far from universal. For most ordinary Chinese at this time, travel beyond China required express government permission. Even Xuanzang, whose departure had not been officially sanctioned, made sure to apply for permission to reenter China as he approached the imperial border posts.
We can draw two major conclusions about the circulation of information about other lands and civilizations in Tang China. First, there was an enormous flow of people, goods, and ideas into and out of China that together provided rich possibilities for the mutual harvesting of knowledge. Second, the emperor and his government played so active a role in collecting information of this kind that we can be certain that from very early times Chinese leaders clearly grasped the value of knowing as much as possible about other countries.
A number of foreign religions thrived in the first couple of centuries of Tang rule. Among these was Buddhism, but by now it was so pervasive and so politically powerful that Chinese usually disregarded its alien origins.
The early Tang were tolerant toward foreign religions on the whole, although they discouraged Chinese from joining them and appointed a special official to keep an eye on them. Their approach to these foreign religions varied, depending on shifts in their perception of the nature and extent of the religions’ influence. During the Tang period Jewish, Muslim, Zoroastrian, Manichaean, and Nestorian Christian foreign traders routinely built their own houses of worship in China; other religions, such as Hinduism, may also have been represented. In early-eighth-century Chang’an alone, for instance, there were four Persian temples, Zoroastrian or Manichaean.
Zoroastrianism, a Persian religion based on belief in a fierce tension between cosmic forces for good and evil, had been patronized by the Tuoba Wei, ancestors of the Tang royal house, in the early sixth century. After Emperor Taizong of the Tang granted asylum to Crown Prince Firuz of the collapsing Sassanian empire, he permitted him to establish a Zoroastrian temple in Chang’an to service his court in exile. With this apparent imperial toleration, if not endorsement, Zoroastrianism gained a certain following in China, but its chief constituency remained the Persian merchant population. Manichaeism, another Persian religion that combined elements of Eastern Christianity, Buddhism, and Zoroastrian dualism, reached China in 694, but within forty years it had been banned among native Chinese for “falsely appropriating the name of Buddha and misleading the people.” Foreigners were still permitted to practice Manichaeism, however, and some credence was given to adherents’ claims to be able to influence celestial patterns. In the late eighth century, for example, Manichaeans, whose knowledge of astronomy Chinese scholars appreciated, were invited to use their magical formulas to bring rain to the parched countryside. In this respect, and in the Tang’s ambivalent attitude toward them, the Manichaeans prefigured seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit missionaries, whose apparent rainmaking skills commoners admired as much as Qing emperors admired their knowledge of astronomy.
The earliest mention of Christianity in China dates from the early fourth century, but at the time its impact was limited. Most early Christianity in China was Nestorianism. This branch of Christianity had seceded from Rome and established its own patriarch in Baghdad after having been condemned in the fifth century as heretical because it taught that Christ’s human and divine natures were distinct, relegating Christ the man and the Virgin Mary to positions inferior to those assigned by orthodox Catholicism. Nestorian missionaries reached China in the seventh century, as recorded in a 781 inscription written in Syriac and Persian and erected in Chang’an. Much later the discovery that these early Christians had once flourished in China aroused enormous excitement—their status as heretics notwithstanding—among European missionaries hoping to convert the whole of China.
Finally, foreign traders brought both Islam and Judaism into China, as we can see from the presence of mosques and synagogues in such commercial cities as Canton. The first Muslim mosque in China, for example, was established in Canton in 627, five years before the death of the prophet Muhammad. But for the time being the spread of these faiths among native Chinese remained relatively limited.
From the mid-eighth century a surge of xenophobia marked the beginning of the end of Tang religious tolerance and a shift in favor of indigenous religions and beliefs. This shift derived in part from the foreign origins of the rebel An Lushan, whose uprising caused widespread suffering as well as a major downturn in Tang imperial fortunes. Not coincidentally, during the rebellion Chinese in Canton and Yangzhou massacred tens of thousands of foreign businessmen, Muslim Arabs, Jews, and Persians, resented for their great prosperity and occasionally avaricious practices. The government started to issue increasingly stringent restrictions on foreign communities. In such a climate some intellectuals began to recall the alien origins of the Buddhist religion and to feel apprehensive about the political strength of the Buddhist establishment.
This hostility to Buddhism was not entirely new. Buddhism’s association with the early-eighth-century empresses Wu and Wei, whose names became bywords for extreme corruption, had first begun to tip the balance against the foreign religion. Then, in Xuanzong’s reign (712–756), various monastic abuses came to public notice. For instance, wealthy families were able to evade paying taxes either by becoming ordained as Buddhist priests or novices or by founding private temples. Nor was the problem confined to the wealthy. In 714, for example, the government ordered tens of thousands of people, who called themselves monks or nuns so as to gain exemptions from tax and service requirements, to return to lay life and hence to the tax and service registers. These abuses, and the growing influence of Buddhist institutions, prompted the Tang authorities to seek ways to restrict the power of Buddhism. They transferred overall control to the honglusi (Court of State Ceremonial), a move intended to undermine Buddhist influence by clearly characterizing it as foreign. At the same time, the emperor became increasingly interested in Daoism, Buddhism’s chief competitor.
The fall from favor of outsiders and their religious ideas culminated in a wide-ranging proscription of all foreign religions, promulgated in 845. Several thousand foreign monks, an undifferentiated group from all the foreign religions then present in China, were returned to lay life. None of the foreign religions, not even Buddhism, ever fully recovered its former position in China.
Confucians were at the forefront of this backlash. In a famous diatribe the great Confucian statesman and essayist Han Yu (786–824) criticized the display of a Buddhist relic in the imperial palace. Han Yu objected to Buddhism both because he found it superstitious and opposed to Confucian morality and because it was foreign. His attack reads in part:
Now Buddha was a man of the barbarians who did not speak the language of China and wore clothes of a different fashion. His sayings did not concern the ways of our ancient kings, nor did his manner of dress conform to their laws. He understood neither the duties that bind sovereign and subject, nor the affections of father and son. If he were still alive today and came to our court by order of his ruler, Your Majesty might condescend to receive him, but it would amount to no more than one audience in the Xuanzheng Hall, a banquet by the Office of Diplomatic Relations [part of the honglusi], the presentation of a suit of clothes, and he would then be escorted to the borders of the empire, dismissed, and not allowed to delude the masses. How then, when he has long been dead, could his rotten bones, the foul and unlucky remains of his body, be rightly admitted to the palace? Confucius said: “Respect ghosts and spirits, but keep them at a distance. . . .”6
Much of the remainder of this famous memorial is even more emphatic in tone. For so boldly speaking out, Han Yu was banished to the far south. But his sentiments were in line with the rising tide of public opinion.
The Tang empire collapsed in 907. After a hiatus of sixty years—a single calendrical cycle by Chinese reckoning—during which several small states vied with one another for supremacy, it was succeeded by the Song empire (960–1276).
Beginning in that interregnum, regional and international commerce expanded greatly, for two main reasons. First, technical advances had prompted a great increase of agricultural and handicraft production, especially in the ceramics industry. As a result, a surplus was available for trade either with other Chinese regions or overseas. At the same time, demand for foreign luxuries also increased. The second reason for the expansion of trade was that the various states into which the Tang empire disintegrated, taking advantage of a period of relative peace resulting from their own military weakness, tried to use trade to form political connections and shore up their support wherever they could. This trend to the expansion of trade continued unabated after the Song empire assumed power.
COMMERCIAL AND MARITIME EXPANSION
UNDER THE SONG, 960–1276
The Song was a period of extraordinary economic, cultural, and social change during which, in the estimation of many scholars, Chinese civilization was preeminent in the entire world. The Song capital was at Kaifeng, in north China, until 1127, when the Song were driven south by invaders from the northeast. From 1127 until its overthrow in 1276 the Southern Song ruled a reduced empire from its reconstituted capital in Hangzhou, while in north China, the alien invaders proclaimed a Jin empire, which lasted until the Jin themselves were driven out by the Mongols, in the early thirteenth century. The Southern Song lasted until their overthrow by the Mongols in 1276.
As we have seen, China during the Tang had become integrated into the flow of seaborne trade that went to and from its own east coast, traveling by way of the kingdoms of Southeast Asia to India and onward to the Middle East. At the same time, the installation of various foreign communities in China, the adoption of Chinese institutions by other states, and the establishment of Chinese communities overseas had reinforced China’s presence in the Asian trading world, long before the advent of Europeans in any number.
In the centuries following the fall of the Tang, China rose to the leading position on the seas. Chinese shipbuilders began to build massive oceangoing junks, up to 300 feet long, with a capacity of approximately 1,250 tons, and able to carry from five hundred to a thousand people. These ships, the technology for which partly drew on Arab models, were capable of undertaking very long-distance voyages and transporting vast cargoes. At about the same time, the Indians, Persians, and Arabs who had dominated the seaborne trade at the height of the Tang became distracted by other concerns nearer to home, and the volume of foreign shipping reaching China diminished. This left a vacuum that the newly competent Chinese merchant marine was ready and able to fill.
Song Chinese made a series of major technical advances related to their improved knowledge of geography, astronomy, mapmaking, and shipbuilding. They invented the compass, which radically improved their ability to navigate; soon every Chinese ship carried one. They instituted lighthouses and beacons. Far more accurately than before they observed tides, winds, weather patterns, and stars; calculated distances; and plumbed depths. Experienced sailors made records of all this new knowledge, and a new genre of technical literature came into existence, consisting, among other things, of marine charts and itineraries and records of islands, currents, and reefs with precise bearings.
Writers of the Song period also produced informative and up-to-date accounts of foreign countries. Some of this new information, which circulated widely, was largely technical, but Song scholars were ready to expand their own more limited literary horizons by studying the contributions of Arab and Hindu navigators and geographers, thus making it possible for Chinese bound overseas to benefit from foreigners’ experiences. Among the most famous of this type of work was Zhao Rugua’s Zhufan Zhi (“Records of Foreign Peoples”), written after 1225. Zhao had been superintendent of the Office of Merchant Marine in Quanzhou on the Fujian coast, which by then had surpassed Canton as China’s leading port for foreign trade. Among other things Quanzhou housed both Muslim and Hindu temples for the use of merchants from Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and beyond, and it honored the Muslim custom of allowing foreigners to be governed by their own laws, indicating a considerable Muslim presence. In his account Zhao discussed in detail such topics as commerce, foreign countries, and the exotic products he had come across in the course of his work. His description of Egypt, for example, was the first known in any Chinese work. It reads in part:
The country of Wusili [Egypt] is under the dominion of Baida [Baghdad]. The king is fair; he wears a turban, a jacket, and black boots. When he shows himself in public he is on horseback, and before him go three hundred led horses with saddles and bridles ornamented with gold and jewels. There go also ten tigers held with iron chains; an hundred men watch them, and fifty men hold the chains. There are also an hundred club-bearers and thirty hawk-bearers. Furthermore a thousand horsemen surround and guard him, and three hundred body-slaves bear bucklers [sic] and swords. Two men carry the king’s arms before him, and a hundred kettle-drummers follow him on horseback. The whole pageant is very grand!
The people live on cakes, and flesh; they eat no rice. Dry weather usually prevails. The government extends over sixteen provinces with a circumference of over sixty stages. When rain falls the people’s farming (is not helped thereby but on the contrary) is washed out and destroyed. There is a river (in this country) of very clear and sweet water, and the source whence springs this river is not known. If there is a year of drought, the rivers of all other countries get low, this river alone remains as usual, with abundance of water for farming purposes, and the people avail themselves of it in their agriculture . . .7
The Song authorities decisively promoted international trade because it was such a valuable source of revenue. Their policy, initiated soon after the founding of the dynasty, was to “invite and stimulate” foreign merchants. Song commercial activism took various forms. In 988 the emperor dispatched a mission to various foreign countries, bearing elaborate gifts with which to lure merchants to China. At the same time the Song envoys purchased valuable goods, such as ivory and pearls, plants and animal horns for medicinal use, and perfumes, to sell upon their return. In China itself government officials in the main trading ports held annual farewell banquets and other celebrations for the encouragement of foreign sailors and traders. Merchant shipping that was blown onto the coast or damaged was taken under Chinese government protection, which included protection from ill-treatment by local officials. If, however, those officials succeeded in encouraging foreign trade, they might be rewarded by banquets or promotions.
In this way foreign trade expanded rapidly, but so did Chinese government control over it, both to maintain its function as an important source of revenue and to restrict the outward flow of hard currency. Customs duties on imports ran at about 10 percent. The central government maintained monopolies on the most profitable goods, such as ivory, coral, rhinoceros horn, and crocodile skins. They banned any private traffic in a number of luxury commodities and retained an option for preferential purchase of anything imported. The government also kept a close watch on exports. A Chinese merchant going overseas had to declare his intended destination. If subsequently he claimed to have been blown off course to some other place, he had to report it promptly and, if possible, produce evidence. He needed an inventory for export items and a receipt for taxes already paid. As in the Tang, products that could be used to make weapons could not be exported legally, although illicit commerce in iron with Southeast Asia flourished steadily; nor could rice, presumably in case the surplus should be needed in times of famine or war. To guard against the threat of piracy, merchants engaged in the overseas trade were allowed to carry arms, but they had to deposit their weapons when they returned to China; if they went overseas again, they could reclaim them.
These restrictions prompted some merchants to emigrate, mainly to the commercial entrepôts of Southeast Asia. Others became pirates. Throughout the Asian seas piracy was endemic, as was smuggling. Both could be enormously lucrative. Such outlawry presented bona fide merchants with a strong temptation as well as a threat. But legal investment in the overseas trade was also attractive; contemporary sources record the willingness of not particularly rich people to put what little spare funds they had into the overseas trade.
The range of goods flowing in and out of Song China was immense. Different markets sought and offered different goods, of course, but overall the most sought-after Chinese exports continued to be silk and other textiles; silk thread; metals, including gold, silver, pewter, copper, tin, and lead; ceramic wares, from fine porcelains to coarse earthenware; and tea. Other exports included lacquerware, semiprecious stones, paper, bamboo, lichees, and books.
China took in as wide a variety of goods as it sent out. From the Khitan Liao empire in southern Manchuria, China imported horses, furs, wool, and slaves; from Japan it brought in sulfur for gunpowder, pearls and antlers for medicinal purposes, coffin woods, weapons, and decorative handicrafts; from Southeast Asia China imported such spices as cloves and cardamom, sandalwood and aloe, fruits, and tortoiseshell; from Tibet, horses in exchange for Sichuanese tea; from India and East Africa, ivory and rhinoceros horn; from Syria, glassware; from the Persian Gulf, pearls; and from the Mediterranean, coral. Some of these imports, such as ivory and rhinoceros horn, were subject to government monopolies, but as in the case of the iron trade, private merchants often were prepared to risk arrest for illicit trading because of the scale of potential profits.
One vital consequence of China’s involvement with other parts of Asia during the Song period was the tenth-century introduction of early-ripening rice from Champa, a state in central Indochina. Over the long term government efforts to disseminate this relatively drought-resistant strain of rice, which could be cropped twice a year, revolutionized land utilization and created the preconditions for population growth. Early-ripening rice, in other words, was one of China’s most influential foreign imports.
Intellectual interaction with other civilizations continued during the Song, although relatively little is known about it. Knowledge about medicine was still an important area of exchange. An early-fourteenth-century Persian manuscript, for instance, reproduced illustrations from an earlier Chinese text on anatomy, demonstrating that others valued Chinese expertise in this field just as China valued that of others. Also, sometime in the eleventh century techniques for inoculation against smallpox reached China, probably from India or Persia.
One side effect of the flourishing foreign trade was the reintroduction of foreign religious communities, which in some cases perhaps had never died out altogether. In Kaifeng a community of Jews established itself before the Song shifted their capital south in 1127. They came from Persia, Palestine, and Yemen; they mainly used Persian, the common language in much of Central Asia; and they sold “western cloth,” perhaps cotton. By 1163 they had built their first synagogue in Kaifeng, which survived until it was destroyed in the mid-nineteenth century. The Kaifeng Jewish community never surpassed perhaps fifteen hundred members, divided into seven clans. But it maintained a distinct identity despite intermarriage, partly because the Chinese authorities tolerated the Jews as a sect of Islam, which continued to flourish quietly in China. Some Chinese Jews did convert to Islam—they had in common at least their abstention from pork, a Chinese staple—and even today Kaifeng Muslims can be divided into two groups: some claim descent from Muhammad while others, presumably the descendants of the old Jewish community, identify their ancestor as Abraham.
After the Mongol leader Khubilai Khan conquered China in 1276 and established the Yuan dynasty, China in effect formed part of a huge empire that stretched right across Asia: from Korea and Manchuria in the northeast across Turkestan and parts of Siberia to Mesopotamia and the Caucasus in the west. In those circumstances it was not surprising that Chinese contact with lands to the west was frequent and extensive. The Venetian Marco Polo, whose claims to have lived in Yuan China remain to this day subject to debate, certainly was accurate enough when he reported China’s astonishing cosmopolitanism and prosperity in the thirteenth century:
To this port [Quanzhou, Fujian] come all the ships of India with quantities of costly merchandise, priceless precious stones and large, fine pearls. Here too all the merchants from south China, or at least those from the surrounding regions, stand out to sea. . . . I tell you, that for every ship loaded with pepper that goes to Alexandria or some other place, to be transported to Christendom, more than a hundred come to Zayton [Quanzhou]. The massive amount of merchandise assembled in this town is almost unbelievable. . . .8
The surging trade patterns and the taste for luxury that had become commonplace during the Song dynasty in many ways continued their momentum after the Mongol invasion. Merchants from all over the world came to China. Up and down the east coast, to the ports of Shandong, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong provinces, navigators and traders came from Vietnam, Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Pagan, India, and the Middle East, as well as from Korea and Japan and from farther afield.
The Mongols inhibited commercial exchange more than the Song had done because, wishing to reap vast profits, they tried to monopolize international trade. In 1284 they banned Chinese merchants from going overseas to trade unless specifically selected by the government and furnished with ships and capital by it. The Mongols took 70 percent of the profits of foreign trade and imposed more and heavier taxes. The net result was that international trade, though still significant, fell into a relative recession.
The vastness of the Mongol empire facilitated the flow of information as well as commodities. Yuan China absorbed ideas about astronomy from Persia, where, toward 1260, scholars from all countries manned an international astronomical observatory. In 1267 the Persian astronomer and geographer Jamal al-Din established a new calendar for Khubilai, although it eventually was replaced by a Chinese one that may have been put together under Arab influence. He also brought him a Persian terrestrial globe, together with various astronomical instruments and designs for them, including an armillary sphere, a celestial globe, a gnomon, and an astrolabe. A few years later the Chinese astronomer Guo Shoujing (1231–1316) adapted some of these designs to specific Chinese needs, for the Chinese system was different from the Muslim one. Guo made the astronomical instruments for the Beijing observatory that remained in use until a new one was built by Jesuit missionaries four hundred years later.
Meanwhile Chinese cartographers continued to make more wide-ranging and increasingly accurate maps. Helped both by the vast extent of territory that the Mongols controlled and by advances in astronomy, they correctly measured the latitudes of more and more places: Pyongyang in Korea; Lake Baikal in Siberia; Karakorum in Mongolia; Hainan Island off the south China coast. About 1320 the cartographer Zhu Siben (1273–1337) made a map that formed the foundation for Chinese knowledge of the world for the next several hundred years. Zhu’s map included phonetic designations for about one hundred place-names in Europe (“A-lu-mang-ni-a” [approximating modern Germany, “Allemagne”] and “Fa-li-hsi-na” [modern France]). It shows a town situated approximately where Budapest now is and depicts the Mediterranean Sea. Unlike contemporary European maps, Zhu’s map also gives the correct shape and orientation of Africa, with some detail for the north of that continent. It depicts both the Sahara and the Gobi Deserts in black, it indicates Alexandria by a pagoda showing the pharaohs, and it gives about thirty-five African place-names. Chinese maps of the world continued to be closely based on Zhu’s work for at least another century.
Under the Mongols, “Arabs,” a term primarily denoting Persians and Central Asians, dominated Chinese science and technology as for a time Indians had done under the Tang. Yuan histories record that Muslim gunners helped the Yuan finally overwhelm the Song in the 1270s; they may well have transmitted military and other information to China. Such knowledge traveled in two directions: tradition holds that it was the Mongols who conveyed the formula for gunpowder from China across their vast Asian empire to Europe, where it utterly transformed the face of warfare.
Another important development in Yuan China was the rapid expansion of the cotton industry, whose advantages the Mongols had perhaps learned to appreciate in other parts of their vast empire. Previously cotton cultivation in China had been more or less limited to border areas in the south, but with Mongol encouragement in the form of tax incentives and the dissemination of technical information, it now became an important factor in China’s economy. State efforts to promote cotton were aided by the work of Huang Daopo (b. about 1245), a woman later canonized as cotton’s patron saint, who spread the techniques of cleaning and spinning the raw cotton to the lower Yangzi region, which became a major center of cotton cultivation and manufacture.
Nestorian Christianity enjoyed considerable success among the Mongols, who also regarded the rulers of Western Christendom as promising allies against the Muslims, whose political power obstructed Mongol plans for world empire. Most Christians in China under the Mongols were Nestorians, including Khubilai Khan’s mother, who encouraged her sons to exercise religious toleration. The Nestorians built several churches in south China and maintained a number of flourishing communities, to the chagrin of the pope’s appointee as archbishop of Beijing, the Franciscan John of Monte Corvino, who reached China in 1294 and built two churches in Beijing in the hope of converting many Chinese to orthodox Catholicism.
Perhaps under his mother’s influence, Khubilai did not persecute his subjects on religious grounds. Instead he encouraged religious diversity in his realm, in part as a counterweight to the influence of Confucianism. He himself privately acknowledged the Tibetan lama ’Phags-pa as his teacher and established joint spiritual and secular rule with him over Tibet.
In the 1280s a Nestorian monk became the first person from China ever known to have reached Europe. Rabban Sauma set off with a student on a pilgrimage to the tombs of the Nestorian martyrs and the Fathers of the Nestorian Church in the Holy Land. With support from their church and the Mongol court, the two pilgrims crossed Central Asia, journeying from oasis to oasis until eventually they reached Baghdad, where they became embroiled in local religious and political affairs. Rabban Sauma eventually traveled on alone to Rome and Paris, charged with a diplomatic mission by Persia’s Mongol ruler, who wanted him to persuade the pope and the French and English kings to launch a crusade with him against Islam. The two kings received Rabban Sauma in audience and apparently pledged to join the desired alliance, but the monk reached Rome just as a new pope was being chosen and so was unable to fulfill his mission. He died in Persia without returning to China.
The adventures of Rabban Sauma—the very idea that a Christian monk from the eastern end of the vast Mongol empire should be conducting diplomacy in the courts of Western Europe—are less astonishing when viewed in the context of Mongol internationalism. In China the Mongols reorganized society along broadly ethnic lines. There were four tiers. The first rank was composed of Mongols; the second was composed of semu, or Western and Central Asians. The third rank was composed of those Chinese from the north who had lived under Jurchen Jin rule after the Song moved south in 1127. The lowest level consisted of the former Chinese subjects of the Southern Song. The Mongols preferred to employ semu, whom they found more reliable than Chinese, in high government office. Apart from Rabban Sauma, at different times their government included Muslims from Central Asia, Tibetans, Western Asians, and, according to Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant himself. Although it was not customary under the Chinese bureaucratic system to give this type of responsibility to foreigners, the practice was widespread by this time throughout Asia, where states often were only loosely defined.
Mongol open-mindedness extended to the arts. One of Khubilai’s protégés, for instance, was the Nepalese painter and architect A’nige (1224–1306), who, in addition to painting the emperor’s portrait, designed a number of temples and pavilions that introduced elements of Tibetan and Nepalese architecture into China.
Whether the Chinese scholars were as cosmopolitan as were their Mongol overlords remains open to debate. The trauma of alien conquest tended to encourage Chinese claims that foreigners, including the Mongols, whom Chinese disparaged as barbaric, longed to acquire Chinese culture. But the evidence indicates that under alien rule cultural influences flowed in both directions.
In the mid-fourteenth century Chinese rebels overthrew the Mongol Yuan and established the Ming in its place. The Ming was the last native empire of imperial China, sandwiched between the Mongol Yuan and the Manchu Qing that succeeded it. Initial encouragement of overseas trade as a source of revenue was followed by a half century of tight restrictions intended mainly to stem the outflow of precious metals. Then, between 1405 and the early 1430s, the Yongle Emperor (r. 1402–1424) dispatched a series of seven major fleets, over a period of twenty years. Led by Zheng He (1371–1433), a Muslim eunuch, the Ming fleets sailed through the seas of Southeast Asia to India, Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, and on as far as Malindi on the east coast of Africa, which they reached only a few decades before Portuguese vessels arrived from the opposite direction in search of a passage eastward to the Indies.
At their largest the fleets comprised more than three hundred ships, sixty-two of which were more than 400 feet long and 180 feet wide, with three decks and nine masts with twelve sails. The Chinese “treasure ships” would have vastly overshadowed the single-decked, much more compact ships with which Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas less than a century later. The fleet also included water tankers, for there was great concern about maintaining a supply of fresh water to keep the travelers healthy. It carried almost twenty-eight thousand people. There were armed troops, including cavalry; eunuchs and civil officials to conduct diplomatic exchanges; translators and imams to deal with the ubiquitous Muslim traders; doctors and herbalists to identify herbs whose therapeutic properties were already known in China and to locate possible new cures in the wake of a string of epidemics; engineers; sailors; and merchants.
Officially Yongle launched these voyages to find out if there was any truth to the rumors that his predecessor, whose position he had usurped, was still alive and planning his revenge. But the expeditions served many other purposes. First, they were intended to impress Ming power upon foreign rulers and to establish diplomatic relations with them along tributary lines, with a view to creating a universal empire that was maritime as well as land-based like that of the Mongols. In this way China could also show the world that the Mongol threat had now been permanently resolved. For the same reason overland missions also went forth—to Korea, Tibet, and across Central Asia—and tributary exchanges were conducted with Japan, from which China garnered, among other things, large quantities of weapons, particularly swords, in exchange for fine art objects, literary texts, and other cultural and practical items.
Trade was another important part of the voyages. Zheng He’s fleet brought back to China tribute-bearing envoys from a number of places it visited, including Bengal, Java, Calicut, and Cochin. The gifts they brought included a giraffe, given to the king of Bengal by the ruler of Malindi. Yongle was so enchanted by this offering that later missions brought more exotic creatures: zebras, ostriches, another giraffe, leopards, and so on. The expeditions both established overseas markets for Chinese goods—notably silks, embroideries, and fine porcelains—and brought back a host of other foreign goods, particularly spices. Yet the circulation of foreign goods in early-fourteenth-century China was much less widespread than it had been under the Tang and Song empires, partly because of conservative criticism of the expeditions’ extravagance.
To underscore the theory that a tributary relationship involved developing cultural affinity as well as economic attachment to China, the expeditions also took with them thousands of copies of educational texts. One such work, Lienü Zhuan, was a series of biographies of model women of the past, originally produced for the edification of women in China. By disseminating works such as this, the emperor noted, the “barbarians” could begin the process of becoming civilized. This approach offers a particularly clear illustration of Chinese notions about the centrality of women as the repository of civilized behavior; it also illuminates how imperial China’s tendency publicly to patronize other cultures, while privately acknowledging their worth, resembled the attitude of traditional Chinese men toward their womenfolk.
Every expedition carried Arabic speakers recruited from mosques in China, whose job was to translate and to convey the clear message that China was friendly toward Islam. This was necessary both because the early Ming had been extremely hostile toward Muslims, owing to their former role as tax collectors for the Mongols in China, and because Muslim merchants now vied with Chinese for control over many of the trade routes. The goal of protecting merchant shipping and securing the maritime passage to India and the Middle East was greatly furthered when Zheng He’s navy destroyed a powerful pirate fleet near Sumatra, in modern Indonesia.
Through the expeditions Ming China gathered immense amounts of information about the world as far as Africa. Officials questioned incoming envoys about the geography of their countries and drew maps on the basis of the responses they received. They asked about their customs, and if they found their appearance especially exotic, they made drawings of their faces and their costumes, in a kind of primitive ethnography. Several of Zheng He’s companions also wrote accounts of what at the time were by far the most extensive maritime explorations in world history. Such works as Gong Zhen’s 1434 “Record of Foreign Countries in the Western Ocean,” Fei Xin’s 1436 “Captivating Views from a Star-Guided Vessel,” and Ma Huan’s 1451 “Description of the Coasts of the Ocean” described Chinese relations with and attitudes toward the cultures of many of the places the fleets visited, particularly in the South China Sea, along the Strait of Malacca, and along the edge of the Indian Ocean. Chinese maps now also began to depict the shape of the Indian subcontinent with some accuracy, marking an advance from Zhu Siben’s work a century before.
Taken together, these provide the most detailed accounts of travel in Asia between Marco Polo’s Travels of 1298 and the notoriously unreliable records of Ibn Battuta, who may have visited China in the early sixteenth century. They also provided a wealth of information on Chinese shipping, navigation, and trade, as we can see from the account of the holy Islamic city of Mecca written by Zheng He’s Muslim adviser and Arabic translator, Ma Huan:
[The Country of the Heavenly Square] is the country of Moqie [Mecca]. Setting sail from the country of Guli (Calicut), you proceed towards the south-west—the point shen on the compass—the ship travels for three moons, and then reaches the jetty of this country. The foreign name for it is Zhida [Jedda], and there is a great chief who controls it. From Zhida you go west, and after traveling for one day you reach the city where the king resides; it is named the capital city of Moqie.
They profess the Muslim religion. A holy man first expounded and spread the doctrine of his teaching in this country, and right down to the present day the people of the country all observe the regulations of the doctrine in their actions, not daring to commit the slightest transgression.
The people of this country are stalwart and fine-looking, and their limbs and faces are of a very dark purple color.
The menfolk bind up their heads; they wear long garments; and on their feet they put leather shoes. The women all wear a covering over their heads, and you cannot see their faces.
They speak the A-la-pi [Arabic] language. The law of the country prohibits wine-drinking. . . .9
The voyages of the Chinese treasure fleets ended with Zheng He’s death in 1433, when, in any event, China’s navy was entering a period of decline. The conclusion of the expeditions came about as the result of a combination of circumstances. The Ming lost enormous prestige when the Mongols captured the emperor at the infamous Battle of Tumu in 1449. The Mongols released the emperor only a year later and in the meantime were greatly emboldened, necessitating a refocusing of Ming attention on the inland frontiers to the north. At the same time, the steady expansion of private trade at the expense of government monopolies meant that goods were harder to obtain and prices were higher. As the result of these developments, the value of paper money collapsed so that the Ming could no longer use it for foreign trade; instead they had to pay market value or offer goods in kind in order to acquire the horses they needed to fight the Mongols and other necessary imports. For these reasons, and also because of a diminishing tax base resulting from natural disasters and spreading bureaucratic corruption, the imperial treasury was depleted, priorities changed, and the dispatch of elaborate fleets came to an end. Nonetheless, within Asia maritime trade continued, drawing China into contact with a range of merchant groups from all over Asia and North Africa. Until the coming of the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century, China remained the most significant external power in the region.
THE ADVENT OF EUROPEANS AND
THE IMPACT OF THE SILVER TRADE
Portuguese ships reached the China coast in the early sixteenth century, but for some time relations between Chinese authorities and European merchants remained, if not downright hostile, distinctly cool as the result of the inevitable mutual misunderstandings. The Portuguese hoped to export both their material goods and their religion, but for a number of reasons they were less successful in China than in Japan, where the more centralized government exercised tighter control. The European China trade remained for the time being clandestine.
By mid-century the steady deterioration of relations between China and Japan had provided an opening for Portuguese merchants. Coastal raids by “Japanese” pirates, who in reality were both Chinese and Japanese smugglers trading illicitly with Japan, and demands for trade and recognition made by various contenders for power in Japan prompted China first to restrict trade with Japan and then, in 1560, to ban it altogether. But Chinese demand for cheap silver from Japan, where extremely rich deposits had recently been found, and Japanese demand for silks and other luxury Chinese goods both remained extremely strong. The formal ban did not therefore put an end to the China-Japan trade; it continued virtually uninterrupted, indirectly through Southeast Asian ports, by Chinese acting clandestinely, or on Portuguese vessels. The Portuguese middlemen’s role in the silver trade was highly lucrative; the profits they made financed Macao, the toehold Portugal established off the southeast coast of China, with tacit Chinese consent, in 1557, and helped fund the Jesuit missions in East Asia. For Japan, the enormous profits from the silver trade enabled those who controlled it to gain political power and ultimately to retreat from China’s tributary orbit and in effect establish a commercial capitalism in Asia.
Silver from the New World began to compete with Japanese silver for the market in China. China, as we have seen, had long been integrated into the complex networks of trade within Asia. Now, however, proliferating links between Asia, Europe, and the Americas, including the establishment of European colonies in Southeast Asia, added a new dimension to international trade. Moreover, China hankered for silver just as Europe craved Chinese silks and porcelains. It was greatly in demand both as currency and as a commodity in its own right. The net result was that its value in China was as much as double its worth anywhere else. Thus adventurous traders willing to risk repeated long-distance journeys could make their fortune by selling silver bought, say, in Europe for twice the price in China and then exchanging the money made in China for twice the amount of silver in Europe, and so on.
The scale of international silver flows was massive. Silver entering China from the Spanish Americas soon vastly outstripped that imported from Japan. In the early 1600s perhaps as much as one-half the silver mined in the Spanish Americas, where new technology had further reduced production costs, found its way to China. Some went directly across the Pacific in the so-called Manila Galleons, which sailed from Acapulco to the Philippines, under Spanish control from 1571; from Manila it was transshipped to China on Chinese junks. More New World silver reached China by way of Europe, either by sea or across the Central Asian trading routes. Toward the middle of the seventeenth century the laws of supply and demand brought the value of silver in China more in line with its value elsewhere, so that profits and shipments began to decline.
The point here is that because of silver, local economies around the world became more and more tightly connected through a highly elaborate network of international trade, in which Europeans acted primarily as middlemen. Chinese demand for silver in effect financed the Spanish empire, Tokugawa Japan, and, more indirectly, the Atlantic slave trade, in that in parts of the Americas, African slaves were exchanged for silver that eventually found its way to China. In short, as the sixteenth century turned into the seventeenth, China was already irredeemably integrated into the rapidly expanding global economy.
The changing configuration of world trade flows and the depredations of pirates along the Chinese coast spurred further Chinese emigration to Southeast Asia. Overseas Chinese settlement had grown substantially since the Song period and had continued thereafter. Some had migrated to escape the devastating Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, while more recently others, including Chinese Muslims, had deserted from the massive Ming fleets and dispersed throughout the region. As Chinese communities expanded, they began to acquire political influence. By the sixteenth century Chinese could be found in powerful positions in Vietnam, where in Ming times Confucianism had become the state ideology; in the kingdoms of Indonesia and their successor Dutch colonies; and in the Philippines.
European colonists often felt threatened by the Chinese presence. Yet at the same time they could not do without their services, both as intermediaries in their dealings with native populations—for instance, in such unpopular occupations as pawnbrokers and rent collectors—and as an entrée to the lucrative China trade. Chinese merchants in Manila, for example, became crucial to the trade between China and the Spanish American colonies because the Chinese government refused to allow Spain to establish an outpost in China.
By 1603 Chinese in Manila were numerous enough to convince the Spanish that an uprising was imminent. To preempt it, the Spanish carried out a massacre in which perhaps twenty thousand Chinese died. The atrocity remained unrequited by the already declining Ming government. Yet the contacts that survivors and new settlers retained with their families at home helped forge new kinds of links between China and the outside world that became more and more important as time went on.
In sum, since very early times China has formed part of an international network that ranged from Syria to Japan and from Korea to Indonesia. The links that bound this network together were commercial, religious, intellectual, and simply human. Both formally and informally, China initiated contacts with foreign countries at least as often as it was on the receiving end. Well aware of the existence of other powerful and civilized nations, China pragmatically sought to establish relations with many of them through diplomacy, sometimes backed by warfare, and through trade. In international commercial circles China’s monopoly on the production first of silk and then of porcelain gave its merchants a preeminent position. Long-distance travel took place both by land and by sea. The accounts of returning travelers made it possible for those who remained in China to learn a great deal about the larger world, often stimulating considerable interest in other civilizations.
Not only did China reach out to the world, but also representatives of many foreign countries journeyed to China in pursuit of Chinese specialties that were the envy of other civilizations. In exchange they brought to China a huge variety of their own native products, which Chinese people relished and adopted with great interest and pleasure. Foreigners introduced new religions, shared scientific knowledge, and established diplomatic ties. In the process China enormously refined its awareness and knowledge of the world. No less important, a whole range of Chinese goods, ideas, and people went abroad, diffusing Chinese intellectual and material influence as well as some of China’s most characteristic institutions, such as its system of government. In short, the flow went in both directions, into and out of China, creating a mesh of relationships that spread right across Asia. China was ineluctably caught up in this network in innumerable ways well before Europeans appeared on the scene; their arrival extended its reach over even greater distances.