The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (36 page)

Funan’s pivotal role in the chain of east–west exchange can be seen in the diversity of goods found throughout its territories. Archaeologists have identified more than 350 riverine and coastal sites associated with the port of Oc Eo, and excavations have yielded artifacts from around Southeast Asia, China, India, Persia, and the Mediterranean. The finds of westernmost origin include a coin and two medallions bearing the images of the second-century Roman emperors
Antoninus Pius and
Marcus Aurelius. A third-century Chinese work entitled
The Peoples of the West
devotes considerable attention to Da Qin, which can mean either Rome proper, the Roman Empire in general, or the
empire’s Asian provinces. This early account of the silk road lists sixty-three products of Da Qin, from gold, silver, and gems to frankincense, myrrh, and “twelve types of aromatic plants.” A section entitled “
The Sea Route to Da Qin” explains that “In early times only the maritime routes [to Da Qin] were discussed because they didn’t know there were overland routes.” This is perfectly consonant with the emphasis on sea routes to the east in contemporary western sources. Furthermore, finds in central
Thailand,
Vietnam, and around the Java Sea show that Funan’s absorption of foreign religions, principles of statecraft, and material artifacts spurred parallel developments throughout Southeast Asia. Despite the greater distances involved, the sea route was probably no more hazardous than the silk road across Central Asia, and it was faster and almost certainly subject to fewer duties because shipboard goods passed through the hands of fewer taxing authorities.

Four centuries before the Byzantine emperors
Justin and
Justinian urged the kingdom of Axum to break the Sasanian monopoly on Indian Ocean trade, the Chinese attempted to bypass the Parthian middlemen to open direct trade with Rome. Between 97 and 101 ce, an envoy named
Gan Ying crossed Asia to the Persian Gulf port of
Charax Spasinou (the Chinese
Tiaozhi) in hopes of joining a ship bound for a Roman port on the Red Sea. Possibly alert to his intentions, the Parthians discouraged Gan Ying by telling him that the three-month voyage could take two years and that “
all the men who go by sea take stores for three years. The vast ocean urges men to think of their country, and get homesick, and some of them die.” For whatever reason, Gan Ying abandoned his plan. Even had he completed his journey, it is unlikely that the new route would have altered significantly the existing patterns of trade, for similar initiatives undertaken from the west met with comparably lackluster results.

Among the best known of these took place in 166 when, according to the
History of the Later Han,
a merchant (or merchants) claiming to represent the Roman emperor reached the Han court. Elaborating on the relationship between the three major Eurasian powers of the third century, the official history notes that the Romans

In fact, the “embassy” may have been something of a fraud. Elephant tusks, rhinoceros horn, and tortoiseshell were not of western provenance but were
routinely available in Southeast Asia. In all likelihood, as even the author of the annals hints, these were simply traders passing themselves off as representatives of imperial Rome to improve their standing. There is no hint that their deception was uncovered at the time, but even an imposter’s knowledge of the west would have been of more than passing interest to Chinese officials.

The
Han Dynasty came to an end at the start of the third century under pressure from the
Xiongnu, a nomadic people whom the Han had fought since the first century, and China entered a 370-year-long period characterized by militarism and short-lived petty states. In its final decades the Han Dynasty was under the effective control of General
Cao Cao, who tried but failed to maintain the integrity of the empire. The deciding moment was at the
battle of the Red Cliffs, one of the most romanticized in Chinese history. Fought on the middle Yangzi near modern Wulin in December 208, the battle pit Cao Cao with a fleet of river ships and about two hundred thousand soldiers against the combined forces of Sun Quan and
Liu Bei, the future rulers of the kingdoms of Wu and Shu Han, respectively. Cao Cao was defeated, and a dozen years later China was divided among the kingdoms of Wei, founded by Cao Cao’s son, with its capital at
Luoyang on the Yellow River; Liu Bei’s Shu Han Dynasty (superseded by the
Western Jin in 265) in the upper Yangzi valley to the southwest; and Sun Quan’s Wu Dynasty in the east, with its capital at Jiangkang (
Nanjing) on the lower Yangzi. Because the states of Wei and Shu Han blocked Wu’s access to Central Asia, an invaluable source of horses, the kings of Wu turned to maritime trade to circumvent their territories. The Wu invaded Jiaozhi to secure the traditional trade in tropical exotics, and because the Red River valley provided access to the
horse pastures of the
Yunnan Plateau. Wu rulers sought trade with and recognition from more distant rulers as a means of confirming their legitimacy as Sons of Heaven.
Linyi, a kingdom founded in 192 on Jiaozhi’s southern border, Funan, and Tang-Ming, in Cambodia, all sent envoys in return. Of more immediate importance to the future of Chinese maritime trade, Wu encouragement of sinicization south of the Yangzi, a region previously outside the mainstream of Chinese culture, initiated a centuries-long process that paved the way for the massive influx of northern Chinese forced south during the tumult of the fifth and sixth centuries.

The
kingdom of Wu’s position was always precarious, and by the 250s it was almost constantly at war in defense of its inland borders. Availing themselves of their overlords’ northern preoccupations, Jiaozhi rebelled, abetted
by the kings of Linyi, Funan, and, eventually, the Western Jin. To avoid the disturbances in Jiaozhi, trading ships from the
Nanhai began bypassing northern Vietnam to sail directly for
Guangzhou. Although this was firmly under
Chinese rule, it was remote from the capital and a place “
where only the poor officials, who cannot otherwise be independent, seek to be appointed.” The advantage of a posting to a port dependent on exotic goods and beyond the prying eyes of imperial bureaucrats was that corruption was easy and enormously lucrative. By the end of the fourth century, Guangzhou was infamous as “the place of strange and precious things, one bag of which can provide for several generations” if one was willing to accept merchants’ bribes to expedite the handling of their goods, as most governors seem to have been. Jiaozhi eventually recovered its trade, but Guangzhou’s emergence as one of China’s premier ports dates from this period.

The defeat of the Wu and consolidation of Jin rule in 280 created a boom in the southern trade as buyers and sellers hastened to make up for the long years that northern China had gone without access to southern luxuries. But while the century ended with great promise for the expansion of the Nanhai trade, between 304 and 316 the
Xiongnu seized most of northern China, and the Jin court relocated from Luoyang to Nanjing. The rise of non-Han Chinese rulers sparked the flight of perhaps
a million northerners that resulted in the first wholesale penetration of the
Yue south by ethnic Chinese, who brought with them their core cultural and political institutions, including language and modes of governance. Now,
for the first time, the preponderance of China’s foreign trade seems to have been conducted by sea.

These newcomers vied with each other for supremacy and in Jiaozhi they antagonized the indigenous people and foreign merchants. In the near term, instability led to high tolls and rampant corruption among officials whose avarice had only grown in the hundred years since Guangzhou was described as a plum assignment for impoverished administrators. At the start of the fourth century customs officers in Jiaozhi and
Rinan routinely levied taxes of 20 to 30 percent on imports, and one prefect became notorious for undervaluing goods by more than half, and then intimidating the offended merchants “
with his ships and war-drums. Because of this, the various countries [from which the traders had come] were furious.” Later still, a popular saying held that “
The governor of Guangzhou need only pass through the city gates just once, and he will be enriched by thirty million strings of cash.”
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The Jin government exerted no meaningful control over its representatives in Guangzhou,
yet while corruption cost the imperial coffers dearly, the merchants of Linyi endured the most immediate losses. After diplomatic overtures to the Jin court failed, Linyi invaded Jiaozhi. Over the next seventy years, the Chinese came to regard the people of Linyi as nothing more than pirates, which in the absence of more legitimate opportunities for trade they may have become. Between 421 and 446, however, they sent six missions to the
Liu Song Dynasty (successor to the
Eastern Jin), and they are said to have offered tribute of ten thousand catties (six thousand kilograms) of gold, one hundred thousand of silver, and three hundred thousand of copper in 445. Nonetheless, the Liu Song launched a brutal campaign during which the Chinese reportedly executed everyone in Linyi’s port of Khu-tuc before
looting the capital’s palaces and Buddhist temples of untold quantities of gold.

The political situation in and around southern China remained chaotic, but there were periods of stability and even prosperity, which is reflected in the intensification of overseas trade. During the fourth century, the Jin court had received only three missions from the south, all from Linyi, but between 421 and the start of the
Sui Dynasty in 589, sixty-four
trade missions arrived from various kingdoms across Southeast Asia—as many as would come in the three centuries of the prosperous
Tang Dynasty. Yet Linyi never recovered from the sack of 446, and Funan also began an inexorable decline. These changes had less to do with Chinese policy or corruption than with a redirection in the long-distance trade of Southeast Asia: the abandonment of the coastal route between the
Malay Peninsula and Funan in favor of an open-water passage across the South China Sea between the Strait of Malacca and southern Vietnam or China.

Although it is possible that some ships had taken this direct route across the South China Sea as early as the first century, if not earlier, it was not the norm for long-distance traders. The first person to write about a direct sea route clearly identifiable as such was Faxian, a Buddhist
monk who after a long sojourn in India (which he had reached overland from China) and Sri Lanka, returned home by sea in 413–14. His misadventures on the journey take up much of the last book of his journal, which provides information about the route he followed, navigational practice, how mariners addressed the dangers of seafaring, and travelers’ superstitions. Faxian’s journey was made in two stages interrupted by a five-month stay on an island in Southeast Asia. Both of the ships in which he sailed carried more than two hundred people, but beyond that he
does not describe the vessels except to note that en route from Sri Lanka to
Yepodi (possibly
Borneo or Java) his ship sailed with a smaller vessel in tow, “
in case of accidents at sea and destruction of the big vessel.” This was scant provision for the number of lives at stake, and when danger struck the crew seems to have felt that their safety took precedence over that of their passengers. (The idea that the officers and crew of a ship should sacrifice themselves for their passengers in the case of
shipwreck is of recent vintage.) During a gale, “The merchants wished to get aboard the smaller vessel; but the men on the latter, fearing that they would be swamped by numbers, quickly cut the tow-rope in two.” Those remaining on the larger vessel began to lighten ship by
jettisoning their goods, although Faxian held on to his books and religious articles. The fate of the smaller boat is unknown, but after thirteen days Faxian’s battered ship reached an island, possibly one of the Andamans or Nicobars, in the eastern Bay of Bengal, where the crew fixed the leak before putting back to sea. Normally the captain would have navigated by “observation of the sun, moon, and constellations,” but overcast skies forced him to hug the coast of the Malay Peninsula despite the slower progress and greater risk of encountering pirates. After three months, “they reached a country named [Yepodi] where heresies and
Brahmanism were flourishing, while the Faith of
Buddha was in a very unsatisfactory condition.” In May 414, Faxian joined another ship bound for Guangzhou at the start of the southwest
monsoon. The passage should have taken “exactly fifty days,” but a month out they ran into storms that blew for several weeks during which “the sky was constantly darkened and the captain lost his reckoning” and was unable to find a familiar coast. The ship was driven off course and may have passed through the
Luzon Strait between Taiwan and the
Philippines and into the Philippine Sea before the captain turned northwest and brought the ship to land finally on the
Shandong Peninsula, thirteen hundred miles north of the intended destination.

If Faxian’s Buddhism went unnoticed in the Bay of Bengal, his shipmates from Yepodi blamed his faith for their troubles: “Having this Buddhist monk on board has been our undoing, causing us to get into this trouble,” they claimed. “We ought to land the religious mendicant on some island; it is not right to endanger all our lives for one man.” He was only spared becoming a castaway when one of the ship’s company threatened to report his defamers to the emperor, “who is,” he reminded his fellow travelers, “a reverent believer in the Buddhist faith and honors the religious mendicants.” It is likely that the merchants who blamed Faxian’s religion for their problems were from Southeast Asia, for Faxian mentions Chinese merchants only obliquely, when he notes that some of his shipmates were returning home to Guangzhou. His silence on this subject, and that of other contemporary sources, suggests that
there was little immediate Chinese involvement in the
Nanhai trade, or at least that the majority of shipowners were
Malays,
Indians,
Chams, or
Funanese. If this was the case, it may have been because the Chinese considered the trade too risky, or because this direct
crossing of the South China Sea was relatively new, although the fact that Faxian reports that the passage should have taken “exactly fifty days” implies that the route was well established.