The South China Sea (6 page)

But at home, the Song court was under increasing pressure. In 1126 it lost control of its northern lands to Jurchen invaders from Manchuria and moved its capital to Hangzhou on the eastern coast. In the resulting crisis it banned Chinese ships from sailing abroad and stopped almost all luxury imports (with the notable exception of the ivory required to make officials’ belt buckles). But even this crisis only lasted, at most, six years before the Song started to liberalise trade once again. Within 14 years trade policies had pretty much reverted to their pre-crisis positions. The imperative to trade was overwhelming. By the 1160s the expat community in Quanzhou had become so large that it required a special cemetery. Many of these traders were Muslim, Islam having taken root in Champa by this time, and they had good connections with both Muslims from the Middle East and China's growing Muslim population.

The Song Dynasty would last another century. Taken as a whole, the period from the fall of the Tang Dynasty in 906 until the fall of the Song in 1279 seems to have been an early ‘golden age’ of commerce around the South China Sea. Changes in China and India and the growth of Islamic commerce unleashed large increases in trade and wealth creation.
¹²
The most powerful of the Champa states, Vijaya, prospered at this time. Srivijaya, on the other hand, declined following an invasion from the southern Indian Chola kingdom in 1025. That allowed other ports to emerge along the coasts of Sumatra, Java, Bali, Borneo and mainland Southeast Asia. Islands in the Philippines (known as Butuan and Ma-yi in Chinese texts) start to be recorded as trading entities too. The discovery, in 1981, of a spectacular hoard of golden treasure in the Philippine city of Surigao, on the tip of Mindanao Island, suggests a wealthy Hindu-ised elite was already in place there by this time.

New commodities were being exchanged, bringing more and more people and territories into the regional, and ultimately global, trading system. But by the end of the thirteenth century, boom seems to have turned to bust. In 1275, Srivijaya's main port, Jambi, was destroyed by raiders from Java. At the same time Mongols were advancing from the north into the Song's territory. The Mongols’ eventual conquest of Fujian and Guangzhou by 1279 seems to have triggered a general decline in regional trade that lasted until they lost power almost a century later. Instead, the Sea became an arena of conflict as the Mongol ‘Yuan Dynasty’ sought influence. Kublai Khan, the ruler of the Yuan Dynasty, sent 14 maritime missions abroad and launched destructive attacks against Champa and Java in particular. Without the wealth from maritime trade, however, the Yuan Dynasty couldn't generate the surpluses needed to maintain their own power. By 1368 they were in the dustbin of history.

They were replaced by the Ming Dynasty who almost immediately tried to abolish private overseas trade and bring it, once again, entirely under state control. Trading relations officially reverted to ‘tribute’ arrangements rather than the open market and Guangzhou was designated the ‘legitimate’ port for ships from Southeast Asia. But after nearly four centuries of private trading by Chinese merchants and with an infrastructure of agents and family networks in place around the region, unofficial trade was never eliminated, particularly among the entrepreneurs of Fujian province. In
the end the smuggling became dominant, particularly when Chinese communities abroad started to use the ‘tribute’ trade as cover. In time the Ming would turn their backs on the sea and focus on inland problems, but not before the most spectacular assertion of Chinese state power in the sea: the 30 years of the ‘eunuch voyages’.

* * * * * *

Geoff Wade is an Australian historian, a level-headed expert on the Ming Dynasty and its written annals, the
Ming Shi-lu
. But if you want to upset him, just ask about the writer Gavin Menzies and his book
1421: the Year China Discovered the World
, describing the alleged exploits of the Chinese eunuch admiral Zheng He. Wade is derisive. Menzies’ book, he says, ‘is quite remarkable in that not one of the claims made in the volume has any veracity whatsoever. The eunuch admirals that he claims circumnavigated the world did not travel past Africa, there are no Chinese or other texts which support the voyages suggested, there has been no Chinese shipwreck found beyond Asia, and there are no Ming settlement sites or structures beyond Asia. That a fiction of this scale could be published and marketed as non-fiction is a damning indictment of Mr Menzies, but even more so of his publisher.’
¹³
Wade might get angrier than most but this is the generally held view among professional historians about Menzies’ claims.

Menzies may have invented large parts of his account but there's no doubt that Zheng He was a fascinating historical figure: a Muslim from Yunnan who was captured during the Ming invasions and castrated, and who later helped the third Ming emperor win a succession battle for the throne. Zheng is now so widely known that it's hard to believe there was a time when he was an obscure figure. That changed in October 1984 when the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping used the admiral to justify his ‘open door’ policy of engagement with the West in a speech to the Communist Party's Central Advisory Commission. In the years since, Zheng has become the poster boy for Beijing's policy of ‘peaceful rise’, an exemplar of China's engagement with the world. In 2004 the man responsible for organising the huge commemorations marking the 600th anniversary of the admiral's first voyage, Vice-Minister of Communications Xu Zu-yuan, summarised the official view of his achievements. ‘These were thus friendly
diplomatic activities,’ he declared. ‘During the overall course of the seven voyages to the Western Ocean, Zheng did not occupy a single piece of land, establish any fortress or seize any wealth from other countries. In the commercial and trade activities, he adopted the practice of giving more than he received, and thus he was welcomed and lauded by the people of the various countries along his routes.’
¹⁴

However, Geoff Wade argues that this account of Zheng is almost as misleading as Gavin Menzies’ version. Wade's study of the
Ming Shi-lu
has revealed there were 25 voyages led by several different eunuch commanders in the years between 1403 and the early 1430s, of which Zheng led only five. The vast majority of the voyages were to Southeast Asia but Zheng became famous because his ships went much further – around the Indian Ocean. Wade argues that the voyages were not peace missions but clear shows of force. Each expedition – of between 50 and 250 ships – carried over 20,000 troops armed with the most advanced weapons of their time. The purpose was clearly to shock and awe. On the first voyage, ordered in 1405, Zheng stopped in Palembang on Sumatra where he chased down a fugitive from the Ming court, Chen Zu-yi. Five thousand people were reported killed in the fighting. On the same voyage Zheng's armada fought an army in Java, which Wade believes probably belonged to Majapahit, China's rival for supremacy in the South China Sea at the time. On another voyage, in 1411, Zheng invaded a Sri Lankan city, destroyed its military, appointed a puppet ruler and took the king back to China. In 1415 he intervened in a civil war in Sumatra and there are also suggestions that his forces committed atrocities on the Arabian Peninsula.
¹⁵

Wade argues that the fact that so many rulers and ambassadors were transported to China on board Zheng's ships suggests they must have been coerced into travelling and that this coercion gave the Ming Dynasty access to ports and shipping lanes. In 1405 the admiral established a garrison in Malacca (Melaka in Malay), a city established just three years before, which enabled Ming forces to control the Straits in which it sits. He awarded the ruler a kingship in return. The overall purpose of the voyages appears to have been two-fold: to control trade routes and to give the usurping emperor legitimacy at home through the enforced paying of homage to him by foreign rulers. This is a long way from the official picture of the ‘outstanding envoy of peace and friendship’ promoted by Beijing. In the
end, this ‘gunboat diplomacy’ lasted just 30 years. Jealous court officials curbed the eunuch's powers. Policy priorities turned inwards: Zheng's maps were burned and his boats left to rot away. China didn't possess another naval ship capable of reaching the islands of the South China Sea until it was given one by the United States 500 years later.

But the Chinese Communist Party knows that myth is stronger than history and Zheng the kindly diplomat still sets sail whenever ‘maritime cooperation’ needs to be discussed in Southeast Asia or an investment deal celebrated in East Africa. ‘Official history’ plays a vital role in Communist China generally, as even a brief visit to the National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square will attest. It buttresses the Party's right to rule and denigrates rivals. Once a particular historical narrative becomes Party dogma, challenging it becomes a career-limiting act of dissent. Supporting it with evidence brings rewards.

In 1986, China's State Administration of Cultural Heritage created an Underwater Archaeological Heritage Centre (UWARC) to be managed by the National Museum. The decision was prompted, in part, by a fear that China was losing its ‘ownership’ of faraway shipwrecks to well-financed foreign excavators. But it also had another purpose. UWARC's first open-water expedition was to the Chinese-occupied but Vietnamese-claimed Paracel Islands. In March 1999 the centre's director, Zhang Wei, announced that his divers had recovered 1,500 relics dating from 907, ‘proving that the Chinese were the earliest inhabitants’ of the Paracels. Less partisan archaeologists guffawed. In 907 the Tang Dynasty had just fallen so it is conceivable that the wreck could have been from one of the very first ships ever to sail from the newly independent state of Minnan. However, it's much more likely that the vessel was Malay or Arab. Chinese pottery was traded all around the region, and beyond. The presence of pottery on any shoal is no more proof of Chinese historical possession than the presence of thousands of cowry shells in a Bronze Age tomb in the Chinese city of Anyang is proof that Henan Province should rightfully belong to the Philippines.

Zhang, the Centre's original director, was not appointed to be an independent analyst of historical evidence. When presenting UWARC to the International Council on Monuments and Sites in 2005, Zhang explained that the organisation was preparing ‘one or two excavations of shipwrecks
in the Nansha Islands’ and that: ‘The results from the excavation can demonstrate that China has the unarguable sovereignty of the South China Sea Islands.’
¹⁶
There is a symbiotic relationship between the Centre and Chinese foreign policy. UWARC has a budget that other archaeologists in the region can only dream about.
¹⁷
Its ‘research base’ in the city of Qingdao alone cost $24 million and UWARC has other centres in Hubei, Hainan and Fujian plus a new research vessel.
¹⁸
The excavation of the ‘Nanhai One’ shipwreck in the mouth of the Pearl River was funded to the tune of $150 million. And UWARC repays the favour with loyal service to the state: finding ‘evidence’ that reinforces the official history and thus the narrative of China's indisputable sovereignty in the South China Sea.

Across that sea, other underwater archaeologists have found it more difficult to research an alternative narrative. In April 2012, a joint Franco-Filipino expedition organised by the National Museum in Manila was investigating a wreck on the Scarborough Shoal, 220 kilometres west of the main island of the Philippines, Luzon. Based on board a support ship, the MV
Sarangani
, they were following best practice: investigating the site in situ, non-commercially and with the intention of publishing their findings for others to review. But then a Chinese Marine Surveillance ship arrived and ordered them to leave – on the grounds that the wreck belonged to China. Only Chinese archaeologists would be allowed to investigate the site so that they could again find ‘evidence’ of indisputable Chinese sovereignty.

Despite these difficulties, archaeologists such as Victor Paz, Peter Bellwood, Wilhelm Solheim, Pierre-Yves Manguin and all their colleagues have accumulated enough evidence to tell a very different story about the South China Sea: that it was a polyglot place of exchange and trade where questions of sovereignty were utterly different from the way they are posed today. Until the early sixteenth century, a series of Indianised
mandalas
dominated maritime Southeast Asia. There was no neat succession from one power centre to the next. Their ascents were gradual, as were their falls, and for long periods they coexisted – sometimes peacefully, often not. Funan, in the Mekong Delta, held sway from the first to the fourth century; Champa, in what is now central Vietnam, from the sixth until the fifteenth; Srivijaya, on Sumatra, from the seventh until the twelfth; Angkor, in the lower Mekong, from the early ninth century to the 1430s;
Majapahit, on Java, from the twelfth to the sixteenth; and Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula, from the early fifteenth until the Portuguese arrived in the early sixteenth. At times the governing power on the north shore of the South China Sea, the area that today we call China, intervened in the affairs of the other polities – but rarely and only for limited periods. In no sense did any state or people ‘own’ the Sea. In September 1975 Deng Xiaoping is said to have told his Vietnamese counterpart Le Duan that the islands of the South China Sea ‘have belonged to China since ancient times’.
¹⁹
The phrase appeared in public for the first time in three Chinese publications in November 1975.
²⁰
The words have been repeated innumerable times since but, as we shall see, a review of the evidence tells us that this sense of ownership is not ancient, but very recent.

CHAPTER 2

Maps and Lines

1500 to 1948

I
N
J
ANUARY
2008, in the light- and humidity-controlled basement of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, about 5,500 nautical miles from the Spratly Islands, Robert Batchelor unrolled a document that has radically changed our understanding of the history of the South China Sea. It was a map, a metre and a half long by a metre wide, covering what we now call East and Southeast Asia: from Japan in the northeast to Sumatra and Timor in the south. It was also a work of art. During the 350 years it had been in the library, many people had admired its delicately painted ‘mountain water’ scenes: the pale green sea fringed with bamboo, pine and sandalwood trees; hills, rivers and plants drawn as they might be seen in life. But what Batchelor spotted – which no-one else had noticed for centuries – was a network of pale lines radiating from the southern Chinese port of Quanzhou. The lines linked Quanzhou with almost every port in the region: from Nagasaki to Manila, Malacca and beyond. More surprisingly, each route was marked with navigational instructions: Chinese compass bearings and indications of distance.