The South China Sea (7 page)

What Batchelor, an American historian, had rediscovered was a guide to the trading highways of Asia. It demolished the traditional image of seventeenth-century China as an inward-facing, isolationist power. Instead it showed a China that was engaged with the sea and, through the sea, to the wider world. It was also a picture of a region untroubled
by formal borders, where kingdoms and fiefs were all connected. The map was the product of an era when the boundaries between rulers had entirely different characters to those that divide the region today. But it was drawn at a time when the nature of those boundaries was starting to change because of battles between empires, and debates between thinkers, on the other side of the world. Those battles and debates both laid the foundations for modern international law and also imposed new ideas about boundaries that continue to disturb the waters of the South China Sea today.

The map's own biography makes that plain. It shows just how strongly connected Europe and Asia had become, even by the 1600s. It was presented to the Bodleian in 1659 after the death of its owner, John Selden, one of the most important legal figures in seventeenth-century England. In his will, Selden said the map had been ‘taken by an English commander’ though he didn't say which one. After years of diligent research, Robert Batchelor believes he knows. In the summer of 1620, a ship of the English East India Company, the
Elizabeth
, stopped at Taiwan and spotted a vessel – Chinese or Japanese – carrying among its passengers a Portuguese pilot and two Spanish priests. The captain of the
Elizabeth
, Edmund Lenmyes, used this as justification to seize the ship, its cargo and, Batchelor believes, the map.
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Selden says in his will that the English commander (whoever he was) was ‘pressed exceedingly to restore it at great ransome’ but refused to give it back to its owners. The commander must have immediately recognised the map's value.

We don't know how Selden obtained the map but he had been a Member of Parliament and knew the key investors in the English East India Company.
²
Robert Batchelor believes the map arrived in England in 1624 after a long and difficult journey. Perhaps it was sold as booty or presented as a gift to an influential patron. John Selden would have been an ideal recipient. He was right at the heart of England's political and trading elite and a pioneer of legal thinking. He's now best known for providing some of the earliest legal arguments for countries to claim territorial waters around their shores. What is less well known is that Selden's contribution, a key foundation of international law, started with an argument about a small oily fish. The fate of the European herring would be caught up in a fight over access to Asia. It was a battle about freedom of the
seas, free trade and the economic domination of the world, a battle that had its roots in discoveries a century before.

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Vasco da Gama's arrival in India in May 1498 had started well but, in a taste of things to come, relations quickly deteriorated. Being the first person to sail all the way from Europe provided initial celebrity status but his Portuguese gifts didn't impress the Zamorin of Calicut. Compared to the silks, ivories and gold the Zamorin was used to, da Gama's offering of scarlet cloaks, hats, oil and honey looked more like an insult. Worse, the Arab and Persian merchants who already handled Calicut's trade with Europe recognised the threat da Gama posed and conspired to run him out of town. The Zamorin sent him away and, lacking understanding of the monsoons, da Gama endured a terrible voyage back to Portugal, losing two-thirds of his crew. Nonetheless, he brought back enough spice to more than pay for the cost of the expedition and his sponsor, King Manuel, was delighted. By sailing around Africa, Portuguese merchants could now outflank the infidel Arabs and also break the trade monopoly formerly enjoyed by the merchants of Venice through their stranglehold over the eastern Mediterranean.

Transporting spices and other luxuries from Asia to Europe in a single sea journey was much cheaper and safer than the traditional Arab–Venetian route combining short voyages with overland caravans. The Portuguese in their modern
carracks
– able to carry both cargo and cannon – quickly came to dominate the trade. In only a few years they had a base in Goa and found their way past Calicut, across the Bay of Bengal and to the Straits of Malacca: the gateway to the Spice Islands. Unfortunately, the Sultan of Malacca had no intention of letting them through. His rule depended on taxing the trade that passed between what we now call Indonesia and Malaysia. Malacca was the new regional entrepôt, the heir to Funan and Srivijaya and rival to Majapahit. The city teemed with foreign merchants brokering trade between their ancestral homes and the rest of the known world. It held at least 100,000 residents and transients, among them Malays, Tamils, Gujaratis, Javanese, Chinese and Luçoes – traders from Luzon.

A Portuguese ambassador met the Sultan in 1509, presenting a more impressive consignment of gifts than Vasco da Gama had carried a decade
before and his countrymen were granted a ‘factory’ from which to trade. However, other merchants – in particular the Gujaratis – objected and persuaded the Sultan to arrest the Christians on charges of treason. In June 1511, Portuguese gunboats arrived under the command of Admiral Afonso de Albuquerque. As negotiations dragged on, his spies gathered intelligence about the city's defences and cultivated sympathisers among the Chinese merchants. The Sultan refused to release his captives so, on the feast of Saint James, de Albuquerque attacked. After two weeks, the Sultan fled and on 10 August 1511 Malacca fell to the Portuguese. It would remain in their control for the next 130 years.

Among de Albuquerque's fleet was a 31-year-old officer, Ferdinand Magellan. Perhaps after the battle he wandered the streets of the city and encountered the Luçoes and their tales. Ten years later, having transferred his loyalties to Spain, Magellan set off to try to reach Luzon and its gold mines from the east and, in 1521, he became the first European to reach Asia via the Pacific. As in the previous voyages, the welcome was initially warm: the ruler of the island of Cebu and most of his subjects apparently converted to Christianity. According to the scholar accompanying Magellan, Antonio Pigafetta, the islanders pulled out their finest porcelain, proof they were already trading with China. Magellan arrived with faith and steel but he underestimated the reluctance of the other islanders to submit to either Jesus or Spain. Only a month later, on 27 April 1521, Magellan was hacked to death on the island of Mactan.

The Portuguese weren't much friendlier. They despatched a fleet to intercept Magellan, eventually discovering some of the expedition's survivors aboard the ship
Trinidad
off the spice island of Tidore and promptly imprisoning them. Having fought so hard to reach the Spice Islands (the Moluccan or Maluku Islands as we know them today) from the west, the Portuguese weren't about to hand their advantage to interlopers arriving from the other direction. This was only one of many disagreements between the two Christian empires. To resolve them, the king of Spain, Charles V, married off his sister to his Portuguese counterpart and three years later wed his new brother-in-law's sister, Isabella. A later fruit of these arranged unions was the 1529 Treaty of Zaragoza. For the first time, outsiders drew a line through Southeast Asia, dividing it between European empires. Although the map-making was inexact, it resulted in
the Portuguese retaining the Spice Islands of what became Indonesia and the Spanish retaining what would become the Philippines. Five centuries later that division still exists. The Muslim rebellion in the southern Philippines and the Philippines’ continuing claim over the Malaysian province of Sabah, which prevents the two countries reaching a border agreement in the South China Sea, ultimately stem from the Treaty of Zaragoza.

The Portuguese had come to Malacca seeking mace, nutmeg and cloves but found themselves, serendipitously, at the gateway to the mysterious land that Europeans then called ‘Cathay’. With Malacca in their grasp there was no military force able to stop them pushing east, certainly not from Ming Dynasty China. After the eunuch admirals’ 30-year spell of gunboat diplomacy a century before, the navy had rotted away. The court became more concerned about threats to its northern borders and an internal financial crisis. The Ming had been the first economy in history to issue paper money – and the first to suffer hyperinflation. Worthless money couldn't keep the navy afloat.

In the decades afterwards, as the official fleets declined, an unofficial private sector had emerged to meet Chinese demand for imported goods and to supply the market for silk and porcelain in places like Cebu. At this time trade in China was supposed to be a state-owned enterprise imbued with the rituals of ‘tribute’. The southeastern province of Fujian, however, became notorious for smuggling. Its ships carried goods around the region and also took away many thousands of Fujianese to set up trading operations in distant ports. They created the first, small, Chinatowns around the shores of the South China Sea.
³
It was some of these people who assisted the Portuguese in Malacca – both in the battle and afterwards.

Encouraged by the Fujianese, the Portuguese pressed on in search of the sources of silk and porcelain. It was the Portuguese who first gave the waters east of Malacca the name by which we know them today: Mare da China or the Sea of China. Later, as they pushed towards Japan, they realised they had to distinguish the ‘South Sea of China’ from the other stretch of water off China's east coast. To the Chinese it was just ‘the sea’ or to the literate, the southern sea – the Nanhai.

The local pilots had no maps as Europeans understood the term – just their accumulated knowledge written in the form of rutters: instructions
for navigating from place to place. Those rutters also included a dose of mythology – notably a belief in the Wan-li Shi-tang. According to a Chinese account of 1178 – Chou Ch'u-fei's ‘Information on what lies beyond the passes’ – this was a long embankment in the ocean near where the waters descend into the underworld. Advised by their pilots, the Portuguese explorers also came to believe in the Wan-li Shi-tang, a vast archipelago of dangerous reefs and islands stretching all along the coast of what is now Vietnam. The Portuguese deployed the best tools Renaissance science could offer but even they were fooled. A sail-shaped Wan-li Shi-tang was copied and recopied on every map of the region for the following 300 years – until surveys in the late 1700s and early 1800s revealed that, apart from the Paracel Islands at its northerly end, it didn't actually exist. For 300 years the mistaken belief in the existence of the archipelago deterred most sailors from venturing into the centre of the South China Sea.

The ‘China’ that the Portuguese reached in the early 1500s was not a single unified state
⁴
and large parts of the southern coast were outside the control of the Ming rulers in Beijing. The Portuguese found it much easier to deal with individual merchants from Fujian than with the hostile state authorities based in the official entry port of Guangzhou. China at this time was in desperate need of one particular commodity that the Portuguese were perfectly placed to provide. The earlier hyperinflation had caused merchants to turn away from paper money and demand payments in silver. The nearest source of silver was only a short sail away in Japan but relations between the two countries were so bad that in 1549 the Ming court had banned direct sailing between them. The Portuguese showed up at exactly the right moment to become middlemen – shuttling between Nagasaki and Macao, trading Japanese silver for Chinese silk.
⁵

In 1567 the Ming emperor finally conceded the impossibility of controlling smuggling and ended – in Fujian province – the official ban on private trade. The result was an explosion of commerce – around 200 junks sailed south each monsoon.
⁶
For the first time, large private Chinese trading fleets began to outnumber those of the Southeast Asian traders who had dominated the ‘China trade’ for the previous millennium. The German scholar Angela Schottenhammer has shown how this change came to be reflected in language: the term
hai shang
– maritime merchant – began to appear in Chinese texts for the first time and even the meaning of the
Chinese word for sea itself –
hai
– shifted. In earlier times it had implied a meeting place between civilisation and the unknown. From the mid-sixteenth century onwards it lost its mystical connotations and evolved into a simple description of geography.
⁷

A further Ming reform would change not just China but the entire world. In 1570 the government gave in to the inevitable and decreed that taxes also had to be paid in silver. But there simply wasn't enough silver in China, or Japan, to meet demand. The price soared to unaffordable levels. What saved the Ming administration was the discovery of the world's largest silver mine in Potosi, 20,000 kilometres away, high up in the Spanish-controlled Andean mountains.

The Treaty of Zaragoza had allowed the Spanish to retain their toehold in the Philippines and in 1571 the heirs to Magellan established a trading base in Manila. They learnt of the rocketing price of silver across the water and so began the ‘Acapulco Trade’. For more than a century, galleons shipped around 150 tons of silver a year across the Pacific from Mexico to Manila where it was traded for gold, silks and ceramics from China. Similarly large amounts of silver travelled eastwards from Potosi, via Europe. The price of silver in China – as measured against gold – was double that in Europe. Simply by shipping Andean silver to China, exchanging it for gold and selling that gold in Europe, the Spanish Empire was able to make vast profits – and pay for its wars in Europe.
⁸
At the same time the European elite rapidly developed a taste for the luxuries of Chinese silk and porcelain.

Faced with such a ‘silver opportunity’, the Chinese population of Manila swelled, reaching 10,000 within 30 years. Most of them came from just four townships in the Jinjiang region of Fujian.
⁹
Manila became a key stop on the eastern trading route around the South China Sea. As well as silver, Fujianese shipped home the seeds of southern China's future growth – literally. The Spanish brought maize, sweet potato and peanuts from South America and farmers discovered they all grew well in the soils of southern China – leading to an agricultural revolution and a rapid increase in population.