FIVE
Water Forces and Naval Operations
Naval warfare and operations were crucial to the creation and unification of the Chinese empire for over two thousand years, yet this fact has usually been overlooked in the military history of China. China has generally been seen as a continental power that failed to develop an effective navy. This orientation is frequently contrasted with Europe's seafaring, outward-looking attitude, which drove it to explore, exploit, and dominate the rest of the world. Defenders of Chinese culture often bring up the six voyages of the Muslim eunuch-admiral Zheng He to the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1433, or even Khubilai Khan's attempted invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281, to argue that China was not exclusively inwardly focused. Yet these adventures were exceptions that neither demonstrate the general importance of naval operations in China nor explain the specific roles that navies usually played in warfare.
China is divided by several large rivers running roughly east-west that had to be crossed by any would-be conqueror attempting to assemble a unified Chinese empire. It is thus not surprising to find that every history of the creation of a major Chinese dynasty is laced with accounts of naval operations and warfare. Without a strong navy, no unification of China was possible. While the Mongols were off conquering much of Eurasia, the Southern Song navy blocked their southward progress for nearly half a century. But a conqueror's naval needs were not limited to river crossing. Rivers were also the most efficient means of transporting men and supplies for campaigns. Hence, control of the rivers was a prerequisite for conquest and control of the empire, but the sea was of limited military importance.
That is not to say that the sea was completely unimportant. A fair amount of sea trade was transacted at various times in Chinese ports, which greatly profited the imperial treasury through customs duties. But the government's interest in profits from seaborne trade did not mirror a similar interest in spreading its influence through a fleet of warships. This was not due to an inward focus by Chinese statesmen so much as to practical considerations of costs and benefits. An oceangoing navy was expensive and served no apparent function, since China was seldom menaced from the sea. Ironically, it was the Mongols, a nomadic steppe people, who made the most use of the Chinese and Korean navies in their campaigns of conquest. The offensive and defensive naval needs of Chinese emperors were usually limited to the rivers and canals of their own territory, not the sea coast. There were some exceptions to this, such as the Tang invasions of Korea by sea in the seventh century, but the government was content, for the most part, to leave the ocean to the merchants and let the merchants take care of themselves.
Naval operations encompasses a much broader range of activities than ship-to-ship combat. As mentioned, control of waterways was crucial to army logistics. Spanning a river with a pontoon bridge is as much a naval operation as an engineering one, and frequently involved the navy in defending the bridge once constructed. In many cases, the success or failure of a naval operation to take control of a waterway or protect a bridge determined the outcome of the land campaign. Large armies could be effectively tied to rivers by their logistical dependency, and the strategy of many campaigns was dictated by the floods and droughts that could ruin an army's riverine supply lines. Operations were not limited to the natural river system; the earliest canals in China were immediately exploited for their military potential.
It is almost impossible to separate the technological, logistical, and purely military aspects of naval operations, and no attempt will be made to do so here. Chinese navies were quick to take advantage of any effective innovation in weaponry or sailing. Fire weapons and true cannon appeared on Chinese ships soon after they appeared on land, and seaworthiness improved dramatically over the centuries. But what is more important to remember in the history of this vast continental power is that it was how ships were used—their vital role in empire building—that is most remarkable. Far from being ignored, naval operations were involved in creating Chinese empires from the very beginning to the very end.
The first recorded use of ships in a military operation occurred circa 1045 B.C.E., when King Wu of Zhou ferried 300 chariots, 3,000 men of his personal guard, and 45,000 infantrymen across the Yellow River at Mengjin in forty-seven ships to attack the Shang capital.1 These were not specialized warships, but vessels commandeered for the operation. Even so, the importance of this operation is clear: A naval contingent of some kind was necessary to span a geographic feature that would otherwise have protected a strategic goal. King Wu's use of ships for military purposes was probably not the first instance of this sort of operation in China. By the first millennium B.C.E. Chinese (to use a somewhat anachronistic term) had been transporting themselves on the water for thousands of years. An oar for a small boat was unearthed in 1978 at a Neolithic site at Hemudu (on the coast of Zhejiang) and dated to 5000 B.C.E. But the pattern set by King Wu was to be repeated throughout Chinese history as dynasty succeeded dynasty and states warred with each other.
Over the succeeding centuries, ships became more specialized. The ships that ferried King Wu's army across the Yellow River were gradually replaced with transport vessels and warships purpose-built for their tasks. Warships were first constructed in the states of Wu, Yue, and Chu in southern China during the Spring and Autumn period (722–481 B.C.E.), as well as in the state of Qi in the northeast. The first recorded naval engagement took place in 549 B.C.E., although no details are available beyond the fact that Chu launched an unsuccessful naval expedition against Wu. It was reported that King Kang of Chu, who launched the attack, was the first Chu ruler to carry out naval expeditions, beginning in 559 B.C.E. when he first took the throne. Some transport vessels at that time could carry fifty men with three months' supply of food and make the thousand-plus-mile trip from Sichuan in the west down the Yangzi River to Chu in less than ten days, covering more than a hundred miles a day.2
The development of ships in general, and warships in particular, was aided by advances in woodworking that were themselves a by-product of improved iron tools. Yet the means of naval warfare were still limited to galleys carrying troops of men armed with bows and hand-to-hand weapons. There were several kinds of warships available to the state of Wu: Large Wings, Medium Wings, Small Wings, Tower Ships, and Bridge Boats. Large Wings (the name perhaps coming from the motion of the oars) were 3.5 meters wide and 23 meters long, bearing a crew of ninety-one men (of whom fifty were rowers). These two-decked vessels were supplied with four long hooks, four spears, four axes, thirty-two crossbows, and 3,200 arrows. The high number of oarsmen indicates that speed was particularly important. Medium Wings were 3.1 meters wide and 22 meters long, Small Wings were 2.8 meters wide and 20.7 meters long. All of these vessels had ramming beaks. Tower Ships were used for assaulting the walls of fortifications adjacent to rivers or other bodies of water. They were used in the same way as siege towers on land, to enable the attackers to shoot down at a wall's defenders. Bridge Boats were fast galleys that served the same function as light infantry and cavalry, and they may well have also had ramming beaks.3
These ships were first explained by Wu Yuan, also known as Wu Zixu, who came to serve the king of Wu after the king of Chu killed his father and elder brother. In 506 B.C.E. Wu was ordered to construct a canal running from Suzhou through to Lake Tai and then on to the Yangzi River. Shortly after this more than 100-kilometer canal was completed, the king of Wu used the canal to launch a successful attack on Chu. The utility of canal building for military operations was clear, so the next king of Wu ordered another canal dug, this time connecting to the Huai River in the north. Upon its completion in 484 B.C.E., a successful attack was launched against the state of Qi using the 185-kilometer canal. This new canal now allowed the Wu army to travel all the way to the Central Plains of northern China by ship, transiting from the Huai River to the Si River and then on to the Ji River. These canals were constructed in order to allow the north–south transfer of troops for military campaigns. By connecting the major east–west rivers, these manmade water routes spanned the natural geographic divisions that separated many of the individual states of early China.
The state of Wu was also an innovator in launching China's first recorded use of oceangoing ships in a campaign, resulting in the first naval battle at sea in 485 B.C.E. Yet Wu's advances in naval warfare were also to prove its undoing. The rival state of Yue carefully trained its own navy, and in a series of naval engagements combined with land operations destroyed the state of Wu in 475.
Naval warfare was now a regular part of Chinese warfare, and it continued to develop as a result of its increasing frequency. By the early part of the Han dynasty (202 B.C.E.–220 C.E.), Chinese ships had added several layers of superstructure and moved from clinker-built to carvel-built construction. In addition, anchors, rudders, sweeps, and sails had all come into common use. The Han navy, the first independently established navy in Chinese history, was actually called the “Tower Ship Navy,” an indication of the central place of the tower ship. This incarnation of the earlier tower ship would continue in use through the thirteenth century, its multiple levels of superstructure serving to protect and provide firing platforms for a substantial complement of soldiers or marines. A variety of smaller ships supplemented the tower ships.
When the Han dynasty was first founded the navy was not powerful enough to suppress the independent kingdoms in the southeast that had broken away from the collapsing Qin dynasty (221–206 B.C.E.). The southeast was and has remained the center of China's maritime culture. Not only does it include an extensive coastline, but inland the area is laced with a vast network of rivers and streams. Three southeastern kingdoms escaped the initial Han consolidation: Dongou, Nanyue, and Minyue. In 138 B.C.E. Minyue attacked Dongou, and the king of Dongou sought Han help. The Minyue navy withdrew without engaging the Han navy, but Dongou was promptly incorporated into the Han empire.
In the fall of 112 B.C.E., having settled the northern border seven years before, the Han emperor sent a larger naval force of 100,000 men to attack Nanyue. The kingdom fell the following year. When the Han navy originally set out to attack Nanyue, Minyue was asked to send a naval force to aid the effort. Although Minyue agreed to the request, the force it sent halted well short of Nanyue, claiming that unfavorable winds prevented it from advancing. Having destroyed Nanyue, the Han commander proposed attacking Minyue on the way home. The Han emperor rejected this idea, and ordered his navy to return to base to refit and await further orders. The Minyue ruler in turn went into open rebellion, and a combined land and naval campaign destroyed the kingdom in 110 B.C.E.
Even before the last shreds of Han sovereignty disintegrated in 220 C.E., the empire had already effectively split into three kingdoms: Wei in the north, Wu in the southeast, and Shu in Sichuan. The balance between them was maintained by geography and naval power. Shu was protected by a ring of mountains, but, despite its position upstream on the Yangzi, could not strike out at Wu because it was unable to develop an effective navy. Wu, on the other hand, had an extremely powerful navy that allowed it to fend off the well-developed land forces of Wei. Yet because its own land forces were considerably weaker than Wei's, Wu was limited in its ability to project power northward.
In the spring of 208 Wei began to build a navy that would allow it to project power southward. This buildup, and the campaign that followed, led to perhaps the most famous battle in all of Chinese history: the Battle of Red Cliff. In mid-year, more than 100,000 infantry and cavalry boarded ship to begin Wei's drive to unify the empire. The Wei force was successful in its drive down the Han River and into the Yangzi. Once on the Yangzi, however, the navies of Shu and Wu united to defeat Wei's large but not particularly skillful fleet. Wei's fleet, now swelled to a force of some 150,000 men (here we should note the proclivity of Chinese sources for giving the number of men rather than the number of ships), anchored beneath Red Cliff chained stem to stern in a continuous wall. The combined Wu-Shu fleet opened its attack on this static formation by launching ten fire ships into the Wei lines. In the ensuing battle, Wei's fleet was entirely destroyed, thus temporarily putting an end to its unification attempts.
Naval operations played an important role in the centuries that followed, as the back-and-forth warfare of the third through sixth centuries kept the political divisions of China in flux. In 581 the Sui dynasty started to bring this period to a close and constructed a large empire like that of the Han. Late in 588 the Sui emperor sent a vast force across the Yangzi to extinguish the southern kingdom of Chen. The construction of more than one thousand Yellow Dragon ships, in addition to a wide variety of other vessels, had begun in 584. Some 100,000 Chen soldiers waited on the south bank of the Yangzi. This was more in the nature of a vast amphibious landing than a naval battle. Five hundred thousand Sui troops invaded Chen along eight routes, seven of them crossing the Yangzi and one approaching from the sea. Despite some spirited resistance by the Chen army on the upper reaches of the river, the kingdom fell early in 589.
The Sui dynasty itself proved short-lived. It was succeeded by the Tang dynasty (618–907). The Tang emperors made extensive use of naval forces in their campaigns against the Korean kingdoms of Koguryo and Paekche in the middle decades of the seventh century. In 663, the Tang navy defeated a Japanese fleet in a great battle fought on the southwestern coast of the Korean peninsula. Although it does not appear that Tang was a period of dramatic innovation in naval technology or practice, this was nevertheless a time of cultural and commercial developments that laid much of the groundwork for naval advances under the Song dynasty. Many of the innovations first attested during the Song (960–1279) may have been of earlier design. It was during the Song, for example, that the use of the compass for navigating is first mentioned (at the very end of the eleventh or the beginning of the twelfth century). There were several other Song improvements in maritime technology. Ships were considerably strengthened by the addition of crossbeams bracing their ribs. Rudders that could be raised or lowered allowed ships to operate in a broader range of water depths, and the teeth of anchors were arranged circularly instead of in one direction, making them more reliable.
The most significant naval development during the Song was the widespread use of a Tang invention: the man-powered paddle-wheel boat. By the early twelfth century paddle-wheeled warships were being manufactured by the dozen. Not only were the numbers of these vessels increasing, their size and the number of paddle wheels was also growing. Ships were built with as many as thirty-two wheels, and some could carry a thousand soldiers. Oceangoing vessels also began to proliferate. Tang developments in this area were built upon to create still larger and more seaworthy vessels armed with a variety of early gunpowder weapons.
Naval warfare in the Song was both more extensive and more sophisticated than in Tang times. It also provides a good example of the way that a navy was vital to continental conquest. In 974 the Song undertook to conquer the Southern Tang, a kingdom based on the Yangzi River. Although conceived in territorial terms, the entire campaign turned on the ability of the Song navy first to span the Yangzi with a pontoon bridge and then to protect that link from repeated attacks by the powerful Southern Tang navy. Every attack on the pontoon bridge jeopardized the army's success on land. The Southern Tang ruler only surrendered after the last of his navy was destroyed or captured, despite the fact that the Song navy had surrounded his capital for some ten months. With the conquest of the Southern Tang, the Song navy faded in importance for nearly a century and a half.
In 1127 the Jurchen Jin from Manchuria captured the Song capital, Kaifeng, on the Central Plains. Song sovereignty seemed on the verge of collapse, with both the emperor and the retired emperor captured. The immediate reach of the Jin army, however, was limited to the land north of the Huai River. A new Song emperor established himself in southern China and began to reconstruct a semblance of a government. Under these circumstances the Song navy became vital to the survival of the state. The contrast between the Jin and the later Mongols is instructive. Jin superiority on land was more than offset by naval weakness, and Jin's failure to develop an effective navy prevented it from conquering the Song. The Mongols, on the other hand, realized that a strong navy was a necessary prerequisite to conquering the south.
The Jin responded to the appearance of the new Song emperor by crossing the Yangzi River and chasing him south. He was forced to take ship and wait at sea for the crisis to pass. The Jin army was unable to maintain itself in southern China and retreated north. When it reached the Yangzi, however, it found its way blocked by Han Shizhong's 8,000-man navy. Jin reinforcements waited on the north bank, while the Jin army on the south bank found itself threatened by the gathering Song forces. The Song navy, with its large oceangoing warships, wreaked havoc on the small Jin vessels. The 100,000-man Jin army was entirely stymied until a Chinese collaborator pointed out that all of the Song navy's advantages and the Jin navy's disadvantages would be reversed when there was no wind. So, on a windless day, the smaller Jin ships rowed out and shot fire arrows into the becalmed Song navy, destroying most of it. The Jin troops were finally able to recross the Yangzi. This narrow escape probably contributed to keeping the Jin on the north side of the river for another thirty years. Han Shizhong's men had held up the Jin army for forty-eight days.
The next major Jin invasion came in 1161. This 600,000-man invasion force was divided into four major routes, one of which was an attack from the sea. The Jin naval force, however, fell victim to a Song fleet under Li Bao. Li's fleet of 3,000 men and 120 ships regularly attacked the Jin territory by sea, and so was quite familiar with the sailing routes. He attacked the Jin's 600 ships and 100,000 troops at their base. Li's force confidently engaged the much larger Jin fleet, knowing that their opponents were poor sailors and unaccustomed to fighting at sea. The Song navy's fire arrows made short work of the Jin fleet, annihilating the entire Jin force in this single engagement.
While Li Bao was disposing of the Jin seaborne force, the main army under the Jin emperor came up against another Song fleet, this time on the Yangzi River. The original Song commander of the border defenses elected to fall back from the Huai River and defend the Yangzi line instead. He was promptly sacked, but before his replacement could assume command of the Yangzi River forces, matters came to a head. The Jin army outnumbered the Song army by nearly ten to one, yet it had failed to make proper provision for crossing the river. Its ships were constructed with the wood from dismantled houses. Command of the Song navy fell to Yu Yunwen, a civil official with no military experience. Yu proved himself a master of naval warfare, however, repeatedly inflicting devastating defeats upon the Jin. It was simply impossible for the Jin army to cross the Yangzi at that point, so the Jin emperor shifted his army downstream hoping to find another way across. Yu anticipated this and, while his navy was then limited by lower water levels, its continued presence on the river dissuaded the Jin emperor from further attempts to cross. Yu and the Song navy had rendered superior Jin army numbers moot. The invasion had foundered on its lack of an effective navy.
The Mongols did not repeat the Jin's mistakes. They completely overran the last of the Jin state by 1234 and, despite earlier cooperative efforts with the Song, found themselves contemplating the same sorts of invasions that the Jin had attempted in the twelfth century. For the moment, the Huai and Yangzi river defenses were not seriously assaulted as Mongol armies occupied themselves with the rest of Eurasia. It was only when Khubilai became khan in 1260 that the continued existence of the Song in southern China came to the fore. Khubilai had originally shifted his power base into China in order to exploit Chinese resources in his struggle for supremacy with the other Mongol princes. Now firmly rooted in China and secure in his rule, he saw that vast riches could be extracted from the wealthy south. It was also clear that a navy would be required for any serious action against the Song, Mongol efforts in Sichuan having already been repulsed through a coordinated defensive system of forts and fortified cities.
The Mongol navy owed its creation to Khubilai. As was explicitly pointed out in his court, “If there were no Yangzi then that country [the Song] would also not exist.”4 Construction of five thousand warships and training of 70,000 troops in naval warfare began in 1270. Three years later a further two thousand ships and more than 50,000 troops were added to the growing Mongol navy. The navy continued to grow into an overwhelming force. Several thousand Mongol ships took part in the 1273 campaign against the Song. Once the Song lost control of the Yangzi River, its fate was decided. The final tattered remains of the dynasty, including an infant emperor, were destroyed in a climactic sea battle off the island of Yaishan (near today's Hong Kong) in 1279.
In the course of destroying the Song, Khubilai turned his navy to other military adventures. He attempted to invade Japan twice, in 1274 and again in 1281. The Mongol navy also attacked Vietnam in 1282 and 1287. These campaigns represented the high point of Mongol naval power. Subsequent Mongol expansion on land and sea lost the explosiveness that characterized their efforts during the thirteenth century, and Mongol control of China was fairly short-lived. By the mid-fourteenth century the Mongol regime had begun to implode, and rebellions sprang up all over China.
The leader who would emerge to found a new dynasty, the Ming (1368–1644), started his career in southern China. Zhu Yuanzhang became the only ruler ever to unify China and establish a stable regime by moving from south to north. Not surprising, naval operations were vital to the growth of his power. By 1360 the Ming was situated on the middle reaches of the Yangzi River, sandwiched between the forces of Han upstream and Wu downstream. Han was the much greater threat, due to both its greater size (its subject population in 1359 was 14 million, as compared to the Ming's 8 million) and aggressiveness. Wu, by contrast, was only slightly larger than the Ming, and much less aggressive.
War between these southern rivals centered around the capture of walled cities. These cities were the economic and political keys to the surrounding territory, and frequently commanded the transportation and communication routes. Combined with the extensive use of ships for transporting men, horses, and provisions, the importance of attacking walled cities led to vessels with extremely tall stern structures purpose-built to overtop walls along waterways. As we have seen from our earlier discussions, this was not a new innovation, but rather the revival of an old idea. These large vessels, combining both transport and siege functions, maneuvered poorly, but were still effective in naval combat because of their size. In spite of the extensive use of fire weapons, including cannon, naval combat was still frequently decided by hand-to-hand combat.
A turning point in Ming fortunes came during the 1363 Boyang Lake campaign against Han. Although a Ming ambush three years earlier near Nanjing had virtually destroyed the Han navy and greatly strengthened that of the Ming, internal rebellions removed Ming pressure long enough for the Han to rebuild their navy. Early in 1363 Wu momentarily distracted the Ming downstream, giving Han a good opportunity to attack the city of Nanchang, on the Gan River off Boyang Lake. Nanchang was vital to the control of Jiangxi province, and lay much closer to the Han center of power than to that of the Ming.
Particularly large ships were constructed for Han's attack on Nanchang, with tall stern castles and iron-plated archers' towers. This was an all-out effort by the Han ruler Chen Youliang, for which he had gathered some 300,000 men and vast quantities of supplies. Ideally, the enormous size of the Han vessels would allow them to quickly carry the main cities and towns as they proceeded downstream, avoiding protracted sieges. However, the fleet was hung up on the siege of Nanchang.
The Han fleet arrived on June 5 and, despite some initial success in breaching the city's outer wall, remained stuck there until August 28, when an approaching Ming fleet some 100,000 men strong drove them off. The ensuing fleet action on Boyang Lake was an uninspired slugging match, led by the rival rulers. If Chen destroyed the Ming fleet, then Nanchang would fall. Zhu, on the other hand, had only to raise the siege to succeed in his objective. Yet the Ming fleet was outnumbered by the Han fleet, and its ships were smaller. Its only advantage lay in its position across the line of retreat of the Han fleet, whose deeper draft vessels were now restricted by lower water levels. From August 30 to September 2 the two fleets fought a series of bloody engagements that weakened and demoralized both sides. Still, Zhu Yuanzhang was succeeding in his objective of raising the siege, and Chen Youliang had failed to win anything like a decisive victory despite his superior strength. Ironically, it was the different drafts of the main ships in the shallow lake that had contributed to the indecisiveness of the fighting. The Han ships were frequently unable to approach the Ming ships in shallow water, so although the Ming fleet was weaker in all respects, it retained the initiative.
The Ming fleet withdrew on the night of September 2, threading its way through the straits leading from the lake to the Yangzi River. It then took a position upstream from the mouth of the straits, again blocking the Han fleet's line of retreat. Despite several important defections to the Ming cause, the Han fleet was still considerably stronger. By the time the battle was joined on October 3, however, the Han fleet was in a do-or-die situation. It had simply run out of food. Combat quickly broke down into clumps of opposing vessels drifting downstream locked in hand-to-hand combat. The results of that day's fighting would have been similarly inconclusive except for two major incidents: Chen Youliang's death from a stray arrow, and the capture of his son, the designated successor to the Han throne. The remains of the leaderless fleet surrendered the following day.
In retrospect, this inelegant and bloody naval campaign was a turning point in the development of Ming power. Zhu Yuanzhang was able to expand into Han territory over the next two years and increase his power to the point where he could overrun Wu in 1367. The following year Zhu declared the founding of a new dynasty, and launched campaigns into north China and along the southern coast. Naval forces played a key role in conquering the southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, and they also played a significant role in supplying the northern campaigns. With the remnants of Mongol power driven back to the steppes, though not destroyed, Zhu turned his attention in 1371 to conquering the Xia regime in Sichuan. A two-pronged attack began in early summer and was over by September. The Ming fleet virtually shot its way into Sichuan, using cannon to destroy the booms deployed to block its progress up the Yangzi River.
Despite continuing increases in the number and size of vessels during Zhu Yuanzhang's reign, the navy was shifted to a defensive role as part of a generally defensive foreign policy. The Ming court's attitude toward foreign trade would vary not only from emperor to emperor, but also over the course of individual reigns. At the same time, however, overseas trade continued to grow without regard for the government's desires. By the mid-sixteenth century the issue of overseas trade came to a head when some court officials connected it to the endemic problem of piracy along the southeastern coast. While there was undoubtedly some truth to the belief that trade and piracy were related, many prominent local families along the coast were engaged in the lucrative overseas trade. Locally, then, central government efforts to suppress piracy by suppressing trading were extremely unpopular, and ultimately backfired. Legitimate merchants who had been interested in helping the government capture real pirates found their livelihood criminalized. They were thus forced to become pirates themselves.
Zhu Wan was originally sent to suppress piracy along the Fujian and Zhejiang coast in 1547. He was forced to recruit his own staff because local officials refused to cooperate with him in his intention to prohibit trade. Whatever the effect of his efforts on piracy, Zhu was fairly successful in suppressing trade. He repeatedly attacked merchant fleets and executed many of those he captured. Unfortunately for him, his actions earned him the enmity of officials from those provinces. Zhu was impeached in 1549, and committed suicide early the next year to avoid disgrace.
Although Zhu Wan was gone and his fleet dispersed, the Ming court did not change its policy on overseas trade. Faced with an even stricter ban, merchant fleets under the leadership of Wang Zhi began coordinated raids against the southeast coast in 1552. These raids came on the heels of famine and drought, further exacerbating already difficult conditions in the region. By 1554, these raids had been so successful, and the government response so ineffective, that the pirates established fortified bases on the mainland from which to raid further inland. Chinese pirates were joined by Japanese warriors, causing all of them to be labeled wokou (Japanese bandits). Much of the countryside was left to be pillaged, while government armies stayed in the walled cities after repeated defeats in the field in 1553 and 1554. During all of this, it seems that Wang Zhi and many of his fellow Chinese merchants were still looking for a way to return to the peaceful pursuit of trade. The emperor had decided upon extermination of the bandits, however, closing off the possibility of allowing men like Wang to surrender and serve the government by destroying the other pirates. Wang eventually did surrender and was executed because his captor could not deliver the pardon he had promised. Even so, the underhanded dealing of the government had eliminated some of the major pirates, and improved imperial forces began to take their toll. This was largely a victory of land forces, though, rather than a massive naval effort. The worst depredations were over by the 1560s.
The fear of pirate raids surfaced again in 1592, after the Japanese invasion of Korea. Naval operations were to play a crucial role in both this invasion and a second one in 1597. The Japanese army had to bring most of its supplies and all of its men to Korea by sea. Its logistics were further complicated by Korean partisans, who actively denied the Japanese control of the countryside. Confronted by the formidable Ming armies in the field, and with their communications attacked at sea, the Japanese forces received the order to retreat even before their warlord Hideyoshi died (in Japan) in 1598. Without control over the sea lanes, the Japanese invasion force was always in danger of being cut off from retreat. Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin's “turtle boats,” iron-plated galleys armed with cannon, wreaked havoc on the Japanese navy (although Admiral Yi is not much credited in the Chinese sources). The Koreans were saved by their navy, and that of the Ming.
The Ming navy would also preserve the last shreds of the Ming cause when the dynasty fell to the Manchus in the seventeenth century. In the 1640s, the dynasty was caught between internal rebellion and the rising Manchu Qing regime north of the Great Wall. These twin threats prevented an adequate response to either, and Beijing fell in 1644, first to the rebel leader Li Zicheng and then to the Manchus. A new Ming emperor was enthroned in Nanjing, the first capital from which Zhu Yuanzhang had ruled the empire, following the suicide of the sitting emperor when Li Zicheng's army entered Beijing. While the Manchu forces were overrunning north China, the new Ming court was attempting to achieve some semblance of normality amidst bitter factionalism. By June of the following year the Qing army had captured Nanjing as well as the new emperor. Ming loyalist forces still held out in southern China, however, relying upon naval strength that they hoped the Qing could not counter. Yet at the same time the men in control of those forces, principally Zheng Zhilong, were reluctant to do more than defend the south. Fragments of Ming rule survived for some years, with one court spending much of its time on Zhoushan Island off the coast of Zhejiang.
Qing efforts to eradicate these Ming remnants concentrated on destroying the various resistance forces on the mainland while building up a navy capable of taking Zhoushan Island. In addition, they made every effort to suppress trade with the island. The Qing fleet overwhelmed the Ming navy in October of 1651, then battered Zhoushan City into submission with cannon fire. Regent Lu, representing one of the last threads of Ming rule, fled by sea to seek the protection of Zheng Chenggong, the son of Zheng Zhilong. Zheng Chenggong (also known as Koxinga) had taken command of the Zheng family navy after his father surrendered to the Qing. The younger Zheng had been born in Japan of a Japanese mother, and represented exactly the sort of trader-pirate that had plagued the Chinese coast in the 1550s.
The Qing had great difficulty overcoming Zheng because of his overwhelming naval strength and his bases in areas nearly inaccessible by land. By 1655, after two years of fruitless attempts by the Qing court to induce him to surrender on favorable terms, Zheng actually began to expand northward. A Qing fleet was destroyed trying to capture Jinmen Island off the Fujian coast in 1656, inducing the Manchus to turn to less direct methods. Their previous prohibition on coastal trading was extended to encompass more of the coastline, while amnesties were offered to pirates who surrendered and served the Qing. This brought the Qing valuable sailors and ships, but Zheng's northern expansion was ultimately hobbled much more by his limited ability to sustain a land attack and his lack of familiarity with the waters of the Yangzi River and the north. After a crushing defeat on land outside Nanjing in 1659, he retreated to defend his territory from the expected Qing counteroffensive. Zheng recognized that he needed a more secure base farther from the mainland. In 1661, he shifted his base to Taiwan, driving out the Dutch. He died the following year. His son held out for another two decades, but there was a limit to what purely naval force could do.
The Qing would have little use for a navy for quite some time after Admiral Shi Lang finally subjugated Taiwan in 1683. It was not until it was confronted by another group of trader-raiders, this time Europeans, in the nineteenth century that the Qing court had to once again take up the serious matter of naval affairs. As with all previous dynasties, the Qing had been forced to develop some naval capability during its conquest of the Chinese empire. And just like many of its predecessors, it later found itself desperately trying to erect a naval line of defense against attacks on its sovereignty.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Very little had been written on Chinese water forces and naval warfare prior to the middle of the nineteenth century. The technology of shipbuilding and navigation is addressed in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4, pt. 3, Civil Engineering and Nautics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). Needham devotes some attention to the tactics of ship-to-ship combat, as does Rafe de Crespigny, Generals of the South: The Foundation and Early History of the Three Kingdoms State of Wu (Canberra: Australian National University Faculty of Asian Studies, 1990). De Crespigny also offers a detailed account of the Battle of Red Cliff. Other examples of naval battles and coastal operations can be found in Frank A. Kierman Jr. and John K. Fairbank, eds., Chinese Ways in Warfare (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); the contributions of Edward L. Dreyer (dealing with the Boyang Lake campaign of 1363) and Charles O. Hucker (dealing with the Ming antipiracy campaign on the Zhejiang coast in the 1550s) are especially valuable. The rise and fall of Chinese maritime power from the Song dynasty through the Ming is treated in three important articles by Jung-pang Lo: “The Emergence of China as a Sea Power during the Late Sung and Early Yuan Periods,” Far Eastern Quarterly 14 (1955): 489–503; “The Decline of the Early Ming Navy,” Oriens Extremus 5 (1958): 149–169; and “Maritime Commerce and Its Relation to the Sung Navy,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 12 (1969): 57–101. The most accessible treatment of the Ming admiral Zheng He's voyages to the Indian Ocean is Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Bruce Swanson, Eighth Voyage of the Dragon: A History of China's Quest for Seapower (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1982) is primarily concerned with naval modernization since the late nineteenth century, but devotes approximately seventy pages to the Ming voyages and the water forces of the Qing dynasty. Zhang Tieniu and Gao Xiaoxing have written an overview of China's premodern naval history, Zhongguo gudai haijun shi [History of the Ancient Chinese Navy] (Beijing: Bayi chubanshe, 1993). There is no comparable survey in English.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
The small amount of existing work on premodern Chinese naval history frequently suffers from a perceived need to compare the Chinese navy with European developments, or to fit Chinese navies and naval exploits into European historical models. Very little progress will ever be made in understanding Chinese naval history if it continues to be directed toward explaining why China did not embark upon a sustained and vigorous program of ship-borne world exploration leading up to a system of global trade and power projection.
There are five areas of research on premodern Chinese naval history that can profitably be explored: naval battles, logistics, administration, technology, and strategic thought. The almost entirely undeveloped state of the field has left all five areas equally unexplored. At the most basic level, Chinese naval history must begin by creating a corpus of detailed battle studies of individual encounters and larger campaigns. This history would necessarily discuss naval warfare both as part of related land campaigns and separately, in its own right. Just as naval warfare needs to be discussed in connection with larger campaigns and in its own right, so too would any research on logistics need to stress both how the need to supply armies and navies led to certain battles or directed campaign strategy, and how logistic capability itself developed and was used. Naval logistics may well have formed the strategic backbone of many campaigns. One of the most peculiar oversights in Chinese naval history is the almost complete lack of discussion of the administration of the imperial navies. Chinese historical source material is usually particularly strong in the areas of government administration and bureaucracy, and it seems likely that this avenue of research could be easily and profitably pursued. The late Joseph Needham lamented the primitive state of knowledge of Chinese naval technology, and his comment deserves seconding. Finally, research must begin to explore the extent of Chinese thinking on naval operations. This is a topic so unexplored that it cannot even be said for certain if there is anything extant that would constitute premodern naval strategy. It is highly unlikely, however, that this topic entirely escaped comment in the vast archives of Chinese history.
NOTES
1. Zhang Tieniu and Gao Xiaoxing, Zhongguo gudai haijun shi [History of the ancient Chinese navy] (Beijing: Bayi chubanshe, 1993), 5.
2. Sima Qian, Shiji [Historical records] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959), ch. 70, p. 2290.
3. Zhang and Gao, Zhongguo gudai haijun shi, 8–10.
4. Liu Minzhong, Ping Song lu, quoted in Zhang and Gao, Zhongguo gudai haijun shi, 113.