Asia Region, ca. 100–500
A
s discussed in chapter 1, international maritime trade and coincident cul- tural networking in Asia developed in stages. Initial prosperity was centered in the maritime Middle East–India route with overland connections to the Silk Road that connected the West with China. The Indian Ocean maritime route (the ‘‘Maritime Silk Road’’) developed after Rome established its Pax Romana in the first century of the Christian era, corresponding to a diffusion of knowledge among sailors of Greece, Persia, and the Roman Orient on the use of the monsoon winds for navigation, which navigators based in South and Southeast Asia had used in earlier centuries to reach the western Indian Ocean coasts. The point here is that heightened Indian Ocean trade was not exclusively due to the agency of Westerners or Chinese (Begley: 1996–2004;Miksic: 2003a).
When Westerners reached India in the first century they found that there was already regular maritime networking between India and Southeast Asia’s Straits of Melaka region. Southeast Asia–based seamen and Indian and Mid- dle Eastern traders routinely made the voyage from India’s eastern coast or Sri Lanka to Southeast Asian ports, which provided access to China’s rich markets. In the earliest era of maritime trade, ships from Indian ports touched land on the upper western coast of the Malay Peninsula rather than the Straits.
They portaged their trade goods across the Isthmus of Kra to the Gulf of Thailand, reloaded them on ships, and navigated the coastline to ports on the western edge of the Mekong Delta, which by the second century CE the Chi- nese thought to be dominated by the Funan polity. According to the Chinese
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Map 2.1. Indian Ocean Maritime Trade, ca. 100–600
records, the lower Vietnam coast–based Funan port polity dominated trade in this sector of the commercial route until the fifth century. From Funan, ships departing for south China might make stopovers at Linyi ports on the central Vietnam coastline or in northern Vietnam’s Red River delta region, which China’s dynasties controlled from 111 BCE to 938 CE.
Traders in the Roman Empire eventually joined the ships on this route, and Western maritime contacts thereafter extended beyond India and Sri Lanka to Sumatra and other commercial centers at the western end of the Java Sea, which in the post-Funan age displaced the upper Malay Peninsula and Gulf of Thailand–adjacent mainland as the principle Southeast Asia centers of international trade. The full development of the maritime route by interna- tional traders making regular use of the Straits of Melaka and the South China Sea came in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. By the fifth century com- mercial networking between East and West was concentrated in the maritime route.
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International Maritime Trade and Cultural Networking, ca. 100–500 39
As a consequence, during the first five centuries of the Christian era inter- national trade in Southeast Asia became well defined, regular, and prosperous as trade relationships extended to include new members and products. This expansion of trade in turn stimulated significant transitions in Southeast Asian economic and political organization as well as cultural practices. Once established through the region, route interaction between Southeast Asian peoples and foreign merchants was inevitable; the populations of the region were thus exposed to foreign cultures and ideas. Initially, the role of South- east Asia’s ports in the international trade was simply to provide facilities for foreign merchants who were passing through on their way to China or India or lying over until the next season’s winds allowed a return voyage. Coastal port-polities on the edges of settled hinterlands served as commercial entre- poˆts providing suitable accommodations for sailors and traders; food, water, and shelter; and storage facilities and marketplaces, thus facilitating the exchange of Eastern and Western goods, as well as ideas (Manguin: 2009).
In the initial era of the trade an international sojourner might make the entire journey, but from the end of the first millennium CE, once the volume of trade increased, it was economically inefficient for a trader to travel from one end of the route to the other, and instead a trader might specialize in one segment of the route. There were partnerships among merchants; instead of functioning independently when he arrived in a foreign port, a sojourner could depend on a trade partner, who would act as his local commercial agent. This agent could also store commodities in anticipation of his partner’s arrival. The sources tell us that merchants were likely to bond based on fam- ily, merchant association, common ethnicity, and/or commodity specializa- tion: for example, Romans, Parthians (‘‘Persians’’), Sogdians (eastern Iran- based traders who were prominent traders along the overland Silk Road), Jews based in Egypt and the Persian realms, and Malayo-Austronesians in the earliest era; members of the multiethnic trading brotherhoods based in south India; and specialists in the trade of frankincense, who were collectively high- lighted in the early Chinese trade records (Sims-Williams: 1994).
While Southeast Asia’s earliest ports seem to have initially developed as commercial stopovers, local merchants took advantage of the opportunity to market their own spices and aromatics as substitutes for foreign commodities and then built upon this substitution to introduce other indigenous products to the international sojourners. Demand for Southeast Asian products quickly followed when spices from Indonesia’s eastern archipelago began to flow out of the Java Sea region to international markets in the fourth and fifth centu- ries. The new marketing opportunities required more formal political and economic relationships between hinterland populations and coastal commer- cial communities than had hitherto been necessary. At that time the interna-
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tional trade began to act as an impetus to state-building efforts in the broader region, whether as a consequence of or as a reaction to the international trade.
From at least the seventh century BCE, goods from India arrived in Baby- lon along two well-traveled commercial routes. The preferred overland route, often called in modern writings the Silk Road, crossed the mountains and steppes of Central Asia. By the fourth century BCE, however, Aramaic lan- guage inscriptions from the Middle East recorded an active maritime trade along the coast, with goods transported by sea from India’s northwestern coast to Seleucia in Mesopotamia via the Persian Gulf and the Tigris River.
Alexander the Great’s admiral, Nearchus, employed local pilots and commis- sioned a fleet of thirty-oared galleys that used the same coastal route to trans- port Alexander’s troops from India back to Mesopotamia in 321 BCE (Ray:
2003, 2004).
Such coastal shipping rather than transocean voyages was typical of the early maritime contact between Middle East and Asian ports. Until the first century CE, there was limited knowledge or use of the seasonal monsoon winds, except by Southeast Asia–based seamen who were sailing between the Indonesian archipelago and Madagascar. The small-oared galleys making these ocean voyages tried to stay within sight of land as they hopped from port to port between Mesopotamia and India. Early Middle Eastern literary references speak colorfully of six-month voyages during which trained birds were used to guide ships to land; sailors navigated by the stars and by watch- ing the flight of birds. Merchants and other sojourners commonly booked space for themselves and their goods on the ship deck.
Regional political fragmentation at first limited Mediterranean markets for goods transported along this coastal route; the real blossoming of maritime trade between East and West awaited a stable Mediterranean Sea–centered marketplace. The consolidation of Roman rule provided this peaceful setting.
Rome’s political growth heralded a demand for luxury goods, among them spices, scented woods, resins, and cloth from the East, which substantially encouraged the expansion of Indian Ocean shipping. Technical advances soon followed as innovations in Western ship construction provided sailing rigs capable of undertaking voyages with larger loads and ultimately promised a means of using the ocean monsoon wind currents, thus enabling navigators to make transoceanic voyages.
Too frequently recent Western secondary sources tend to collectively cate- gorize Middle Eastern traders as ‘‘Arabs’’ (Sen: 2003, 174, 234). This gener- alization ignores the multiethnic communities from the Middle East who participated in the Indian Ocean trade since its inception. In the earliest era, Parthian merchants predominated, from the period of the Persian king Mithradates I (r. ca. 171–139 BCE) onward. Parthians supplied Indian iron,
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International Maritime Trade and Cultural Networking, ca. 100–500 41
Chinese silk, and Asian hides to Rome, and competed with Roman merchants to maintain their monopoly over the maritime trade between India and the Red Sea and Persian Gulf—and even went so far as to try to block Roman envoys from traveling to China and discouraging Chinese embassies from traveling to Rome (Sen: 2003, 161). In the first century CE the Parthian domi- nance over the Silk Road caravan trade faced a challenge when the Kushanas consolidated their control over the northern India and Central Asia region, and the Parthians further isolated themselves by maintaining their own silver standard rather than accepting the Kushanas’ preference for the gold standard as the basis for commercial exchanges. Gold was becoming the more valued precious metal in the remainder of the ancient world, while China retained its preference for silver well into the twentieth century. Then, in the late second century, wars between the Romans and Parthians diminished Parthian for- tunes further, and when the Parthian Empire eventually fell to the Sassanids in 225 CE, Persia-based Sassanian and eastern Iran–based Sogdian merchants emerged as the new leaders among Western traders active in the Indian Ocean and the Central Asian caravan trade. The Sogdians were the most prominent Western traders in Asia from the fourth through the eighth centuries (Sims- Williams: 1994). Following the seventh-century fall of the Persian Empire to Islamic armies, many other Persian Gulf–based traders converted to Islam and thereafter became one among numerous Middle Eastern Muslim mer- chant communities who competed on the Indian Ocean maritime network.
New Arabic-language literature described those travels to a receptive public (Sen: 2003, 160–68; Park: 2010).
INITIAL INTERNATIONAL MARITIME CONTACTS WITH SOUTHEAST ASIA
Early references to trade with Southeast Asia are rather ambiguous. Indian literature from the first centuries CE refers to Southeast Asia in general as Yavadvipa or Suvarnadvipa, the ‘‘Golden Island’’ or ‘‘Golden Peninsula.’’
The Ramayana, India’s classical-era mythic epic poem about Rama’s attempts to rescue his wife, who had been abducted by the evil king of (Sri) Lanka, records seven kingdoms on the ‘‘Gold and Silver Islands’’ beyond Sri Lanka. The Buddhist Jataka fables from contemporary popular Sanskrit litera- ture mention Indian merchants who went to Southeast Asia in search of wealth.
The Egypt-based Roman geographer Ptolemy, writing in the mid-second century, usesYavadvipa, ‘‘the Golden Peninsula,’’ in describing the lands beyond India. He makes it quite clear that few Roman sailors were making
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the passage to Yavadvipa, and indeed Indian evidence indicates that not many Indian sailors were making the passage either.
Chinese records provide a more satisfactory yet still incomplete view of the burgeoning commercial networks that connected China with the West in the era of the Roman Empire (Liu: 1988; Ray: 1994). By 111 BCE, the Han dynasty controlled southern China, and Han emperors, following the lead of the illustrious emperor Han Wudi (140–87 BCE), who was responsible for the development of the Central Asian caravan (Silk Road) route, came to con- trol Guangzhou (Canton), a coastal city with strong commercial interests.
Together with Quanzhou to its north, Guangzhou would serve as the early terminus for China’s maritime trade with the West. During a break in Han rule from 9 to 25 CE, south China became a haven for refugees escaping from the turmoil in the north, among them northern aristocrats who further encouraged the development of Guangzhou as a commercial center. These aristocrats constituted a growing market for Western goods.
The Chinese used the termDa Qinin reference to the Roman provinces in the Middle East stretching from Syria to Egypt. From these western regions
‘‘precious and rare objects of all foreign countries’’ were said to come (Hirth:
1885, 42). The Han history (Hou Han-shu) dating from 125 CE vaguely describes Da Qin’s trade with the northwestern coast of India. Profit to Da Qin’s traders from this trade was said to be tenfold, but ‘‘honest’’ (Wolters:
1967, 40). Da Qin products reaching China included glass, carpets, rugs, embroideries, piece goods, and precious stones. Among these, manufactured goods—notably glassware in the form of costume jewelry, ornaments of col- ored glass, and glass beads—were especially valued (Wolters: 1967, 39–40;
Miksic: 2003, 18–22).
The decline and fall of the Han dynasty between 190 CE and 225, and the corresponding collapse of the Silk Road network, increased the Chinese gentry’s need for a maritime link between East and West to supply them with exotic goods. The south China–based Wu dynasty (220–264 CE) encouraged the import of Western textiles (mainly Indian cotton), tree resins, coral, pearls, amber, glassware, jewelry, and other manufactures. When in 226 Da Qin merchants from the West visited the Wu court, they were questioned extensively by the emperor himself, who sent an official to accompany them on their return voyage (Wolters: 1967, 42). The Wu governor of the Chinese province in northern Vietnam was subsequently delegated the special role of advertising south China’s interest in this trade. When envoys from the lower Vietnam coastal states of Funan and Linyi paid official visits in 226 and 231, respectively, the emperor congratulated the Wu governor for his ‘‘meritorious performance.’’ In 240, the Wu court dispatched envoys led by the court’s appointed agent Kang Tai to Funan’s ports to view firsthand the nature of
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Map2.2.SoutheastAsiaTrade,ca.100–600
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trade with the West—and seemingly as well to evaluate whether conquest down the coast beyond the Red River delta would be worthwhile (Wang:
1958, 33). These envoys’ reports provided the first written details on Funan, Da Qin, and the networked centers of maritime trade that lay beyond in Southeast Asia, northern India, and the Middle East.
Kang Tai informed the Chinese emperor that the kingdom of Funan was a prosperous realm from which great merchant ships departed for China and India. Funan’s authority stretched along the trade route beyond the lower Mekong Delta to the upper Malay Peninsula. He reported that after a major naval expedition in the early third century, Funan had assumed authority over many of the trade centers on the Malay coast, thereby consolidating its domi- nance over the flow of commerce through Southeast Asia. By the early fourth century, however, significant changes were taking place on the international route that resulted in the fifth- and sixth-century demise of Funan and its net- worked northeast Malay Peninsula commercial centers (Manguin: 2009; Mik- sic: 2003a, 28–33).
THE EARLY CHINA TRADE
Who provided passage from Southeast Asia’s ports to China and India in the first centuries of the Christian era? Early Chinese records make it clear that Malayo-Austronesian seamen (Kunlun) and ships (kunlunpo) based in South- east Asia, with the ships described as extending to two hundred feet in length, rising up to twenty feet above the water level, and said to be able to hold from six hundred to seven hundred passengers and ten thousand bushels (nine hundred tons) of cargo, sailed the route between Southeast Asia and China (Wolters: 1967, 154; Manguin: 1994; Miksic: 2003a, 22). Until the eleventh century no Chinese ships made the voyage on a regular basis, and until the sixth century Persia-based ships went no farther east than Sri Lanka. There is disagreement, however, on who provided the passage from South Asia to Southeast Asia.
Many Western historians initially thought that Indian seamen in Indian- made ships developed the route. In reiterations of this view, it used to be argued that Southeast Asian seamen were not capable of building the great ships making the voyage (Wheatley: 1975, 154). In this West-prejudiced view Indian craftsmen copied the more advanced Persian ships in shipyards along the Indian coast and Indian sailors, most of them Buddhists, then sailed the vessels with their international passengers and cargoes to the ‘‘Land of Gold.’’ Other historians now believe that it was not Indians but multiethnic Southeast Asians, piloting ships (kunlunpo) built in Southeast Asia from the
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International Maritime Trade and Cultural Networking, ca. 100–500 45
Southeast Asian archipelago to India and back, who provided this early link- age for international merchants (Wolters: 1967, 154). In their view Southeast Asian seagoing populations were responsible for opening the entire sea route from India to China. They point to Western accounts from this age that record voyages by ‘‘Malay’’ seafarers as far west as the African coast and draw the conclusion that if Malay ships could reach Africa, they could certainly reach India (Manguin: 1980).
When the need for a maritime route increased, international sojourners were able to turn their maritime skills to financial gain. Because Western trad- ers at this time were primarily interested in exchanging Western goods for Chinese products without voyaging beyond South or Southeast Asia them- selves, access to the ports of south China was a critical factor that allowed Southeast Asia–based sojourners to expand their Western trade. By securing Chinese commodities and transporting them to Southeast Asian and South Asian trade depots, Southeast Asian seamen effectively eliminated the need for Western ships to venture beyond South Asia.
Southeast Asia–based seamen, however, were not only facilitators of inter- national trade; they could be a serious detriment to it as well. They had the potential to be shippers and/or pirates. Chinese records recognized this dual- ity in their report that ‘‘merchant ships of the barbarians’’ piloted by Kunlun seamen were used to transfer the early third-century Chinese envoys to their destinations in the archipelago, and that these seamen profited equally from the trade and from plundering, enslaving, or killing people (Wang: 1958, 20).
The Chinese considered Southeast Asia to be generally unstable politically and a potential threat to the efficient flow of commercial goods into China.
The Chinese government was most interested in having its political legiti- macy and dominance recognized—above all to ensure the stability of their southern borderlands—as it was in establishing commercial goals as the basis of relationships. The Chinese thus looked for a strong, dominant port-polity in the area that would be able to maintain trade and prevent plundering by the sea pirates based in Southeast Asian waters.
The Chinese apparently favored consistency, preferring not to shift alli- ances from one port-polity to another. They would recognize one port and attempt to maintain a tributary relationship with it. If the state stopped send- ing envoys to the Chinese court, the Chinese would try to reestablish contact with that tributary state before granting official recognition to another. South- east Asian states in a tributary relationship with China received token recipro- cal material gifts from the Chinese court and the even more valued Chinese recognition of their legitimacy and trading status. Appeals for direct military aid or patronage were almost always ignored. Southeast Asian states did capi- talize on Chinese recognition, however, to attract trade to their ports. Chinese
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