The South China Sea (5 page)

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Sea cucumbers,
trepang
in Indonesian, have been exported from Southeast Asia to China as both a delicacy and a medicine for at least 2,000 years. So it was fitting that a
trepang
diver should literally stumble on a find that radically changed our understanding of the history of trade in the South China Sea. In August 1998, while pursuing the slithering creatures across the seabed nearly 2 kilometres off the northern coast of the Indonesian
island of Belitung, the diver found a strange mound. It turned out to be an Arab dhow laden with more than 55,000 pieces of Chinese pottery – a cargo that would eventually sell for $32 million, though neither he nor his country would see much of that. Markings on the pottery would reveal that the ship had sunk in 826
CE
in the middle of the Tang Dynasty, making this the earliest concrete evidence of direct sea trade between the Arab world and China.

Evidence is what all historians seek and, in contrast to China with its centuries of written records, Southeast Asia lacks it. Few documents survive, waterside settlements have been swept away and a combination of tropical climate and voracious insects has disposed of most of the rest. The great lost cities bear useful inscriptions but there are still gaping holes in the historical record. The best chances of filling them lie in the discovery of physical artifacts. The smallest details, from the molecular composition of shells to the techniques used in building boats, can unlock revelations about where and how people moved, what they ate, what kind of societies they lived in and how they related to others. As a result, modern archaeologists are fastidious about recording everything about their excavations: the layout of a ship's living space might hint at the culture and the hierarchy of the people on board and the arrangement of the cargo might reveal the order of its ports of call. Every scrap of evidence could be useful. Moreover, colleagues will only regard the interpretations as valid if the findings are accurately logged and made open to review and reinterpretation. These things did not happen at the Belitung wreck; at least not at first. There were other, more pressing priorities.

After the
trepang
divers had extracted a few bowls and sold them in the market, word spread and a local company, Sulung Segara Jaya, obtained a licence to excavate the wreck from the Indonesian national committee for shipwreck salvage. It was quickly joined by Seabed Explorations, owned by a German construction engineer turned underwater explorer, Tilman Walterfang. The two companies worked fast. They knew from bitter experience the site would be swiftly looted by others if they did not. In August 1998 Indonesia was in meltdown. General Suharto had been deposed, over a thousand people had been killed in rioting, separatism was flaring up and expatriates and their wealth were fleeing the country. Walterfang stayed put: his future wealth still lay on the bottom of the sea. The teams kept
working, removing as much of the cargo as they could during September and October before the monsoon stopped their work. As they feared, local treasure hunters moved in almost immediately. Walterfang contracted a separate company, Maritime Explorations, owned by another former engineer, Michael Flecker, to excavate the remainder of the site in the new year and do a more scientific analysis of what remained. Flecker had excavated dozens of wrecks in the area and also had a PhD in marine archaeology.

We now know that the pottery on board the Belitung wreck was mass-produced in at least five separate places across China, that it was tran-shipped around the Chinese coast to Guangzhou where it was loaded aboard a ship reminiscent of those still used in Oman, made from timber originally grown in Central Africa and India. The crew was probably a polyglot assemblage of Arabs, Persians and Malays and the end customers for the cargo were the upper and middle classes of the Abbasid Caliphate, centred on Baghdad. The ship sailed on the monsoon winds southwest from Guangzhou, probably stopping en route to refresh stocks of food and water before being wrecked on a reef within Srivijaya's sphere of influence. So to whom did the cargo rightfully belong? In Walterfang's view the answer was simple: him – and whoever was prepared to buy it from him. As the pottery was taken away for conservation and cleaning and the remains of the ship examined for clues about its origin, the haggling started.

In the end only Singapore wanted the treasure enough to pay the sum that Walterfang sought. The driving force behind the acquisition of the cargo was Pamelia Lee, then head of the Singapore Tourist Board and a sister-in-law of Singapore's long-serving prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew. ‘I thought it was time for Singapore to look for the finer things in life,’ she recalls. ‘Like every other nation that becomes wealthy you have to look at building your roots.’
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Lee hoped that the cargo would repay the purchase price by attracting visitors to the huge resort then being planned for Sentosa Island in Singapore. In April 2005 the state-owned Sentosa Corporation, part of the Singapore Ministry of Trade and Industry, announced an agreement to buy the hoard from Walterfang's company for $32 million. Half the cost was contributed by the estate of one of Southeast Asia's richest men: the banking and hotel magnate Tan Sri Khoo. The deal was described as a key part of Sentosa's plans to create a new maritime museum filled with artifacts salvaged from shipwrecks.

In early 2011, while the maritime museum was being built, some of the ‘Tang Treasure’ went on display at the ArtScience Museum on the Singapore waterfront. The plan was to transfer the exhibition to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC the following year. But then a coalition of American archaeologists intervened. They were furious that a private company had been allowed to excavate such a rare and precious site. Some accused the Institution of promoting looting. It became an argument between idealists and cynics – between those who believed that best archaeological practice should be observed in every case and those who felt that the real-world problems of looting and of financing exploration demanded real-world solutions. In April 2011, the Smithsonian gave in and cancelled the exhibition. Walterfang accused his critics of being ‘social climbers’ playing ‘yet another political game’.
⁹
Relations haven't improved much since.

Even worse, the Maritime Experiential Museum on Sentosa has also snubbed the Tang Treasure. There are pieces there from other wrecks but not a single piece from Belitung. At the time of writing, only a tiny fraction of the cargo is on public display, in a few cases inside the Goodwood Park Hotel in Singapore, formerly owned by Mr Khoo. It seems Singaporeans have little interest in one of the world's most remarkable archaeological discoveries. Pamelia Lee is disappointed that the people of the island state, in many ways the modern equivalent of Funan or Srivijaya, have not understood the significance of the treasure. ‘My vision is that in years to come, when they have the best of all gadgets, they will look for something tangibly different,’ she sighs
¹⁰
. But perhaps there's a more profound message here. It appears that not only do Singaporeans have no sense of ‘ownership’ of the cargo, they have no sense of ownership towards the sea either, despite the fact that their entire country owes its existence to seaborne trade. Singapore is an entrepôt, capitalising on the east–west currents passing its harbours, but that doesn't translate into a sense of entitlement to its riches.

Its modern meaning aside, what the Belitung wreck proves to archaeologists is that by the middle of the Tang era (the three centuries between 618 and 907) the South China Sea trade had become a highly integrated export industry. Enterprises in many parts of China were designing products for specific markets (decorated with Buddhist symbols or Koranic inscriptions as required) and mass-producing them. Local agents were then transporting the goods over land, down rivers and around the coast
to the entrepôts where foreign merchants would handle the long-distance shipping. There was a clear division of labour between domestic manufacture and foreign trade.

The Tang court took special measures to encourage the relationship. Early on it ordered that provisions be made available to foreigners arriving in Guangzhou and created an official position to supervise the trade. Malay traders (perhaps those Nusantao again) moved to Guangzhou in significant numbers along with Arabs, Persians, Armenians and Indians. They brought with them the finest products from their home countries: pearls, rugs and minerals from Persia (including the cobalt blue used in pottery glazes), frankincense, myrrh, and dates from Arabia, jewels and glassware from India and spices and perfumes from Southeast Asia. They exchanged them for the ceramics, silks and metalwork of China. The maritime silk route, the Abbasid–Tang superhighway from Guangzhou to Baghdad, by way of Srivijaya and Sri Lanka, created vast wealth for those who could control it.

Under the Tang, trade was the preserve of the court and only appointed officials could handle imports: eunuchs who had every incentive to demand bribes and exploit traders at their most vulnerable. The corruption became worse and worse until, in October 758, there was a riot. Persian and Arab traders sacked the city and took their trade elsewhere. The rulers of the Red River Delta in what is now Vietnam (nominally under Tang rule but largely autonomous) jumped at the opportunity. Their port, at Long Bien, became the trade terminus for a few decades. However, Guangzhou must have regained its position by the time the Belitung ship departed there around 826. But 40 years after that, in 878, anti-Tang rebels occupied Guangzhou. One Arab account says they singled out and slaughtered thousands of Arabs, Persians, Jews and Christians who were resident there. Nonetheless, the surviving foreign traders seem to have clung on to their toeholds on the coast.

The revolt was a taste of things to come. In 906 the Tang Dynasty collapsed, their former realm fractured and the coast became independent again. The ramifications changed the whole region. On the southwest coast, the area around Guangzhou broke away to form the Nan Han kingdom and then the rulers of the Red River Delta broke away from that to form Dai Viet. Dai Viet would grow to rival and ultimately conquer the lands of Champa (and over the next thousand years evolve into Viet Nam).

On the southeast coast, in the modern province of Fujian, the kingdom of Minnan emerged. Cut off from the north, Minnan embraced the sea. Over the course of the tenth century, it became a fully maritime trading state. The port of Quanzhou emerged from obscurity to become a hive of entrepreneurial energy and the destination of choice for merchants from the Middle East. After more than a thousand years of trading with foreigners, the people whom we would now call ‘Chinese’ set sail across the oceans on their own vessels for the first time.
¹¹
It was the start of a seafaring tradition that would carry Fujianese – and members of the Min or Hokkien ethnic group in particular – across the South China Sea and beyond.

By 970, after 60 years of independence, the south came under the control of the Song Dynasty, with its capital in the northern city of Kaifeng. Initially the Song regarded the sea in the way inland rulers traditionally had: as a source of threat. It was a place where ‘bad elements’ could hide – whether smugglers or political rivals – and where foreign ideas could propagate. In 985 all Chinese merchants were banned from travelling abroad. The Song followed their predecessors and imposed a state monopoly on trade. Private dealings were banned, forcing foreign merchants to import their cargoes through official channels, so that the court could then impose taxes on ships, customs duties on imports and also confiscate a proportion of the cargo and profit from its resale to domestic consumers.

But within a few years the Song initiated a remarkable policy U-turn. In 987 the court sent four missions abroad to encourage foreign states to trade. But that wasn't enough. Pressure on the court to relax its controls grew further: from coastal merchants, who wanted the profits; from consumers, who wanted the foreign goods; and from the treasury, which needed revenue to support the bureaucracy. In 989 private Chinese shipping was allowed to sail abroad for trade. Finally, after centuries of being on the receiving end of trade, in the late tenth century Chinese mariners were officially permitted to make their own trading voyages. There were tax incentives too. The proportion of inbound cargo that was automatically commandeered by the state was cut to just half and later reduced further. Boat-builders learnt to construct ocean-going vessels. They adopted inventions from the Chinese inland water trade, such as watertight compartments and sternpost rudders, but they also copied elements of the Malay ships that had been visiting their shores
for centuries. Even the name they gave these vessels –
po
– was of Malay origin.

In the years after 1069, a Song court official, Wang Anshi, pioneered reforms intended to increase government income by stimulating trade. In a very early experiment with liberal economics, import taxes were reduced and the management of trade devolved to each port. It was a success: within 20 years, the value of trade had doubled. One other reform had far-reaching consequences. The court lifted its ban on the export of copper money. The currency spread rapidly around the South China Sea trading network and Song coinage became a medium of exchange as far away as Sumatra and Java.

By 1090 Chinese ships were being allowed to sail abroad from any port, spreading the income from trade much more widely. The move also allowed Fujianese traders to break into a business previously monopolised by foreigners. And just like the foreigners, they too were obliged to follow the monsoons and wait in foreign ports for winds to change. While sojourning they began to put down roots: dedicating temples to their seafaring goddess Mazu and creating embryonic Chinatowns. Nonetheless restrictions remained. Chinese ships were only allowed to be away from port for nine months, one monsoon cycle. They could only reach as far as Sumatra before having to return home. Westward trade into the Indian Ocean remained the preserve of Arab, Indian and Srivijayan ships. However, the more adventurous Chinese merchants began to push onwards to India and the Persian Gulf regardless.