The timing of the European arrival in the China Sea was fortunate, for Europeans: in effect they entered a power vacuum, occupied only by small trading city-states and by pirates. Central to the international relations of the region was the Chinese tributary system; but this was no longer backed, as it had been, by a very considerable, highly organised and effective naval power. Nor was it translated effectively into Chinese commercial power; there were of course many Chinese merchants in the ports of the ‘Southern Seas’, some of them long settled there, but their activities were unofficial, as it were extra-legal, and often, from the Imperial point of view, actually illicit. However, a concept analogous to the ‘factory’, the alien merchant community extra-territorial as regards its own administration and (within limits) its law, though not so in sovereignty, was as indigenous in Asia as it was in the Europe of the Hansa and of the Genoese and Venetian colonies of the Levant.^[2] This greatly eased initial commercial penetration; but in dealings with major powers—Mughal India, China, Japan—it meant that European activity was not so much imposed on them, as it often appears in Eurocentric histories, as infiltrated into them, on Asian terms and sometimes under severe restrictions. It was often otherwise with the pettier states of Southeast Asia, a geopolitical fracture-zone.^[3]

This setting largely conditioned the mechanisms of European trade, and some account of it (perforce too brief and hence over-simple) is needed for the ‘placing’ of a drama which in the West is still too often seen as simply the forceful and picturesque activity of the European protagonists. Forceful and- 145 -picturesque it indeed was, but the action was moulded by the setting of the stage and the reactions, often themselves very forceful, of other actors in the play.

Centuries before Portuguese keels first furrowed the Indian Ocean, or even the Atlantic, Chinese ship-building and maritime activities, especially in the southeastern provinces of Fukien and Kuangtung, had reached a much higher pitch than European technology and organisation were to attain until well into the sixteenth century. Chinese ships sailed to Java in the fifth century of our era; in the thirteenth the prolonged resistance of the Southern Sung dynasty to the Mongol invasions was largely a naval affair, with some remarkable technological developments; and the anti-Mongol revolt of 1348 in sea-oriented Fukien was essentially a naval campaign, intercepting the convoys of rice and tribute to northern China. The Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan mounted full-scale overseas expeditions against Japan (a disastrous failure), Champa or Annam, and Java (another failure). Already in Sung times ocean-going ships could exceed 500 tons burthen and may have reached twice that size; Marco Polo and Ibn Battutah were mightily impressed by, amongst other things, the individual cabins, sixty or more in the larger ships, with some private baths—which would have been difficult indeed to find on European vessels before the passenger liners of the later nineteenth century. Archaeological evidence, including an 11-metre long rudder post, indicates that by Cheng Ho's time (1405–31) the greatest Treasure Ships were at least 100–150 metres long and of 2500 tons burthen, 3100 displacement, approaching the practicable limit of wooden-hulled sailing ships in the nineteenth century.^[4]

The Chinese were very probably in contact with East Africa by the tenth century (as suggested by finds of ‘Chinese porcelain by the shovelful’ and by an intriguing reference in Idrisi (c. 1154)); there is a near-certainty that Cheng Ho's ships sailed into the Mozambique Channel, and even a possibility that they rounded the Cape of Good Hope from the east. Obviously these voyages, made by thousands of men in scores of ships, did not come out of the blue; they seem to have been essentially a reassertion and an extension by the new Ming dynasty of the Chinese suzerainty into which their predecessors the Mongols had brought all the organised kingdoms of Southeast Asia; it was obviously desirable for a new and native dynasty to demonstrate that its prestige was no less than that of the old. As an organiser of voyages Cheng Ho would seem sans pareil, as a navigator he must have ranked with Vasco da Gama and Magellan, with the single allowance (a large one) that north of Kilwa his voyages were by long-navigated seas to known ports. But surely he more than Columbus might claim the title ‘Admiral of the Ocean Sea’.^[5]

Unlike the Mongols, the Ming did not seek military expansion; the two or three warlike incidents which took place on Cheng Ho's voyages were just that, mere incidents. There may well have been an element of serious scientific enquiry into resources; but the voyages were also a form of disguised state trading:- 146 -the ‘tribute’ brought back included not only exotic rarities such as ostriches and ‘the auspicious giraffe’ but also fine timbers, copper, sulphur, spices, and (perhaps especially important) drugs. The counter-presentations were largely luxury or ceremonial objets d'art, easily spared by China but very flattering to the local rulers, who welcomed both the recognition and the display. This tributary relation, while bulking large in the minds of the rulers on both sides, seems to have had little practical effect except in kingdoms actually contiguous to China, such as Annam and Korea. After the Portuguese took Malacca, its refugee Sultan did indeed appeal to his overlord in Peking, but received at first a dusty answer, and no practical help; by this time the Ming court was preoccupied with the northern frontier.^[6] Sometimes the effects were negative: misunderstandings of the relationship—innocent, wilful, or generated by interested intermediaries—bedevilled Sino-Japanese negotiations during Hideyoshi's Korean wars.^[7]

But this was after the decline of Ming sea-power, a decline more sudden than its rise and seemingly more difficult to explain. One factor was certainly the increasing involvement with revived Mongol power in the north—already in 1421 the capital was moved from Nanking to Peking; another the drying-up of special fiscal resources devoted to such expeditions. Cheng Ho himself was a Muslim eunuch; the voyages were sponsored by the Emperor personally and carried out by his eunuch-dominated household staff, and hence met with the bitter and effective hostility of the Confucian officials, who saw in this venturing overseas at once a departure from the agrarian polity rooted in ancient tradition,^[8] a drain of funds, and more power to the eunuchs, their hated rivals in Imperial counsels. The navy's prestige must have been weakened by several defeats in the successful revolt of the northern Vietnamese against the Chinese occupation of 1406–27. Needham points out also that the remodelling in 1411 of the centuries-old Grand Canal (1705km from Hangchow to Peking, and still active today) fitted it for transport at all seasons, so that grain convoys by sea could now be dispensed with. The great ship-building capacity of littoral China was diverted to inland water transport; in 1431 the naval crews were set to transporting rice on the Canal, ‘thus reducing them from fighting men to stevedores’.^[9]

As a result of all these factors, even the record of Cheng Ho's achievement was so far as possible buried: when a later Ming Emperor showed some interest in reviving overseas enterprises, the files were officially ‘lost’. The Ming navy, which in 1420 comprised some 3800 units, some very large—a force which would have made any contemporary European mind boggle—‘simply fell to pieces by the end of the century’, and in the next even private trading overseas was legally banned, though this was far from completely enforceable. Decidedly the Portuguese were lucky in their timing!^[10]

Chinese maritime commerce did not cease with the end of official voyages; the eunuchs switched their capital into private ventures, and in the later fifteenth century there was some revival of trading enterprise. But it was increasingly- 147 -subject to official hostility; by 1500 it was (theoretically) death to build a three-masted sea-going junk; in 1551 it was decreed that those who went down to the sea in ships ‘committed a crime analogous to espionage by communicating with foreigners’. As in Japan in the next century, this ‘agoraphobic mentality’ was basically motivated by a desire to maintain a pure polity, uncontaminated by dangerous alien thoughts and mores; the Great Wall played an analogous role vis-à-vis the nomads of the north. In both cases there was some rationale in exclusion.^[11] For the Ming, it was a desperate attempt to cope with the virulent problem of piracy, a merely negative reaction once the positive solution of naval power had been scrapped; but as Spain was to find in her Spanish American empire, the result was erosion of control by smuggling: ‘The Minister at Madrid’ or Peking ‘may give what orders he pleases … but still a people who want goods will find out wayes for a supply. …’^[12] In the fifteenth century legitimate maritime trade came to be dominated by two great entrepôts: Malacca in the Southern Seas and in the north the Ryukyu Islands, known to Europeans as the Lequeos or Loochoos or variants of that name.

Although Malaccan ships went as far as India and China, the Sultanate lacked capacity for building large vessels, as distinct from light war-craft, and seems on the whole to have been less a great trading-state in its own right than an emporium, for which its location was unrivalled: a good defensible harbour on a strait only 65km wide, strategically situated in relation to the alternating monsoons of the Indian Ocean and the China Seas. This was ‘the only point throughout the 8,000 miles [13,000km] of the trade-route [between the Moluccas and the Mediterranean] at which a monopoly of spice distribution could be established’; for Tomé Pires, ‘there is no doubt that Malacca is of such importance and profit that it seems to me it has no equal in the world’.^[13] By 1460 its Sultan held both shores of the Straits for some 700km; such a position was not likely to escape the fine geopolitical eye of Afonso de Albuquerque, who duly took the town in 1511 and, as we have seen made of it the forward base whereby Spanish intrusions in the Spice Islands were thwarted.

As for the Ryukyuans, from the 1370s until the mid-sixteenth century they were ‘self-made agents of entrepot trade’. They profited greatly when the expansionist atmosphere of Cheng Ho's day was succeeded by the Ming policy of inhibiting foreign trade; many Chinese merchants and seamen transferred themselves to the ‘southern lands’, and in fact most of the executive officers on Ryukyuan ships were of Chinese origin. Later, the Ryukyuans picked up the threads of Malayan trade, after the fall of Malacca to the Portuguese: Patani on the Gulf of Siam became an alternative entrepôt, and Siam was Ryukyu's most important trading partner in Southeast Asia. Chinese trade continued under the guise of tribute missions. The islands themselves produced sulphur and horses; their traders distributed to the ‘Southern Seas’ Chinese porcelain, silks, and other fine textiles, metal goods and drugs, and Japanese weaponry, lacquer, and gold. Returns included exotic beasts and birds, camphor, rhinoceros horn and other- 148 - materia medica, but especially dyewoods and spices, above all pepper, which sold in China at several hundred times the buying price.^[14]

The Ryukyuans seem to have provided an element of stability and respectability in an often fluid and tricky half-diplomatic half-adventuring context. The trade was a royal monopoly, and it was for example to the advantage of Japanese traders, whether agents of the local lords of Kyushu or private merchants, first to carry Ryukyuan official envoys (trading in tributary guise) and later to act themselves as such, since both Chinese and Korean authorities were very ready, and not without reason, to see Japanese commerce as being compounded with piracy. But the increasing instability of the later sixteenth century, the decline in the effectiveness of Ming power with the resulting rise of smuggling and piracy, and finally the extension of Portuguese competition and even control, confined Ryukyuan trade to the more limited, though still profitable, role of carrier between China and Japan. Early in the seventeenth century the little kingdom became a vassal to the Shimazu, lords of Satsuma in Kyushu: but both sides played the dependency relation down so that Ryukyu could continue to act as a channel for Sino-Japanese trade, otherwise illegal from the expulsion of the Portuguese from Nagasaki in 1638 until a relaxation of the Chinese ban in 1684. There was even a secret manual for Ryukyuans going to China, who were instructed to fob off awkward questions by saying that their money and merchandise came from ‘Treasure Island’. Probably nobody was much deceived, but appearances were preserved.

Japan's Wars of the Roses were also a Hundred Years' War: ‘The Emperor in Kyoto sat powerless upon his throne, his shogun or generalissimo could exercise no authority over the regional lords’.^[15] This time of troubles, the ‘Warring States’, lasted from 1467 until 1568, when Oda Nobunaga, the first of the three unifiers of early modern Japan, occupied Kyoto and was able to dominate his rivals. As a State, therefore, and despite its population of 15–20,000,000, Japan hardly comes into the reckoning before Nobunaga; for example, St Francis Xavier made an arduous journey to Kyoto in 1550, seeking imperial favour for his mission, but soon realised that he must fall back on the local lords or daimyo.^[16] But if Japan did not count, Japanese did: they showed such interest in Western ways that they almost at once took rank, in European eyes, as the most ‘civilisable’ Asians—an elegant and intelligent people, ‘the best who have yet been discovered’, said Xavier. But they were also the tough cruel men who formed the core of the ‘Wako’, the pirates who scourged the coasts of eastern Asia before and after the periods of Mongol and Ming naval strength, and as such were ‘not suffered to land in any port in India with weapons; being accounted a people so desperate and daring, that they are feared in all places where they come’.^[17] So early was the love-hate relationship born on both sides.

The century of turbulence which began in 1467 saw a slide into a completely decentralised feudalism, as a result of which ‘The daimyo domain became in- 149 -essence a petty principality’ where the lord ruled with ‘only the haziest reference to … sanction from the Shogun and emperor.’^[18] At the same time, however, the wars themselves demanded supplies and servicing, and merchant communities were growing up in the interstices of feudal power; in a few cases they were approaching, rather distantly, the position of European free cities. The most notable were Hakata and especially Sakai, near Osaka, which for long was the main port for trade with Korea, Fukien, and the Ryukyus. Although obviously not so well placed for Korean trade as Hakata and Hirado on the Tshushima Straits, Sakai was closer to the heart of consuming Japan—the core area between Kyoto and Edo (now Tokyo)—and by going south of Shikoku and Kyushu its ships could avoid the petty pirates (protected by local daimyo) of the Inland Sea. The city could hold its own against the local lords; it was a centre of arms supply and had its own defences and its own oligarchic government by thirty-six senior merchants, and even after being forced to accept a governor from Nobunaga, it retained much significance under his successors Hideyoshi and Ieyasu—all three had a keen sense of trade values.^[19] Exports to China were copper, sulphur, craft work, and great numbers of swords; imports raw silk, porcelain, strings of cash, drugs, books. The trade was from a Chinese point of view a tributary one: the ships were despatched by the Japanese Emperor, the Shogun, great lords and monasteries, but their fitting-out and the business arrangements were in the hands (and much to the profit) of the Sakai and Hakata merchants. But this commerce was of course vulnerable to the increasing restrictiveness of Chinese policy, and by the 1540s it was collapsing, to be replaced by piracy on a grand scale.

The China Seas, with their multitude of coves and off-shore islands, were a highly favourable milieu for sea-bandits, and piracy was of great antiquity and endemic in times of turbulence. The decline of shogunal power allowed the daimyo of the west—especially of strategically located Kyushu—to take over the missions to China, officially tribute missions but de facto trading convoys. The Ming authorities naturally endeavoured to recognise only one mission at a time; rejected groups turned to smuggling, with the active connivance of Chinese merchants, increasingly inhibited in legal trade by official policy, and sometimes of the mandarins themselves. Thence it was but a short step to piracy.

In 1523 the quarrels of rival Japanese ‘embassies’ led to serious disorders, with the loss of Chinese lives and property, in Ningpo, the official port for trade with Japan; all trade with that country was forthwith prohibited. This absolute ban was relaxed, but the continually changing restrictions made the formerly licensed trade impracticable, smuggling and piracy increased, and eventually the Ming reacted by banning all sea-borne commerce, presumably on the principle of no trade, no pirates. Of course trade went on, but with no Chinese sea-power and no central control in Japan, it ceased to be merely illicit and became utterly lawless. Some daimyo found their account in co-operating with the pirates; the feudal wars provided plenty of daring leaders, whose crews were swelled- 150 -by the forcibly unemployed Chinese seamen, who in fact were numerically the great majority in the Wako gangs. By the 1540s Fukien and the region of the Yangtse delta (where the Chusan Islands were a handy base) were subject to pillage, rape and murder by the almost continuous incursions of bands

- 151 -sometimes numbered in thousands; to such a pitch that some littoral areas were evacuated and a scorched earth policy adopted.^[20] This was the milieu in which the Portuguese attempted the commercial penetration of China and Japan, and the evangelisation of the latter.