Imagined Geographies is a pioneering work in the study of history and geography of the pre-1800 world. In this book, Gunn argues that different regions astride the maritime silk roads were not only interconnected but can also be construed as “imagined geographies.” Taking a grand civilizational perspective, five such geographic imaginaries are examined across respective chapters, namely Indian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and European including an imagined Great South Land. Drawing upon an array of marine and other archaeological examples, the author offers compelling evidence of the intertwining of political, cultural, and economic regions across the sea silk roads from ancient times until the seventeenth century. Through a thorough analysis of these five geographic imaginaries, the author sets aside purely national history and looks at the maritime realm from a broader spatial perspective. He challenges the Eurocentric concept of center and periphery and establishes a revisionist view on a decentered world regional history. This book will definitely interest history lovers from all around the world who wants to know more about how their forebears viewed their respective region and how their region fits into world history with local uniqueness.

Geoffrey C. Gunn is professor emeritus at Nagasaki University, Japan. Besides earlier books with a world history theme, as with Overcoming Ptolemy: The Revelation of an Asian World Region, he has published a number of country studies on East-Southeast Asia, some with translations into Portuguese, French, Indonesian, and Chinese. He is the author of History Without Borders: The Making of an Asian World Region, 1000–1800 (HKUP, 2011) and editor of Wartime Macau: Under the Japanese Shadow (HKUP, 2016).

“Gunn takes large themes and makes them understandable. He is not afraid to make the grand statement, and to look at the sweep of history all in one arc. I admire that greatly; this is not history for the faint of heart. But it is history well-done, and history that can show the forest from the trees.”

—Eric Tagliacozzo, John Stambaugh Professor of History, Cornell University

“This is one of the most ambitious and insightful books that I have read on pre-Modern maritime Asia. The author offers fascinating perspectives on how this vast region was imagined, charted, and experienced over many centuries. That requires mastery of an immense range of scholarship and primary sources. His aim is to knit this watery world together into a conceptual whole. This mission is accomplished with style and discipline.”

—Andrew R. Wilson, John A. van Beuren Chair of Asia-Pacific Studies, U.S. Naval War College

Imagined Geographies

The Maritime Silk Roads in World History, 100–1800

Geoffrey C. Gunn

Hong Kong University Press

The University of Hong Kong

Pokfulam Road

Hong Kong

https://hkupress.hku.hk

© 2021 Hong Kong University Press

ISBN 978-988-8528-65-3 (Hardback)

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Arrival of the Southern Barbarians in Nagasaki (南蠻人來朝之圖).

Courtesy of the Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture, Nagasaki, Japan.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I. Moving beyond National History

II. Imagined Geographies/Geographical Imaginaries

III. Unpacking Area Studies and the Importance of Scale

IV. Islamization

V. Sinicization

VI. The Chapters

Part I: Writings

Chapter 1: Writing a Decentered World Regional History

I. Historiographical Trends in World Regional History Analysis

II. Between China and India: An Essential Southeast Asia?

III. European Exceptionalism?

IV. East Asia Regionalism and the Framing of World Region

V. European Imaginaries on an East-Southeast Asia Region

Conclusion

Part II: Imaginaries

Chapter 2: An Indian Imaginary

I. Indian Civilizational Influences in the India-China Interzone

II. Deeper Patterns from Prehistory

III. The Indian Trade and Civilizational Transfer

IV. The Archaeological Record from the India-China Interzone

Conclusion

Chapter 3: Arab Geographic Imaginaries

I. Arab Trade and Islamic Conversion

II. Arab/Muslim Geographies of Asia

III. Arab Navigational Primacy

IV. Ninth-Century Arab Merchant Accounts as Translated by Renaudot

Conclusion

Chapter 4: Geographic Imaginaries from the Chinese Tradition

I. The China-Centered Tribute Trade System Explained

II. Chinese Monks to India and the Making of an India Imaginary

III. Song China Appraised

IV. A Song Dynasty World Imaginary

V. A Chinese South Seas Priority under the Mongol-Yuan Dynasty?

VI. The Early Ming-Era Voyages of the Muslim Admiral Zheng He

VII. Chinese Maritime Prowess and Cartographic Empowerment

Conclusion

Chapter 5: Japanese Geographic Imaginaries: The Tokugawa Invention of a Japan-Centered International Order

I. Japan’s Tribute Trade with China and the Korea Connection

II. Accommodating the Nanbanjin

III. Accommodating Other Asians

IV. Japanese Geographic Imaginaries

Conclusion

Chapter 6: Geographic Imaginaries of an Austral Land

I. European Discovery Narratives

II. Manuel Godinho de Erédia’s Australia

III. Portuguese-Dutch Navigations

IV. The Macassan Connection

V. A Chinese Imaginary of Australia

Conclusion

Part III: Evidence

Chapter 7: Connecting Up the Dots on Global Port Cities

I. Port Cities of the Middle East–Indian Ocean Circuit: The Greco-Roman World of Seafaring

II. Islamic World Ports

III. Southeast Asian Circuits

IV. The South China and East China Sea Circuits

Conclusion

Chapter 8: The Evidence from Marine Archaeology

I. Ceramic Trade as a Proxy for Early Trade Activity and the Rise and Fall of Port Cities

II. Key Marine Archaeology Sites across the Indian Ocean

III. Early Modern Trade Polities in East-Southeast Asia: The Evidence from European Shipwrecks

Conclusion

Part IV: Examples/Alternative Realms

Chapter 9: The Ryukyu Trade Networks Revisited

I. Precious Documents: The Rekidai Hoan

II. Ming China and the Ryukyu Tribute Trade

III. The Ryukyu-Korea Trade

IV. The Ryukyu–Southeast Asian Trade

V. Dual Subordination: Between the Qing and the Tokugawa Bakufu

Conclusion

Chapter 10: Configuring Macau on the World Map

I. Portuguese Macau Exceptionalism

II. Early Jesuit Mapping of Ming China

III. The Jesuit Astronomical Project in Macau

IV. Macau Mapped According to European Conventions/Macau and Pacific Ocean Exploration

V. Macau in the Chinese Xylographic/Cartographic Tradition

Conclusion

Afterword

I. Alternative Realms

II. The Rise and Fall of the Thirteenth-Century World System

III. Autonomist or Borderless Histories?

References

Index

Acknowledgments

Since publishing History Without Borders: The Making of an Asian World Region, 1000–1800 in 2011, interest in world history texts has multiplied not only in volume but also in sophistication, including attempts to theorize the discipline as it has emerged across many global centers and institutions. Fundamentally though, world history or any kind of history is largely written by people sitting in armchairs, and indeed the advent of the internet even obviates visits to libraries. Still, as I look out my window upon the East China Sea faintly visible beyond the narrow fjord-like harbor of Nagasaki, a city where I mostly reside, or indeed the vista of the South China Sea as I behold it when in my alternate residence in Macau, I do have a slightly different perspective on the world than my fellows who stayed home. I recall pioneer world historian the late Jack Wills Jr. telling a younger audience in Macau around 1998, probably then reflecting upon his recent visit to the Moluccas, or spice islands, in Indonesia, that you simply have to visit these places if you want to achieve deeper understanding. Well, in this vein, I also recall my earlier journeys and sojourns across the maritime silk roads, including a long time in the eastern archipelago (including the nations known as Timor-Leste, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, and Malaysia); the two coasts of India including Sri Lanka; the “Swahili coast” of Africa; Gulf of Aqaba and Red Sea ports including Massawa, then under Ethiopian control; and an eye-opening year among the Greco-Roman ruins in the Socialist People’s Arab Jamahiriya on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. Besides traversing the seas and oceans I describe—some in native craft when it comes to the archipelago—as with many others of my generation I also managed to crisscross the overland silk roads connecting Turkey with India via Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. I suspect that few if any readers of this book will ever visit the crescent of port cities mentioned here, much less the land routes, although I would not hold you back from making the attempt. Still, it is one thing to connect up the dots on the map and another to investigate the locales they represent, as with those who actually conduct marine archaeology or terrestrial excavations, those who read and decipher ancient scripts, those who curate museums, and those who conduct carbon-dating tests. I am not among them, though I remain in thrall to their skills and labors. On a more personal level, during a visit to Okinawa in 2002—a subject treated in Chapter 9—I was privileged to learn first-hand from leading Japanese scholar of the longue durée in East Asia, Hamashita Takeshi, the fine details on how the Ryukyu kings received the visiting envoys at Shuri Castle with respect to court protocol.

Strictly speaking, the core chapters of this book first emerged as conference papers presented at the Department of History, University of Macau, between 2014 and 2018. In particular, I wish to acknowledge the enterprise of former head of department Chuxiong George Wei and his successor, Wang Di, in hosting these events, and especially for exposing me to broader scholarship on maritime Asia, including work by Chinese scholars. Likewise, I am grateful to readers of the manuscript for their respective critical appraisals and advice. Chapter 1 has been adapted from my published article, “East-Southeast Asia in World History: The Making of a World Region,” TRaNS: Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia (Vol. 2, Issue 1, 2014: 5–30) (© Cambridge University Press, reprinted with permission). I am also obliged to Yoon Hwan Shin for hosting the conference at Sogang University in Seoul, where this paper was first presented. Some parts of Chapter 6 are derived from my article, “The Timor–Macao Sandalwood Trade and the Asian Discovery of the Great South Land?,” Review of Culture, no. 53 (2016): 125–48, published by the Cultural Affairs Bureau of the Macao SAR government. Thanks also to Toulouse-based geographer and Asia specialist Frédéric Durand, who drafted the maps.

Plate 1: Candi Bima, Dieng Plateau, central Java, c. ninth century CE. Source: author, 1980.

Plate 2: Vishnu, Candi Srikandi, Dieng Plateau, central Java, c. ninth century CE. Source: author, 1980.

Plate 3: Borobudur ship. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borobudur_ship#/media/File:Borobudur_ship.JPG.

Plate 4: “Four kinds of ships which Bantenese use.” Source: Part 3 of Johann Theodor de Bry (1561–1623) and Johann Isreal de Bry’s (1565–1609) Orientalische Indien (“Little Voyages”), Dritter Theil indiae orientalis . . . Frankfurt: 1599 (first edition). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Four_Kind_of_Ships_which_Bantenese_Use_de_Bry.jpg

Plate 5: Al-Idrisi’s world map rotated 180 degrees, c. 1154 (early fifteenth-century version), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Al-Idrisi%27s_world_map_Rotated_180_degrees.JPG.

Plate 6: Selden map in the Bodleian Library, Dongxiyang hanghai tu (Nautical chart of the eastern and western seas), c. 1620. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selden_Map#/media/File:Selden_map.jpg.

Plate 7: Chikyū bankoku sankai yochi zenzusetsu Nagakubo, Sekisui, 1717–1801, 改正地球萬國全圖 Kaisei Chikyū bankoku zenzu (revised map of the world). Source: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, https://www.loc.gov/item/gm71005079/.

Plate 8: Nanban byōbu screen portraying the arrival in Nagasaki of the great ships from Macau (section, left side). Source: Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture.

Plate 9: Nanban byōbu screen portraying the procession of the capitão-mor and priests in Nagasaki (section, right side). Source: Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture.

Plate 10: Typical Greek and Roman sherds excavated Berenice (Benghazi). Source: author.

Plate 11: Hoi An wreck treasures, private shop window, Hoi An. Source: author.

Plate 12: Hoi An wreck treasures, private shop window, Hoi An. Source: author.

Plate 13: Nova tavoa hydrographica do mar de novas teras do sul, Manuel Godinho de Erédia, c. 1602. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Hydrographic_Map_of_the_Sea_and_New_Southern_Lands-_Made_by_the_Cosmographer_and_Mathematician_Emanuel_Godinho_de_Eredia_WDL852.png.

Plate 14: Qi sheng yan hai tu. 七省沿海图 Coastal map of China. Qing Guangxu 7 nian, 1881. Scale c. 1:760,000. Late Qing coastal defense map, area surrounding Macau including Pearl River delta only. Source: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, https://lccn.loc.gov/gm71005022.

Introduction

Today we cannot imagine world or global history without acknowledging a Eurasian or even an Afro-Eurasian exchange reaching back to ancient silk roads. In fact, it is a fashion given new immediacy with Chinese president Xi Jinping’s invocation of the Belt and Road Initiative spanning both maritime and terrestrial tangents and with his Maritime Silk Road vision announced during his visit to Indonesia in October 2013. The notion that the sea silk route should be institutionally celebrated was also demonstrated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) back to the early 1990s. But just as new evidence revealed by marine and other archaeological discovery in the previous few decades has fed into new scholarship, so in this book we seek to read out new interpretations of the premodern sea silk road literally connecting Rome with China. With interconnectivity and exchange at its heart, it is an approach that brings to the fore a novel appreciation of the pivotal place of the sea passages linking the Indian and Pacific Oceans. By the second century CE, maritime traders had mastered the changing wind patterns of the South Asian and East Asian monsoons, allowing them to make both coastal and open-ocean voyages from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea and return. Across the centuries the maritime connection would become paradigmatic of civilizational exchange. This was especially instanced from the early centuries of the first millennium with the Sanskritic transfer arriving from across the Bay of Bengal to the region now known as Southeast Asia. This was also the case with respect to the arrival of Islam in the archipelago first attested in the thirteenth century, such as that carried by seaborne traders arriving from India or Arab lands leading to the establishment of religious beachheads, the setting up of Sultanates, and with conversions still ongoing.

Since recorded history global regions have been distinguished from each other by culturally assigned criteria. In this sense, geographic imaginaries are also called into play in consideration of the ways that space is represented mentally and cartographically across civilizations and time. What also appears to be necessary in the articulation of regional world history is a double sense of long time and grand space. It is an approach that sets aside purely national history, especially as the spatial ordering of the world cannot be taken for granted. History is never linear. Rather, it is multivalent. Even the best resourced and researched history is ultimately mediated through subjective experience. Most histories are imagined, if not contrived. And so are geographies and even sailings. As historian Roderich Ptak (2018: 235) has written, even relative to the crossings of the terrestrial silk roads, we can associate sailing corridors such as those linking China with the Afro-Asian world “with a strong mental component.” The notion that a sea route is a mental construct or “only exists in our minds” is something that this work also ponders.

Especially in consideration of the space or corridor linking China with India and farther west, my research seeks to demonstrate just how a series of interconnected historical world regions emerged in their own right long before the age of high European imperialism. For example, the Roman or Hellenic world calls down one sense of historical region. The Hindu-Buddhist world embracing the subcontinent including Sri Lanka appears cogent. The broader Sanskrit or Buddhist cosmopolis such as it touched both maritime and mainland Southeast Asia also appears as a coherent world-historical region, but even this has been challenged. The Sinic world at the core appears obvious but not so its boundaries or reach across the oceans. Over long periods and across civilizations, distantly apprehended geographic evocations of place present themselves as imaginaries, subjective understandings, or otherings fitting local values or conventions. Universal values to the degree that they have gained acceptance today were far over the horizon in ancient Rome, Catholic Europe, the Islamic caliphates, Ming China, or Tokugawa Japan, to strike just a few examples of powerful centrisms.

Intellectual fashions wax and wane, just as new paradigms replace the old. Indeed, practitioners of connected world history have pushed the envelope of research by identifying the corridors and circuits within them literally linking the seas and littorals of, respectively, the Mediterranean, the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian subcontinent, and the intervening islands and land reaching to China, Korea, and Japan. Yet another body of scholarship, notably that related to the Sino world, imposes its own dimension and scaling with special attention to the impact of China’s tribute-envoy system upon the maritime world from the Ryukyu Islands to the Malacca Straits and Java Sea and even touching the Indian subcontinent.

As I have elaborated elsewhere (Gunn 2003; 2018b), the calibration of the vast Afro-Eurasian world was well known to the ancients at both ends of the silk roads connecting China with Rome. Nowhere was this world better understood than by the first-century CE Alexandria-based astronomer Ptolemy. Drawing upon Babylonian and well as Greco-Roman understandings of the known world—a tricontinental picture—the Alexandrian also bequeathed the now-familiar concept of latitude and longitude, with longitude measured east or west of a prime meridian (today centered on Greenwich), as well as a method to produce maps based on astronomical data. Although highly inaccurate with regard to regions east of the Mediterranean, once revived in late medieval Europe, the Ptolemaic template would become a standard down until the early modern age, also taken on board by cartographers, Muslim included. Such Ptolemaic riddles as the true location and calibration of the Golden Chersonese or Malay Peninsula including the Straits of Malacca, Singapore, and Sumatra, and the Sinus Magnus (Great Gulf) or China seas—critical in the European age of discovery—not to mention the scaling and mapping of China conducted by European missionaries in the service of the Qing, proved to be a millennium-long quest. Even setting aside the disambiguation of Terra Australis (Australia) from the Antarctic landmass (only demonstrated in the early 1800s), the quest to correct and adjust Ptolemy would not completely end until the last oceanic atoll found its place in a world mapping graticule. In a word, the Ptolemaic datum point and legacy cannot be ignored in interrogating ancient, medieval, European Renaissance, and even early modern renditions of Asian space.

To illustrate the point—and the theme—a small number of discretely connected sites lending to a world regional framing are highlighted. They include such termini ports as Siraf in the Persian Gulf, connected to Quanzhou on the eastern seaboard of China; a key maritime destination astride the Malacca Straits (Palembang in southern Sumatra) leading to India in one direction and Java and Timor in another; a single multiport trading site linking Northeast Asia with both maritime and mainland Southeast Asia (Ryukyu); and, from the mid-1500s onward, another site associated with East-West commercial activity—namely, Portuguese-administered Macau, directly linked to Nagasaki in southwestern Japan in the silk-for-silver trade. If we read history correctly, we may see in this study a premonition of the present age of networked businesses where once again East-Northeast Asians and others partner with South and Southeast Asians (notwithstanding the transformations engendered in modern national economies in line with the prevailing rules governing interstate relations).

I. Moving beyond National History

Obviously, there are many ways to write a history without national blinkers. We could examine intellectual, cultural, or religious exchanges across cultures and even civilizations. We could just examine trade and commerce, drawing out answers to such questions as accumulation on a world scale, center-periphery dynamics, and others that animate economic historians. We could proceed in ways that examine commodity chains, for example, the way that spices and other exotics sourced from remote locations end up in distant marketplaces. Or, in a similar vein, we could explain how precious items like porcelain from China end up in royal palaces in the Middle East or Europe or even in tribal settings where they are venerated as semisacred items. Or we could investigate the global arbitrage trade in silver that was closely examined by Adam Smith.

The craft of world or global history writing today also calls up some sense of the cyclical (not excluding East Asian dynastic cycles), along with the demographic, the environmental, and the economic, as with the forty-five- to fifty-five-year wave pattern described by Nikolai Kondratiev. More so than ever before, findings from marine archaeology actually help to outline the sinews of the ancient maritime silk roads connecting the seas and oceans. In fact, all of these approaches are called into play to demonstrate global connections as well as intraregional correlations across time. While Rosetta Stones are not found every day, it is also true that major archaeological discoveries, including in marine archaeology, continue to revolutionize our understandings of ancient trade and commerce.

Practically by definition, world history is not national history, although it can be so subverted. Still, to lay my cards on the table, where these histories are autonomous or build upon privileged access to palace archives or arcane texts, national perspectives cannot be ignored. For better or worse, the lion’s share of historical research is conducted or mediated under national auspices. Research visas are vetted, access may be limited, and patronage denied. As Sebastian Conrad (2017: 4), author of What Is Global History?, explains, with its assault on national history, global history has a polemical bent insofar as it “aims to effect a change in the organization and institutional order of knowledge.” Nevertheless, authors of global histories do not seek to replace national histories with total histories or histories of the planet. Neither do they necessarily write macrohistory. Rather, and close to the approach adopted in this book, Conrad (12) continues, “It is often more a matter of writing a history of demarcated (i.e., ‘non-global’) spaces, but with an awareness of global connections and structural conditions.”

The zeitgeist of the age is also telling as with new intellectual currents and interests. Fresh understandings, such as those emerging from environmental and even epidemiological studies, can be important in shaping historical writing. The global dissemination of ideas is another by-product of the scientific age, and world historians are also beneficiaries of the digital revolution. As Conrad (2017: 2), puts it, “Writing history in the twenty-first century is not what it used to be,” inter alia suggesting that the way historians use this technology has affected their thinking, as with assimilating competing narratives and (hopefully) taking heed of a diversity of voices. Still, a feature of my approach is to combine pioneer investigations dating back to the efforts of the first Orientalist scholars with present-day ongoing research and drawing upon local as well as international expertise. But where the Orientalist generation trained in epigraphy tended to focus upon the monumental, today the application of modern technologies such as carbon dating, remote sensing, and aerial surveillance have vastly improved our understanding. As the editors of a collection touching upon historical links between China and Southeast Asia have remarked, the field is now so large and complex that a synthesis of ideas, approaches, and information seems desirable (Tagliacozzo and Chang 2011: 13). This is all the more so given that no single scholar can handle all the requisite languages, geographies, and events. To be sure, few historians master multiple working languages across cultures, and practically all stand on the shoulders of earlier generations of researchers.

World regional history analysis might thus be seen as spinning out of a convergence of intellectual interests and fashions. The name and impact of French Annales school historian Fernand Braudel (1975) merits particular attention, especially with his stress on geography (the Mediterranean) and the longue durée. Indian Ocean studies appears to have developed separately, with major contributions on “segments” or circuits from both local and nonlocal authors. With his concern for unequal exchange, core-periphery exploitation, and world markets, Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1974, 1979, 1984, 1989, 2004) world-system approach has been a compelling addition to the lexicon of post-Columbian history. As a globo-centric approach that places Asia outside of European incorporation until the nineteenth century, Wallerstein also calls up a literature of critical response. Especially for want of perspective, such an approach tends to underestimate premodern geohistorical formations. But a second generation of scholars of oceans and trade has also drawn upon Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis, notably sharing a concern for his core concepts.

In particular, one who has worked from inside a world-system perspective, and to whom I shall refer in subsequent discussions, is Janet Abu-Lughod (1989: 4), especially what she dubs the “Thirteenth-Century World System.” Observing a particularly high cultural level of efflorescence in the thirteenth century, such as was achieved from one end of the Indian Ocean circuits to the other, especially via the agency of Arab traders, she describes this period as an important prelude and corrective to a “modern” world system based on European hegemony. While the West would eventually forge ahead with the faltering of the Thirteenth-Century World System, up until that time, the Orient was far advanced. No matter the range of critical discussion on world-system theory, all parties to the debate are wedded to the view that the wellspring of historical change is to be found in global interactions (Lewis and Wigen 1997: 136–37; Vink 2007: 43–52).

II. Imagined Geographies/Geographical Imaginaries

Just as maps sets and imaginaria date back to ancient Greece and Rome in the Western tradition, so it is not difficult to seek out in other civilizations and traditions mental maps and tropes, especially when it comes to rendering space. In particular, this applied to empires and it still holds. Although the measurement of global space goes back to ancient Babylonia through the Alexandrians, for most of the past two millennia the geography of lands and nations stood outside of cartesian space (or that of René Descartes’ usage). In some traditions, kingdoms positioned themselves as radiant centers or mandalas. In both Christendom and the Islamic world, overlords emerged as defenders of their faith. In yet other traditions, emperors purported to rule everything under heaven. Almost everywhere pomp and ceremony ruled. Frequently, control of labor and minds eclipsed notions of territory, and barbarian others and war captives were relegated to outcast status.

Since Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), the notion of imagined histories and geographies has gathered intellectual force, as with Benedict Anderson’s (1983) concept of “imagined communities” or, from another tangent, a newfound concern for identity and even identity politics. In this light, geographies can be viewed as instruments of power serving to “other,” exclude, alienate, or to suborn. As Said argued, in the discourse of European Orientalism, “Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant.” For Said (1978: 56–58) it is Europe that “articulates” the Orient, with its roots in antiquity with the Greco-Persian Wars of 480 BCE resulting in Alexander the Great’s push eastward to the Indus Valley. Mentally, this led to the creation of a new taxonomy and the subdivision of Asia into realms (regions actually) of those conquered and known versus those unknown and awaiting conquest, including the Near Orient and Far Orient. Old World and, after Columbus, New World distinctions (although at the time it was mistaken for part of the Old World) are not excluded from such mental apprehension as in “the mind’s geography.”

To be sure, Said’s classic went on to spawn a major critical literature, with Said entering the fray with new editions and commentaries. For example, Kim M. Phillips (2014: 2–3; chap. 1) draws attention to a “distinctive European perspective on Asia during the era 1245–1510,” at a time when attitudes were little touched by colonial mentalities. Contrary to Said’s major concern with postmedieval attitudes, as Phillip’s intervention reminds us, we should also be alert to era. Moreover, Said’s preoccupation with the Middle East leads him to ignore the true Eastern Hemisphere. With China at its core, the Eastern Hemisphere as identified by Ptolemy was hardly known in “Western” classical antiquity aside from vague allusions to sources of silks and spices. Even when attested by Marco Polo under the Mongol Khanate, China was still vaguely rendered as Cathay (and still is in Russian and some other languages), with the true China (now under the Ming) only revealed and identified by the first-arriving Jesuit missionaries in the late sixteenth century. In other words, the classical world was also polycentric across the vast Eurasian landmass when we consider the rise and fall of civilizations. That which was not Asia on the Eurasian continent was loosely Europe, and that which was not Europe was Asia, although the Hellenic-Roman world of the eastern Mediterranean was part of both worlds and before it, Phoenicia. From Roman times, India was connected east and west via its Indian Ocean trading networks and with major Hindu-Buddhist outliers in the region we now know as mainland and maritime Southeast Asia. From 800 onward, Islamic caliphates and empires dominated swathes of Afro-Eurasia, Persia and Mughal India included. With even longer continuity the central kingdom of China remained the major civilizational influence in East Asia, bringing Japan, Vietnam, and Korea within its cultural orbit, standing as well at the core of a powerful tribute trading network reaching even the extremes of the Indian Ocean at its apogee under the early Ming emperors.

While conventional world histories typically elaborated upon the rise and fall of empires and, in the Saidian version, physical and political-ideological conquest, there was also flux and borrowing. Alongside the sinews of trade connecting East and West—such as testified to by the evidence produced by marine archaeological research—there were also significant transfers of ideas, philosophies, and religions. Elsewhere I termed this the “Eurasian exchange” (Gunn 2003). Many books and treatises have addressed these issues, but the focus of this study turns precisely upon the geographic. Geographies, whether Orientalist or not, tended to be compiled from data supplied by travelers, including sailors, traders, and missionaries. Marco Polo’s Travels is one such work. Ibn Battuta’s Travels, the work of an early fourteenth-century Morocco-born traveler, fed into an Islamic tradition. The early Ming voyages of Admiral Zheng He likewise produced a range of spinoffs, as in Chinese geographic writing on the Indian Ocean trade. Needless to say, such empirical works fed into cartographies, many culture-bound and many fanciful, comprising a range of imagined geographies. Successive chapters in this book likewise refer back to the mapping, charting, and arranging of space in civilizational context.

III. Unpacking Area Studies and the Importance of Scale

As with cartography, we cannot imagine space without reference to scale: small scale with regard to world maps and globes, large scale as with city map and province-level maps, and perhaps, intermediate scale with respect to world regions. Map projection matters because projections can produce their own distortions. In a word, boundaries that encompass space are also constructs, although they are not physical as with mountains, rivers, and seas. And for regions without a core, riven by mountain ranges and inaccessible forests, divided by rivers and seas, albeit navigable—such as would fit what has been labeled Southeast Asia—then special caution is required. My point is that all imaginaries of place should be referenced against the perspective that scale offers. For example, a map depicting glass bead distribution across the Asia-Pacific may have little congruence with a map depicting an Indic world footprint or even musical gong distribution. Likewise, a map depicting the regional presence of megalithic culture may have little congruence with linguistic patterns. The same is true with respect to mapping ethnic boundaries. But even where there are congruities across mainland and maritime Southeast Asia as testified by the presence of material objects or shared traits, how can or should we essentialize this world?

Colonialism was certainly fertile in inventing empire or congruities of space and territories where none existed before: French Indochina was one; the Dutch East Indies was another; British India, which included Burma, Ceylon, and, by extension, Malaya, was another. For that matter, Qing China hardly resembled the ancient Chinese core between the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. Japan too would aggrandize its own homeland before moving upon Korea, Taiwan, “Manchukuo,” and China at large, not to mention its presumed wartime Co-prosperity Sphere taking in most of mainland and island “Southeast Asia” before being expelled. The Southeast Asia we know today—namely, the intermediate zone between India, the Bay of Bengal, and the western Pacific—was an invention of Allied war planners and, in the hands of Cold War warriors, an arena of contestation. With the outbreak of the Korean War, East and Northeast Asia had already been brought on board, with each defined by its own civilizational inheritance. India (South Asia) was sui generis, albeit complicated by partition. Notwithstanding the complex overlay of civilizations touching upon Southeast Asia, it too would fall into the Western (mostly US) academic realm of area studies with three of four languages matching core subregions given special attention. Over the decades that the Cold War raged a succession of regional organizations made their appearance. Even a nation was invented—namely, Malaysia coming into being in 1963, growing larger with the merger of two Borneo state, and then smaller with rejection on the part of Brunei and the eviction of Singapore in 1965. Then, out of the bloodbath that led to the creation of the Western-backed Indonesian New Order, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was born, adopting English as its elite-centered lingua franca. In 2002 under United Nations auspices, yet another territory gained or, rather, reclaimed its statehood. This was Timor-Leste, abandoned by Portuguese colonizers in 1975 in the face of an Indonesian military occupation that cost the lives of practically a third of the population.

The invention of region and even a region lacking a single core, as with a Rome or Mecca or the Middle Kingdom, or even a common language whether Latin, Arabic, or written Chinese thus calls up some inquiry, especially when it comes to the zone between India and China. Actually, scholars of Sanskrit—with many in the employ of colonial governments—and with some voices in India adding their agreement, did vest the region between India and China with coherence. In this argument, a Greater or “Farther India” paradigm placed India at the core of a “colonial” ensemble reaching to a Southeast Asian periphery from Java and—with Hindu Bali as living testimony—to the central mainland, as with Angkor and the Cham coast of Vietnam (as testified by the first-arriving Westerners). Excavations and research both confirmed the depth and reach of the Indic world and its Sanskrit imprint in the era of monument building (sixth to fourteenth century CE) even prior to the emergence and spread to Southeast Asia (eleventh to fourteenth century CE) of the Theravada Buddhist Pali canon from its Ceylon/Sri Lanka loci.

Nevertheless, postwar struggles against colonialism and the emergence of independent nation-states led to a variety of reactions. In some new nations, Western missionaries were shown the door, while in others, missionaries were welcomed in. Still others would look to neo-traditionalist ideologies, as with “Buddhist socialism” in Burma, Pancasila in Indonesia, “Malay, Islam, and Kingship” in Brunei Darussalam, or “patriotic education” in the People’s Republic of China, as ways of legitimizing authoritarian rule. In other situations, Marxists have torn down Christian churches and Buddhist temples alike. Buddhists have squared off against Muslims and vice versa. Across regions, war and social strife have periodically arrested archaeological and other research and, lamentably, destroyed much monumental evidence. The two sixth-century monumental statues of Gautama Buddha carved into the side of a cliff in the Bamyan Valley in Afghanistan was lost at the hands of an Islamicist party, and even the famed Angkor complex became a shooting range in the Cambodian civil war of the 1970s.

On the sidelines as it were, academics (with natives largely supplanting Westerners as the century wore on) strove to make sense of the historical dynamics behind what is obviously a rich cultural legacy mixing indigenous and borrowed traditions. Reaction to the notion of foreign borrowing (Indianization, Westernization) entering standard historical discourses on Southeast Asia gave way to a vigorous advocacy for indigeneity or “autochthonous” development. For example, in Siam Mapped, historian Thongchai Winichakul (1994: 17) writes that “the geo-body of a nation is a man-made territorial definition.” More generally, he was contrasting traditional notions of Asian space to the “hegemony of modern geography” or the obsession of the first-arriving Europeans in Asia with the fixity of space and boundaries encoded in mapping. His concern was with Thailand, but we should at the same time be cognizant in this sense of not only the application of mathematics to land or geodetic survey but also the hydrographic when it comes to surveying ports, seas, and oceans.

As will be further discussed, out of this debate emerged a powerful trope around the processes of “localization” of civilizational transfers under which far greater agency and genius is attributed to natives in domesticating foreign imports. In the words of the Sanskrit scholar Andrea Acri (2017: 11), such scholarship “has contributed to shape the manner in which modern Southeast Asians perceive their identities in the context of a dialectic relationship between post-colonial nation-states and such a supra-national entity as ASEAN.” From this understanding, he argues, “it is essential to transcend arbitrary geo-political and disciplinary contingencies, and move towards a wider-ranging, and truly ‘borderless,’ connected history.”

IV. Islamization

Islamic world culture infiltrating the terrestrial and maritime silk roads would likewise impose its own sense of scale and spatiality across an ocean arc reaching from the Middle Eastern heartland to the coastal provinces of China (and matched as well by the land silk roads). For all Muslims, orientation to Mecca becomes an imperative, so Arabs and Persians were precocious in their invention of direction-finding devices. Islam also implied membership in an ummah or community irrespective of race, language, and polity. Under the rule of caliphs and with the Ottoman Caliphate, from its advent in 1517 only extinguished in 1924, Islamic loyalty often ran counter to the sway of temporal authority, especially but not exclusively under European colonialism. In reality, outside of the heartland most Muslims existed over long periods as religious minorities or adapted eclectically, for example, the role played by Sufi brotherhoods. In other contexts, Hindu rajas-turned-sultans retained many of the trappings of pre-Islamic courts (and this we can see in the archipelago even today). Granted that such Islamic sultanates as with Aceh, Malacca, Johor, Brunei, Sulu, Patani, and Banten, along with courts on Java were territorial in their own rights, there is little evidence of direct connection between these and other Islamic polities even if they were brought into contact by long-distance trade conducted by Indians, Arabs, Persians, Ottomans, Chinese and even Ryukyuans. While Islamic orthodoxy was attested in such sultanates as Aceh, the widespread adoption of orthopraxic Islam on the part of the faithful in modern-day Southeast Asia such as that fueled by Saudi Arabian dakwa, or missionary zeal, is a relatively recent development. A narrative of steady Islamic missionization also papers over or disguises the way that Islam adapted or indigenized with local societies, although reformist currents would indeed add impetus to conform to a single, usually Sunni, standard. The current trend toward intolerance in some quarters actually adds fuel to the argument that this part of the Dar al-Islam (world of Islam) was indeed shaped by outsiders, although Islam has no special term for this region as it does with, for example, the Maghreb or Arab far west as with Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.

V. Sinicization

As with Indianization and Islamicization, Sinicization is a blanket term with regard to processes of religio-cultural transfer. If we are looking for deep roots of a Sinic world transfer, then we may find it in such prehistoric examples as Hoabinhian culture first identified in northern Vietnam but more broadly attested in Yunnan and Guangxi as with bronze drum culture. We may also see the roots of such transfers in rice seedling or rice terracing adoptions in the Philippines, Java, and Bali. Or we may even see the origins in what some ethnographers have described as the “Austronesian dispersion,” or sea migrations of people out of China and dispersion through the archipelago and across oceans as discussed in Chapter 2 (Gunn 2011: 297–304). Turning to a historical period, the advent of the Han outlier state in the Red River valley was epochal in signaling a widespread implantation of Sinic culture in a Southeast Asian locale with China ruling northern Vietnam as an imperial province for nearly a millennium until 938. While Vietnamese kings would fight back against Chinese domination, Vietnam took on board everything from chopsticks to divination, from patriarchy to rule by mandarins selected by examination. We would have to move on to Song seafaring and the Mongol Yuan period for attestations of direct Chinese contact with Southeast Asia polities. The Malacca Straits area ruled over loosely by the Palembang Srivijaya Empire was one such contact zone.

But unlike India or even Islam, China was a political core from which the emperor ruled all under heaven, served by elite bureaucrats steeped in Confucian traditions and recruited through examination and so ensuring the dynastic continuity of a powerful state center. As carefully developed in this book, the “central kingdom” would also be linked with inner and outer polities via a ritualized tribute-envoy or trade system. Glossed as tianxia, or “everything under heaven,” the term even remains serviceable today as a non-Eurocentric contribution to international relations discourse. While Vietnam from the Han dynasty, Korea and Japan in an early period, along with the Ryukyu Kingdom did acculturate with China, taking on board many of the tenets of Confucianism and other defining elements, there was also powerful and creative interplay short of outright Sinicization. The outer circle of tributary states was hardly even touched by China outside the reciprocal visits of envoys or, during the Mongol Yuan interlude, as victims of punitive expeditions. More generally, it was only the Ming-Qing transition period that saw large numbers of especially Fujianese migrate to coastal zones from central and south Vietnam to Malaya, to Java, to the Philippines (later joined by Cantonese, Hainanese, Teochiu, and other dialect groups). Needless to say, such movements led to wide-scale cultural transfers, intermarriage, and religious symbiosis, with Thailand as a special example.

VI. The Chapters

With “geographical imaginaries” as a trope, the ensemble of chapters seeks to read out from a multi- or even decentered approach to region-informed lessons on early modernity, the rise and fall of city states and port polities, state consolidation, cultural-civilizational exchange, maritime prowess and commercial acumen, and a great deal more. Allowing of course great variation with respect to the select number of sites and ports, and notwithstanding historical method itself, it is an approach that deliberately seeks to unsettle or even challenge many verities seemingly embedded in national historiographies and myths.

Under the rubric of “Writings,” Part I examines just how the genre of world regional history has emerged within the larger framing of world history, sensitive to both time and space as well. Chapter 1 examines historiographical trends relating to segments of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea trade, finding a rich albeit not always connected literature.

Standing back from Eurocentric framings, Part II, “Imaginaries,” brings to the fore, variously, Indian, Arabo-Persian, Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese European imaginaries across five sequential chapters, separately setting down the empirical background to the study with reference to interchange and cultural borrowing linking India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. Chapter 2 examines evidence relating to the transmission and reception of Indic civilizational influences in Southeast Asia. Chapter 3 reveals a new constellation of geographic imaginaries of Asia outside of a Western or at least rigid Ptolemaic tradition—namely, those owing to Arabic-Persian-Islamic provenance. Chapter 4 focuses on the Chinese civilizational tradition and explains the China-centered tribute trade system and the world that trade made. Chapter 5 highlights the pivotal role of Japan in turning from Ming loyalist to haughty renegade under the long Pax Tokugawa. Chapter 6 is dedicated to a single hypothetical, although one that has drawn more heat than light: Who (aside from Aboriginals) discovered Australia first, Portuguese, Dutch, or Asians (at least as viewed from the perspective of a Portuguese-Eurasian geographer writing in the early seventeenth century)?

Part III is concerned with evidence. Allowing that ancient as well as early modern port cities were connected by maritime trade, Chapter 7 offers a synchronic and diachronic analysis through a sampling of nine archaeological sites and a number of trade centers spanning the maritime silk roads. Allowing that recent advances in marine archaeology have practically revolutionized this field, Chapter 8 examines shipwreck and other archaeological data to adduce comparative lessons on a number of interrelated facets contributing to a general world regional history perspective.

Part IV, “Examples/Alternative Realms,” turns from broad-brush theoretical considerations to two case studies. Chapter 9 is devoted to the Ryukyu Kingdom or island chain off the central coast of China, revealing a veritable Oriental Venice linked by trade to practically every maritime port and polity in Southeast Asia until its abrupt eclipse triggered by the Portuguese conquest of the Malacca Sultanate in 1511. As discussed in Chapter 10, even allowing that Macau on the southern coast of China was a virtual New World creation, we can also see in this example a fundamental misconception on the part of the first-arriving Europeans as to local concepts of space and territorialization, especially as the age of imperialism closed in.

Part I: Writings

1. Writing a Decentered World Regional History

As a way of compensating for the generalized neglect of broader narratives, this chapter seeks to position the writing of Asian world regional history within the genre of global history in general. In this sense we can agree with Victor Lieberman (2003; 2009) that both European and Asian historiography has favored “connections” over correlations and that wider perspectives are needed to embrace “broader Eurasian narratives.” But the actual writing of history outside of national, ethnoreligious, or cultural bias calls for bold new analysis and rethinking. As adumbrated below, a new world history method actually privileges a “decentered” perspective on the world (although this approach will not satisfy localists and other specialists). It is also a method that transcends essentializing views of civilizations and one that allows us to see in cultural diffusions and borrowings a rich array of hybrid experiences and forms. The method also draws out the processes of interaction, migrations, and conversions typically veiled in conventional history writing. As opposed to national narratives, the new history actually celebrates the crossing of boundaries, not only between nations and peoples but also across the social science disciplines. Only through a close study of such interactions can we attempt to construct our own notions of self and “other.” If that self is Europe or North America, then such understanding allows us to become that much less Euro- or America-centric. The same holds for Indo-centric, Sino-centric, Islamo-centric, or other essentializing views of self and “other.”

This chapter opens with a survey of historiographical trends in world regional history analysis with an eye toward periodization and world history cycles such as those that touched the sea silk road exchange. A second section problematizes the zone between China and India known as Southeast Asia especially as to its autonomy or standing between the major civilizations. A third section examines specific texts and literatures with a view to better understanding the salience of connections/correlations or parallels across macro regions. Two further sections examine the literature on East-West historical sequencing and priorities with particular reference to an East-Southeast Asian world region in an age prior to full-on Western imperialism.

I. Historiographical Trends in World Regional History Analysis

Undoubtedly a major shift in writing about the interplay between Europe and Asia was heralded in the iconoclastic prewar writings of Dutch scholar-bureaucrat J. C. van Leur (1955), especially his acknowledgment of Asian agency alongside external stimulus that masked deeper rhythms dating back to the ancient world. In a large sense, as explained below, his revisionism was directed at early European Orientalist approaches to Southeast Asia that tended to view the region through the prism of India, China, or even Europe. In particular, as signaled by Abu-Lughod (1989: vii) mainstream scholarship continued to perpetuate several shibboleths apropos Asia in general—namely, a European essentialist view of the planet and a view of a stagnant Asia that can be read back in history, an Asia that was only wakened from its slumber by Western enterprise. As noted below she is one who went to great lengths in seeking to “cross the battlefields that now lie between received wisdom and subaltern challenge.”

In 1971 Joseph Needham published Volume 4 of his celebrated Science and Civilisation in China, dealing with seafaring and the early Ming-era voyages of Zheng He (1403–1433), practically a first in Western literature. This volume brought to the fore his particular civilizational approach to world history. As Robert Finlay (2002: 268) wrote in a critical essay, while the scientific community largely ignored Needham’s conception of world history, more than a few world historians integrated his world history approach, Fernand Braudel, Pierre Chaunu, Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, William H. McNeill, and Janet Abu-Lughod included. Signally, he eschewed discussion of individual states and regions in lieu of a broad-brush framework incorporating Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Western achievements “within the context of reciprocal relations of European cultures.” He was also concerned to place China’s accomplishments in science and technology in the context of comparative and world history. In so doing, he produced “a conception of world history built around the dialectic of China and the West.” In particular, he illustrated this theme by counterposing the voyages to the Indian Ocean by the Chinese Admiral Zheng He in the early fifteenth century against the later arrival of the Portuguese. Nevertheless, according to Finlay (302), Needham “skewed” his presentation of the voyages, thus endowing “an unfortunate influence on the writing of world history.” This is strong criticism, but we cannot ignore the weight of Needham’s civilizational approach, including his framing of the Indian Ocean world as an arena. Nor can we ignore his general iconoclastic approach to unbridled Eurocentrism far ahead of his time.

The quest to advance studies on the Indian Ocean trading regime as it connected up the Middle East at one end and China at the other would take time and would engage such historians as George F. Hourani (1951), Philip Curtin (1984), Om Prakash (1985, 1991); K. N. Chaudhuri (1985, 1990), Michael Pearson (2003, 2005a), and Kenneth McPherson (1993). According to Markus Vink (2007: 42–43), it was Chaudhuri who went further in assuming full autonomy of the Asian actors in the maritime trade linking east and west. Importantly, as well, Chaudhuri elaborated upon the segmented nature of the trade within such “circuits” as the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the South China Sea, joined by Sanjay Subrahmanyam (1990, 1993) on the Bay of Bengal and R. J. Barendse (2002) on the Arabian Seas. Milo Kearney (2004) and Hugh Clark (2006) have added to this lexicon.[1]

Inspired by Braudel (1975), world historians of the present age have also sought to find parallels with an “Arabic-speaking Mediterranean” each with its focus upon sea and ocean basins as a framework of historical analysis. While this discussion is taken up below with respect to alternative “Mediterraneans,” we should draw attention to a seminal multi-volume French-language study on maritime Southeast Asia from within a Braudelian framing, namely that by Denys Lombard, a colleague of Braudel and director from 1993 up until the time of his death in 1998 of the influential École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) or French School of the Far East. With his major work titled, Le carrefour javanais: Essai d’histoire globale (Javanese crossroads: towards a global history) (1990), unquestionably Lombard set the tone for the writing of connected longue durée history. Successively, across three volumes, namely, “Les limites de l’occidentalisation (The limits of Westernization)”; “Les réseaux asiatiques (Asian networks)”; and “L’héritage des royaumes concentriques (The legacy of concentric realms)”; Lombard reveals the linkages created between an agrarian Java and the influences borne by merchants and religious communities arriving across the seas from India and China.

Harking back to Abu-Lughod (1989), another recent historiographic trend is to shift the goal posts, as it were, back to the kind of perspective favored by classical texts: the world system (or rather the known world system of the medieval period). Madagascar–East African coast specialist Philippe Beaujard (2019; 2020) is one to enter this field. Under Beaujard, the Indian Ocean becomes a center of the world economy uniting hinterlands beyond, at least until becoming peripheral under a European-dominated world economy centuries later.

Also taking inspiration from this genre is the three-volume Harvard University Press series edited by Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, and Peter C. Perdue, Asia Inside Out, which, as announced in the first volume (2015: 1), “seeks to redefine conventional understandings” of the vast land between Yemen and Japan, with “conventional” implying separate histories “as determined by national and imperial boundaries.” It is also an approach adopted in the edited volume by Tagliacozzo and Chang (2011), which includes a preface by Wang Gungwu. In his survey text, Dominic Sachsenmaier (2011: 6) argues against a single definition of world history and demonstrates the presence of multiple or “pluralistic” and equally valid global approaches and perspectives wherever we stand on the globe. I also proceed in this spirit.[2]

Temporizing World Regional History Analysis

More than a few scholars of world history have wrestled with temporal issues, seeking major inflections or turning points according to scale of analysis. Some, such as Barry K. Gills and Frank (1993) have emphasized cyclical patterns lasting up to five hundred years. More recently, Peter Coclanis (2008) has drawn attention to the cyclical nature of economic history with reference to what Lieberman (2003: 14) has called “linear-cum-cyclic trajectories.” What is proposed here is a broad schemata corresponding to, respectively, the Roman-era Indian Ocean trade system, the Thirteenth-Century World System, the Chinese century (pending the Great Ming withdrawal), the modern world system, the Canton (Guangzhou) trade system, and the age of imperialism. Each is explained with reference to its key expositors and, loosely, will serve as a guide to the discussion, especially on port cities and marine archaeology in Chapters 7 and 8 alongside key narratives touching on the sea silk road exchange.

The Roman-Era Indian Ocean Trade System

We should not ignore the connectedness of ancient Rome with Han China (206 BCE–220 CE) either via the Indian Ocean trading system or across the terrestrial silk roads. The antiquity of Indian trade and civilizational transfer has also been hailed by Needham (1971: 499–500). In his colorful metaphor, for two millennia the Mediterranean region acted as a kind of pump continually piping east all the gold and silver that entered it. But the Arabs, the Indians, and the Chinese were largely indifferent to European staples, leaving Europe with a “large perennial insoluble deficit.” India also supplied Rome with a torrent of fine cotton and silk products, precious stones, porcelain, and other goods collected from marts in Africa, the Middle East, and even China, exchanged against silver and gold of which the Europeans and others were the key suppliers.

G. R. Tibbetts (1971: 1–2) is another who has drawn attention to the antiquity of the Indian Ocean trade, dating it back to Sumerian times with ships crossing from Arabia to India at the time of Solomon’s Ophir expedition. Hippalus, the presumed author of the Peryplus of the Erythraean Sea, a first-century CE Greco-Roman treatise on the monsoon wind system, may have drawn his knowledge from actual pilot guides. To be sure, this was long before Muslim Arabs arrived on the scene. As Tibbetts surmised, the coming of Islam and Arab conquests “may have upset the course of trading and to some extent removed the causes which encouraged Indian Ocean navigation.”

The Thirteenth-Century Indian Ocean World System

The notion that the Indian Ocean world can be theorized at the level of a system or world system owes to Abu-Lughod (1989). As she sums up, from the end of the twelfth century and at its peak in the opening decades of the fourteenth century, an “incipient” world system came into being stretching between northwest Europe and China. “Although it was not a global system,” she declaims, “it represented a substantially larger system than the world had previously known.” She also draws attention to “an impressive set of interlinked subsystems”—namely, Europe, the Middle East (including the northern portion of Africa), and the coastal and steppe zones of Asia (352–53). Moreover, what is notable about the world system in the thirteenth century, she points out, is that “a wide variety of cultural systems coexisted and cooperated, and that societies very different from those in the west dominated the system,” from “near” private capitalism to “near” state production. These ranged from China and India, where the basis for economic activities rested upon the processing of agricultural raw materials, to city-states such as Venice, Aden, Malacca, and Palembang, where activities were compradorial (and where no value added processing took place), to places like south India, the Levant, and the Persian Gulf, where trade routes converged, to places that supplied rare commodities in demand. She cites jewels from Ceylon and camphor from Sumatra, but the list is long (354–55).

As Abu-Lughod (1989: 365) explains, contra the “modern” world system that emerged in the sixteenth century with its hierarchy of the core hegemon situated in northwestern Europe, an agrarian semi-periphery in the rest of Europe, and a periphery everywhere else, the world system of the thirteenth century was organized very differently. First, it was not dominated by a single hegemon. Rather, there were a number of competing core powers that through conflictual and cooperative relations became increasingly integrated through this period. It was not hierarchical insofar as cores, semi-peripheries, and peripheries existed in a number of places across the globe (with the Arabo-Persian imperial centers as one core and the Mongol Empire coalescing into China as another). In my own language, I would describe the world system of that era as “decentered.”

The Early Ming-Era “Chinese Century”

As Wang Gungwu (2011: xii) has elaborated, in the early dynasties China long appeared to be content to deal with arriving foreign, including Muslim, traders rather than launching its own long-distance maritime voyages, but the tide gradually turned with a major flourish at the time of Zheng He’s Indian Ocean excursions. Observing that the Zheng He fleets preceded the Portuguese by at least a generation into the Indian Ocean littoral, some, particularly Needham (1971: 593), have termed this epoch a “Chinese century,” notwithstanding the sudden termination of these state-sponsored “treasure ships.” Even though China’s Ming dynasty lost its chance for world hegemony, with the entry into Southeast Asian waters by private, mainly Fujianese, junk traders, the effects were long lasting and even permanent. As Sun Laichen (2010: 57) contends, “No other dynasties before or after Ming ever achieved such effects.”

The Modern World System

The phenomenon of European expansion has drawn heated debate between two broad schools of world history. This has been summarized by Frank and Gills (1993) as turning upon five hundred years of history or a five-thousand-year perspective. The five-thousand-year perspective allows for a seamless view of history stretching back to antiquity, acknowledging that the “New World” was in fact home to world systems prior to its incorporation from 1492. By contrast, Wallerstein (1974; 1979; 1984; 1989; 2004) and others regard capital accumulation over the past five hundred years as the engine of world-system theory and continuous capital accumulation as the differentia specifica of the “modern world-system.” In the latter view, world empires or tributary systems were dominated by ideological questions as opposed to the economic law of value in the accumulation of capital. For Frank and Gills (1993), the debate is really about continuity versus discontinuity in world history.

For Wallerstein (1989), the “spiceries” of the East Indies remained external to the European system between 1500 and 1800. The Portuguese did not break “the international Asian character of trade” and conducted trade only on terms established by the Asian nations. In making this claim Wallerstein also finds support in arguments of the prewar opponent of Eurocentric historiography, J. C. van Leur (1955). Asia, in the Wallersteinean view, therefore remained an “external arena” in a relationship between two zones “not within a single division of labor” involving the trade in luxury goods versus trade in bulk or necessities. According to Wallerstein (1989: 132), luxury exports refers to the disposition of socially low-value items at prices far higher than those obtainable for their alternate usages. Such traffic then is only applicable between two separate historical systems holding different measures of social values. Such obviously was the case of prized nutmeg and cloves from the Moluccas, which entered trade chains reaching Europe, but it was also the case of sandalwood from Timor, which entered the “external arena” in India and China via Java or Malacca as a product of luxury consumption in religious ceremonies.

The Canton (Guangzhou) Trade System

Outside the European core, as theorized by Wallerstein et al., we cannot ignore events internal to the Chinese core on its own terms, although it too would not evade incorporation into a European-centered world economy. The period begins with the permanent establishment in 1557 with Ming approval of the Portuguese at Macau on the southern coast of China, also connecting up Guangzhou (historically known in the West as Canton) with the silk-for-silver trade with Japan. In parallel fashion, just decades later, the westward-sailing Spanish would connect Manila and the China coast with the transpacific galleon trade in bullion. Nevertheless, the progressive arrival on the China coast of the rising European hegemons, the English and the Dutch, would inexorably lead into major changes in the East Asian core (signaled by the short-lived establishment of a Dutch proto-colony on Taiwan). With its origins in Dutch East India Company (VOC) transactions in India reaching back to the 1600s, the Europeans then aggressively entered the opium-for-tea trade, forcing a drain on silver from China to Europe. As described by Paul van Dyke (2005: 1, 16), writing almost a century after H. B. Morse (1908), from 1757 to 1842 Canton was officially designated China’s center of foreign trade. The strength of the Canton System, he asserts, “was its flexibility in addressing the concerns of the Beijing court, both in controlling foreigners and trade while at the same time serving their needs.” The advent of the steamship not only contributed to the collapse of the Canton System; it also ushered in an age of imperialism. Famously, Qing attempts to put an end to the opium trade would reach their climax with the Opium Wars (1839–1842, 1856–1860), leading to the imposition on China by the Western powers of the system of unequal treaties and special privileges, including concessions and treaty ports.

The Age of Imperialism

To paraphrase Coclanis (2008: 10–11), sometime during the mid-seventeenth century following a dynamic “age of commerce,” we find evidence, stronger in some parts of the region than others, of “deglobalization” lasting for some time. After one hundred years of deglobalization, the economies of the Southeast Asian archipelago began to expand rapidly again, due largely to renewed export growth. The economies on the mainland, he argues, began expansive phases even earlier, in the 1710s and 1720s, after a half century or so of economic setbacks, disappointments, and reverses. The principal imports into the Southeast Asian zone were textiles, manufactured goods, and opium, while the leading exports consisted of coffee, sugar, pepper, and rice. The age of imperialism brought another growth cycle or, actually “great boom,” albeit with the benefits unequally skewed toward metropolitan capital and profit takers. In any case, as Coclanis (15) summarizes, “the master narrative of the 1850–1914 period in Southeast Asian history emphasizes the inflow of outside capital and labor from East Asia, South Asia, and Europe and the outflow of Southeast Asian commodities and raw materials such as rice, sugar, coffee, tobacco, tin, and rubber to other parts of the world.” The boom of 1850 and 1914 was followed by the bust of 1914 and 1945, with the world economy essentially deglobalized again. For the Southeast Asian region, as Coclanis (16) explains, this was a period of “overproduction, debt crises, land-tenure problems, declining markets, falling income levels, and peasant revolts—book-ended by world wars, the first, only indirectly damaging to the region’s economy, the second, profoundly destructive economically and catastrophic in human terms.”

II. Between China and India: An Essential Southeast Asia?

Setting aside the more generalized literature addressing variously the maritime and terrestrial silk roads, the intermediary zone between China and India, today glossed as Southeast Asia, cannot be ignored whether as an essentially autonomous zone or as an outlier of the major civilizations. Lieberman (2003: 6–21) offers a summary of how Southeast Asia has been viewed through scholarly optics over time, while also entering his own temporal-spatial framing of region. In so doing, he takes very seriously “strange parallels” between state consolidation in Europe, Japan, and mainland Southeast Asia (Burma, Thailand, Vietnam) in the early modern period. A variety of contingent factors are convincingly called into play, from the bullion trade, to the circulation of firearms, to biological and environmental factors, leading him to announce a correlation or connectedness of the “ends of the earth,” albeit outside of a strictly connected world history framing.

First, it bears briefly tracking Lieberman’s (2003: 6–9) critique of the dominant schools of writing on Southeast Asian historiography. “Externalist historiography,” he explains, was much favored by those European savants who arriving in maritime Asia saw the shadow of “Farther India” and Indochina, suggesting an immobilist Southeast Asia as beneficiary of the fruits of other civilizations but lacking local agency. Court centered, the Sinological-Indological approach seldom offered a larger synthesis that would embrace the region. Lieberman (9–15) approvingly cites the work of French classicist Paul Mus (1933; 1935), with his studies on Champa and Borobudur, as well as van Leur (only reaching English translation in 1955).

George Cœdès, himself EFEO director between 1929 and 1946, has sometimes been viewed as a major proponent of the Farther India school (see Bayly 2004). Nevertheless, it would be worthwhile reviewing how he actually viewed the region. This is especially important insofar as he produced a range of pioneering interpretations of epigraphic and archaeological evidence touching upon both the Indonesian Archipelago and the broader Indochina peninsula (and this is duly noted in subsequent chapters). Practically alone among the EFEO scholars, he also produced major synthetic studies of the entire region translated into English, as with his Les peuples de la péninsule indochinoise (1962; 1966). Here, he recapitulates his belief in the importance of Sanskrit as a vehicle for the spread of Indian ideas overseas. As noted, it was practically the sole language used in epigraphy, it deeply influenced local vernaculars, and it lent its script to local vernaculars (even if, besides India, not one regional polity adopted Sanskrit as its language of state). In sum, he concludes, indications of Indian influences in this culture area could be multiplied indefinitely “and provide ample justification for maintaining that the civilizations of the Indianized countries of Indochina are simply overseas extensions of Indian civilization” (Cœdès 1966: 229). He also extended the argument to Vietnam with respect to its absorption of Chinese culture suggesting a lack of “inventiveness” among all the prehistoric cultures of the broader mainland and their propensity for receptiveness to foreign influences.

The postwar advent of newly independent states gave major stimulus to an “autonomist historiography” or an acknowledgment of indigenous agency. Some sympathy for postcolonial nationalism also favored the autonomist history direction, just as a shift away from the classical period in postwar area studies was compensated for by an interest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Empowerment and agency became dominant themes in a range of studies. Major revision of the concept of Indianization came from the former Malayan civil servant and administrator-turned-scholar Oliver W. Wolters (1999: 55–56), who advanced the idea of selective “localization” of Indian cultural elements (see Ray 2019: 174–75). As Wolters argues, even where there was often convincing evidence of foreign elements in Southeast Asia’s past, these elements could and should be read as “local cultural statements.” For example, even though the language of a text might be Indic or Sinitic, the statements made were ultimately local, such as Khmer or Vietnamese.

More than a few scholars have entered or engaged this discussion. Seminal in this respect was the aptly titled essay by John R. W. Smail (1961), “On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia.” Published in Singapore and written at a time when the shadow of colonialism still weighed upon the region, Smail undoubtedly threw out a challenge to new generations of historians both local and external to the region. Some, like Herman Kulke (1990), posed the question of Indianization, Indian colonies, and cultural convergence. For some, as with Lieberman (2003), the issue turns on locality, whether maritime or mainland. Some others, as with the Sanskrit specialist Sheldon Pollock (2009), draw upon new revelations from archaeological and other research with theory building in mind. More recent writing, as with Acri (2016, 2017), continues to buy into the “autonomy” question through his focus on medieval Buddhist networks. Still others, as with Tansen Sen (2003) and Himanshu Prabha Ray (2014), track historiographical trends such as those highlighted in this book: connectivity and correlations across the maritime sea silk roads.

Hailed as a benchmark study at the time of their publication, Anthony Reid’s (1988; 1993) two-volume Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450–1680 is notable in the way it heralds a coherent maritime world. As implied, the Reidian age of commerce in Southeast Asia commencing in the mid-fifteenth century witnessed prosperity, cosmopolitanism, and centralization on the part of disparate polities. In large part these mainland and maritime polities together were called into being by active commerce with India and China, albeit not ignoring local craft and industry of a certain caliber. Nevertheless, Reid also acknowledges a reversal of fortunes occasioned by the global economic downturn of the mid-seventeenth century, a drastic shift that would persist until modern times.

The cogency of Reid’s age of commerce thesis has also been critiqued on a number of levels, not only the coherence of his 1450–1680 framework but also his apparent conflation of the maritime world with the mainland polities of Southeast Asia. Ming China specialist Geoff Wade (2009) is one who has taken issue with Reid’s celebration of a Southeast Asian age of commerce spanning 1450–1680. In reading back into this period of close trade links with India, the Arab world, and China, Wade has gone as far as heralding an “earlier age of commerce” from 900 to 1300 CE, sufficiently intense to induce significant political, social, and economic changes throughout the region. Whatever else, a great body of evidence leads us to believe that the world between India and China cannot be seen outside the general premises defining the Thirteenth-Century (Indian Ocean) World System. In my own view, while Reid’s promotion of the concept of Southeast Asia as a both a physical and human unit is undoubtedly seductive, it is also reductive, as with the assignation of a common “Southeast Asian” identity. Of course, historians are obliged to deal with aggregates, but the notion of “ordinary Southeast Asians” or even “average Southeast Asians of the seventeenth century” (Reid 1988: 48) might be as confusing as it is illuminating.

While Lieberman (2003: 15–21) extols Reid’s age of commerce thesis as an exceptional narrative of regional history with attention to the wider maritime world, he nevertheless takes exception on a number of levels. Echoing his long-stated assertion of fundamental differences attaining to mainland versus maritime Southeast Asia, Lieberman argues that Reid’s archipelago marine commerce template, when imposed over the mainland, fails to account for ethnic/cultural homogenization, nor does it account for mainland territorial consolidation that was not driven by maritime commerce. Additionally, Lieberman doubts the relevance of a seventeenth-century decline in mainland economies, much less one linked to a decline in maritime commerce. Rather, the Burmese Konbaung (1752), the Chakkri (1772) centered in Bangkok, and the Nguyễn (1802) with their capital in south-central Vietnam, reached their apogee in this age. As well, Lieberman advises, the mainland states received no jolts analogous to the Islamic-Christian conversions of the archipelago, suggesting no special dawn in the sixteenth century. Finally, Lieberman critiques Reid’s approach as beclouding the relationship between Southeast Asia and other parts of modern Eurasia. Seeking to differentiate his approach to the “externalist” historiography, diverging from “autonomous history” and the age of commerce thesis, Lieberman (21) presents a narrative of “relentless” territorial consolidation of Burmese, Tai/Khmer, and Vietnamese/Cham polities across a thousand years (c. 800–1830).

III. European Exceptionalism?

Granted that “rise of the West” literature alongside a “stagnant” Orient became in article of faith in the academy practically down until the recent present, the reasons for eventual divergence between rising Europe and stagnating Asia has also spawned a specialist literature on the part of economic historians, of whom Kenneth Pomeranz (2001) is representative. For example, as Joel Mokyr (1992: chap. 4) has argued, technologically, China reached a dead end by 1500. Others, such as Michael Mitterauer (2010), have reasserted the European-defined path to modernity. Still others, as with Robert C. Allen (2011), have sought answers to the “divergence-income gap” or income differentials besetting different geographical zones across time through macroeconomic analysis that recalls Adam Smith. More recently, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong (2011) have tackled the divergence debate from the perspective of comparative economic and political history. As discussed in Chapter 4, William Guanglin Liu (2015) blames the Ming anti-market policies for China’s faltering, an argument critiqued by such scholars as Pomeranz (2001), who defends China until 1800 as a foil to cast doubt upon the intrinsic superiority of Western economic models.

As with Lieberman (2009: 11), I do not entirely reject European exceptionalism, but I also seek a reconsideration of East Asia on its own terms. Far from stagnating and withdrawing completely from global commerce, through its active participation in the bullion trade in Japan, Manila, and other Southeast Asian ports, especially via the informal junk trade, Ming China actually helped to dynamize the region (see Gunn 2018a). This it did by creating many pioneer industries, just as Chinese settlers arriving from the prosperous coastal provinces brought unprecedented commerce to Southeast Asian lands. It also introduced a range of practical technologies and commercial practices, in some cases even more sweeping than parallel transfers from Europe. Closure—and apparent stagnation to the extent that this occurred in China and Japan—was more out of fear of losing control of the conditions of engagement.

Much earlier, Abu-Lughod (1989: 18–20) entered her own explanations for Europe’s sixteenth-century ascendancy at the expense of the rest of the world, especially around geographic, political, and demographic reasons. Primary, she declares, was the progressive fragmentation of the overland silk roads that had been unified by Genghis Khan during the first half of the thirteenth century. Added to that, the depredations visited on Baghdad around 1400 by the last of the great nomadic conquerors of the Eurasian steppe, Tamerlane, in turn coming after the earlier Mongol invasion of 1257, struck a hammer blow in the Middle Eastern core (even if Cairo’s prosperity continued until its peak in the third decade of the fourteenth century). Second, the Black Death that spread across the trade routes from China to Europe between 1348 and 1351 simply decimated most of the cities along the sea routes (although the evidence is stronger for the Mediterranean region). Not only did the plague wreak major demographic loss as in continental Europe and Ming China (and this is well attested), but it provoked radical transformations across the world. One such upshot was the rise of England, shielded from the worst epidemiological effects, and, following its recovery, the steady rise of Venice, leading into Atlantic exploration.[3] The Spanish assault upon the New World was about to begin. And so was the Portuguese, additionally taking on the Old World, as signaled by the pioneering voyages around the Cape of Good Hope of Dias (1488) and da Gama (1497–1499), the first to link Europe and Asia by the ocean route. Taken together, both events were game changers in ushering in the five-hundred-year cycle of Western hegemony.

Europe’s early modern period (1500–1800), broadly coterminous with the Ming-Qing transition in China, captures a long period of metamorphosis reflecting the ebb and flow of ideas and their uneven receptions and adaptations across the vast Eurasian space. Few then could have foreseen outcomes, especially as Europe appeared weak and divided alongside impressive achievements in Asia under the China-centered interstate system. But even by the eighteenth century, no part of the world save the most remote and isolated zones was outside some form of globalization and creolization of culture. While Southeast Asia tends to fall through the cracks in world region literature in the broader East Asian encapsulation, this work nevertheless opens up a range of additional inquiries, from such questions as European exceptionalism; Eurocentrism versus Asia-centrism—particularly Sino-centrism—in shaping the modern world system, the motor of capitalism or at least precapitalism in this part of Asia, Asian “stagnation” versus European dynamism, the now-popularized phenomenon of cross-cultural interactions, and even the question of the origins of globalization.

IV. East Asia Regionalism and the Framing of World Region

East Asia has also been brought into the framing of “world region.” Rejecting Confucian heritages in favor of an analysis stressing interdependencies and interactions between groups of contiguous countries, East Asia emerges as a gloss upon a superregion, with China as the center of an interstate system bringing into play, besides Southeast Asia, Inner Asia and Northeast Asia. The impetus behind the emergence of an “East Asia regionalism school” has not come from China but, rather, from the group of international scholars, mostly North American but including Japanese.[4] As alluded, this is a historiographical trend that places Asia, especially India and China up until c. 1800, at center stage in the making of the East-West exchange. For me, it also helps to explain how Song China at least served as the motor driving the sea silk road trade, just as earlier dynasties reaching back to the ancient Han had served that role with respect to the terrestrial silk roads leading to Rome.

An East-Southeast Asian Integrated Silver Zone

The best example of a correlated macroeconomic environment in premodern East-Southeast Asia was the acceptance of mostly Japanese mined or minted copper coinage alongside silver and other local units of currency in a currency regime that included most of East Asia, including especially Nguyễn Vietnam, Java, Ayutthaya/Chakkri, and the Burmese kingdoms. Not only did Western transfers and merchants accommodate to this currency regime; they helped to lubricate it, as with the VOC copper trade with Japan (Shimada 2005). Such a framing of region should take into account the bullion trade networks, as with the Manila galleon trade in silver for silk connecting up with China (Flynn and Giraldez 1994, 2006; Flynn 1996; Flynn, Giraldez, and von Glahn 2003; Giraldez 2015), as well as with Portuguese and Dutch participation in the Nagasaki trade in silver against an array of Southeast Asian products along with silk (Gunn 2018a). The subject also requires some sense of changing monetary policy in China and Japan (von Glahn 1996, 2003, 2014; Shimada 2005), but fiscal mismanagement, debasements of currency, and a drawdown on finite silver and copper reserves, as with late Tokugawa Japan, also led to fiscal and liquidity crises.

An East-Southeast Asian Integrated Commodities Trade Zone

But Asian states also mediated trade in noncurrency items, many virtually bartered at the source. A newer literature has sought to explain the full range of traded commodities across the broader region along with the merchant groups concerned (see Tagliacozzo and Chang 2011). As highlighted in Chapter 8, the age-old ceramic trade in which all the East-Southeast Asian states participated is illustrative of this theme. Whether it was the Chinese porcelain capital of Jingdezhen 景德镇, or Arita 有田 on Kyushu in Japan, or the Red River valley kilns of Vietnam, the scope of the enterprise so vastly eclipsed the capacity of private enterprise in logistics, transport, and marketing that ceramic trade networks were almost always part and parcel of state-sponsored endeavors, even if private enterprise, as with the Fujian trading networks, also rode on the back of this trade on a kin or clan basis, especially during the Ming-Qing transition period or even in defiance of general state prohibitions. Similar profiles might be drawn of other commodities entering East-Southeast Asian supply chains, from proto-chemicals such as sulfur procured from the Ryukyus and Taiwan, to marine and forestry products traded more generally across the oceans, to luxury items procured at specific locations, as with the sandalwood from Timor alongside spices and other exotics entering China. Simply, the state took over where the complexity of organization or risk was too much for private merchants to bear. In general terms, the officialized tribute trade fell into this pattern of state- and quasi-state-directed trade. As intimated, such trade also called down elaborate and ancient commodity trade networks not only involving China, Japan, Vietnam, and Thailand on the supply side but with West, South, and Southeast Asia emerging as major markets alongside Europe and the Americas into the early nineteenth century (Ho 1990, 1994, 2001).

Such writing departs from conventional Eurocentric history by allowing that, at its height in the eighteenth century, East Asia achieved high levels of peace, prosperity, and stability. In this view, China and its tributary trade system as perfected under the Ming (1368–1644 CE) underwrote this prosperity just as it provided a geopolitical framework in which nonofficial trade across Eurasia could also flourish. While it might be objected that both the Qing (1644–1911 CE) in China and the Tokugawa in Japan (1603–1868 CE) imposed strict maritime restrictions on overseas trade, nevertheless trade continued on the margins. Notably, as discussed in Chapter 9, the Fujian connection linked coastal China with the Ryukyu Kingdom, Japan, and Southeast Asia (Selden 2009). From Nagasaki where, successively, Portuguese, Dutch (and English), and Chinese conducted mostly uninterrupted trade, Japan maintained a window on the world (Gunn 2018a).

Bringing in the (Imperial) State

One feature of the premodern East-Southeast Asian regional world system that cannot be ignored is the role of powerful bureaucratic state agencies. Even setting aside China, truly the central kingdom over the long term, considerable autonomy and agency was likewise wielded by, for example, the Tokugawa state, Choson (Yi) Korea (1392–1897), as well as western mainland polities such as Pegu and Ava, the central mainland polities of Angkor and Ayutthaya, and eastern mainland polities of the Trịnh and Nguyễn, as well as their Cham adversaries. Although less well documented, the Islamic kingdoms of Southeast Asia also fit into the tribute trade with China, as did their predecessor in the Hindu-Buddhist Sailendra-Srivijaya dynasties, as discussed in Chapter 2.

Notoriously, the larger bureaucratic kingdoms also carefully set the terms of trade through designated ports: Macau for the Portuguese, Beijing for the Russians, and Nanjing and Ningbo for the Japanese. Strict customs regimes (Macau, Nagasaki, Busan) were also involved, as were licensing systems (Japanese “red seal” ships), and blanket bans on overseas trade arising out of security concerns (Tokugawa Japan’s selective sakoku, or “closed country,” policy). Even when Japan resumed maritime trade with the Dutch at Nagasaki, owing to the drain on bullion showing up in the national accounts, in 1715 the Shogunate responded by sharply curtailing exports of silver (Gunn 2018: 236). As further discussed in Chapter 8, maritime archaeological research has actually revealed a “Ming gap” in ceramics exports from China during a period of domestic turmoil.

But in more positive ways, Islamic court officials such as the shahbandar (harbormaster) facilitated and welcomed trade by all comers (Malacca, Banten), just as Tang and Song China-appointed trade officials had in cosmopolitan ports as with Quanzhou. Obviously, foreign merchant diasporas could not have taken root without a great deal of official connivance, such as with Persians, Indians, and Arabs (Malacca, Banten, Canton); or Japanese (Hội An, Manila, Ayutthaya); or Chinese (Malacca, Hirado, Nagasaki, Hội An, Saigon, and the Cochinchina littoral); the pesisir, or northern coast, of Java; and Brunei. We may assume as well that everywhere there was regulation of foreign merchant communities: taxes, quasi-passports, licenses, payoffs, or ritualized gift-giving, and sometimes with the merchants delegated to collect taxes such as touched upon by Abu-Lughod (1989: 281) with respect to the Chola dynasty of southern India.

We may also wonder—indeed, it is often wondered—whether the broad system outlined above was conducive to capitalism. Or, indeed, if the seeds of capitalism were found in East-Southeast Asian merchant communities, why did accumulation not occur on a grander scale outside of royal or state coffers? But even allowing for evidence of large-scale accumulation and consumption in the rising urban centers that hosted merchant communities, along with banks and credit organizations (Hakata, Osaka, Sakai, Edo, Canton, Hanoi, Busan), we are still curious to know why no fundamental revolution of productive forces was then transpiring in these Asian hubs of commerce as it certainly was in early modern Europe. This is not a Eurocentric ploy, this is fact. The rise of the West at the expense of the rest should be part of this narrative, especially if we are to become cognizant of the correlation between early modern trade and the shaping of the modern world system, out of which East-(Northeast)-Southeast Asia is now emerging (Pomeranz 2001).

V. European Imaginaries on an East-Southeast Asia Region

In framing East-Southeast Asia as a world region, we are also casting some aspersions upon the postwar construction of area studies (Lewis and Wigen 1997: 172). Even so, in an earlier age the Portuguese, Dutch, and English imposed their own conceptualization or imaginaries of region upon the southern or maritime tier of Asia, usually with reference to seat of empire. In its time, British India ruled alternatively from Madras (Chennai) and Calcutta (Kolkota), embraced not only the vast Indian subcontinent but Burma (Myanmar), Penang, Singapore, and, in a general sense, Malaya and Java when they came under British domination during the Napoleonic Wars. All Dutch establishments in the sprawling and ethnically heterogeneous East Indies, as did outposts in Taiwan and Japan, answered first to Batavia (modern Jakarta) and then to company directors in Europe. Analogously, Goa in India served as seat of the Estado da India, the term the Portuguese gave to their far-flung maritime empire in Asia, albeit answerable to the Portuguese Crown. From their fortified base in Manila, in turn, answering to New Spain (Mexico) and the Spanish Crown, the Spanish via the galleon trade were much more focused on a China-centered Asia. It is also true that, with the entry of the Dutch and English into the South China Sea in pursuit of the lucrative and indispensable China trade, a new sense of bounded region emerged. English inroads into Indian commerce and the eventual opening of China to European maritime trade by the late eighteenth century confirmed this shift. It is of interest that, in such early eighteenth-century travel collections as that of John Harris (1705), East Asia was already used to refer to the China, Japan, and Korea area.

Over long time, as described by Abu-Lughod (1989: 311, 348), East-Southeast Asia already hosted a number of “world cities,” Malacca, Palembang, Hội An, and Quanzhou among them (and each shall be revisited in separate chapters of this book). As world cities astride strategic maritime trade routes and choke points, their prosperity depended less on their hinterlands than on their ability to service the regional segments of the interocean trade. The cosmopolitan nature of the resident merchant communities in this “archipelago of towns” is much remarked upon in the classical Arab, Chinese, and European travel accounts. The age of Western imperialism not only relegated these ports to obscurity but called up a new set of ports and cities of colonial creation: Jakarta, Manila, Rangoon, Saigon, Penang, Singapore, and Hong Kong, which, with merit, we can also describe as embryonic world cities, not only cosmopolitan as were their predecessors but also part of the emerging European-dominated East-(Northeast-Southeast) Asia world region.

Southeast, East, or East-Southeast Asia?

Observing the wartime origins of the “Southeast Asia” label and the “imagined reality” it became with the advent and prosecution of the Cold War, Benedict Anderson (1983: 3–8) also reflects upon the sense of region in an earlier age. As an artifice this region was named by outsiders. Even today Chinese gloss this broad and elastic region as Nanyang and contest ownership of large parts of the South China Sea with Vietnam on the basis of prior imperial contact and interest. In any case, Anderson observes, it was imperialism that supplied the boundaries, drawing the line through the island of New Guinea, hiving off Vietnam from the cultural orbit of the Middle Kingdom, and rupturing the millennium-long link between Ceylon/Sri Lanka and its Theravada emulators in Siam/Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos.

Hamashita (1994) has gone further in raising doubts as to the validity of a bounded Southeast Asia separate from East Asia. As he expressed the problem (or in his imagination), the East-Southeast Asia zones should be viewed as part of an integrated silver trading or tribute zone beholden to the Sino-centric tribute-envoy system. In this millennium of trade, many countries participated from all over the southern oceans. This is not necessarily an “indigenous” perspective, after all it is an attempt at social science concept building, but attending to such an approach offers yet another optic upon the world region approach. As alluded to, the notion of China at the head of an Asian interstate system long before the European system institutionalized at Westphalia in 1648 is also heralded in Arrighi, Hamashita, and Selden (2003).

But, even in bounding Southeast Asia we would also be advised, following Lieberman (1990: 70–90), to observe fundamental differences between island and mainland Southeast Asia, underlying a fundamental difference in geography and cultural and mercantile penetration. Contra Wallerstein’s theory of the world system, as Lieberman contends, peripheralization proceeded differentially between island and mainland Southeast Asia. To greatly simplify, he argues that, whereas the Dutch (unlike the Portuguese) successfully imposed their hegemony over large swathes of island Southeast Asia by the late 1600s, the contrast could not have been greater in the case of the mainland, where simultaneous attempts by, variously, the English, the Dutch, and French to oust local competitors were checked. He continues that, instead of the appearance on the mainland of a Wallersteinean world economy, what we find is a thriving multicountry trade involving the entire China coast through to the Indian subcontinent, ranging from the import of Indian and Chinese textiles to, crucially, as far as the survival of the dominant mainland states was concerned, Japanese and New World silver and copper.

It is also true that, as Lombard (1997: 125) wrote, that while a basic opposition is identifiable between maritime and terrestrial Southeast Asia, a distinction that also holds between continental Europe and the Mediterranean, it is not a true dichotomy, as there were no terrestrial kingdoms without some elements of trade and no harbor cities without any demand for agrarian products and without some hinterland. Accordingly, we should be careful not to gloss all regional trade as maritime trade because trading networks were equally maritime and terrestrial, especially in consideration of the considerable cross-border exchanges between the mainland Southeast Asian states and Yunnan-China.

Barbara Watson Andaya (2002; 2006) is one scholar of Southeast Asia who has tended to heed a broader construction of region in a number of creative ways, including a major treatment on the subject of gender. As she has written, there is also a sense of “oceans unbounded,” a broad reference to maritime lifestyles of numerous Southeast Asian groups dubbed orang laut, or “sea people” in Malay, but including Buginese and many other “sea nomads.” Surprisingly, as well, many sedentary ethnic groups across the archipelago share origin myths with maritime themes. Here we are reflecting upon long-distance sea migrations such as those associated with the Austronesian dispersion, a subject to which we will return with reference to archaeological evidence in the following chapter.

On another register, merchant-pirate bands with roots in the thirteenth century plagued the coast of China, including those from Japan, such as confronted by the first-arriving Europeans. Such actions also engaged Fujianese fleets testing Spanish power in Manila, as well as Chinese Ming loyalist outcasts on the coast of Sumatra and Vietnam (Antony 2010). Just as huge multisailed craft are but a recent memory in the Java Sea and along the coast of China, it is fair to recall that modern East Asian cities commanding large fleets of trading and fishing junks such as Macau earned their living from fishing through to the early postwar period (Gunn 1996). A sea-centered approach to the macro-Asian region is now generally recognized in the new world histories.

A Chinese Mediterranean Today?

Through his studies of the Mediterranean, as suggested, French Annales historian Fernand Braudel (1975) offered a new paradigm for viewing culture and space. He also wondered whether it was a coherent zone given its hundreds of frontiers and its kaleidoscopic variety. Importantly, the Annales historians broke with a historiographic tradition that emphasized the state and administration to take up a perspective that encompassed regional or supranational levels, drawing upon a range of disciplines, especially geography, economics, and anthropology.

With respect to Southeast Asia, the notion of indefinite and changing boundaries, as much as the interdisciplinary approach, has found emulators in Reid (1988, 1993) and Lombard (1990). As Heather Sutherland (2003: 15) explains in a survey essay, both Reid and Lombard saw in Braudel a way to reconcile doubts as to the importance of external influence versus local agency. The notion of a central sea was also attractive, as was his vision of a maritime trade-connected world. Prior to Braudel, she notes, Cœdès (1944) had already offered up the Mediterranean as an analogy for Southeast Asia, emulated by Wolters (1967, 1975, 1982) with his attention upon Srivijaya, and, in turn, by Indian Ocean specialist Chaudhuri (1985, 1990). Whether viewed as Eurocentric, whether masking a narrative of collective destiny, or whether just a “picaresque Rabelaisian narrative” (Sutherland 2003: 17), few would doubt the need for vision and passion in seeking to emulate the master (Brummett 2007).

Again, as Lombard (1997: 125) suggested, even if Southeast Asia lacked an equivalent of the Roman Empire, which succeeded in unifying both shores of the Mediterranean politically over four or five centuries, there were sufficient shared linguistic, cultural, and even political features in Southeast Asia to suggest an Oriental Mediterranean. For Lombard, it is only by making use of a supranational framework and by adopting an “integrated approach” that we can apprehend this reality. For our purposes, this is another way of appreciating a region of shifting frontiers outside of any fixed conventions of the nation-state. We of course acknowledge the many and shifting centers of power, but, like the mariners, traders, and travelers who crossed these lands and oceans, it would be refreshing to recreate a virtual history without borders.

In a seminal essay exploring “Braudelian regions” of Asia writ large, Wong (2001) writes that not only was the Chinese empire more economically developed than Southeast Asia, but its political power also enjoyed an edge. In drawing attention to a “Chinese Mediterranean,” Wong is also influenced by the writings of Hamashita Takeshi (1995) on the working of the Tribute Trade System. He also observes that, while Lombard allows a Chinese dynamic in his construction of maritime Southeast Asia, Reid presents a more autonomous region. Wong further comments that a Braudelian concept of region is less defined by a particular configuration of space than a multiplicity of bonds between peoples, as implied by a “total human experience.” But in Braudel’s Mediterranean, where Latin Christians and Turkish Muslims each retained their respective centers of gravity, as Lombard emphasized of Southeast Asia, this was a region defined by its diversity and hybridity.

A more recent convert to the Braudelian analogy is François Gipouloux (2009), who also asks whether the Mediterranean of the fourteenth century fits as a model for East Asia in the twenty-first century. Gipouloux reflects especially upon the maritime corridor linking East Asia to Singapore and beyond, just as Genoa, Venice, and Barcelona commanded the global flux of the fourteenth century. Gipouloux (2) defines an Asian Mediterranean as “a maritime corridor articulating several interconnected basins, the sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea, the South China Sea, the Sulu Sea, and the Sulawesi Sea.” But, in the twenty-first century, he sees China undergoing a recomposition of economic space, a special reference to the post-1990 influx of foreign capital, the emergence of new macroregions, urbanization alongside decentralization and fragmentation, and new concepts of industrialization. Coastal China once again comes to the fore, and it is not only trade driven but also a crucible for the penetration of new ideas such as those brought home by returning students (385), what we might call mondialization, or globalization, under a new guise. But neither has the Chinese state wilted away in the age of the nation-state. Old patterns resurface, just as even older Confucian values are confirmed in the Chinese periphery. Undoubtedly, Gipouloux goes further in reading the present backward to an earlier Asian Mediterranean.

Conclusion

As this chapter brings to the fore, the new world history method privileges a “decentered” perspective on the world insofar as that is possible, given the obvious bias toward nonindigenous sources and the synoptic approach adopted. As demonstrated, such a perspective allows us to transcend essentializing views of civilizations by teasing out the crossover elements in the meeting of peoples and cultures. Cultural diffusions and borrowings along with hybrid outcomes were duly acknowledged. With specific reference to the Thirteenth-Century Indian Ocean World System linking the Middle East and China, the method as applied here acknowledges multiple “cores” and multiple semi-peripheries and peripheries.

As asserted above, from a civilizational perspective, we should also be cognizant of the profound Indianization of both mainland and insular Southeast Asia along with Sinicization of Vietnam reaching back to the earliest centuries of the first millennium. At the same time, as developed in a following chapter, we should of course be aware of the deeper rhythms associated with indigenous practices. In addressing the Thirteenth-Century Indian Ocean World System, neither can we ignore the role of Arab and Indian Muslim traders who, from the eleventh century CE, turned the Indian Ocean and even the China Seas into a virtual Islamic lake, just as Islam became the most important civilizational influence in the archipelago by c. thirteenth century onward. Besides the Arabo-Persian core in the west, China was always a looming force in the region, whether symbolically through tribute missions or in actuality back to the Southern Song, or, more forcefully, under the Mongol Yuan with its seaborne invasions reaching to Java, or with the spectacular Zheng He seaborne voyages of the early Ming era. That also held for Ming China’s subsequent participation in the silk-for-silver and bullion trade with Japan and via Manila with the galleon trade from South America. And it also held for the ceramics trade via the flourishing China Sea junk trade connecting up with the Indian Ocean.

Allowing that the Thirteenth-Century Indian Ocean World System would collapse over the following century owing to various contingent factors, we cannot ignore the new geopolitical dynamics. In the wake of the “Chinese century” as marked by the Zheng He voyages, this would include the rise and reach of Ottoman naval power in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, naval clashes between the Portuguese and Islamic kingdoms from Oman to the Indian coast, and, no less dramatically, the eruption of the Portuguese into the Malacca Straits trading zone leading to the capture of the port-polity of Malacca in 1551. In the South China Sea area, the new dynamic would include the permanent settlement of the Portuguese on Macau in 1557 by arrangement with the Ming and the establishment by conquest of the Spanish in the Philippines in 1564. No less significant in defining the emerging modern world system (shading into the age of imperialism) was the forced entry of the Dutch and English East India Companies into the Java and China Seas, the establishment of trading monopolies at the source, and the laying of the foundations of future colonies and protectorates. From a “linear-cyclic” perspective, we should also heed the turbulence associated with the Ming-Qing transition otherwise sealing the fate of Formosa/Taiwan and interrupting the Chinese junk trade with Japan and the Southeast Asian monsoon zone. Finally, as intimated, the rise of the Canton Trading System and the advent of the opium-for-tea trade was no less significant in seeing a reversal of the historic bullion flow into China.

More so than the Reidian and Lieberman debates over differential externalist and internalist drivers of change with respect to maritime and mainland Southeast Asia, my own rendition of world system is to bind West Asia (the Middle Eastern core) to South and Southeast Asia and the East Asian core as virtually seamless when it comes to major economic interactions, not to mention social, civilizational, and technological transfers in another sense (Gunn 2011: Chap. 11). As this chapter has underscored, world history writing draws out the processes of interaction, migrations, and conversions typically veiled in conventional histories. As opposed to national narratives, the new history actually celebrates the crossing of boundaries not only between nations and peoples but also across the social science disciplines. Such themes are carried forward in subsequent chapters, with an emphasis on the actual writing of world histories as they relate to discrete regions.

1. Scholars of the China Sea zone include Wang Gungwu (1968, 2011, various); Wills (1974); Souza (1986); Hamashita (1989, 1994, 1995, 1998, 2003a); Ptak (1998a, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2004); Schottenhammer (1998, 2001); and Blussé (1999). Yet another group of scholars have made major contributions on the maritime world, as with Wolters (1967, 1975, 1982); Lombard (1990); Reid (1988, 1993); Hall (1985, 2008a, 2008b); and Lockard (2009). Another group of scholars, including Pollock (1996; 2009); Sen (2003, 2006, 2014); Acri (2016, 2017, 2018); and Tibbetts (1971, 1979), have enormously advanced our knowledge of religious exchanges, variously, Hindu-Buddhistic and Islamic.

2. Needless to say, world history perspectives are not restricted to the Afro-Eurasian world but have equally been applied to the “Atlantic World” (Canizares-Esguerra and Seeman 2007; Thornton 1992), Africa (Gilbert and Reynolds 2004; Manning 2003), oceans in general (Buschmann 2007), and even the world (1450–1750) (Ringrose 2018), in particular as with his acknowledgments of early European “trade diasporas,” as opposed to colonies.

3. Drawing upon William H. McNeill (1976) especially his Chapter 4, “The Impact of the Mongol Empire on Shifting Disease Balances, 1200–1500,” Abu-Lughod also acknowledges that this kind of epidemiological explanation requires further research.

4. In addition to those mentioned, Sugihara (2005); Pomeranz and Topik (1999); Frank (1998); Frank and Gills (1993); Arrighi (2007); Arrighi, Hamashita, and Selden (2003); and John M. Hobson (2004).

Part II: Imaginaries

2. An Indian Imaginary

Indic influences from the early years of the first millennium embraced until today by populations and polities from Tibet to Mongolia, from China to Korea and Japan, appears to be self-evident in the light of religious and philosophical borrowings of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Tantrism. This also holds for the interzone between India and China or, roughly, the lands and seas and archipelagos lying east of the Ganges as it was conceived by the ancient Greeks. In shorthand this is the area known today as Southeast Asia although, as alluded, that description is also problematic. It is also an area where popular beliefs as with localized versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata remain and where royal traditions where they have not been abandoned are matched with impressive monumental evidence from Prambanan and Borobudur in central Java to Angkor in Cambodia.

From a scholarly perspective, research conducted by outside researchers working under the patronage of, variously, the Dutch, British, and French colonial establishments—some of them Sanskritists—revolutionized understandings with respect to a range of ancient kingdoms, Funan, Champa, Angkor, and the Java-Sumatra-based Sailendra and Srivijaya Kingdoms included. Today such research is truly localized and each of the concerned states hosts its separate national archaeological research institutes. At the same time, they are no less engaged in heritage protection, museuming, and civic education, sometimes harnessed to national goals (see Braginskiĭ 2002: 1–48 on British scholarship). As suggested in the Introduction, outsiders also bequeathed their interpretations of the Indic transfer to the interzone. These interpretations would turn on one dubbed the Farther India school (see Bayly 2004). This was not only an evocation announced by European Orientalists but one to which Indian scholars contributed and which, in its extreme version, posited an Indian colonization. On the contrary, an autonomous perspective acknowledges the priestly Brahmanic transfer but confers equal or greater weight upon native genius and creativity in its grafting with and adaptation to local traditions. Nevertheless, advances in carbon dating and other techniques along with concerted new fieldwork across multiple sites in both the mainland and maritime components of the interzone have pushed back the origins of the Indic transfer to even earlier epochs (see Simanjuntak et al. 2006).

The end of the Indochina wars also gave a fillip to such research in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, though the wars had inflicted major damage to a number of archaeological sites. Alongside locals in revived institutional settings, the new peace also brought back to mainland Southeast Asia a number of Western scholars. The new age also saw the application of a range of newer scientific techniques such as advanced radar remote-sensing mapping of greater Angkor, drone images of possible spatial patterning on the Plain of Jars in Laos with respect to prehistoric megaliths, among many other examples. To strike another postbellum example from the archipelago, East Timor today has yielded revolutionizing insights into settlement and migration patterns such as those drawn from prehistoric cave sites (Lape, O’Connor, and Burningham 2007).

Mindful of a scholarly trend gaining ground in the 1980s to essentialize a coherent “Southeast Asian” identity, we are concerned in this chapter to test such assumptions against the evidence provided by newer waves of research and reconsideration of bounded areas (and area studies) now stimulated by renewed interest in civilizational and other macro-exchanges. We should also be careful to note in discussions on Indianization that the elitism and relative exclusivity of the courtly world, with its cast of Brahmans and ritual practitioners along with inner circles of devotees, possibly little touched surrounding village life, at least on the mainland, until the reception of Theravada Buddhism and the creation of monastic communities. As in the mountain areas of northern Thailand, Laos, and Burma, including Yunnan in China, and so indeed across the archipelago as in Java and Bali today, the spirit world permeated belief and still does outside of official prescriptions (Indonesia under military and postmilitary rule; Laos, Vietnam, and China under homogeneous state-building projects; the Philippines and Timor-Leste under Catholic Church strictures; and Malaysia, Brunei, and Aceh under Islamic orthodoxy). First, this chapter offers a summary of Indian civilizational influences as they touched the Southeast Asia area. A second section examines deeper patterns from prehistory. A third section links the civilizational transfer with Indian trade activities, while a final section surveys the archaeological record as it pertains to Southeast Asia. This chapter also seeks to read out lessons from significant advances in prehistorical research since the 1980s and to contribute to the “identity” debate.

I. Indian Civilizational Influences in the India-China Interzone

From the beginning of the first millennium, the major external civilizational influences reaching the India-China interzone were from India, the major exception being northern Vietnam, a virtual Chinese outlier from the early Han era (206 BCE–220 CE) and firmly within the Chinese orbit from around the eleventh century CE. Indeed, modern travelers to Java or Thailand today cannot but be struck by the frequency of Indian place-names, derived respectively from Pali and Sanskrit, bearing such suffixes as pura for “town” or nagara (sometimes negara) connoting “state” (Raman 2006). Some of them are contrived, some have long ancestry. Bangkok has named its airport after Suvaṇṇabhūmi, loosely “golden land,” a toponym that appears in many ancient Indian literary sources and Buddhist texts but its actual location in southern India or on the Malay Peninsula is so contested that the matter has never been settled. Even Java has a Sukabumi, but this name was coined during the short British interregnum in the Dutch East Indies (1811–1815).

As alluded to in Chapter 1, just as colonial scholarship invented a Farther India paradigm to explain the process of Indianization in the broad region across the Bay of Bengal from the Indian heartland, the pendulum would subsequently swing in favor of an autonomous Southeast Asian narrative emerging from various scholars and schools. More recently, however, Pollock (1996: 123) has explained how an entire “Sanskrit cosmopolis” took root in nation-states now known as Burma (Myanmar), Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia, not to mention India, just as inscriptions in Sanskrit began to appear in this broad area from around the fourth century CE, enduring for one thousand years. To be sure, Sanskrit was not a lingua franca in this world. Rather, vernacular idioms played that role. If that is so, what purpose did Sanskrit serve? As Pollock answered, it served as a kind of aesthetic of power or code for literary and political expression. Of the concrete reality of the “Sanskrit cosmopolis,” he writes:

For a millennium, and across half the world, élites participated in a peculiar supralocal ecumene. This was a form of shared life very different from that produced by common subjecthood or fealty to a central power, even by shared religious liturgy or credo. It was instead a symbolic network created in the first instance by the presence of a similar kind of discourse in a similar language deploying a similar idiom and style to make similar kind of claims about the nature and aesthetics of polity—about kingly virtue and learning; the dharma of rule; and universality of dominion. A network, accordingly, wherein the élite shared a “broadly based commonality of outlook” and could perceive “ubiquitous signs of its beliefs.” (229–30)

In part, the following pages elaborate upon the Sanskrit footprint at least where it helps us to understand the way the broader region—the vast interzone between Indian and China—was part of a community of shared traditions and religious values, albeit one without a center beyond symbolic versions of the metaphysical Mount Meru standing at the center of the universe, as with those of the Sailendra kingdoms of central Java from about 750 to 850. This is also an approach adopted by Andrea Acri in a number of studies with respect to Nusantara, or the island world (Acri 2016; 2017; 2018).

The Kingdoms

Of the many Indianized kingdoms found in Indochina, the pre-Angkorian kingdom of Funan was probably the most ancient, with its origins in the first century CE. With its focus in the Mekong Delta zone around the ancient port city of Oc Eo, Funan undoubtedly served as a gateway for the long-distance trade from India to China, including both goods and pilgrims. Attested in Chinese chronicles, Funan was superseded in the seventh century CE by Chenla (a collective term). Also from the beginning of the first century CE, the Nha Trang area in southern coastal Vietnam was penetrated by Indian civilization (Briggs 1951: 12, 20). Another example was Draravati, a kingdom and a culture identified with the Mons, flourishing in the sixth to ninth century CE, particularly associated with the site of Nakhon Pathom and the walled citadel of U Thong in what is today central Thailand. Archaeological investigation confirms the importance of Theravada Buddhism in this culture (Southworth 2004: 442–43).

Although brought within the orbit of China with the conquest of the Red River Delta in 221 BCE, we also include the Đại Việt among numerous precursor kingdoms and myriad smaller polities, especially among the Tai-Lao prior to their consolidation into larger political entities as the result of conquests or alliances. Yet another political constellation was the six or more polities that emerged in the Dali region of southwest Yunnan, including Nanzhao (737–937 CE) and Dali (937–1353 CE). The Theravada Buddhist Kingdom of Nanzhao imposed its own tributary overlordship over adjacent polities in present-day Burma, just as it benefited from the patronage of Tang China (618–917 CE) until it rebelled in 750 (Backus 1981).

We can appreciate that during the first centuries of the second millennium CE, the political map of the region known to Ptolemy as India extra Ganges began to change with the emergence of supraregional powers dominating large areas. This began in Cambodia with Angkorian civilization in the ninth century CE, perfected in Thailand under Ayutthaya from the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, with Pagan in Burma ruling over the western mainland zone. By the thirteenth century CE, Java was also part of this suprapolitical community with Majapahit, the last kingdom and empire of the Hindu-Buddhist period of the island world. But Angkor (a gloss upon nagara) was most successful in transforming autonomous centers into provinces and in building up a central bureaucracy (see Kulke 1986: 7–8, 17).

Typically, as Lombard (1997) cautions, agrarian-based kingdoms like their maritime counterparts were also woven into complex trading networks. As today, certain trade routes were by land, such as those connecting the Burmese and Tai-Lao Kingdoms with, respectively, Yunnan and Vietnam. Nevertheless, other networks were aggressively maritime, such as the trade plied by the Trịnh and Nguyễn kings of Vietnam. As discussed below, this also applied to Austronesian-speaking Cham predecessors and rivals, active even in the long-distance Arab trade with China.

All, to degrees, were hydraulic-based kingdoms of which Angkor astride the Tonle Sap, or Great Lake, and seasonally flooded by the Mekong River was paradigmatic. As revealed on a section of relief displayed on Angkor Thom from the ninth century CE, Khmer and Cham warriors also engaged in naval battles using galley-like vessels with massed rowers. But unlike the maritime world, where sea raiding and naval predominance was crucial, mainland armies marched on land. As wonderfully illustrated on the bas relief of Angkor (and Borobudur on Java), elephants became bearers of weapons, often crucial in determining martial outcomes.

II. Deeper Patterns from Prehistory

While we have acknowledged pioneering research on the Indian transfer going back to the colonial period, today a concern with prehistory has gone deeper than just assaying the monumental as with the relics of ancient empires or state formation around Indianization. Advances in prehistoric research in Southeast Asia since the 1980s have tended to push back the origins of the Indic transfer to even earlier epochs. As Pierre-Yves Manguin (2011: xxii–xxiii) explains, the new research with its emphasis on transculturalization has challenged certain of the historiographic trends in understanding Indianization, not only the Farther India or Indo-centric approach but also the autonomist, or indigenous, approach gaining favor in the postwar period.

With prehistory as its weapon, the new school endeavors to uncover even deeper patterns than that offered by the elitist Sanskrit footprint. Such “deep pattern” tropes range from concerns for “substratum” or “autochthonous” development, or “cultural matrix,” or culture zone as with Austronesia, or even “geological imagination” with respect to India as with the work by Pratik Chakrabarti (2020). The scope of such research is kaleidoscopic. It may engage the truly local as with village level studies, or the intermediate as with wider community studies, or it may enter a more interpretative or even theoretical level as with the crossing of national boundaries or even seas and oceans. This is not new if we consider Darwin’s theory of evolution or, more down to earth, the postulation by his Victorian colleague Alfred Russel Wallace of a “Wallacean” ecozone separating Australian from Southeast Asian fauna, or even early linguistic research into the roots of Indo-Aryan languages or a broad Austronesia-Indonesian language family. To offer just a sample, present-day research ranges over, variously, shared maritime space or seafaring traditions, Dongsonian heritage (associated with the production and dissemination of bronze items including Dong Son drums dating back three thousand years), the reception of rice culture including terracing, architecture (the Southeast Asian house), shared weaving traditions, participation in the ancient glass bead trade, the status of nonstate peoples, animist-magical traditions, musical styles, and degrees of female autonomy.

To this list of communities we might add an even larger Indo-Pacific dimension of shared patterns outside of Indian influence as with widely attested instances of megalithic culture or defensive fortifications in Ryukyu or East Timor, or even the shared Melanesian bond with land and its ownership. The commonality of prehistoric pottery techniques, as with incised pottery found in such Southeast Asian sites as Brunei, Sabah, and Mindanao, stylistically matching those of the Pearl River delta region (including Macau and Hong Kong) dating back to 5000–3500 BCE, also speaks of prehistoric cultural diffusion in little-understood ways. This has been signaled by Matussin Omar (1981) with respect to Brunei and, more generally, by Peter Bellwood (2017) in numerous studies relating to what he would later term “first islanders.”

For example, as Ian C. Glover and Bérénice Bellina (2011: 41) conclude from archaeological research at two sites in west-central and lower Thailand, the presence of metallic vessels and hard stone and glass ornaments, some with Indian religious symbolism, along with an evident transfer of technologies to locals, suggests that Indianization in Thailand was “a long drawn out process and with its origins in the late prehistoric Iron Age.” The maritime bead trade with its origins dating back to 2000 BCE exemplifies such primordial patterns of association. As studied by Peter Francis (2002: vii. 27–30), beads as artifacts of some aesthetic and other value traveled widely across the sea silk roads. Made of glass or crafted from semiprecious stones, they can also be traced archaeologically. Their manufacture has been associated with a number of key sites. In particular, Arikamedu, a location just south of Pondicherry in southeast India, has been identified as the earliest known Indo-Pacific bead-making site dating from the early first millennium. From a later period, other known bead-making sites have been associated with Mantai on northwestern Ceylon facing the Palk Straits, Oc Eo (as discussed below), Khlong Thom on the Kra Isthmus, and Sungai Mas and Kuala Selinsing, both riverine locations on the lower Malay Peninsula facing the Malacca Straits. In the words of Acri, Blench, and Landmann (2017), such understandings reveal the way that “processual communities” from prehistory “are still being negotiated in the modern period.”

The Animist-Magical World

As alluded, outside of the courtly centers in the villages or at the edge of the forest everywhere in mainland and maritime Southeast Asia, another world pervaded, namely the world of spirits. Whether in water, in rocks, in leaves, or wherever in the natural world, these spirits—some playful and benign, others malignant—had to be propitiated. We could take examples from Hindu Bali, or Buddhist Burma, or Cambodia, or jinn of the Malay world, but examples from Cambodia and Laos suffice.

As David Chandler (1982) has written of Cambodia in the context of its fall from grace as a Buddhist kingdom and the rise of the Khmer Rouge, two Khmer words bear consideration. These are srok and prei, traditionally paired terms translated variously as “field and forest,” “civilized and savage,” “wild and domesticated.” Chandler’s concern was with the performance of shared notions of social order expressed at the margins, including that of violence. There was also a vast hinterland or liminal zone between these two idealized spaces, but the wilderness of the forested uplands was also occupied by the montagnards. Variously dubbed Phnong or Pnong in Khmer and ritually linked with the kingdoms through their spirit beliefs as either a king of fire or a king of water, they were also feared. In perennial revolt, montagnards invariably invoked the role or shamans or sorcerers in their quest for legitimation and defense of territory (Gunn 2014a).

As scholar of Sinhalese Buddhism, John Clifford Holt (2009: 45) found in his study of Theravada Buddhist thought and practice in Laos, not only has it been heavily conditioned by veneration of phi, or spirits, but it is actually through the categories of the phi that “Lao Buddhism is understood in its uniquely Lao manner.” Building upon the work of such scholars as Georges Cœdès, Georges Condominas, Frank Reynolds, Marcello Zago, Charles Archaimbault, and Pierre-Bernard Lafont in revealing Lao history and society, Holt declares that the “powers of place” evoked by traditional spirit cults in Laos have brought about major changes in how the figure of the Buddha has been locally understood. Despite attempts by past regimes, French, royals, and communist alike, to eliminate the worship of phi, the practice has not been displaced and shows no signs of abating.

With his research mostly restricted to the Lao of Luang Prabang, we should also be alert to the vitality of spirit cults even today among the mountain minorities of Laos only lightly touched by Buddhism. In my own study of montagnard rebellion in Laos, I offer multiple examples where the spirit world intrudes as, for example, with the initial reception by mountain tribes in the 1930s of the airplane as a phi, or the actions of sorcerers in igniting tax rebellion, or efforts by royal officials to do away with the veneration of phi in the interests of state building around a Theravada Buddhist monarchy (Gunn 1990: 64, 94, 121, 128).

An Austronesian Maritime Tradition

Notwithstanding the existence of grand terrestrial-based kingdoms in the Southeast Asian region, a great deal of archaeological evidence demonstrates anterior sea migrations of disparate groups, as with Bellwood’s (2017) first islanders. Here we are reflecting on long-distance sea migrations such as those associated with the “Austronesian dispersion.” Surprisingly, as well, many sedentary ethnic groups across the archipelago share origin myths with maritime themes. Sometimes the evidence is mythic as with the crocodile ancestor of the Timorese, or symbolic as in the sweeping boat-shaped gables of Batak house architecture in Sumatra, or more evocative as in rock art survivals.

As known since Portuguese colonial times, one of the richest and most diverse concentrations of painted rock art yet found in the Indo-Pacific region is near the small village of Tutuala at the easternmost part of East Timor. Excavations at Lene Hara and at three other caves sites carried out between 2001 and 2003 revealed eighteen images of watercraft. They include three types of vessels built by Austronesian-speaking peoples that exhibit the lashed-lug construction technique. According to Lape, O’Connor, and Burningham (2007: 238), “Boats are among the most dominant and enduring of motifs depicted in a variety of media in South-East Asia and the western Pacific, appearing sculpted in bronze and as representations on textiles, bronze drums and other vessels, and extensively in the painted rock art.” As they acknowledge, past boat-hull and sailing-rig technology is of central importance in the quest to address such central questions as settlement and colonization. In the absence of direct archaeological or documentary evidence, researchers have relied on a variety of secondary and proxy lines of evidence to infer past boat technology. Even though the authors have not specifically dated the East Timor paintings themselves, the chronological sequence of the cave sites spans the period from 35,000 years ago up to the late metal age (c. 500 years ago). Pottery also made an appearance in all the caves approximately 3,500 years ago, and domestic animals such as pigs and dogs appeared at, or shortly after, this time. Still, the researchers enter a caveat, noting that the vessels depicted may not all be direct representations of vessels observed on the sea but representations of vessels as represented in other artworks such as Lampung cloths, decorated kettle drums, and wood carvings.

Researchers such as Adrian Horridge (1986: 1–9) have long asserted the importance of maritime traditions that, for example, facilitated the arrival of aboriginal peoples onto the Australian continent sixty thousand years ago. This was at a time when people resembling modern Papuans inhabited certain island clusters. The simple rafts employed in these migrations were superseded over the millennia by those of new arrivals. Subject to much conjecture and hypothesis, today a literature around an Austronesian dispersion of first islanders out of the Taiwan area assigns these people as variously, proto-Malays, or Malayo-Polynesians speaking Austronesian languages (Bellwood 1991). Likely equipped with rigs and double canoe designs, their migrations and maritime culture spanned an immense space, reaching Melanesia by 3000 BCE, Fiji by 2000 BCE, Tahiti by 1500 BCE, Hawaii and New Zealand by 900 CE, and westward to Madagascar some two thousand years ago.

As the Malayo-Polynesians spread, so their boatbuilding traditions developed and specialized. Besides stylized dragon-boat images found on Dong Son bronze drums cast around 500 BCE and carried from Vietnam across the archipelago, practically the only images we have of these vessels as they had developed by the ninth century are the eleven boats carved on stone panels on the Borobudur monument of central Java. Horridge’s (1986: 44–45) major finding was to establish the “lashed lug” method of Austronesian boat construction allowing for a durable hull that could easily be dismantled. Along with the outrigger and rigged sail, he dubbed this “an outstanding technological advance made by the early Austronesian peoples.” The technique has been attested in a wide distribution across the Indian Ocean.

As studied by Douglas Inglis (2014), the Borobudur reliefs serve as an important source of information on the complexities of classical Indonesian shipbuilding, including rigging elements, rope use, fastening, rowing configurations, and outrigger construction. As such, they represent evidence of physical structures that have not survived in the archaeological record, and some of these elements were actually retained by Indonesian prauh, or sailing boats, into the twentieth century. From careful analysis of the ship reliefs, Inglis (116) affirms that these are Indonesian (Austronesian) maritime traits, not Indian as earlier claimed.

III. The Indian Trade and Civilizational Transfer

As has been long understood (Mookerji 1912; van Leur 1955), the Indian Ocean trade brought together coteries of Indians, Arabs, Persians, Turks, and Malays joined by Chinese and other merchant groups according to the particular period under review. Having mastered the Indian Ocean monsoons, currents, and basic navigational lore, elaborate sets of trade routes plied by navigators of many nationalities linked coastal China with the Mediterranean region via the Java Sea, the Malacca Straits, the Bay of Bengal, the two coasts of India, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea routes. It is believed that, long before the age of Islam, Arabs also participated in the Indian Ocean trade. And, as intimated, so did Rome, dating back to 50 BCE–500 CE. This has long been known from the Indian side, as with the discovery of Roman coins at sites in Kerala (Logan 1887; 1989: 261), with repeated finds recorded through the twentieth century, as summarized in Chapter 8.

The Rise of Chola

As alluded to previously, south Indian trade connections with the interzone and even China date back to the third century CE. But the rise of the Hindu Chola Kingdom on the Tamil coast of south India during the tenth century in turn animated the extension of merchant guilds, Brahmanic temple communities, and Indianized forms of statecraft into Ceylon and eastward across the Bay of Bengal (see Sen 2014: 44–52). Spanning a very long historical duration, Chola (300 BCE–1279 CE) not only became a military, economic, and cultural power in South Asia but extended its influence to Southeast Asia. Hindu Saivite missionization and temple building by Chola would also encompass a civilizational push with respect to complex processes of state building inside and outside of India.

Throughout this period we have numerous notices in Chinese annals of Indian Buddhist devotees visiting China, matched by those relating to Chinese Buddhists visiting India. Notably, the Chinese monk Yijing who visited India in 673 CE recorded the itineraries of sixty Chinese who reached India by the maritime route. In the seventh century CE, way stations on Java or Srivijaya ports on Sumatra connected up the pilgrimage route. Chola also dispatched two embassies to China, one in 1033 CE and another in 1077–1118 CE, the latter consisting of seventy-two ambassadors-cum-trading mission shareholders (Mookerji 1912: 177).

Chola links with China appear to have reached a zenith between the late twelfth and mid-thirteenth century, as testified by a Chinese-sponsored pagoda in Nagapatanam founded in 1267 CE, matched by the presence of a Tamil temple in Quanzhou 泉州, a port city in eastern China also known as Chinchew and identified as Marco Polo’s Zayton. Dated to 1281 CE, this temple was consistent with south Dravidian architectural style of the late Chola period (Guy 2001: 296). Chinese texts also confirm strong links between south China and southern India during the Mongol-Yuan dynasty (1271–1368 CE) in ceramics traded against textiles and pepper. Wade (2015: 64–65) has drawn attention to the services provided to Yuan traders who settled in the south Indian port of Ma’bar in Madura by Sayyid Dinin, an Arab family of Gulf origins, including assistance to Mongol envoys on their way to Persia. Karashima (2009: 40) has also drawn attention to finds of Chinese ceramic sherds on coastline sites in India and Sri Lanka. These include porcelain sherds from the Jingdezhen kilns excavated from the Chola capital of Gangaikokondacholapuram and ascribable to the eleventh and twelfth centuries. While the Chola dynasty would decline by the thirteenth century, the same cannot be said of its legacy. Even today this can be attested in present-day Indonesia, Thailand, and Cambodia with respect to ceremonial aspects of kingship, not to mention popular culture. Nevertheless, it is to archaeology that researchers turn to reconstruct Chola history (Cœdès 1968; Majumdar 1952; Kulke and Rothermund 2001).

Map 2.1: Historical empires: First millennium

The Importance of Srivijaya

With little physical evidence to attest to its existence, the Sumatra-based maritime kingdom of Srivijaya (650–1377) was practically reinvented by foreign scholars, in particular the Dutch scholar Hendrik Kern along with George Cœdès, known for his epigraphical studies on both mainland and island Southeast Asia. As Cœdès (1918: 7–8) writes, “En réalité, le nom de Çrîvijaya n’est pas complètement inconnu.” As evidence, he presented an eleventh-century Nepali manuscript along with a Chola epigraphy linking the kings of Katāha (Kadãram) with Srivijaya and, in turn, Palembang correlating to a polity known in Chinese writings as San-fo-ts’i or Sanfoqi 三佛齐. Cœdès (26) goes further to speculate as to whether this kingdom was none other than the celebrated Zãbaj (Jãwaga) known to Arab geographers. There may also have been broader dynastic connections such as between Srivijaya and the founder of Angkor, Jayavarman II (802–860 CE), but interstate links in this age are not well recorded. Elsewhere in a discussion on the consecration of Jayavarman II as a universal monarch, Cœdès (1966: 97) views this an act of liberation from the overlordship of the Javanese Sailendra.

While, as discussed below, subsequent archaeological research has confirmed much of Cœdès’s early hypothesis of a Malay Buddhist kingdom centered on Palembang on the Sungai Musi (River)—or the adjacent Sungai Tatang—it is likely that Srivijaya was in effect a confederation of harbors and their hinterlands as opposed to a centralized bureaucratic state. In any case, as in 878 CE, Srivijaya entered into a tributary relationship with Tang China (619–907 CE) just as Chinese communities put down roots in the southeastern Sumatra region. Further evidence is provided by the Buddhist pilgrim Yijing, who left an account of Srivijaya when he visited the kingdom in 671. Both Chola and Song China (968–1279 CE) emphasized international trade, leading to a range of cultural and commercial exchanges between the two states, notwithstanding the huge distance.

Variously, as Billy K. L. So and Jilang Su (2000) as well as Angela Schottenhammer (2001) have determined, a number of drivers were behind this trade. Notably, the popularity of Buddhism in China created an enormous demand for such products as aromatics. But also the outflow of silver from China created a crisis demanding that the state authorities encourage export of ceramics and other commodities in an attempt to correct the trade balance. Accordingly, designated ports were also established to handle the new commerce. Song and Yuan (1271–1368 CE) together took such measures as creating a superintendent of foreign trade at Canton (Guangzhou 广州) in 871 and a parallel office in Quanzhou the following century, linked to a rising awareness of the importance of maritime Asia as a source of aromatics and other produce. As elaborated in Chapter 4, another factor influencing changing patterns of trade was the transition of south China, particularly during Southern Song times, from frontier zone to settled region with a rising market and urban population.

From a variety of sources and evidence we know that, as a maritime state athwart the Straits of Malacca, Srivijaya was pivotal in the interocean exchange. Concurrent with its trade links with Song China, Chola also engaged a range of ports coming under Srivijaya control in the Malacca Straits area (see Guy 2001: 287–88). However, as Kulke, Kesavapany, and Sakhuja (2009: xiv–xv) reveal from their study of Tamil and Sanskrit inscriptions along with Chinese texts, Chola naval expeditions against fourteen key port cities in Southeast Asia abruptly disrupted these apparently pacific relations. This is a reference to the oceangoing fleet dispatched by King Rajendra Chola I in 1025 CE against the Srivijaya kingdom, followed by a smaller naval expedition in c. 1070. Scholars are divided as to motive, whether empire aggrandizement, or cementing privileges for Tamil-speaking merchants, or controlling the trade link reaching from Song China to the Fatimids in Egypt. As Kulke (2009: 2) explains, the synchronous rise of these three new and powerful dynasties also coincided with the decline of the Abbasid dynasty (750–1258) and a shift in Muslim trading activities from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. Ships from the Red Sea and Aden now sailed directly to the Malabar or the southwestern coast of India firmly under Chola power, as were Ceylon and the Maldives.

Following four or five centuries of power and splendor, the foundation or charter kingdoms faced exhaustion, both environmental and political. Notably, the Mongol-Yuan ascendancy in China led to the capture of Dali in 1253 and the invasion of Pagan in the late thirteenth century. The Cham kingdoms, in turn, began to bear the brunt of pressure from the Đại Việt people moving south. Even so, Brahmanical-Buddhist traditions continued to flourish in Sukhothai, Ayutthaya, Bình Định, and the Cham capital from 1100 CE onward and at Angkor, until its eclipse in 1431 CE. Likewise, the weakening of Chola power from the mid-thirteenth century allowed other kingdoms in the Bay of Bengal to participate in the Indian Ocean trade. But the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in 1206 and temporary extension to central and south India in the fourteenth century and the spread of Islam to Indian and Southeast Asian ports further connected India with the Indian Ocean Muslim trade. In the meantime, south Indian Muslim merchants such as the Telugu Klings and Tamil Chulia carved out a special niche in Southeast Asian ports as with Malacca prior to the arrival of the Portuguese (see Kulke 2009: 14).

IV. The Archaeological Record from the India-China Interzone

We should not ignore the fact that select prehistorical sites reveal deeper patterns of association than even those registered in the period of large-scale Indianization. As mentioned, the maritime bead trade with its origins back to 2000 BCE exemplifies such primordial patterns of association. Still, we wish to know how archaeology at such monumental sites associated with Indianization reveals patterns consistent with, for example, Pollock’s Sanskrit cosmopolis. Or is the evidence more in line with Wolters’s (1982) refutation of the “Farther India” thesis and evocation of the Southeast Asia area as “a broadly based community of outlook” sharing a “mosaic of literary cultures.” Wolters is well referenced by Pollock (1996, 2009), just as Pollock also distances himself from the Farther India colonization line. But still in this discussion anthropology married to archaeology alongside an earlier tradition of epigraphy extends the boundaries of the known as exemplified by continuing research in the field, for example, shipwreck discoveries or excavations, sometimes through the application of new technologies.

Funan/Óc Eo

Of the many Indianized kingdoms found in Indochina, as mentioned, the Angkorian predecessor kingdom of Funan, also known in Chinese texts, was probably the most ancient, with its origins in the first century CE. With its focus in the Mekong Delta zone, Funan has come to be associated with the ancient port city of Óc Eo, an archaeological site in Thoại Sơn District in Vietnam’s southern An Giang Province. As Cœdès (1966: 58) long ago pointed out, with its key position along the maritime trade routes, Funan was an “inevitable” port of call for mariners passing through the Malacca Straits or, likely, the more numerous peoples crossing the isthmuses of the Malay Peninsula. Moreover, it may even have been the eastern terminus of trade originating in the Mediterranean if we accept that Cattigara, mentioned by Ptolemy, was on the western coast of Indochina or in the Gulf of Siam/Thailand (see Gunn 2018b: 186).

With Óc Eo sites rediscovered in the 1920s, and working from an aerial survey, in 1944 EFEO scholar Louis Malleret commenced excavations, inter alia recovering two Roman medallions along with a corpus of jewelry of Mediterranean origin or inspiration, as well as Persian coinage and Indian objects, including Indian-script items (1959; Higham 2002: 236). Archaeological research has not stood still at Óc Eo sites, of which more than one hundred have been discovered spread across present-day Long An Province of Vietnam.

According to a display at the Long An Museum (Bảo tàng Long An), the early inhabitants of the area acquired the technique of rice planting on high, low, and swampy land. Certain of the sites, including the ten-hectare cemetery located on a mound adjacent the left bank of the Vàm Cỏ Đông (Đức Hòa District), yielded stone implements, ceramic utensils, and the like, indicating origins dating back three thousand years and one thousand years of habitation. As explained, successors to the original prehistoric inhabitants came to be “creatively” influenced by foreign, particularly Indian, cultural transfer. This is attested by cultural vestiges excavated at multiple sites from the low-lying area of the Plain of Reeds to higher ground at Đức Hòa-Đức Huệ. Among the artifacts recovered are processing implements, workshop sites, gold implements, and stone inscriptions, clear evidence that the local inhabitants had reached an “unsurpassable degree” of skill in gold, silver, gems, and glass making, thus confirming its status as a bead-making site (Francis 2002: 31).

In a recent evaluation of the archaeological evidence, Le Thi Lien (2011) found that whereas the two hundred–odd sculptures recovered from Óc Eo sites mostly bore images of Vishnu and Shivalinga, the gold plaques revealed a far richer pantheon of Hindu deities. In commenting on the religious character of the sites surveyed from the early centuries of the first millennium up until the seventh to eighth century CE, Le concludes, “The presence of gods and goddesses and their symbolism in each period of time indicates continuous contacts between southern Vietnam and various places in India.” With respect to regional trade, as archaeologist Charles Higham (2002: 235) highlights, ancient Funan served as a “nodal point” for transporting goods along the routes over the Thai/Malay isthmus and the coastal ports of Vietnam and southern China. From such evidence we might impute that even longer-distance trade by stages connected Funan with Indian ports and even Rome.

The Andaman Coast-Gulf of Thailand Transpeninsular Trading Routes

By no means did all communication between the Indian Ocean trading realm and that of the China Sea area pass through the Malacca Straits. To the contrary, overland portage routes across the Thai/Malay Peninsula provided a long-tested alternative. Undoubtedly, that held with the ancient trade in beads back to the prehistoric period, but it also continued into the medieval period and beyond. As Francis (2002: 5) points out in his wide-ranging study on the bead trade, a long-preferred alternative to the time-consuming maritime route through the Malacca Straits was portage across the Malay Peninsula, about sixty-five kilometers wide at the Kra Isthmus.

Modern archaeology has confirmed this hypothesis. Notably, pioneering research by Janice Stargardt (1973; 1983) revealed the importance of a hydraulic society identified with Sating Phra, a coastal lagoon zone located in present-day Songkhla Province of Thailand that flourished from the sixth to thirteenth centuries. A sheltered harbor supported a complex port-city polity. At the narrow neck of the isthmus between the Gulf of Thailand and inland isthmian lakes, the Sating Phra canal system facilitated overland portage across the peninsula, thus providing a shortcut on the longer maritime route. Many of the Chinese ceramics attested alongside the central canal system date from the Five Dynasties (906–960 CE) through to the early Yuan (1279–1367), with far fewer ceramics of Islamic provenance.

Another site of interest is Kham Sao Khao, a sprawling settlement atop four hills along the Tha Tapao River in Thailand’s Chumphon Province. As researched by a Thai-French team under Bérénice Bellina (2017), Kham Sao Khao emerged over the centuries as “a cosmopolitan hub that drew merchants and artisans from India and other Asian horizons.” Not just a trading center for Chinese ceramics, Vietnamese bronzes, and Roman wares making their way to the markets of Southeast Asia, local artisans worked gold and silver, carnelian, and glass jewelry. New crops of Indian origin were also introduced.

Two ancient seaports on Thailand’s Andaman coast, Khuan Luk Pat in Krabi Province, excavated in 2005–2006, and Thung Fuk, a site in adjoining Phang Nga Province investigated in 2003 (both situated south of Chumphon), are of no less interest with respect to transpeninsular routes. Thai researcher Boonyarit Chaisuwan (2011: 105) has found evidence at Khuan Luk Pat of active trade dating back to the third century BCE with the discovery of Roman intaglios; large numbers of beads and glass, indicating local bead making; Indian seals from the first to fourth centuries CE; a Tamil inscription from the third century CE; and rouletted ware of Indian origin. Further research at Thung Fuk reveals evidence that arriving traders further explored and exploited riverine travel across the neck of the isthmus (Ta Kua Pa to Ban Don Bay) connecting with the Gulf of Thailand. Artifacts excavated at Thung Fuk include not only beads but an array of Chinese ceramics not older than the eighth century CE. Some Persian ware from the eighth to ninth centuries CE, along with glassware of Syrian origin, has also been attested. Broadly contemporaneous with the Srivijaya period, the site reveals strong evidence of Hindu and Buddhist exchanges. Taken together, this rich assembly leads to the conclusion that sites on the Andaman coast and farther inland reveal not only close trade across the Bay of Bengal but an earlier dating than hitherto understood. More generally, transpeninsular research confirms general assumptions as to the validity of a trade connection reaching from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, and China (see Boonyarit 2011: 83).

The Importance of the Cham Maritime Connection

Associated with the Cham coast of central Vietnam, the first of these Hinduized centers was founded in the second century CE, and the last was absorbed into the southward-expanding Vietnamese Empire during the first half of the nineteenth century. The name Champa first appears in an inscription dated around 600 CE found in the Hội An region, but it is suggestive of a series of small states developing on river mouths along the coast of Vietnam participating in an active trade with each other and with the South China Sea trade commencing during the early Tang (618–907 CE). New scholarship on the Cham of coastal Vietnam stress their seaborne origins, their trading activity, and, from the seventh century CE, their siting of port polities astride rivers (see Hall 2011: 86–87). Once a generic name, the Champa kingdoms gradually became unified through a complex system of kinship and marital alliances. As speakers of an Austronesian language, the Cham were entirely distinct from their Vietnamese neighbors and, as arriving seafarers, were pioneers on Vietnam’s eastern seaboard.

Brick temples and sandstone sculptures attest to a flowering of Hindu and Buddhist influences during this period. By the mid-eighth century CE, with the temporary decline of Canton/Guangzhou, the center of gravity of the kingdoms moved south to modern Nha Trang (Kautara) and Phan Rang (Panduranga), where Cham towers can be observed still today. By the eleventh century Bin Dinh Province in central Vietnam became the locus of the powerful Vijaya Kingdom now coming into conflict with the Đại Việt based at Thăng Long (Hanoi) and the Angkorian Kingdom. Although Vijaya survived these raids and depredations, including a Mongol (Yuan) invasion in the thirteenth century, it fell to Đại Việt in 1471, with Kautara following in 1653. Panduranga held out until 1832. As Lieberman (2003: 393) explains, the Cham armies were no match for the Vietnamese, who had acquired military technology in the form of handguns and artillery from the Ming if not the Yuan.

While early studies tended to perceive Champa as a unified polity (Maspero 1928), more recent scholarship has prompted some scholars to liken the polycentric Cham negara (state) to an archipelago (Southworth 2004: 321–22). But neither is pioneering French research on Cham culture and civilization ignored in Vietnam today. According to Cham researcher Ngô Văn Doanh (2006: 313), “With his profound knowledge about India, and by his thorough study of stelas and ancient Cham relics, the French scientists, especially H. Parmentier (1909) inventoried and described almost all the Cham towers as well as the vestiges of the Cham towers.” This was important because as Ngô acknowledges, many of the temples inventoried by Parmentier were damaged or even destroyed during the thirty-year war and all research was suspended between 1945 and 1975. Forty years after Parmentier, Philippe Stern (1942) identified Cham towers according to epoch and architectural style. Obviously, as Ngô (2006: 29) explains, over eight centuries there was a long and continuous evolution of Cham towers from the early ninth century (Phu Hai, Hoa Lai) to Po Rome in the sixteenth century. With a distribution ranging from Quảng Nam to Đà Nẵng in central Vietnam to Bình Thuận on Vietnam’s southeast coast, each was matched by impressive monumental brick towers, as at the Mỹ Sơn complex in Quảng Nam, and with the Mỹ Sơn god becoming the god king of the country from the eleventh century (see 39–40).

As is well understood, the temple abodes of Hindu deities are built to represent in miniature the symbolic Mount Meru. However, as Ngô (2006: 17) underscores, the builders are also obliged to abide by “strict regulations: centripetal in lay-out, axes oriented towards four cardinal points, the facade—main eastward entrance—looking to the direction of sunrise, source of life.” These precepts, we may infer, also held for other Hindu-inspired sites, as with the complex of temples on the Dieng Plateau on Java dating from the seventh to eighth centuries. Coinciding with the period of Buddhist expansion (from c. 400 CE to 800 CE), as pioneer historian of Indian art Ananda Coomaraswamy (1913: 64) explains, Dieng, Phra Pathom (Nakhon Pathom in Thailand), and the Mỹ Sơn group, “markedly Indian in character and purest in form,” stood as exemplars of “cubist” architecture reminiscent of the brick temples of the Gupta period (third century CE–43 CE) and the early Pallava (275 CE–897 CE) of southern India. Nevertheless, present-day research on the Dieng complex tends to view its architecture as a vernacular translation of Indian models (Romain 2012: 311–14).

The Archaeology of Srivijaya

We have alluded to the importance of the eponymous Srivijaya Empire and its reinvention at the hands of Dutch and French scholars working from thin epigraphical evidence matched by Chinese and other textual references, but what of the archaeological evidence on the ground? Commencing under Dutch colonialism significant epigraphic evidence collected in and around Palembang and now archived in the National Museum of Indonesia in Jakarta does suggest the proximity of a powerful regional Buddhist center perhaps matching Chinese chronicle source information. Such discoveries include a Buddhist statue, brickwork, and inscribed stones, along with pottery sherds dating from the Tang and early Song, in turn feeding into new understandings as to the history of the Hindu-Buddhist era in that area and the possibility of a Srivijaya capital. Nevertheless, as Cœdès explained in his 1930 article, Srivijaya epigraphy was then extremely poor and amounted practically to five inscriptions, three of which were found in Sumatra, one on Bangka, and one on the Malay Peninsula. He found it odd that alongside Javanese, Cham, and Khmer epigraphy, all but one of the inscriptions touching on Srivijaya were silent as to the name of the reigning monarch. Moreover, given that the four Srivijaya Malay inscriptions were engraved in the space of four years, between 683 and 686 CE, he also wondered among many other unsolved questions whether they related to the same monarch (Cœdès 1930: 52).

Notable was the Kota Kapur Inscription discovered on the western coast of Bangka Island by J. K. van der Meulen in December 1892, written in Pallava script using the Old Malay language and alluding to a curse upon whomever committed treason against Srivijaya and to the beginning of the Srivijayan invasion of Java. Dated 28 February 686 CE by Kern, who first examined the inscription, he initially took Srivijaya to be the name of a king, in any case testament of a Srivijaya era. Cœdès (1930: 46–50) offered a revised opinion and translation.

This was followed by the Kedukan Bukit Inscription discovered by M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920 on the banks of the Sungai Tatang, a Musi River tributary. Taking the form of a small stone of 45 centimeters × 80 centimeters, the inscription is dated 1 May 683 CE and written in Pallava script. As studied by Cœdès (1930: 33–37), the inscriptions contain numerous Sanskrit words. Although declaimed as the oldest surviving specimen of Old Malay found in the archipelago, it is also rivaled by a fourth-century rock transcription in Cham found to the east of Mỹ Sơn temple, as explained above (see Cœdès 1966: 65).

The Talang Tuo (Tuwo) or Bukit Seguntang Inscription is a stone block measuring 50 centimeters × 80 centimeters, discovered by the Dutch official Jan Constantijn Westenenk in 1920 some five kilometers northwest of Bukit Seguntang and dated to 23 March 684 CE. First translated by P. S. van Ronkel (1924) and Bosch, the fourteen lines of inscription contain many words intelligible in modern Malay. Cœdès (1930: 54), who revised van Ronkel, declared the Talang Tuo Inscription the earliest testimony of Mahayana Buddhism in the archipelago. Separately, Cœdès (1930: 45) also analyzed the Karang Brahi Inscription found at Jambi in 1904.

The Pepper Coast of Sumatra

As in Vietnam, so in the archipelago archaeological research began only in the modern period under colonial auspices. Attracting such Sanskrit names as Svarṇa Dvīpa (Island of Gold), vaguely known to the ancient Greeks as Tabrobana, known as Al-Ramni or Lambri in Arabic, and misleadingly labeled Java Minor by Marco Polo, Sumatra Island was a case in point. Dubbed la côte du poivre, or pepper coast, in 1880 by French explorer-ethnologist Xavier Brau de Saint-Pol-Lias, Sumatra first attracted the attention of early Dutch colonial administrator-archaeologists (see Labrousse 2009: 106).

Nevertheless, it was not until the early 1970s that sites such as Kota Cina, adjacent to the modern port of Medan-Belawan, were actually excavated, revealing Hindu and Buddhist images, porcelain shards, earthenware, stoneware (from both the Northern and Southern Song dynasties), glass, stone beads, and Chinese coins dating from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. As Perret et al. (2016) explain, because of its location astride the Straits of Malacca, Kota Cina would have been part of a network of Tamil trade guilds extending from the Red Sea to the China coast, including the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and Ceylon. Besides tapping hinterland resources, Kota Cina also plausibly connected with the spice trade via Java (see Miksic and Yap 1992). Recent archaeological evidence suggests that the Ming voyages of 1403–1433 also fostered important new material changes across the maritime trade routes, as with the introduction of new forms of coinage (Miksic 2010).

Across the China Seas: Old Port Brunei

A sea-oriented empire, Brunei achieved some considerable political-commercial strength on the northern coast of Borneo, at least until a decline set in during the fourteenth century, possibly owing to outright invasion by Majapahit. With Brunei connected to Quanzhou either by a southerly route via the Champa coast or by an easterly route via Luzon, trade flourished especially under the Yuan dynasty but carried through under the Song (Ptak 1998b: 289). Integrated into China’s tribute-trade zone and, accordingly, well documented in Chinese chronicle sources, local Brunei sources are nevertheless wanting. While Brunei’s origins remain imprecise, historians agree that a powerful pre-Islamic kingdom known to the Chinese as Po-ni existed on Borneo (Wade 1986). One candidate site for Po-ni is near Kuching on the Sarawak River. Another is at Kota Batu (lit. stone fort) upstream on the Brunei River and thereby comprising a sheltered port anchorage dating back as early as the seventh or eighth century.

Reexamination of Muslim tombstones found in cemeteries on the left bank of the Brunei River underscore the importance of the Brunei polity in the fifteenth- to sixteenth-century Muslim trade networks. With one of the tombstones identified with a member of the Quanzhou merchant community, this has led some analysts to suggest that the transmission of Islam to Brunei was actually via China. Besides confirming a strong Chinese connection through the fifteenth century (e.g., by decorative tomb elements), the evidence confirms a Brunei raja from 939 CE and a sultan from the early 1400s (Kalus and Guillot 2006: 175). According to A. V. M. Horton (2004: 270), Brunei was not a bureaucracy that recorded events. Neither did it issue coinage or maps or personal papers. It is therefore not known how many sultans there have been, nor can their reigns be dated accurately. Neither can the first conversion of a king to Islam be accurately dated, although it has been asserted. In any case, under King Karna (Ma Je Ka Na), Brunei appears to have rebounded. Having established tribute relations with China, in 408 Karna along with his royal consort and entourage visited Nanjing, where he died and was buried. Fitting his status as a prince, a stela, only recovered in 1958, records the ruler’s title in Sanskrit. But whether the king was a Hindu prince rather than a Muslim remains contested. Current Brunei historiography assigns Ma Je Ka Na the name Abdul Majid Hassan, the second reigning sultan of Brunei (r. 1402–1408). Further tribute missions followed at least up until 1425, when they ceased. There is also a belief or tradition passed down from this period that a Brunei king married a Chinese princess. As Robert Nicholl (1989: 21) affirms, links with China during this period were evidently close, allowing Brunei to recover some of its lost glory.

There is no question that Pigafetta’s early sixteenth-century description of the court of Brunei—undoubtedly the Kota Batu site—is seminal, confirming the court’s conversion to Islam. The Italian also offered up a crude map of the island, which he labeled Burne. He also described another city in Brunei Bay inhabited by heathens “larger than that of the Moros, and built like the latter in salt water,” a reference to Brunei’s famous water village (Nicholl 1975: 10). Pigafetta also described the existence of juru tulis, or secretaries, signaling the rise of a literate court center in Borneo from an early period. By the mid-sixteenth century, as testified by correspondence of the sultans of Brunei with the Spanish in the Philippines, Arabized Malay written in Jawi script had emerged as the language of state. Arabic, the language of the Holy Qur’an, remained largely inaccessible to all but a restricted coterie of religious practitioners. Instead, the Malay language written in Jawi or Arabic script mediated the language of the Qur’an to a wider circle of believers. Furthermore, it was Malay in its oral form that served as a language of Islamic proselytization, especially along the coast of Borneo and into the Philippines (Sweeney 1988; Gunn 1997: 45).

“Proto-historical” archaeological research at other selected sites in Brunei (Kupang and Lumut) conducted in 1968 and 1978 deepens our knowledge of ceramic trade connections with Song China and even Thailand (Sukothai and Sawankhalok), just as finds of local pottery with its characteristic impressed pattern designs link this trade item with a wide distribution from, if not the Hong Kong area of south China, then other parts of coastal Borneo. The evidence suggests that (Kuala) Kupang had its origins as a Song site, although eclipsed by Kota Batu, at least until the Spanish invasions of the late sixteenth century, when Kupang again began to attract trade from Qing China (Matussin 1981).

Beginning with the British researcher Tom Harrisson, terrestrial archaeology in northern Borneo is fairly well advanced, including at prehistoric sites such as in the Niah Caves in Sarawak. There, in 1954, Harrisson uncovered considerable evidence of past human habitations, dating from about 40,000 BCE. Across a number of sites, both coastal and inland, studies have confirmed evidence of ceramic trade activity, inter alia revealing ceramics traced to China, Đại Việt, and Thai kiln sites (Miksic 2010: 396). However, the Kota Batu site as first excavated by Harrisson in 1952–1953 (1958, 1974) reveals evidence of continuous occupation over more than one thousand years. Obliquely, this is demonstrated in a survey article on archaeological finds in Brunei by B. A. Hussainmiya (1992: 138).

Specifically, the archaeological excavations conducted by Harrisson (1974: 19) at Kota Batu revealed a sculpted laterite platform bearing Hindu cosmological features suggestive of Srivijayan or Majapahit influence. With reason, Harrisson describes Kota Batu as “unique among known Southeast Asian sites” for existing continuously in one limited space, a reference not only to discoveries of Chinese stonewares and porcelain dating from the Tang dynasty but also to the presence of prehistoric stone walls, cut or shaped wood, and associated vegetable materials.

As inspected by this author in 1994 in the company of members of the Universiti Brunei Darussalam Department of History accompanied by a specialist from the Pusat Penelitian Arkeologi Indonesia, the core structure of the Kota Batu site as it remains today (literally in wraps) is not Islamic but of Hindu provenance (Gunn 1997: 38). This is demonstrated by a 32-sided stone base (typically Hindu and not Islamic symbolism) sited on a mound, carved with makara, or demon images, in the Hindu tradition. The ground floor and superstructure is entirely missing. In any case, the Kota Batu mound site in Brunei is out-of-bounds for investigators just as the Islamic Sultanate is not keen to advertise its Hindu antecedents.

Conventional wisdom might suggest a Srivijaya or Majapahit connection with Kota Batu, as demonstrated by sites on northwestern Kalimantan (Tanjongpura). Even so, the gap in research into the spread of Indic influence on this part of the coast of Borneo island does not permit such a positive assertion. Neither is the sequencing of Islamic conversions of rulers well established. In the light of references to Cham connections with Malacca in the Sejarah Melayu, or Malay Annals, I now go as far as to hypothesize a seaborne Cham connection with northwest Brunei, as Cham sites have been located in the southern Philippines and on Hainan Island. In the latter case, this is a linguistic connection with a community hypothesized to have arrived by sea ahead of the Đại Việt invasion of the Cham capital, Vijaya, in 1471 (Sun 2006: 104).

Temasek/Singapore River

Located at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula astride the Singapore Straits, the existence of an ancient capital dubbed Temasek was known as far back as the Stamford Raffles period coinciding with the British occupation two hundred years ago. As understood by the first-arriving British, the Bukit Larangan/Fort Canning area comprised one side of a quadrangle of an ancient walled settlement adjacent to the Singapore River. Some inscriptions along with gold ornaments then discovered suggested a connection with the fourteenth-century Majapahit Kingdom. As interpreted by British classicist R. O. Winstedt (1935: 5–9), the Javanese Nagarakretagama, Malay Annals, and Chinese sources offer certain corroborating information. Modern archaeology beginning with John Miksic (1985) and leading to an archaeological dig at Fort Canning and other locations confirmed the existence of a long-supposed Hindu polity or outlier of the Hindu-Buddhistic kingdoms of Java-Sumatra, named Temasek. As attested by the discovery of ceramic shards dating back to the Yuan dynasty, along with a treasure trove of material objects of Indian and Chinese provenance, Temasek obviously attracted significant trade activity (Miksic and Lim 2004).

As summarized by Derek Heng (1999, 2011), Temasek was actually a port polity on Singapore Island during the fourteenth century and was active for just one hundred years. It was never a great emporium and, as with other Malay ports, was subject to external vicissitudes. No archaeological artifacts earlier than the fourteenth century have been found. More recently, Lim Tse Siang (2012: 115–18) has sought to clarify “conjunctures and hypotheses” surrounding Temasek through analysis of a range of material cultural remains sourced to a single archaeological site matched by historical texts. Having subjected a variety of artifacts to scientific analysis, such as high-value ceramic artifacts along with glass and gold ornaments, he was able to determine significant “differentiation in material wealth and social status,” as befitted a socially complex society of those times. As he argues, given the paucity of historical data at hand relating to fourteenth-century Southeast Asian polities, his examination of the artifact assemblage from Temasek-Singapore and the lessons drawn offer even broader insights into the study of maritime Southeast Asia during this transitional period.

The Localization of Indian Epics: Examples

Still, there is an abundance of evidence in literary and other sources of a pre-Islamic past in the broader Indonesian-Malay region, not to mention in the Theravada Buddhist world. Ramayana stories appearing in reliefs carved into the walls of the temples of Prambanan (Candi Lara Jonggrang) in central Java date from around 900 CE, with an Old Javanese Ramayana composed at the end of the ninth or beginning of the tenth century. In Bali, the story of Rama still plays a central part in the religious and cultural life of the island. With Malay versions of the Ramayana first entering manuscript form at some point between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the longevity of this tradition even under Islam is remarkable (Barrett 1963). As known in Brunei, the song-poem Syair Awang Semaun references an ancestral figure descending from a keinderaan (heaven, or abode of Indra). As such, the Syair taps into a broad Malay world oral tradition that also includes Indian epics.[1]

As one would expect, the Indic traditions as vested in the Ramayana was no less powerful in its reception in the Theravada world. That would include the Mekong valley “Naga cities” invoked by Martin Stuart-Fox (2006). Notwithstanding war and revolution and the abolition of the monarchy in Laos in 1975, the Ramayana tradition has survived to the present day. This was attested by John Clifford Holt (2009: 269) in his fieldwork conducted in Luang Prabang in the present century, noting the specific adaptation of the Ramayana in a Lao context.

In an earlier period, until war closed in on his research in northern Laos in the late 1940s, Henri Deydier sought to investigate the “profound divergence” separating Lao and Indian Buddhism. In Sam Neua Province he found a preponderance of Tai traditions in Lao Buddhism, but the closer he drew to the Yunnan border the more he found an “impregnation” of Indian culture among the local Tai Lu population. There on the frontier with Sip Song Panna (the current Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous County of Yunnan), he heard recited the legend of King Asoka and came to the realization that the farther he journeyed through northern Laos, the more he became aware of the way that Buddhism was acculturated to local traditions. Deydier also collected Tai Lu manuscripts.[2] “C’est là le fond du problème du bouddhisme laotien” (At base this is the problem of Laotian Buddhism) (91). As he further explained, he did not simply read this Buddhism according to the ancient texts of India but, rather, sought to understand them in line with local Lao customs. As a result, Deydier (1954: 90–91) conceded, this entirely changed his perspective on Buddhist studies.

According to modern research, Buddhism did not become deeply rooted in Sip Song Panna until the second half of the fifteenth century, with Chiang Mai the major Buddhist center and disseminator of Dhamma or Old Tai Lu script (see Grabowsky 2019). Neither do I except myself from research in Xixuangbanna, having visited in 1983 among the first wave of individual visitors since the Chinese revolution. Then, the ravages of the Cultural Revolution as described by Grabowsky were all too obvious, as with the Chinese characters “Long Live Mao Tse Tung” daubed across deserted temples and their manuscripts and artifacts destroyed. Still, I saw evidence of local script (actually on an advertising hoarding) and much evidence of local Tai tradition including language, house architecture, farming practices, and many other indicators suggesting identity outside of total Sinicization.

Obliquely, Deydier’s method has been adopted by Indian researcher Sachidanand Sahai. With specific reference to the Ramayana, Sahai (2011: 443) queries, in what way do Lao transform the Indic story to express the cultural ethos of the Indian epic befitting the Mekong valley axis? What is the pedagogical use of the Ramayana to teach geography at the innumerable village monasteries along the Mekong? Palm-leaf manuscripts collected by Sahai revealed to him a wide receptivity to the Ramayana across northeastern Thailand and the Mekong valley, most being ancestral to mid-nineteenth-century copies (in turn derivative of earlier copies). The Phra Lak Phra Lam, also known as the Rama Jataka, is considered the national epic of the Lao people. As revealed in dance and drama and song, as well as in religious texts, it was recited by monks during ceremonial occasions to enraptured audiences into the 1970s. But with Theravada Buddhism only received in Laos (c. 1400s and even later in the case of the Tai Lu) and much later than in Cambodia and Thailand, it came to be far more localized in its reception. This being so, it was treated as a Jataka tale more generally relating to the previous births of Gautama Buddha in both human and animal form. Specifically, as Sahai (453) describes, the physical and human geography of the middle and lower Mekong emerges accurately from the “mythic topography” carried in the Phra Lak Phra Lam. Its depiction of the Mekong axis are as rich as the reports of nineteenth century French explorers; the Phra Lak Phra Lam relates the exploits of the Bodhisattva Rama up and down the river from Vientiane to a putative capital featured in the Mahabharata epic imaginatively relocated to the west bank of the Mekong river (in Phnom Penh). To answer his own question, Sahai (458) concludes that, given its localization, the Rama Jataka is a “compendium of the Buddhist doctrine and spirit cult . . . a symbiosis of the exogenous religious faith and indigenous Tai belief system.”

Conclusion

It is certainly thought provoking, as Pollock (1996: 199) points out, that for the first millennium the spread of Sanskrit “helped create a new kind of vast zone of cultural interaction, what some might name as ecumene.” Yet there was “no imperial power or church.” There was no conception of single community as with Christendom, the Islamic ummah, or the Middle Kingdom. Neither was there “fixity” in written versions of Sanskrit as there was in Latin, Arabic, or Chinese (232). Pollock, we note, also tracked through a small corpus of literatures to add caveats to the defenders of the autonomy school of thought surrounding the localization of the Indic transfer.

We have acknowledged this shadowy community of Brahman priests, poets, and temple architects-aesthetes with reference to a select cluster of sites, some subject to epigraphic research, others known through archaeological investigation, and still others matched with textual descriptions like the Chinese chronicles. But we have looked both ways in consideration of a deeper substratum of ideas and practices that are not Indian and not necessarily Chinese when it comes to broad Indo-Pacific prehistoric migrations, as with Bellwood’s (2017) first islanders. From what we have seen, it seems that sometimes archaeology trumps anthropology in seeking greater truths, but the converse could equally apply (as with the omniscient spirit world of both mainland and maritime Southeast Asia). In making this assertion, we have also sought to look beyond the courtly centers to the peripheries, borderlands, villages, and forested uplands where, as alluded, the spirit world still pervades, although it may also be eclectic with grander traditions whether Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, or the Sinic. Stated another way—and again with the spirit world in mind—the exogenous and the indigenous often coexist. This is all the more so outside the purview of priest, imam, preacher, soldier, and mandarin-bureaucrat.

1. No less, a version of the Hikayat Seri Rama has been published by the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Language and Literature Bureau) in Brunei Darussalam, with the most recent reprint appearing in 1999. A copy of the Hikayat Seri Rama dating from the early 1600s is held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. See Teh Gallop 2014.

2. Deydier cites Pra Cao liep lok (Buddha visits the world) but he also collected many other manuscripts. See Lafont 1965.

3. Arab Geographic Imaginaries

The Dar al-Islam (lit. abode of Islam or peace) conjures up a very different rendition of space and civilization relative to that of the Indic, not to mention the Sinic, world. Comprising a vast community of believers, the ummah, the world of Islam at large is multicultural, multiracial, nonhierarchical, and largely egalitarian. Outside of the historical caliphates, Islam has no single political center, although sultans and emirs may command the allegiance of this or that polity. From its origins, however, Islam was centered upon the Arabian heartland. Orientation toward Mecca is part of Islamic geography as is an obligation for a pilgrimage for those with the means. Muslims also share a Holy book, the Qur’an, read or recited in Arabic, no matter the local vernacular. It may seem paradoxical, but in the Malay world of rajas-turned-sultans as began to transpire from around the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, Islamic courts duly incorporated many of the trappings of the Indic courts they superseded. This was especially the case with the inland courts on Java, where the weight of pre-Islamic traditions was practically overwhelming. Those sited along the sea lanes, however, assumed far more orthopraxic styles, of which Aceh was a paradigm, as was Banten on Java. Whether of Arab, Persian, Indian, Malay or even of Chinese ancestry, they were also connected by long-distance trade. Importantly, several of them left travel accounts of Indian Ocean voyages ranging as far as China and even Korea. Some were translated into European languages in the eighteenth century, as with Antoine Galland’s translation (1704–1717) of a fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript of the tale of Sinbad the Sailor under the title Les mille et une nuits.

As a preliminary, this chapter explains the origins of Arab trade and Islamic conversion. A second section discusses Arab/Muslim geographies of Asia. A third section examines Arab primacy in navigational knowledge—as much knowledge of Asia—ahead of Europe. A fourth section follows with a review of Arab merchant accounts of India and, especially, China from the tenth century. Inter alia, as translated and reinterpreted by French Arabists, the Arab-Persian corpus reveals a rich civilizational crossover and exchange, but it can also be understood as mutual otherings or imaginaries.

I. Arab Trade and Islamic Conversion

Especially with the advent of Islam at the start of the seventh century CE and with Islamic conversion reaching out of the Arabian heartland in subsequent centuries, we should be cognizant of major geopolitical shifts across Eurasia, not excluding the westward spread of Islam through the Mediterranean. As Hyunhee Park (2012: 7) summarizes in her study of the Islamic world exchanges with China, following a successful rebellion in central Asia, the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258) with its center in Baghdad replaced the Umayyads (661–750), who had already incorporated central Asia east of the Caspian Sea, northern Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula. By continuing its eastward push, the Abbasids came into political and military collision with the Tang dynasty of China (618–907 CE) in the Battle of Talas (751), leading to a Muslim advance and a Tang retreat from the Transoxiana region (as it was known to the ancient Greeks). By the eighth century, with the central Asian silk roads disrupted and falling into decline, trade across the maritime silk roads surged.

Pax Mongolica

Just as the Muslim empire underwent rapid expansion in the seventh century CE from its heartland in the Arabian Peninsula, especially westward into the Maghreb and Al-Andalusia, respectively, in north Africa and Spain, so Islamic traders and missionaries began to infiltrate the ancient terrestrial silk roads reaching to China during Tang dynasty (618–907 CE). Such central Asian cities as Kabul and Samarkand were key points on routes leading to Kashgar and to China itself. Seaborne trade from China also reached the Persian Gulf area by the ninth century CE via Arab traders plying coastal routes in this period (see Abu-Lughod 1989: 306–10). This was trade by stages via many intermediary ports, and not all merchants made the entire journey, if any did all.

As Park (2012: 8) determined from a scrutiny of Arabic and Persian texts, when the Mongols ruled both China and Persia under the Il-khanate in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, their mutual geographic knowledge expanded greatly. As she explains, both overland and maritime societies experienced integration under the Mongols, who conquered most of Eurasia and reopened trade routes that had been closed for centuries. During this period, Chinese-Muslim relations especially developed via the maritime route, culminating in the spectacular advance into the Indian Ocean littoral of the Zheng He voyages. As explained below, many other knowledge exchanges resulted from this maritime commerce broadly understood.

Particularly during the Mongol-Yuan ascendancy, Muslim-controlled trade also reached the Mediterranean, connecting with Venice and beyond. In these exchanges, as explained below, Arab lands, southern India, Ceylon, and such maritime trade-oriented polities as Srivijaya, Champa, along with Brunei from around the twelfth century, were all connected with coastal China via Muslim trading networks. Setting aside the provenance of the ships, which will be discussed in a subsequent chapter, trade was conducted on large multisailed vessels capable of carrying immense cargoes and many passengers, Indian traders among them (Briggs 1951: 23; Sarkar 1986; Glover 1989).

Pioneer Arab Trade in Southeast Asia

The process is not well documented, but Muslim sailors arriving from Gujarat and the eastern seaboard of India were undoubtedly among the most active in the Southeast Asian trade, though, as elaborated below, Arab seafarers were also pioneering in pushing their trade links as far as the coast of China. While obviously the evidence is not readily identified by archaeological research, such as with the case of Chinese ceramics, it should be recalled that, from an early age, India was the leading producer and exporter of textiles—in high demand in the courts and marketplaces of Southeast Asia—and would remain so until the British eclipse of the Mughal Empire. To date, the oldest verified Islamic inscription found in the archipelago—although not of local provenance—is the Leren stela, dated 1082 CE, excavated from the Leren site (Gresik) near modern Surabaya on a dead estuary of the Solo Bengawan River, believed to have been an important port from the ninth century (Kalus and Guillot 2006). Nevertheless, as confirmed by the discovery of an Islamic inscription dated 1211 at Lamreh, Islam had established a beachhead in Aceh. Islam, such as attested in northern Sumatra by Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, undoubtedly made rapid conversions among the formerly Indianized princes, especially in zones astride maritime trading routes. While the process was not even and remained highly syncretic as to reception, across the archipelago rajas turned sultans while their populations converted en masse. A ruler of Champa may have been the first of the Hinduized kings to convert to Islam, just as Islam may also have arrived in Brunei from a northern route. More or less, by the end of the eighteenth century, Islam reached the limits of its geographical expansion in the Malay world (Riddell 2001: 168).

Muslim Networks on the China Coast

Having mastered the maritime route from Persia across the Indian seas and through the Malacca Straits, Muslim communities then developed in a crescent of south China coastal locations. In particular, there were three major segments along the long maritime route. From west to east these were from the Red Sea/Persian Gulf to southern India, from India across the Bay of Bengal to the Malay Peninsula, and from the Malay Peninsula to China. As Peter Francis (2002: 4) has pointed out, there were two important choke points on the route. The first, the reef-strewn Palk Strait separating India from Ceylon, which could be navigated only by the smallest of vessels (until the sixth or seventh century when Persians learned to navigate around the south coast of the island). The second choke point was between the Andaman Islands and the South China Sea at the 800-kilometer-long Malacca Straits. Setting aside navigational risks occasioned by mangrove swamps concealing river mouths on the Sumatra shore and island passages in the extreme south, not to mention piracy, here the monsoon wind system was weak and the passage could extend to more than one month.

There is one constant in this narrative of east-west trade across the Indian Ocean and that is geography and climatic regimes. The monsoon wind (after the Arabic musim, or season) blows in one general direction for a specific period of time and then, after an interval of calm, reverses direction in a yearly cycle governed by differences of sea and land temperature according to season. Especially for vessels sailing out of sight of land, such knowledge was imperative for navigation in tandem with a wealth of local knowledge. Yet other variables applied especially in the South and East China Seas, notably the typhoon regime. Missing or mistiming the winds usually resulted in a long waiting period in one or other of the intermediary ports.

While the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou (Canton) had long been the premium port of embarkation for long-distance trade, in 1087 CE the Song established an office to regulate trade at Quanzhou in the so-called Fujian triangle area comprising a number of ports that soon exceeded Canton in the collection of tax receipts. By the early Ming, Fuzhou 福州 and Suzhou 苏州 would also serve this role. Quanzhou hosted numerous mosques alongside, as mentioned, Buddhist and Hindu temples. Inscriptions found in local cemeteries include scripts written in Arabic, Persian, Syrian, and Tamil, attesting to the cosmopolitan nature of the Chinese trading port. Especially during the trade-oriented Southern Song, the office of director general of shipping was consistently held by a Muslim, as Muslims virtually dominated China’s long-distance trade during this period. Although the Mongol-Yuan invasion of the south scattered many Muslim communities, in Ming times Muslims achieved social integration in Han society as well as privilege. The Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta visited these trading ports in 1345 CE.

Confirmation of the maritime trade between Indian and Arabian ports and those of Southeast Asia and the coast of China continues to be revealed by marine archaeology, as will be discussed in Chapter 8. Ceramic assemblages found in marine wrecks offer rare evidence of East-Southeast Asian trade and production cycles. In reflecting upon the Persian and Arab commerce with China, van Leur (1955: 111) was undoubtedly correct that “the complete internationality of trade from the earliest times on is certain.”

II. Arab/Muslim Geographies of Asia

More generally, Arab pilots began reaching the region known today as Southeast Asia in the seventh century in search of spices. By the ninth century, Arab traders had also voyaged to the Caspian area. But the lure east might also have been direct trade with China, especially linking up with the source of fine porcelain and other valued commodities. As explained below, the first compilation of traveler’s tales based on these voyages emerged in the mid-ninth century, although they would remain in manuscript form until a later age. While, as discussed below, Muslim/Arab navigational priority was both sophisticated in terms of its mathematical foundations and workable at a practical level as Europeans were entering the Indian Ocean, much more reserve can be attached to Arab/Muslim descriptive accounts of China and other destinations that came to be produced in the fourteenth century.

Arab/Muslim Geographies of Asia

According to Tibbetts (1971: 2), with the advent of the Abbasid empire and the establishment of an Arab tradition of prose literature, the earliest Arabic descriptive geographies began to appear. In addition to other contemporaneous works, he cites ninth-century Persian geographer Ibn Khordadbeh’s Kitāb al-Masālik w’al-Mamālik (Book of roads and kingdoms). As translated by C. Barbier de Meynard (1865), the work reveals knowledge of maritime trade routes to India, Southeast Asia, the coast of China, and as far east as Korea. Nevertheless, it was only with the translation of a fragment of the text dealing with Jewish merchants called “Radhanites” by another French orientalist, Joseph Toussaint Reinaud, that the text was brought to the attention of Western scholars (see Gil 1974: 299).

The Ninth-Century Ibn Khordadbeh Account

As described by Ibn Khordadbeh, the Raddhanite merchants operated along several routes stretching from western Europe to China. They ranged from the center of the Abbassid Caliphate to its periphery, to the northern parts of India (Sind and Hind) and Khurasan (Persia) in one direction, and Constantinople, Antioch, and the Slavonic lands in another. They also connected with the Caspian Sea and Transoxiana regions. From west to east, they brought slaves, brocades, furs, and swords. From China they carried musk, aromatic wood (probably aloes), camphor, and cinnamon. As Moshe Gil (1974: 300) points out in a detailed literature review, “Though there are differences of scholarly opinion concerning various aspects of the fragment, there is relative unanimity as regards the land of origin of these merchants, namely Western Europe.” The fact that (Western) Jewish merchants could operate in this way owed to the existence of a chain of Jewish communities stretching from Spain to China, just as conditions under the Frankish-dominated Carolingian Empire (800–888 CE) were favorable for such travel.

As Arabist Paul Lunde (2005) interprets, with their most probable home port of Venice, the Raddhanite merchants set sail from the Mediterranean, crossing the Isthmus of Suez. From the Red Sea they sailed to Sind, India, and China. Of their four principle routes, two were overland and two maritime, coinciding with trade routes described in other Arabic sources. Offering confirmation of the Ibn Khordadbeh account, as Gil (1974: 323) concludes, the Jewish merchants held an “unrivaled position” in the international trade of that period. “They were no association, nor organization, nor group, they only had in common their country of origin.” Nevertheless, other sources reveal that long-distance trade actually consisted of a chain of “interregional trips rather than the long and inevitably perilous journeys.” On the journey to China, as Ibn Khordadbeh writes:

From Senf to al-Wakin (Loukin) which is the first point of contact in China is 100 pars, by land and sea. . . . One can go from el-Wakin which is a great port to Khanfou in four days by sea travel, or in twenty days by land. . . . In all the ports of China there is a great navigable river which is subject to the influence of the tide. . . . China contains three hundred cities, all prosperous and well known. This country is bounded by the sea, Tibet and the country of the Turks. Foreigners from India are established in the eastern provinces. (Barbier de Meynard 1865: 299–300; author’s translation from French)

To be sure, the names of the four seaports of el-Wakin (Hanoi?), Khanfou (Canton?), as mentioned, along with Djanfou (coastal Fujian?) and Kantou (Yangzhou in the lower Yangtze?) have been subject to much speculation (see So and Su 2000: 17).

Ibn Khordadbeh also references the Silla Kingdom of Korea as a destination for Muslim traders in such products as ginseng, musk, aloeswood, camphor, and porcelain (Barbier de Meynard 1865: 294). As one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea coinciding with this era, Silla (57 BCE–935 CE), together with Japan and the Ryukyu Kingdom, may not have been directly touched by the Arab trade, though nevertheless indirectly connected.

From this rich evidence, according to Tibbetts (1971: 2), “we may assume that the tradition of navigational literature current in the Indian Ocean perhaps since the time of the Peryplus was by A.D. 850 available in Arabic (or perhaps Persian) for Arabic speaking authors to peruse.” By c. 1000 CE, as discussed below, the Ibn Majid tradition of navigation was already in existence.

Al-Ya’qubi’s Kitab al-Buldan (Book of the Countries)

Another Arab geography from this epoch is that of Aḥmad ibn Abī Ya’qūb ibn Ja’far al-Ya’qūbī, or Al-Ya’qubi (d. 897), coming to prominence during the Abbasid Caliphate. He is also known to have traveled in India, Egypt, and the Maghreb. A version of his Kitab al-Buldan (Book of the Countries) was first published in the West in Leiden in 1850 and again in 1892, so it was not an image-forming text during the age of European discovery. According to Lunde (2005), Al-Ya’qubi obviously followed oral tradition in his description of the Indian Ocean seafaring world, including the names of these seven seas. As Lunde interprets, the names of these seas including an evocation of a China sea leading to Khanfu (Canton) derive from the languages of the peoples who lived on their shores and preserve, “as if in amber,” the varied linguistic and cultural backgrounds of the seafarers who first explored these waters. Precisely, these are the seas sailed by Sinbad such as invoked in The One Thousand and One Nights dating from the ninth or tenth century.

Al-Mas’udi’s Muruj al-Dhahab (Meadows of Gold)

In his Muruj al-dhahab (Meadows of Gold), the Baghdad-born Cairo-based historian and Asian world traveler al-Mas’udi (896–956 CE) explains how direct voyages to China were replaced with a system in which merchants stopped at a halfway house in either Ceylon or Malaya, where they purchased goods brought there from China. In this and other Arab narratives, the name Siraf, a Persian Gulf port servicing the lower Tigris and Euphrates valleys also emerges (Lunde 2005; 2007). Excavated in 1968, as will be discussed in Chapter 7, the Siraf site revealed large quantities of Chinese ceramics indicating a surge of activity dating from the eighth century (Park 2012: 16). As discussed below, al-Mas’udi also relates the climactic events of 878 in Canton that led to disaster for the Arab traders who had made this city their terminal port in China where they were well received.

The al-Idrisi Map of the Indian Ocean/China

Seminal in its crystallization of Islamic geographical knowledge during the European Middle Ages was Sicily-based Arab geographer Abû ‘Abdallah aš-Šerîf al-Idrîsî’s twelfth-century map representing the Indian Ocean, the China Sea, and the archipelago, as it was conceived during this epoch.[1] Created in 1154 under the patronage of King Roger II following the Norman reconquest of Islamic Sicily, al-Idrisi’s Nuzhat al-mushtāq fi’khtirāq al-āfāq, or Tabula Rogeriana, encapsulates the most advanced geography of the known world during this epoch. As al-Idrisi noted, Ptolemy represented these seas as enclosed by land. To this effect, the east coast of Africa from Cape Guardafui is oriented west to east with its extremity reaching the far east of China. As interpreted by Gabriel Ferrand (1922), ten centuries after the Alexandrian, al-Idrisi reproduced the same Ptolemaic configuration of this southern ocean, making only the small modification that the enclosed sea is open in the Far East and put in communication with the ocean surrounding the world; another Greek legend. Other Arab texts of that age suggested that the surrounding ocean is nothing else than the Oceanus, or River Ocean, of the Greeks that encircled the Earth.

According to Ferrand (1922), the projection of the east coast of Africa eastward considerably diminished the extent of the Indian Ocean and neighboring seas and so profoundly altered the design of continental and island lands. The Indian peninsula has almost completely disappeared; the islands of western Indonesia are divided from the seventh section to the tenth; Sumatra is divided into several islands of which one, the island of Komor or Malay, is composed of Madagascar, the Malay Peninsula, and Burma, which the map locates to the south of eastern India and China. A number of islands mentioned by al-Idrisi have not yet been identified. Finally, the division of the world into climates and climates into ten sections extending from the Far West to the Far East, is also a borrowing from the ancient Greek geographers. Like other Muslim cartographers who preceded him, al-Idrisi and his successors oriented their maps with the south on top, north below, west to the right, and east to the left, the inverse of the European tradition. As Ferrand contended, this convention, also reproduced on some medieval European maps, was initially borrowed from the Chinese by the Muslims, who transmitted it to Europe.

Needless to say, Arab and Persian geography continued to advance in the following centuries. Notable was the production between 1315 and 1329 by Damascus-born Abu’l-Fida (Abduseda) of his Tarikh al-Mukhtasar fi Akhbar al-Bashar (The Concise History of Humanity, or Chronicles). Drawing upon the works of his predecessors, including Ptolemy and al-Idrisi, Abu’l-Fida tabulated major towns of the world according to longitude, latitude, climate, spelling, and observations borrowed from earlier authors. Parts of the work commenced to be published and translated in Europe, for example, German scholar Johann Jakob Reiske’s Abulfedae annales Moslemici. Latinos ex arabicis fecit Io (1754) and, as discussed below, the writings of French Arabist Joseph Toussaint Reinaud, as with his Géographie d’Aboulféda (1840).

Ibn Battuta (1304–1369), Afro-Eurasian World Traveler

Setting aside the production of maps and geographies of Arab and Islamic world characteristics as discussed above, real-world itineraries were in short supply. The account bequeathed by the Moroccan-born Berber, Ibn Battuta (1304–1369), a near contemporary of Marco Polo, of his travels across the Afro-Eurasian world is practically unique. Departing Tangier in June 1325, Ibn Battuta would return twenty-four years later having visited south and central Asia, including China, the Swahili coast, and west Africa. Among the Asian destinations to which he journeyed along the maritime route to China were the Maldives, Malabar, Ceylon, Samudera Pasai in northern Sumatra, Malacca, central Vietnam, Zeitun or Zaiton (Quanzhou), Cabton (Guangzhou), Hangzhou, and Peking (Beijing). He departed Quanzhou on the return journey in 1346. Subject to a substantial and swelling scholarship, his rendition of the world of the mid-fourteenth century is unparalleled even by that of Marco Polo.

Based on his rihla or “journey,” as dictated in Arabic to Ibn Juzay (Djozai), Ibn Battuta’s account remained obscure even within the Muslim world. It was only in the early nineteenth century that extracts started to be published in European languages based on manuscripts discovered in north Africa. A translation into German was published in 1819 from a manuscript vaguely sourced to Cairo. Ten years later, Rev. Samuel Lee translated into English a copy lodged in Cambridge University library by the Arabist John Lewis Burchhardt. On his part, Lee (1829: xii) stood by the authenticity of the text. However, as he noted, his subject was “superstitious, and addicted to the marvelous . . . but for this allowance must be made, as it occasionally must in travellers of much later times. It is for his historical, geographical, and botanical notices, that he is principally valuable.” Lee also acknowledged his inability to decipher many of the places Ibn Battuta purported to visit. In the 1830s, five manuscripts were discovered in Constantine (Algeria), trophies of the French occupation, including two that contained more complete versions of the text. These were used by C. Defrémery and B. R. Sanguinetti to produce their French translation (1848). Separately, a version was translated into Portuguese by José António de Santo Moura (1840) from an Arabic manuscript discovered in Fez.

In this age, Persian geographical knowledge was also expanding. A notable example was the travels of Abd-ur Rassaq (b. 1413) to India. Serving from January 1442 to January 1445 as ambassador of Shah Rukh, ruler of Persia under the Timurid dynasty, he made a sea journey from the Gulf to Calicut in south India, leaving behind an account of his visit to the Hindu Kingdom of Vijayanegara (Muzaffar Alam and Subrahmanyam 2007). Yet, by this age, it cannot be said that journeys performed by Arab or Persian envoys and travelers influenced European images, not even in the way of European travelers to the Mongol court as with Marco Polo. As map historian Thomas Suárez (1999: 51) observed, Europeans of the sixteenth century found that Arab geographical knowledge of Asia had stagnated by three centuries, although Persian and Turkish geographies were rising. By then, Arab geography was incorporating European sources.

Evaluation

To be sure, as Park (2012: 82) declaims, the sheer variety of Muslim maps and treatises written in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish reveals a process of variation in Islamic geographical knowledge based upon different traditions and sources. Such diversity matches the experience of Islam from around the tenth century onward as it expanded east in its encounters with different cultures and peoples. It is certainly true that the spread of Islam from the Arabian heartland to, in one direction, the Maghreb, and in another to China and the Indonesian Archipelago, was also accompanied by the circulation of ideas. As the European translations from Arabic point up, as indeed does the reception granted the Marco Polo legend, Europe actually lagged far behind the Islamic world in its knowledge of China, where, as indicated, Muslims under the Khanate were actually embedded in government offices in addition to carrying out their commercial activities.

Not surprisingly, some authors are less sanguine as to the veracity of Arab geographies. According to Suárez (1999: 51), many of the places mentioned in these early Arab geographies cannot be identified with certainty and many assume a mythological status: “Some of the fanciful places may derive from the Alexander Romances, or perhaps from attempts to reconcile Ptolemaic geography with the Qur’an.” Even by 1000 CE, the Arab geographers continued to recycle three-century-old lore without updating. The nineteenth-century Portuguese diplomat and cartographer Viscount Santarém (1852: 334) was even more dismissive, offering a wealth of examples. While Arab geographical knowledge was superior to that of Europe with regard to the east African coast, he contended, they were basically ignorant of the west African coast. The Portuguese discoveries were not acknowledged. Sicily-based al-Idrisi, as mentioned, was not immune from this tendency, even though he was dedicated to collecting traveler’s information. Neither did Ibn Battuta’s fourteenth century firsthand account feed into Arab geographies. More specifically, the Arab embrace of the Ptolemaic view created great confusion, especially the notion of an enclosed Indian Ocean, which led to the mixing of information pertaining to Southeast Asia (al-Zabaj) with the east Africa coast (al-Zanj). Still, as Suárez (1999: 50–52) allows, Arabic navigational texts, as with the presumed Arab pilot who accompanied Vasco da Gama to India, were accurate and did facilitate navigation to Malacca and all the major points on the sailing routes to Java, Borneo, and China.

III. Arab Navigational Primacy

For Muslims residing west of Egypt in the region known as the Maghreb; those of the Mashriq (Mashreq, Mashrek), generally denoting the region of Arab countries to the immediate east of Egypt, namely the Levant and the broader Arabian Peninsula; and for those of the faithful living even farther east, in China or the Indonesian Archipelago, direction then as now is crucial for praying to Mecca as much as for performing the hajj. But the ancient Arabs also knew the compass as an essential maritime navigational aid, just as celestial navigation was also part of local lore in traversing vast deserts and arid regions from the Sahel to the Eurasian silk roads. Islamic mapping and navigational guides, accordingly, developed across the Islamic world to fulfill the religious needs of the community of believers. As suggested, the Holy Qur’an is read or memorized in one language, Arabic, just as Arabic became the vernacular across the Dar al-Islam.

As Nuno Crato (2014) observes, Muslim scholars had studied the angles of triangles on the surface of terrestrial spheres, and this study was spurred by the qibla (kiblah) problem, ascertaining the direction of Mecca. While the problem was relatively easy to solve in the vicinity of Mecca, as Islamic civilization spread to the Iberian Peninsula, the African continent, and the Far East, solutions were required. True north, or geodetic north, is marked in the skies by the north celestial pole, and it is not hard to imagine how ancient mariners and nocturnal travelers across Arabian deserts referenced Polaris, the North Star, even if GPS systems of the present age have obviously rendered the old technology redundant.[2] Eventually, the question of determining direction as applied to maritime navigation would be taken up by Portuguese astronomers in the service of the kingdom.

Historically, however, the direction-finding problem with reference to the qibla was solved by Ahmad Abu al-Rayhan al-Biruni (973–1050), author of Kitab Tahdid al-Amakin, the demarcation of the coordinates of cities. Born in Khwarazm (today Biruni), now a region of Uzbekistan on the southern shores of the Aral Sea, al-Biruni’s work became better known via Edward Sachau’s translation from the Arabic in 1887. An English translation executed by Jamil Ali (1967) is not only the most accessible but explains the different methods used by al-Biruni to determine both latitudes and longitudes essential for producing a cartography of the earth including its size. In particular, as Park (2012: 73) has highlighted, a sketch map produced by al-Biruni advanced upon other Arab schools (as with the Balkhi school maps with their focus on Islamic regions). Notably, al-Biruni offered an oceanic expanse in the Southern Hemisphere corresponding to the Indian Ocean, thus replacing the terra incognita of the Balkhi school. In turn, the Indian Ocean is connected with the Atlantic Ocean, and southern Africa is depicted as a rectangular, not triangular, shape.

Muslim Navigational Priority

As opposed to geographic accounts, virtually no Arab sea chart of the China trade survives from this era. Nevertheless, the Arabs did have navigational maps, as with Indian Ocean routes. Marco Polo makes more than one reference to them. In his Meadows of Gold, al-Mas’udi also observed the existence of Arab mappemondes. Colored for clarity, “they represented the world with celestial spheres, astres, continents, seas, inhabited land, deserts, occupied regions, peoples, great towns.” As Santarém (1852: 377) points out, besides al-Idris’s manuscript, there were seventy other Arab map geographies in the Paris collections.

Born 1431 in Dhofar, present-day Oman, Ibn Majid (Ahmad b. Majid al-Najdi), inter alia author of Book of Profitable Things concerning the First Principles and Rules of Navigation, provides rare information bearing upon Arab sailing and navigational lore at a time when the first Portuguese were also entering the Indian Ocean. Contemporaneous with Vasco da Gama, Ibn Majid should not be confused with the pilot hired by the Portuguese at Melindi. Offering meticulous instructions on how to sail the Indian Ocean using twenty-eight “lunar mansions” and star positions, compass rhumb lines, the monsoon, and other seasonal winds, his book is divided into twelve chapters. In the opening chapter he evokes early writings on navigation including compass points and “lunar mansions.” These themes are elaborated in the second, third, and fourth chapters, including “compass rhumbs.” A fifth chapter discourses on astronomy and geography; a sixth on three types of sailing (in sight of land, open sea, and point to point); a seventh treats latitude measures off Ceylon according to the Pole Star, the Bay of Bengal, the coast of Thailand and the Red Sea; an eighth is dedicated to typhoons and other natural phenomenon; a ninth is on the measurement of the earth and description of coasts of the world; a tenth is on islands from Java, Sumatra, Madagascar, to Zanzibar; and an eleventh is on seasonal sailing routes and dangers. The final chapter focuses on Red Sea sailing and dangers (Tibbetts 1971: 5–6). To be sure, as Park (2012: 188) estimates, Ibn Majid produced the best navigational work of its time, a work that later Muslim navigators would consult.

But how did they actually navigate across the seas out of sight of land? As Park (2012: 185–86), points out, having adopted the compass from the Chinese and combining it with their own astronomical methods for sea navigation, following generations of acquired knowledge, Arab navigational lore reached a new level of sophistication. As such, the two key navigational elements employed by the Arabs were “star altitude measurements and compass bearings.” From the ninth to tenth centuries, the Arabs were already using a celestial navigation device called the kamal to determine latitude. The invention of the kamal allowed for the earliest known latitude sailing and was thus the earliest step toward the use of quantitative methods in navigation. A handheld rectangular wooden device through which a knotted thread is attached, the kamal consists of twelve square wooden boards. It was adopted by Indian navigators soon after (Ives 1961). Known to Chinese as suoxing ban, the kamal undoubtedly served Chinese navigators including on the Zheng He voyages (Park 2012: 174). Arab navigational knowledge and its heritage was not only confined to the Indian Ocean but spread westward to other cultures, including those of the Mediterranean, and, as demonstrated below, to eastward-sailing Arabs, Persian, and Indians traversing the Bay of Bengal and the Straits of Malacca via coastal Vietnam to China.

IV. Ninth-Century Arab Merchant Accounts as Translated by Renaudot

It is a matter of fact that Arabs were taking the sea silk route to China centuries prior to the first European accounts such as Marco Polo Travels to the court of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan (r. 1260–1294). In fact, Europe would wait until the early eighteenth century before authenticated Arab travel accounts entered translation in European languages. Particularly notable were two ninth-century descriptions of travel to China via India translated by French Arabist-Orientalist Eusèbe Renaudot (1646–1720) and published in 1718. Both are said to be taken from statements made by a merchant named Sulaiman (Sulayman), the second a continuation of the first, by Hasan Ibn Yazid and Abu Zeid al Hasan (Abu Zayd). The voyages described therein date from 851 to 877 CE, contemporaneous with the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258) and Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), with its capital at Chiang’an, present-day Xian in what is now China’s Shaanxi Province (see Renaudot 1718) (see Gunn 2018b: 49).[3]

Even so, as the English translator of this work estimated, the travels seem to have been mostly performed by one person only; the latter portion being chiefly a commentary upon the former, and they appear to have been the work of the (Sirafi) merchant Abu Zeid (Zayd) written about 915 CE. The manuscript employed by Renaudot belonged to the library founded by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of state under Louis XIV, prior to entering the Royal Library under the code No. 597. Appearing to have been written in the year 1173 CE, the manuscript thus predated Marco Polo by four hundred years (see Gunn 2018b: 49).

In any case we wish to know the veracity of these accounts and how, if so, they informed general Arab understandings of India, Southeast Asia and China. In considering this we should also be alert to errors, commentaries, and even revisionist translations such as the work by Joseph Toussaint Reinaud published in Paris in 1845. In particular, Reinaud (1845) notes lacunae in the manuscript translated by Renaudot as well as errors of omission and commission in his interpretation. He also discovers complementary information reproduced by al-Mas’udi, in his Muruj al-Dhahab (Meadows of Gold). He refutes Renaudot’s assertion of two travelers, claiming that there was only one or a composite of many voyages. In turn, the presumed author, Abu Zeid, fed material to al-Mas’udi, who had never made the trip to India or China.

As Renaudot (1718: iv) acknowledged, the importance of the manuscript is that it contains the earliest (foreign traveler) account of China in the Arabic language. He also allows that there are many curious and fabulous passages in these travels, although far fewer than in many other Arab accounts. Moreover, they wrote of actual historical events, like the civil wars in China and India prior to the Muslim conquest. Nevertheless, there are lacunae. Notably, no mention is made of the magnetic compass. Yet they convey information respecting customs and events that are nowhere else to be found. As he asserted, the general veracity of these accounts was subsequently confirmed by Polo and, in succeeding ages, by such writers as the Jesuit Martino Martini (Atlas Chinois) as well as by the Portuguese voyages. As Renaudot (xxxiv) also acknowledged, there was no exactitude in Muslim renderings of place-names and, as Martini was the first to point out, in China place-names frequently change. Still, Renaudot does impose names in the text, for example, the Maldives, Ceylon, and Canton (see Gunn 2018b: 49). Though he is cautious, his text was also subject to major criticism and revision.

The Voyage from Siraf to China

The two Muslim accounts translated by Renaudot have been read over the centuries in various ways, attracting much commentary. My reading in turn seeks to tease out, first, the geography of the trade route, which is not novel, and second, the sense of China as a bounded region in an interconnected world. Starting with geography, the Renaudot account opened:

The third of the seas we traveled is Herkend. Between this sea and that of Delarowi, there are many islands, and they number 1,900. They separate the two seas from each other, and are governed by a queen. (1718: 1–2)[4]

As Renaudot (7) announces, this is the sea surrounding the Maldives (a name he imposes), dividing that part of the Indian Ocean from the sea of Delarowi, or the Magnus Sinus of the ancients. Adding veracity to this location is an account of “shells, of which even the royal treasury is full,” an undoubtedly early reference to the cowrie trade reaching the interior of India and western China, of which the Maldives stood as the source of supply.

Across from these islands, in the sea of Herkend, is Serendib or Ceylon, the principal of all these islands, called Dobijat. Completely surrounded by the sea, they fish for pearls on the coast. (3)

Renaudot (5) also imposes the name Andamans, and that would undoubtedly correlate with the anthropological features so described.

The Voyage to China

As Renaudot (1718: 142) commented, “It is difficult at this distance of time to ascertain the route laid down by this author, on account of the changes of names.” As noted below, he also fell into the trap. Turning to the actual voyage, important because four hundred years before Polo and contrary to the Ptolemaic notion of an enclosed Indian Ocean, the authors reveal that a sea route to China actually existed. He also acknowledged that this was a two-way trade with ships coming and going to and from China.

Respecting the places whence ships depart and those they touch at, many persons affirm that the navigation is performed in the following order: Most of the Chinese ships take in their cargoes at Siraf, where also they ship their goods which come from Basra, Oman, and other ports; and this is done because there are frequent storms and many shallows in those seas. (10)

As Lunde (2005) points out, unlike the Red Sea with reef-filled waters and a complex wind regime, the Persian Gulf was relatively easy to navigate. At the head of the Gulf, present-day Basra was conquered by the Arabs in the year 636 CE, quickly growing into a major city attracting Arabs, East Africans, Persians, Indians, and Malay-speakers from “Zabaj” (or Zabedji), as explained below. A clearinghouse for information, it was here that practical knowledge of Southeast Asia and China began to reach Arabic- and Persian-speaking peoples, gradually entering works of geography and fabulous accounts (the Sinbad story cycle). As Lunde alludes to (and, as well noted in the Renaudot translation), al-Mas’udi explains how direct voyages to China were replaced with a system in which merchants stopped at a halfway house in either Ceylon or on the northern Malacca Straits at Kadah/Kedah, or Quedda, a port estuary on the Malay Peninsula where they purchased goods brought there from China.

The Renaudot translation continues the itinerary with the ships departing Muscat and arriving off India one month later, then entering the “sea of Herkend (Herkand)” before arriving at destinations that could be the Malacca Straits, Java, or the Singapore Straits in stages of ten days (approximating the practice of replenishing water supplies) as with the island of Sanderfulat (Renaudot 1718: 307). Plausibly, this could be an Arab gloss on the Javanese Kingdom of Sunda with “fulat” meaning selat, the Malay term for “strait,” as with the numerous islands astride the crucial passage through the Straits of Singapore. They then steered to the “gates of China; for so they call certain rocks and shallows which form a narrow strait in that sea, through which the ships are obliged to pass,” noting that it required a month to sail from Sanderfulat to China, and it took eight days to steer through among the rocks and shoals (145). This would approximate the time it would take to navigate from the coast of Vietnam through the myriad islands leading into Macau and the Pearl River estuary.

The Veracity of Medieval Arab Accounts

Much like Marco Polo’s account, the Muslim travelers tended to mix fact with fiction, but the believable parts do indeed appear striking. For example, with reference to China, they offer a very early notice on the construction of clocks or devices to measure time. Besides beating drums “to point out the hours of the day and night to the inhabitants; and for ascertaining the time; they have sun dials, and clocks with weights.” The widespread use of copper coins, strung together by means of a string threaded through a central hole, is a convincing description of Tang dynasty Kaiyuan Tongbao coins first minted in 621 CE. As noted, such were also attested back in Siraf, marked with Chinese characters (Renaudot 1718: 78–79). Much cited by Renaudot commentators is the reference to tea, “a certain herb called Tcha, which they drink with hot water, and which is sold in great quantities in all the cities in China.” Rice and rice wine are also attested. So is toilet paper. And so is porcelain with much praise: “They have excellent earth from which they make vases of as delicate as if it were glass and of equal transparency” (31). A system of registered prostitutes is also observed. A high level of literacy is praised, “rich and poor, great and small, all learn to read and write.” Comparing India and China, “the Chinese have no sciences, and their religion and most of their laws are derived from the Indians.” “Medicine and philosophy are cultivated among the Indians. The Chinese also have some skill in medicine; but that almost entirely consists in the art of applying hot irons or cauteries. [The Chinese] also have some knowledge of astronomy, but in this the Indians surpass the Chinese” (46).

A historical event (he states 877 CE) is also described in the “second relation,” or commentary on the first relation of Abu Zeid. This refers to the sacking of Canfu (Canton) in 879 by the Chinese rebel Huang Chao, leading to the purported massacre of 120,000 Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Parsees in the process. Notably, the Muslim merchant community had their effects seized and were forced to pay indemnities, among other injustices of such a degree that the trade was abandoned, and they returned wholesale to Siraf and Homan. Huang’s rebellion was eventually suppressed in 884 (Jacq-Hergoualc’h 2001: 265; Park 2012: 69, 87). The destruction of mulberry trees and the crippling of the silk industry is also asserted by Renaudot.

As suggested, al-Mas’udi also related the climactic events of 878 in Canton. As informed by Abu Zeid, the pattern of trade also changed with the city of Kalah (in Malaya) emerging as the terminus or intermediate point for Muslim vessels from Siraf and Oman. “Here they meet the ships from China. But this was not so in the past. Formerly, ships from China sailed directly to Oman, Siraf, the coast of Persia and Bahrain, al-Ubulla and Basra, and ships from these places sailed directly to China.” As Lunde (2005) explains, political events in China reverberated in the Arabian Gulf. Simultaneous with the sack of Canton, the Zanj Rebellion was an insurgency of slaves from East Africa who worked in the nitrate beds in the marshes of Lower Iraq. During this period, Basra, al-Ubulla, and Abadan were dangerous places. Just as traders had moved away from Canton, so they moved south down the Gulf out of harm’s way. They settled in Siraf, a small town on the Persian side controlled by men from Oman. Siraf became the main port for the eastern trade, and Basra never reclaimed its former position.

Reexamination of the Renaudot and Renaud Texts

A long time would pass before both the Renaudot and Renaud texts were reexamined. According to Henry Yule (1866: 79), compared to the former translations, French scholar Alfred Maury (1846) offered the “most consistent and probable interpretation yet published.” As Maury (1846) acknowledged, the documents at hand were without question the most ancient found in Europe touching the India-China trade. He also does not doubt that the merchant Sulaiman actually made the voyage. Yet reexamination of the Renaudot and Renaud texts relating to their translation posed serious problems. Renaud improved upon Renaudot but nevertheless left some obscurities, especially relating to precise destinations. Such inexactitudes prevailed especially in Renaud’s version of the route between Siraf and Khanfu (Canton). Maury reexamined Renaud’s text with reference to al-Mas’udi, al-Idrisi, and even the Sinbad imaginary.

Another problem is presented by the extent of the Sea of Herkand and its limits as imposed by Renaud, extending from the Maldives to Ceylon. However, according to Maury (1846), the depiction distorts the location of Serendyb (Ceylon). The islands encompassed by Renaud’s interpretation of Herkand are actually those of Sunda, rigorously placed by the Arabs at the same latitude as Ceylon. In Maury’s interpretation, the Sea of Herkand extends from the Maldives all the way to northern Sumatra (Aceh). On another tack, Renaud links Ceylon, Manar, and Al-Ramny as sources of camphor. But this is false. The camphor tree is native to Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula, and Borneo. Many other issues relating to place enter this discussion, as with confusion between Java and Sumatra and the true location of al Zabedji (Zãbaj) described in Arab sources (al-Mas’udi) as “opposite China.” Mention of certain woods and especially tin (by al-Idrisi) further helps to identify certain locations with the Malay Peninsula area.

As interpreted by Reinaud (1845: lxxv), Zabaj fit Suvarnadvipa, or the “Island of Gold” of the Ramayana, or “Zapadiv” (obscure) attributed to Ptolemy, or, alternatively, Tche-po (Java) as in Song China sources. Independently, Cœdès (1962: 95) associated Zabaj with Java/Sumatra or the Srivijaya Kingdom. Initially, according to scholar of early maritime trade, Kenneth R. Hall (1985: 122), Arab geographies referred to a broader Zabaj realm connecting up Java, Sumatra, and the lower Malay peninsula. However, as Arab perceptions of the Indonesian Archipelago became more precise by the late ninth century, some distinction was drawn between a ruler of Zabaj in Java and a ruler equated with the maritime center on southeastern Sumatra. By the tenth century, coinciding with the transfer of Sailendra rule from Java to southeastern Sumatra, the Palembang-based polity became known as Sribuza, described as a kind of water village-city astride a bay. The rise of a new capital commanding access to the Malacca Straits trade with the ability to impose taxes on shipping also suggested a transition in Java’s fortunes. Similarly, earlier Chinese references to Srivijaya as Shij-li-fo-shih changed to San-fo-ch’i around 900 CE.

Old Port Senif (Champa?)

The location or identification of Old Port Senif with Champa is another issue. Importantly, Maury (1846) places Senif on the coast of Cochinchina, correctly noting that the prime source of aloeswood was either the interior of Laos, Champa, or Cochinchina. He believes that Senif equated with Champa (as mentioned by Marco Polo). Al-Mas’udi spoke of the Es-Send Sea, and the Gulf of Siam/Thailand extending to the Moluccas but also to China. Even so, al-Idrisi and others varied widely on the location of Senif. Maury (29) blames the extreme confusion as to its location found in all Arab journeys and texts upon Ptolemy and the received Ptolemaic ideas brought on board in the Arab tradition, notably the notion of an enclosed Indian Ocean. Whatever the confusion and whatever imaginary Arabs imposed upon new lands, according to Maury (25, 38), one thing is certain, that aloes came from this mainland Southeast Asian zone, and Champa ports offered the best access.

Sander-Foulat (Coast of Vietnam?)

As Maury (1846) interprets, from Senif it was six days’ sailing to Sander-Foulat (named by al-Idrisi as one of the doorways to China and surmised by Maury to be somewhere on the coast of Vietnam). From there, the ships entered the China Sea and then advanced to the gates of China comprising mountains bathed by the sea between which the ships could pass. Al-Idrisi listed a dozen such islands. Citing French navigator Jean-Baptiste d’Après Mannevillette, Maury proposed that because of difficult navigation the Arab ships avoided the Gulf of Tonkin and the coastal route, which merely added time. Taking sight of islands (off the eastern seaboard of Vietnam) and coasting (south of) Hainan, the Arab pilots took advantage of the strong easterly currents emanating from the Gulf during the southwest monsoon. Visually guided by islands with hilly or mountainous features, they then arrived at Poulo-Taya, then at Sanciam (which at least is marked on modern charts). As Maury (41) asserts, in later centuries, Marco Polo, the Portuguese, and the Dutch followed a similar route in line with the seasonal winds such as pioneered by the Arabs (and he is undoubtedly correct).

Maury’s Revised Itinerary of the Sulaiman Voyage

In Maury’s revised itinerary of the Sulaiman voyage, after departing the Maldives the ship descended the western coast of India during the northeastern monsoon around December and arrived proximate to Ceylon the following month. Although sighting Cape Comorin, the voyage did not pass through Palk Strait as asserted by Renaud but crossed the Bay of Bengal from the southerly point of Galle, arriving off Sumatra at the end of February or early March, as the northwest monsoon mitigated. To be noted, these ships made no landfall on the Coromandel coast. En route the ships passed south of Nicobar or through the canal between Little Nicobar or Polou Rondo and Great Nicobar. They would have made sight of the islands north of Aceh. From the tip of Aceh the ships took the southwest monsoon heading into the Malacca Straits, and the month of April optimum for this navigation. Making passage through the Malacca (and Singapore) Straits, they made for the coast of Cambodia moving along the coast of Vietnam as far north as Phú Yên on the south-central coast (approximately 13 degrees north). From there they made passage direct to the southern coast of China. Driven by the southwest monsoon, they would arrive in June or July, practically coinciding with the onset of the typhoon season in the South China Sea (Maury 1846: 34–35).

Yet another translation of the Sulaiman voyage was made by Gabriel Ferrand in 1922, which in Tibbett’s (1971: xv) estimation was to that point, “the only really scholarly attempt to compare the texts with the actual topography of the area concerned.” According to Ferrand (1922: 18–19), Sulaiman did not estimate the duration of the voyage from the Persian Gulf (Muscat) to China. But departing Muscat it took more than four months. From Muscat to Palk Strait it took one month; from Quilon to the Isthmus of Kra or the Malay Peninsula, one month; from Kra to Tioman Island, ten days; from Tioman to Kundrang (modern Vung Tau?), ten days; from Kundrang to Champa, ten days; from Champa to Čundur-fûlât (Hainan?), ten days; and from Čundur-fûlât to Hânfû-Canton, one month. Thus, he estimated, it took some five months sailing directly from Siraf to Canton.

The Contemporaneous World of Tenth-Century Arab Voyaging

It would be appropriate to examine the contemporaneous world of tenth-century Arab voyaging as it touched the Southeast Asian world and China. Once again Ferrand (1922: 14–16) has supplied an interpretation. As he observed, in the ninth century CE, South Asia and East Africa experienced an unparalleled maritime and commercial activity and prosperity. China had then entered the Tang dynasty (618–906); in the south of Sumatra, the era coincided with the great Sailendra-Sriîvijaya dynasty. In Baghdad, the illustrious Abbasid Khalifs Harun al-Rashid (786–809) and his son Al-Mamum (813–833) ruled (and with both contemporaries of Charlemagne). Commerce, navigation, arts, letters, and sciences were then practiced by the Chinese, Indians, Malays, and Arabs with equal success. With the Khmer Empire (802–1431) founded by Jayavarman II (r. 802–835), Angkor Wat was built in the first half of the twelfth century under King Suryavarman II (1113–1145/1150) (contemporaneous with the construction of Notre Dame). Neighboring Champa reached a high degree of civilization at that time, and the two empires stood in bitter contention (and with naval battle scenes carved in stone on the Angkor complex). In Java, toward the end of the ninth century, the center of the island occupied for a hundred years by the Sailendra regained its independence, and Borobudur was erected during the same century.

Arab Imaginaries of China

In revealing paragraphs, the Muslim travelers appearing in the Renaudot translation both describe and configure China with respect to its neighbors, the territory now known as Tajikistan to the northwest and an “island” tributary state to the east that we can identify as Korea:

Beyond the kingdom of China, there is a country called Tagazgaz, taking its name from a nation of Turks who inhabited it, and also the country of Cakhan of Tibet which borders on the Turks. Off the sea coast are the islands of Sila, inhabited by white people, who send presents to the Emperor of China, and who are persuaded that if they were to neglect this then no rain would fall upon their country. None of our people have been there to give us any particular information concerning them. (Renaudot 1718: 47)

A second relation (that of Abu Zeid) also describes a land of Zapage, “mid passage between China and the country of the Arabs,” rich in redwood, camphor, and many other commodities. “This island is 80 leagues in circumference, and to it they bring all sorts of merchandise, as aloes wood of several kinds, camphor, sandal wood, ivory, the wood called cabahi, ebony, red-wood, all sorts of spice, and many others; and at present the trade is carried on between this island and that of Oman.” Ruled by a sovereign, the towns were populous and no part of the fertile soil was left uncultivated. The palace of the king stood on a broad tidal plain along a river. “Opposite to China, and distant from thence a month’s sail or less, if the wind be fair,” there are several candidate sites for this obviously Southeast Asian location, rich in woods and spices (Renaudot 1718: 75). Various sites have been canvassed in the literature, but I would suggest Palembang or somewhere on Sumatra, somewhere on Borneo, or even Oc Eo on the lower Mekong River Delta.

A somewhat fanciful encounter between an Arab prince, Ebn Wahab, and the emperor of China, is recounted, touching upon the Arab defeat of the Persians. The prince is asked as to his knowledge of other kings of the earth, to which he answers that he knew them not:

Then, speaking through an interpreter, the emperor admitted but five great kings. He who is master of Iraq has the kingdom of widest extent and is surrounded by territories of other kings, and we find him called King of Kings. After him is the emperor of China, who is styled King of Mankind, for no other king has more absolute authority over his subjects, and no people can be more dutiful and submissive than his subjects. Next is the king of the Turks, whose kingdom borders on China, and who is styled the King of Lions. Next is the king of the Elephants, who is king of India, whom we call King of Wisdom. Last of all is the King of Greece, whom we call King of Men, as there are no men of better manners, or nicer appearance on the face of the earth, than his subjects. (66)

Reading backward, the account suggests some modesty on the part of the “King of Mankind” (son of heaven), or the account neglects to mention all the tributary kingdoms of Tang China that in the ninth century exerted a powerful cultural influence over neighboring states such as Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

In another exceptional commentary upon geography and Arab shipbuilding, the author observes a new discovery or revelation:

No one ever imagined that the great sea which extends from the Indies to China had any communication with the sea of Syria. Yet we have heard, that in the sea of Rum, or the Mediterranean, there was found the wreck of an Arabian ship, which had been shattered by a tempest, in which all her men had perished. Her remains were driven by the wind and weather into the sea of the Chozars, and thence by the canal of the Mediterranean Sea, and were at last thrown upon the coast of Syria. Hence it is evident, that the sea surrounds all the country of China and Sila or Cila, the uttermost parts of Turkestan, and the country of the Chozars, and that it communicates by the strait with that which washes the coast of Syria. (73)

Setting aside the presumption of an Arab circumnavigation of Africa, this account could be a garbled reference to the possibility of a Red Sea route to the Mediterranean via the “Pharaoh canal,” explored by Napoleon. Park (2012: 73), who offers her own interpretation of this ship, attributes this account to Abu Zayd (Zeid) and al-Mas’udi.

The text includes comment on a distinctive feature of Arab shipbuilding that actually persists into modern times:

This is proved by the structure of the wreck; of which the planks were not nailed or bolted, like all those built in the Mediterranean, or on the coast of Syria, but joined together in an extraordinary manner, as if sewed, and none but the ships of Siraf are so fastened. (74)

Renaudot’s account was challenged, especially, as he neglected to explain the provenance of the Arabic manuscripts and also fell afoul of Jesuit Sinologists, who contested certain of his negative views on governance. Yet he was subsequently redeemed. An English translation of his work followed in 1733. In time, his merchant accounts would enter mainstream European text versions of Chinese history thus becoming image-forming texts for cartographers, as with the official French cartographer, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville (see Gunn 2018b), but not of course image-making in the age of discoveries, as with Polo.

Conclusion

In particular this chapter has revealed how a new constellation of geographic imaginaries outside of a strictly European tradition, those owing to Arabic-Persian-Islamic provenance, came to jell and resonate not only in elite circles but within the sailing merchant communities as well. Once again we make the point that in past times (as well as in the present), renditions of geographic space have been constructed. According to scientific advances, from the compass to the astrolabe to the navigational chart, along with new horizons, exchanges, and discoveries, these imaginaries continued to be produced, no matter how embedded in civilizational—especially Islamic world—verities.

With Arab pilots reaching the region known today as Southeast Asia from the seventh century in search of spices, Muslim traders also gained a priority on practical navigation reaching beyond the Indian Ocean. From within their own traditions, as this chapter has demonstrated, they recall powerful Arabo-Persian Muslim imaginaries of China in particular. As such they are no less resonant than the Marco Polo accounts entering manuscript and later book form in Latin Europe, and this we have seen in the writings bequeathed by Ibn Battuta. Neither should we neglect the power of oral traditions of which the Sinbad story cycle appears to an exemplar, not excepting embellishments entering Galland’s translation into French.

Another dimension comes into relief as well, and that is the power of translation and reception of the Arab imaginaries in Europe. Certainly, that would apply to al-Idrisi’s spectacular summation of Arab cartographical knowledge along with the contributions of other Arab geographers and mathematicians received in late medieval Europe. Such contributions would resonate again in the hands of Renaissance thinkers and monarchs seeking to disentangle myth and legend from reality when it came to hard geographical and navigational knowledge of Indian Ocean sailing routes. Although the Renaudot, Renaud, and Maury translations of tenth-century Arab merchant accounts came long after this age and did not of course influence Renaissance thinkers, they nevertheless provide a kind of ex post facto validation of Arabo-Persian prowess—or sometimes inventiveness—indeed, a trait that tripped up more than one generation of European Orientalists with many puzzles remaining unresolved today.

1. It is accessible as Arab manuscript 2222 in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, with an identical manuscript held at Oxford.

2. Writing these lines (in Nagasaki, Japan), I am informed by online calculation that my distance to the Kha’bah in Mecca is 8743.95 km. My qibla direction as an angle relative to true, or geodetic, north (not compass north) at this writing is 288.28 (just off due west).

3. Henry Yule, author of Cathay and the Way Thither, Being a Collection of Medieval Notices of China, Vol. 1, has provided his own reading of Renaudot and Reinaud. In his view, the “most consistent and probable interpretation yet published appears to be that of M. Alfred Maury” (79).

4. All translations of Renaudot from the original French are executed by the author.

4. Geographic Imaginaries from the Chinese Tradition

As previewed, trading east, Indian merchants and priestly classes established communities and networks in Southeast Asia, certain among them connecting with the China coast in a period long before China itself ventured out. Arabs, Persians, and Indians likewise traded by stages along the long maritime route via Southeast Asia to the China coast. The earliest arrivals may have helped to implant Indic traditions. Later arrivals were bearers of Islam, likewise establishing beachheads and eventually winning converts. In this chapter we focus on Chinese imaginaries of the Nan Yang, or southern seas, not excluding the Indian Ocean area. Allowing for filtering and embellishment, the Chinese geographic-cartographic tradition is seminal in this respect, as is the tradition of recording dynastic annals. Accordingly, this chapter taps into a long tradition of scholarly interpretation of such maps and texts.

Just as Europe back to ancient Rome entered a taxonomy of conquered and yet-to-conquer—if we read Said correctly—so China of the Yellow River heartland developed its own sense of civilized and barbarian, categories with long staying power as the core expanded over the millennium. Agrarian and inward looking for most of its three-thousand-year history, with a fear of invasion from the outer steppes as testified by defensive walls such as the Great Wall of China, the Central Kingdom was a land to which travelers and merchants visited on sufferance. Although there were exceptions as with the Han dynasty outlier established in northern Vietnam, China eschewed significant expansions and invasions. When one came, it was under Mongol-Yuan auspices far eclipsing even the dreams of Alexander on the Eurasian mainland. But the Mongol seaborne “invasions” of Java and failed invasions of Japan also opened another epoch. As introduced in this chapter, having mastered open-sea navigation and sailing techniques such as those carried on by subsequent early Ming voyages to the Nanyang, or South Seas, would usher in an epoch of formalized trade missions and interstate relations cementing links between a Chinese center and an East-Southeast Asian periphery.

A first section explains the China-centered tribute trade system. A second section frames a Chinese India imaginary around the journey undertaken in 399 CE by a famed Chinese monk to India and back. Taking cues from the “California school” on economic differentials between Europe and China, a third section offers an appraisal of Song China economic strength. Through an examination of navigational texts, a fourth section offers a Song-era world imaginary. A fifth section contemplates China’s South Seas priority under the Mongol-Yuan dynasty, while the early Ming-era voyages of the Muslim admiral Zheng He are set down in a sixth section. Finally, the chapter offers an evaluation of Ming China maritime prowess and cartographic accomplishments.

I. The China-Centered Tribute Trade System Explained

As adverted in my work History Without Borders (2011: Chap. 4), for well over one millennium China was wedded to the broader East-Southeast Asia region via elaborate and highly formalized tributary trade networks. Generally, this was a China-focused trade system in which almost all of the maritime East-Southeast Asian polities participated. These would include an inner circle of states deeply touched by the Chinese tradition—namely, Japan, Korea, Ryukyu, and Vietnam, but also a more distant circle as elaborated below. As described by John F. Fairbanks (1983: 158), the tribute system was “an application to foreign affairs of the Confucian doctrines by which Chinese rulers gained an ethical sanction for their exercise of political authority.” This is the conventional understanding passed down through numerous texts and discourses, but it still needs to be examined and even unpacked not only with respect to broader assumptions but also with reference to dynasty or time frame.

To understand the principles under which the East Asian maritime world operated and was organized, we should examine the full range of political, economic, and ideological-cultural factors at issue. According to Hamashita (2003b: 20), the major historical principle that loosely unified this world was the idea of “middle kingdom versus barbarian states” that governed tribute relations from the Tang through Qing dynasties of China. This principle was not necessarily China-centered, as Korea, Japan, and Vietnam also asserted themselves as “centers” vis-à-vis smaller neighboring states under their sway (this is demonstrated in a separate chapter with respect to Japan and the Ryukyu Kingdom). The principle was sustained by a hierarchical order led by the Confucian “rule of virtue.” Of course, how Japan, Vietnam, and Korea sought to assert themselves within the system should not be ignored. Taking note of the various Ming and Qing codes that ranked and modified, according to circumstances, the various geographical groupings or tributaries, Hamashita (1994 cited in Frank 1998: 113–14) then elaborates upon a separate Chinese-based world economy. This he describes as a “unified system characterized by internationalized tribute-trade relations, with China at the center[,] . . . an organic entity with center-periphery relations of southeast, northwest, central and northeast Asia . . . connected with the adjacent India trade area.” As Hamashita confirms, and we will test, the tribute trade system did not necessarily exclude competitive merchant trade; indeed, it often masked such trade.

Evolution of the Tribute Envoy System

While the notion of paying tribute to superior rulers was common globally in interstate relations, the Chinese developed the concept to the fullest extent for the longest time, more than 2,500 years. Allowing that the Chinese sense of their own superiority was not unique, Wang Gungwu (1968: 61; 2004: 350) offers a picture of a Chinese world order presided over by the “Son of Heaven” in which Southeast Asians were confirmed as “outer barbarians” or outside the Chinese cultural world. The system also involved the dispatch of envoy missions and was well recorded in official annals. Beginning with the establishment of a unified empire in 220 BCE, the “all under heaven,” or tianxia 天下, system reached well beyond China’s boundaries. But where the system may have been used as part of an instrument of defense and diplomacy with respect to China’s overland relations, as far as Southeast Asia was concerned, no military threat was forthcoming. Rather, it functioned “more as a regulator of foreign trade” in the sense of being a flexible institution combining diplomacy, defense, and commercial advantage. As explained above, while China’s relations with Vietnam were about extracting primarily political loyalty, for the rest of Southeast Asia as with Thailand, trading and cultural relations were the key features (see Wills 2012).

The tribute envoy system was not static and of course evolved according to China’s own dynastic history. Under the Tang (618–916 CE) dynasty—especially the seventh and early eighth centuries—when Indian, Persian, and Arab merchants were active in the Indian Ocean trade touching China, an office of the superintendent of trade was opened in Canton. The Song (960–1279 CE) revived many Tang practices, and tribute envoy missions from Southeast Asia arrived regularly, facilitated by the rise of the Java-Sumatra-based maritime empire of Srivijaya. But private Chinese overseas trade also flourished over the following two centuries outside of the official trade. The Mongol-Yuan (1279–1368 CE), however, subverted the tribute trade system away from commercial ties to an instrument of submission to a great power. In the 1290s, Vietnam, Champa, Burma, and later Java were all deemed insubordinate and therefore punished by an invasion mounted by huge fleets of war junks (see Rockhill 1914: 445–46). While the first three Ming emperors with their capital in Nanjing paid considerable attention to maritime links with Southeast Asia, with the removal of the capital to Beijing in 1421 and, wary of threats from the ocean, the Ming emphasized political and security concerns. As detailed below, the seven expeditions by Zheng He from 1405 to 1433 merely confirmed Chinese power and reaffirmed that all relations be conducted via tribute (Wang Gungwu 2004: 352).

Allowing for an inner circle of tributary countries such as Annam, Korea, and, until it dropped off, Japan, the tributary trade system is also illustrated by the way that such longer-distance kingdoms as Burma, Ayutthaya, Champa, Java, Malacca, Brunei, and Cambodia regularly sent missions to China bearing obligatory gifts, cementing diplomatic relations, facilitating trade there, and confirming China’s sense of imperium and majesty as the central kingdom (see Wang Gungwu 1970: 375–401). As Stuart-Fox (2003: 53–54) has summarized, tribute in a Southeast Asian context was very different from that demanded by Chinese emperors of vassal kingdoms. Tribute was not an economic transfer that necessarily benefited China, especially as the emperor constantly offered higher-value goods in return; it amounted to symbolic submission of the tributary state and reinforcement of China’s superior status in its own Sinocentric world order. Over the long term the Southeast Asian polities, as different as they were from the Chinese center, operated a culture of compromise in building acceptable bilateral relations with the Central Kingdom, albeit building upon certain congruities.

Revisionist Views of the Tianxia System

Because the Fairbanks interpretation has been particularly serviceable to international relations specialists posturing as to a peaceful China or an aggrandizing China, we should be cautious. As Peter Perdue (2015) points out in a dedicated essay, “tribute system” is an English-language term and there is no specific Chinese correlate. Moreover, it is a blanket term that obscures an array of relationships from military force to protocol, to cultural hegemony or suasion. Allowing then that the Tribute System as baldly stated is a Western Sinological construct, it is important not to essentialize its meaning as if eternal across the ages. First, he explains, there may not even have been a system per se. Second, tribute as it were also implied exchange. Under Qing practice, dealing with inner and outer nations or polities was another distinction. Perdue (1010–1011) also wonders about the colonial assumptions of Qing practice. Space precludes a detailed examination, but again Perdue is undoubtedly correct to see the roots of the discussion in prewar Chinese Nationalist scholarship on China’s “destiny.” Although he does not mention the fact, China’s nine-dash line encircling the South China Sea is one such Nationalist Chinese invention falling in with a determinist approach to historical geography.

Carried forward in the international relations literature, even the tianxia system has become a bellwether of attitudes toward a rising China on the part of a range of political pundits, both inside and outside of Asia. To the realists, practically the dominant school under the US Trump administration, China’s Belt and Road Initiative appears as a repetition of ancient patterns where the central kingdom seeks to reassert imperial goals not excluding plunder of natural resources (and in some versions with hegemonic designs and with China’s nine-dash line serving as an example). Such is implied in Howard W. French’s evocatively titled Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power (2017). In still other versions, China’s external behavior is but the working out of millennium-long assertions of ethnic and race-based nationalism (Friend and Thayer 2018). Others posit a more benign interpretation stressing harmonious coexistence as in the past (the view from Beijing). In yet other versions, iterations of the tianxia system obliquely call down a challenge to Western-centric schools of international relations (Beeson 2020). Yet both sides of the argument would suggest that statecraft comes to the heart of the question as to China’s success vis-à-vis the target or recipient countries in its diplomatic outreach or, alternatively, pushback on the part of the same.

II. Chinese Monks to India and the Making of an India Imaginary

The cultural-religious encounter between China and India especially with relation to the reception of Buddhism is epochal and far reaching in consideration of the history of civilization touching China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. The long journey undertaken in 399 CE by the Chinese monk Fa Hsien (Faxin) along with nine others across the ancient terrestrial silk roads to locate sacred Buddhist texts is germane to this history. Many other monks went to India between the seventh and ninth centuries, bringing back books and relics. For example, the Tang-era monk Yijing departed Canton for India aboard a “Persian” ship. As noted in Chapter 2, around 670 he also sojourned in the Srivijaya capital, then a center of Buddhism. Sui (581–618 CE) and Tang China were then vibrant centers of Buddhism. From the middle of the seventh century, Japan had a civil government on the Tang model, with the capital, Nara, built according to plans similar to those of Chang’an and Buddhism was the state religion (see Beaujard 2020: Chap. 1).

Fa Hsien also bequeathed a narrative account, the Foguoji (A record of Buddhistic kingdoms). Following the James Legge (1886: Chap. 15) translation into English, after two years in India, Fa Hsien undertook a disastrous passage to Java before heading north to China. Having obtained copies of Sanskrit Buddhist texts unknown in China, he took passage on a large merchant vessel carrying more than two hundred persons. With a favorable wind, the voyage proceeded eastward for three days, at which point they encountered a storm. Nearly sinking, on the thirteenth day they careened the boat on an island and repaired the leak. The presence of pirates was noted. A vivid description follows, which has an eternal ring for all seafarers of those ages:

The great ocean spreads out, a boundless expanse. There is no knowing east or west; only by observing the sun, moon, and stars was it possible to go forward. If the weather were dark and rainy, (the ship) went as she was carried by the wind, without any definite course. In the darkness of the night, only the great waves were to be seen, breaking on one another, and emitting a brightness like that of fire, with huge turtles and other monsters of the deep (all about). The merchants were full of terror, not knowing where they were going. The sea was deep and bottomless, and there was no place where they could drop anchor and stop. But when the sky became clear, they could tell east and west, and (the ship) again went forward in the right direction. If she had come on any hidden rock, there would have been no way of escape. (112)

In an important contextualizing reference to Java, he continues that after ninety or more days they arrived at a country called Java-dvipa, “where various forms of error and Brahmanism are flourishing, while Buddhism in it is not worth speaking of” (113). Following a sojourn of five months (no doubt dictated by the season), Fa Hsien again embarked on another large merchantman, which also had on board more than two hundred men. Commencing the voyage on the sixteenth day of the fourth month, they sailed for more than one month in a northeast direction with the intention of reaching Kwang-chow (Canton). However, mid-ocean they encountered a typhoon. By then, more than seventy days had passed (since leaving Java) and provisions and water were nearly exhausted. Seemingly off course, they directed the ship to the northwest. Finally, after sailing day and night for twelve days, they reached land on the south of the Shandong promontory.

To be sure, this is a remarkable story of bravery and survival from this distant age, but it also raises questions as to type of ship and navigation. Could ships of that age actually carry two hundred passengers? It seems to be an exaggeration but possibly not if we can imagine a vessel approximating the Borobudur ship with its outrigger construction and multisail propulsion. As Inglis (2014: 142) explains, the eleven vessels depicted on the walls of Borobudur are components of Buddhist seafaring stories and nine of the vessels are associated with known legends of maritime events related in Buddhist Jātaka and Avadāna tales. These narrative traditions matured in the first half of the first millennium CE when the Asian maritime world was rapidly expanding (261). According to Ray (2019: 166–67), such narratives associated with the sea are found at several sites in India and Southeast Asia.

But did Indonesian-type craft ever make it to China during this era? As Manguin (1993a: 261–62) points out, Chinese sources of the third century CE offer vivid descriptions of these vessels. Generically known in Chinese sources as kunlun bo or “Southeast Asian ships,” they were capable of great speed, had huge capacity, carried large numbers of passengers, and featured multimast and multisail design. Another description from the eighth century CE commented upon the typical use on such vessels of fibrous cords to bind the planking. Still the question remains as to why Fa Hsien’s ship strayed so far from the coastal navigation pioneered by the Arabs, Indians, and Persians. Or was open-ocean navigation established practice at that early period, as only a storm-blown ship would follow such an erratic mid-ocean course given the risks to survival?

Navigation

This question was also pondered by Friedrich Hirth and W. W. Rockhill (1911: 28) in the introduction to their translation of Chau Ju-Kua’s (Chao Rugua) trade compilation from the Song dynasty. When out of sight of land, as they observed, Chinese and other nationalities of this age relied upon knowledge of the monsoon (and no doubt the currents and tides) and “steered solely by the sun, moon and stars,” presumably taking soundings as frequently as possible. They also adopted the practice of carrying homing pigeons to relay news back home. “Such was the method of sailing ships in the fifth century, such it remained down until the twelfth.” But what of astrolabes, compasses, and other devices? While the lode stone had been known in China since antiquity, as they state, the “south-pointing needle,” or compass, was adopted only on long-distance Chinese navigation at some point in the twelfth century. Whether Arabs preceded Chinese in this practice remains a point of investigation.

As introduced in Chapter 6, the Malacca-based geographer Manuel Godhino de Erédia (1881: 95–98) had the opportunity to observe a Chinese compass firsthand in the late 1500s or early 1600s. As he notes, neither Pliny nor Ptolemy mentioned the use of the compass. Neither did Marco Polo record the use of compasses on his sea journey home in 1295. The invention of the compass and its adaptation to marine usage, as he wrote with great confidence, can be attributed to the Chinese as adopted from long-distance navigation in tandem with longer-established celestial navigation traditions. The compass employed was a simple device comprising a magnetized needle set to float in a porcelain bowl filled with water, thus allowing the needle to point north. Writing from Goa on 24 November 1613, as he noted, the invention passed to Europe in 1304 under Pope Clement V.

III. Song China Appraised

China’s mixed state-capitalist model needs no introduction, but the notion that the world’s first large integrated market economy emerged in China one thousand years ago might appear surprising to a general reader. Simply, Song China (c. 960–1279), unknown in Latin Europe, commanded a more populous country than all Europe combined. On his part Joseph Needham (1959: 206) writes of the “great flourishing of the natural sciences under the Sung dynasty.” As identified by the “California School,” otherwise known for its decentering approach to European precocity, Song China’s industrial capacity dwarfed that of Europe. Its iron and steel making, its porcelain production, its inland communication system via canals, its grain production, its military technologies brooked no equal. Here proto-industrialization had been achieved, and state consolidation was a constant. Although less well documented, it should be borne in mind, as reported by Tansen Sen (2006: 446), that, in tandem with the development of shipbuilding technology during the Southern Song period, traders from China “seem to have started sailing to the Indian ports on indigenous vessels [although not necessarily Chinese vessels] during the second half of the thirteenth century.”

This is also a thesis advanced by William Liu (2015) in his study of China’s booming market economy between 1000 and 1500 (see Gunn 2016a: 346–48). Drawing from an array of Chinese-, Japanese-, and Western-language texts, Liu reads Chinese history backward, finding a stellar economic prequel in Song China to post-Dengist efforts to tap a deep promarket vein in the Chinese psyche. Rather than laying the blame on Western imperialism for China’s loss of rank, Liu squarely attributes the decline of the flourishing eleventh-century market economy to both the Mongol conquest (1206–1279) and, from 1368, to the anti-market “command” policies inaugurated by incoming Ming dynasty (1368–1644) successors. As a comparative study of eleventh-century Song with the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries under the Ming economy, the author delves deeply into a trove of imperial data to make informed statements on premodern economic development. In sum, as Liu contends, it was this abrupt switch from market to “command” economies that was the most significant element steering events between 1000 and 1500.

In his own words, Liu seeks to challenge the prevailing assumptions about the dynamics and structure of the Chinese market economy and to refute optimistic Malthusian explanations of early Ming living standards by pointing to a decline. In doing so, he seeks to challenge the notion of a “fourteenth-century turning point” in Ming China’s fortunes based on population data as promoted by a number of Western economic historians of China (Mark Elvin among them). More generally, Liu offers a foil to both officialized scholarship produced in China as well as to Western “revisionist” writings (the California School and “Marxist-Malthusians” among them).

To take one example, the spectacular rise of inland water transport with the shift in the Northern Song (960–1127) capital to Kaifeng in Hunan Province, connected to the Grand Canal, reveals the extent to which the eleventh-century mercantile economy flourished. Following the work of Japanese economic historians, he dubs this period a “canal century.” Population growth, increase in household size, expansion of acreage, and improved agricultural productivity all revealed a prosperous market economy. Other scholars have used iron and steel production as an index of Song sophistication as well.

Song China’s maritime footprint was long ago hailed in Western writing (see Rockhill 1914), and this is discussed in Chapter 10. Under Song, as leading analyst of Chinese monetary systems Richard von Glahn (2014: 641) summarizes, Chinese merchants exported substantial quantities of coins to Japan and Southeast Asia. Citing the geographical survey of overseas lands compiled by Zhao Rugua, the maritime customs inspector at Quanzhou in 1225, as further elaborated below, he also notes that Chinese mariners defied the imperial ban on the export of coins to bring Chinese coins to the east Javanese Kingdom of Kediri (c. 1045–1221) to trade for pepper and other tropical products. From 1293 the Majapahit Kingdom adopted Chinese bronze currency as its monetary standard in the early to mid-thirteenth century. Subsequently, Chinese coins displaced indigenous gold and silver pellets as the principal form of money throughout Java.

Contrariwise, the early Ming “command” economy with its lijia, or community administrative system, its military farms, and its involuntary migration actively stifled the market economy. Farmers were deprived of their right to produce for the market. Demonetization ran its course to an actual retreat to a barter economy in the Lower Yangtze. Ming taxes further stymied development. Even Song soldiers were better rewarded. Early Ming, to take one example of an unproductive state-sponsored display, famously dispatched Admiral Zheng He on what he terms a largely “useless” overseas expedition, followed by a move of the capital to the arid north. The Ming did turn around in the sixteenth century. This was not a new departure, as some would contend, but actually a “delayed recovery of the market” as opposed to a “new phase towards proto-capitalism” (Liu 2015: 200).

While accepting Liu’s central argument as to the marketization and relative prosperity of Song times as well as the damaging effects of early Ming policies, in a review article Pomeranz (2017) adds a number of caveats to Liu’s research. In particular, he raises questions as to matters of degree: “How prosperous? How marketized? How big and lasting a blow did the early Ming inflict?” He also raises a second set of questions centering on causation, and thus on the role of other factors. As he points out, Liu says very little about the many technological innovations during the Song, certain of which we have accepted in this book. These include the invention of gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and paper money, and the importation (from Southeast Asia) of early-ripening rice. Likewise, as Pomeranz points out, while the Mongol conquests of the mid-thirteenth century had a devastating impact in some places (especially North China and Sichuan), the impact was much less in the Middle and Lower Yangtze Valley and in the far south. Importantly, as well, since the coastline south of the Yangtze was better endowed with ports than the northern coastline, “the southward shift of China’s economic center of gravity was also propitious for foreign trade, which boomed under both the Song and the (Mongol) Yuan.”

It is also true that substantial private trade continued from the Fujian coast under the Ming, notwithstanding official bans. Moreover, as examined in Chapter 9, Fujian was connected with this trade via its relationship with the rulers of the Ryukyu Kingdom. As Annie Hoping Nie (2014: 22–23) summarizes, China’s financial strength and its power continued to grow during the Yongle era (1402–1424). Notably, Emperor Yongle ordered the reopening of the Grand Canal to connect the north and south inland waters, resulting in an expansion of trade and prosperity and more people engaged in commerce. Compared to the “first commercial revolution” under the Song, the “second commercial revolution” of the Ming dynasty witnessed a broader market economy and more diversified economic growth, including more resources and capital for maritime trade. As Nie 26; 33) continues, Ming dynasty maritime navigation and shipbuilding built on the achievements of the Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties and was extremely advanced. While the large-scale shipbuilding industry at the beginning of the Ming dynasty was state run, from the mid-Ming, there was a rapid and widespread expansion of privately owned shipbuilding industries. As a consequence, Ming maritime trade was even vaster in scale than the prosperous maritime trade of the Song dynasty. In 1567, not long after Emperor Jiajing died, the prohibition on foreign trade was lifted, allowing large numbers of Fujian merchant ships to put out to sea to carry out legitimate trade abroad. A range of scholarship now supports the facts surrounding the emergence of a Chinese diaspora during the Ming dynasty in the Philippines, coastal Vietnam, Java, and other coastal locations (Nie 46). As I confirmed in a dedicated study on Nagasaki, Ming trade with the western Japanese port was long and enduring and supported a significant resident Chinese presence (Gunn 2018a: Chap. 7).

IV. A Song Dynasty World Imaginary

With Quanzhou the major terminus port for Arab, Persian, and Indian sailors under the Song dynasty, one of its customs inspectors, Zhao Rugua, completed his compendious Zhu Fan Zhi (Description of barbarian nations) circa 1225. Recording the people, places, and items involved in China’s foreign trade in his age, his work thus preceded Marco Polo’s account by a century. In Volume 1, fifty-eight countries and regions are noted, embracing north Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, with much of this information derived from the foreign merchants he met in Quanzhou. While reproducing a great deal of poorly assimilated information, some credible, much is also fantastical, such as the land of Amazons. Among the credible is the Buddhist Kingdom of Poni on Borneo, possibly pre-Islamic Brunei or perhaps a composite picture of a similar kingdom on Borneo trading camphor and other local products.

In a carefully chosen passage, Hirth and Rockhill (1911: 26–27) offer what they consider “a statement on the world of Barbarians in the time of this author . . . (the like of which is found in no other author of the Sung period).” As this reads (stripped of Chinese characters):

The Great (World)-encircling-Ocean-Sea bounds the Barbarians’ countries. In every quarter there are kingdoms of them, each has its peculiar products, each has its trading centre from where it derives its (commercial) prosperity. The (Barbarian) kingdoms due south have San-fo-ts’i [Palembang, Sumatra] as their commercial centre. Sho-P’o [Java] is the centre of those from the south-east. The countries from the south-west are so vast in extent that they cannot all be described. The nearest are Chan-Ch’ong [Annam] and Chon-la [Kambuja] as the commercial centres of Wa-Li [Laos?]. The most distant is Ta-Ts’in [empire of the caliphs or Arabia] as the commercial centre of the countries of Western India. Among the distant ones Ma-li-pa [Hadramaut coast of Yemen including Aden] is the commercial centre of the countries of Ta-Shi, and beyond these there is Mu-lan-p’i [southern Spain] as the commercial centre of the countries of the West.

To the south of San-fo-ts’i (here Sumatra) is the Great Southern Ocean Sea and in this Ocean Sea there are islands inhabited by myriad and more of peoples. Beyond these to the south one cannot go [adding some fantasy elements like Amazons and a drain to which the southern ocean disappears].

This was but a synopsis, with the main text offering vivid page-long description of the countries concerned. In dealing with the world known to the Chinese in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Zhao Rugua’s compilation should have been an image-forming text in Song China. But, according to Hirth and Rockhill (1911), that was not so. Confucian scholars of the time held such travel accounts in low esteem. The first complete published text saw the light of day only in the fifteenth century but was still buried in obscurity until the late 1700s.

From Song to Mongol-Yuan Rule

The story of how an essentially a horse-based armed force, the Mongols, came to take the Southern Song capital of Hangzhou in 1276 and launch naval expeditions against Southeast Asian kingdoms as well as Japan certainly is not only understudied but has yet to be explained. According to Wade (2015: 55), the major contribution to our knowledge of these events is the interpretation offered by the scholar Lo Jung-pang (1955; 1958). Certainly information provided by Lo as to the frenzy of shipbuilding under Kublai Khan (d. 1294) and the scale and dimension of the fleets and manpower is particularly revealing in consideration of the two major expeditions against Japan (1274 and 1276) and Champa (1283–1284) and the disastrous Mongol-Yuan sea battle against Vietnamese forces fought in 1285. By any measure we would have to agree that Mongol-Yuan shipbuilding and naval development dwarfed contemporaneous European shipping and technology. As Lo concludes in retrospect, “The Yuan navy was essentially the Song navy” (Lo 2012: 246).

While scholars today reexamine the relevance of the Yuan naval expeditions from a world history perspective, Rockhill’s (1914: 423–29) study made more than one hundred years ago was pioneering. As he explains, when in 1277 the Mongols established their power over the coastal provinces of southeastern and southern China, the Song organization of the merchant shipping offices was basically maintained. The only important change made was the opening to foreign trade of some ports that had been closed in the latter years of the Song dynasty. In 1324 measures were taken by the new dynasty to control the outflow of Chinese money, as in the purchase of “expensive and useless objects” and the arrival of foreigners (Muslim traders) with so-called presents for the court. Nevertheless, the concerned coastal officials called attention to the importance of encouraging trade relations with the peoples of the southeastern (or southern and eastern) islands. In the meantime, envoys continued to arrive in the Mongol court, for example, the missions of 1279 from Ma’bar (southern India), Annam, and a kingdom on Sumatra. From this date there was a relatively frequent coming and going of missions to southern India and Ceylon including even the dispatch of animals as gifts, such as zebra procured from Africa. In 1279–1280 missions were sent to Java but bore little fruit. In 1286 ten states arrived at the Mongol court as part of a pooled mission. Lambri (Lamuri) in Sumatra joined this list. The 1300s saw a drop off in missions. With the dispatch of an envoy from China to southern India (Kulam) in 1334, relations (with the Mongol court) apparently came to an end (440–43). Such a rupture may or may not have been associated with the decline of the Yuan dynasty and its final eclipse by the Ming in 1368.

It seems unlikely that the terrestrial Mongolian Empire would launch maritime adventures, but they also employed seaborne power to outflank the Song. Obviously, as well, the Mongol Khan inherited the impressive Song maritime tradition and carried it through. As Needham (1971: 315) informs us, following the Mongol unification, they brought the Grand Canal up to a high level of efficiency, using the canal to harness coastal shipping to supply southern grain to northern destinations. But, unlike their predecessors, the Yuan also had naval goals in mind when it came to invading Japan, punishing an insubordinate Java, alongside sequential interventions and military actions against the Trần dynasty of northern Vietnam, along with Champa in 1258, 1285, and 1287–1288, also toppling the Pagan Empire between 1277 and 1287. What can be read into this is that the Mongols under Kublai Khan were just as adamant as their predecessors as to tributary protocol and in enforcing it.

The Inconclusive Mongol Invasion of Java of 1292

Drawing upon the writings of Dutch Sanskrit specialist C. C. Berg, historian Bernard Vlekke (1965: 62–66) explains how the center of power in Java moved eastward from the historic centers of Hindu-Buddhist power associated with Borobudur and Prambanan in central Java and with such successor Hindu-Buddhistic kingdoms as Singasari (1222–1292) (based nearby the present-day east Java city of Malang). Attracting wealth from the spice trade, Singasari boasted an impressive capital. In this narrative, the last king of Singasari, Kertanegara (r. 1269–1292) assumed a central role especially as his reign coincided with the rise of Mongol power and the militant actions of Kublai Khan between 1280 and 1290 in attacking Japan and the mainland Southeast Asian polities.

Chinese chronicles relate how imperial ambassadors sent to the Singasari court on Java were rebuffed and humiliated. Kublai Khan was shocked and ordered a punitive expedition against the “barbarian” Kertanegara. According to the Yuan Shilu or (History of the Yuan dynasty), in 1292 after some years of preparation Kublai Khan sent a large invasion fleet to Java with twenty thousand men conscripted from the Fujian area. As Rockhill (1914: 445–46) explains, after a difficult journey one section of the fleet anchored at Crimon (Karimun), a chain of islands offshore Jepara in Java (whence a part of the troops proceeded to effect a landing on the nearest point of the coast of Java), while another section continued by sea eastward to the mouth of the river of Surabaya, where it made its junction with the other and advanced.

In the meantime, Kertanegara had died and a pretender named Viraraja took power. In this narrative Viraraja lured the Chinese fleet into a trap, causing them to withdraw, although not before they inflicted considerable local havoc. But the intermezzo not only witnessed the eclipse of Singasari but the rise in 1293 of Majapahit, the last of the great Java-based empires. Unquestionably, the Mongol seaborne expedition mounted on Java was consequential. Vlekke (1959: 62–66) believes it entirely possible that the Mongol-Chinese threat led to a major preoccupation on Kertanegara’s part with international relations. We might also speculate that news of these dramatic events from Burma, to Vietnam, to Champa, somehow trickled into Java. In the Hindu-Buddhist tradition, he responded in two ways, first, by strengthening his inner or spiritual power and, second, by boosting his military strength. As Rockhill (1914: 446) interprets from his reading of the Yuan Shilu, commercial relations between Java and China were too important for these countries to remain long on unfriendly terms. In 1297 the ruler of Java sent the emperor a letter, and, in 1298 and 1300, other missions arrived at the Chinese court. Subsequently, at pretty regular intervals and in rapid succession, official missions were sent to China by Java (Majapahit) until the downfall of the Yuan dynasty.

V. A Chinese South Seas Priority under the Mongol-Yuan Dynasty?

Just as the Arabs gained the compass from the Chinese, so the Mongol-Yuan along with early Ming-era Zheng He missions incorporated the full spectrum of Arab navigational knowledge. Notably, Arab ships arriving in their major Chinese port of call at Quanzhou (Zayton or Chinchew in classical works), were required to surrender their navigational logs. The southern Chinese port city also hosted a Muslim harbor master, a mosque (the Qingjing Mosque, dated from 1009), along with qadi, or judge. It makes sense that, in the careful preparations for these massive maritime expeditions, Arab navigators were brought on board. In turn, the Ming inherited the navigational skills of their Yuan forbears. Hitherto, as remarked by Ibn Battuta in the early part of the fourteenth century (Defrémery and Sanguinetti 1848, 1, 4, 90), “Chinese ships only are used in navigating the Sea of China. . . . These vessels are built at Zayton and at Sin Kala (Canton).”

With the Mongol-Yuan armadas reaching Java, we begin to see not only the implantation of Chinese communities in the Nanyang or South Seas but also a Chinese record of voyaging to a number of destinations, usually with a trade connection. As Sen (2006: 425–26) asserts, without the earlier contribution of the Yuan-era traders, it would be hard to envision the maritime exchanges between Ming China and the Indian kingdoms and the expansion of the maritime networks to southern Asia. As evidence, he cites Yuan shi records relating to a Yuan mission led by Yang Tingbi from Quanzhou to the Malabar coast in 1281 alongside a total of fourteen official missions dispatched to India by Kublai Khan. Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta both testify to the presence of Chinese merchants on the Indian coasts during the Yuan period. Thus, by the time the Hongwu emperor established the Ming dynasty, the knowledge of foreign states and peoples had grown significantly (436).

Wang Dayuan’s Tao i chih lio (Dao Yi Zhilue)

At least one of the most important image-forming texts bequeathed from the Mongol-Yuan period drawn from personal experience of sailing the southern ocean is that of Wang Dayuan, a Yuan-era traveler and native of Nanchang. His text, the Tao i chih lio (Dao Yi Zhilue) or Brief Account of Island Barbarians 岛夷志略; was written circa 1350. It was subject to modern reprints in China (1896). As Roderich Ptak (1995: 49–51) asserts, the Dao Yi Zhilue was a particularly influential text continuing into the Ming period. Ptak acknowledges as well that the Yuan empire formed part of a commercial “world system” with dense maritime networks reaching across the Indian Ocean. With both Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta traversing this world, their itineraries lend to comparison with the Yuan imaginaries (or otherings) in general but with Wang Dayuan in particular because he was a traveler.

As analyzed by Rockhill (1915a: 63), Wang’s book is divided into a hundred chapters or sections, in which he describes ninety-nine countries, ports, and noteworthy localities from the Pescadores or Penghu Islands of the Taiwan Strait area and the Moluccas in the east, to Arabia and the east coast of Africa in the west (the final chapter adds ten additional). Although he may have visited most of the places mentioned, it remains very doubtful whether he ever reached the remoter ones, as with Timor and most of the places in the Far West. As Rockhill (62–63) points out, the Dao Yi Zhilue differs from the work of Chao Ju-kua (Zhao Rugua), who did not write from personal observations but only from reports made to him by others. At the same time, as Rockhill points out, Chao Ju-kua’s Song-era compilation exercised considerable influence upon Wang Dayuan: “It served him as a model, and he has followed it closely in the arrangement of his text.” Wang made two voyages, one from 1330 to 1334, and the other from 1337 to 1339. It is also believed that he lived for some time in Quanzhou in Fujian.

Although he can hardly have visited, Wang Dayuan also left a description of Kan-Ma-Li or the Comomo Islands, which Rockhill (1915d: 623) acknowledges as “the first and only reference to these islands I have found in Chinese geographical works.” As related, “They build ships in this country to transport horses. Their sides are of planks, and they use neither nails or mortar (to join them), but coco-nut fibre. Each ship has two or three decks with a board shed (over the upper deck?). To make head against leaking, the sailors take turns, day and night, without any intermission, at bailing out the water.”

Wang Dayuan also left a description of what has been interpreted as Temasek, or the general area of Singapore and the nearby islands. In particular, he described Longyamen, or “Dragon’s Tooth Strait.” “The strait runs between the two hills of the Tan-ma-hsi barbarians, which look like ‘dragon’s teeth.’ Through the centre runs a waterway. The fields are barren and there is little padi. The climate is hot with heavy rains in the fourth and fifth months. The inhabitants are addicted to piracy. In ancient times, when digging in the ground, a chief came across a jewelled head-dress” (Wheatley 1961: 82). As Rockhill (1915a: 129) explains, “There exists among Western scholars a diversity of views as to the location of this important strait. Some identify it with the Straits of Lingga, while others believe it is the Singapore Straits, or rather the New Harbour (Keppel’s Harbour) of Singapore.” According to a Singapore National Library version, it is “probable that Longyamen refers to the waterway between what is now Sentosa island (formerly Belakang Mati) and Labrador Point. The strait was probably named after a pinnacle of stone called Batu Berlayar, which means ‘Sail Rock’ in Malay” (Singapore National Library 2020).

In a reference to early Song- or Yuan-era settlement of Chinese in the Straits area, Wang Dayuan observes, “Men and women live mixed up among the Chinese. Most of them do up their hair in a chignon, and wear a short cotton shirt with a blue cotton sarong tied around them” (Rockhill 1915a: 131). Reid (2010: 313) goes further to suggest that this situation of Chinese settlement and acculturation such as also transpired on Borneo and at such other locations in the Straits as with Palembang, represented the “first Sino-Southeast Asian moment.” To be sure this is all the more credible if we allow that thousands of members of the Mongol invasion force sent to Java did not return and put down roots.

The Dao Yi Zhilue as an Imaginary

My own evaluation is that Wang at times waxes evocative and informational, as with descriptions of raft or floating communities on the Musi River at Palembang, or methods of fishing for pearl oysters off Ceylon, or the gathering of cowrie shells in the Maldives to be used as currency. He also waxes descriptive of Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim practices as in India or Ceylon in a relatively neutral tone. He pays close attention to sartorial style as with white turbans and slippers in India, as well as female attire and use of ornaments as in India, or the wearing of the sarong as a garment in the archipelago, or nakedness among “barbarians.” Royal or courtly practices appear alongside the plebeian. Musical style and punishments are not neglected. From a trade or commercial perspective he does not neglect natural products, domestic animals, and so on, alongside commercial intelligence, wind and sailing conditions, or even musical style and punishments. We might even say he was ahead of the curve relative to the early Arab voyages and was no less evocative than Ibn Battuta or Marco Polo.

As Ptak (1995: 47) has written, “There are different ways of reading old ethnographic accounts of foreign countries. One way is to look at them as sources of information that furnish geographical, economic, and other factual data; another is to treat them as hybrid products with a mixture of literary elements and historical facts, or subjective views and objectively verifiable data.” His study surveys ethnographic data in two Yuan texts, the Dao Yi Zhilue, and the Yiyu Zhi (Gazetteer of strange regions), known to intellectuals in the Ming era and probably written during the Yuan era. Even though the Mongol-Yuan was a non-Chinese dynasty, he contends, variously Confucianist, Daoist, or cosmological elements can be adduced from a reading of the Dao Yi Zhilue. Geomancy also figured, as with the representation of Longmayen standing at the junction of two oceans, the eastern and the western. As part of the ethnographic repertoire stood a concern for foreign customs (fengsu) rated from beautiful or pure to savages in the Nicobars, and with “lust and evil” in Timor. Confucian ethics stand out in representations of foreign women—especially around patriarchal norms—although contradictions abound as well (as with the presence of affectionate women in Champa). By contrast, the Yiyu Zhi expressed a concern to record marvels and miracles, as with reference to “women countries” and unusual marriage and other practices.

As Ptak (1995: 74) concludes, “If a ‘wild’ comparison could be allowed here: Wang’s account comes close to that of Marco Polo, while the author of the Yiyu Zhi follows an approach that more resembles that of Odorico de Pordenone of John of Mandeville.” On their part, the early Ming-era traveler, Ma Huan (as referenced below) and Tomé Pires followed Wang and Polo. This is a reasonable assessment, allowing that, as a veritable Portuguese diplomat, Pires was of a different age and disposition. While through to the Qing era, neo-Confucianism would stifle innovation in China, post-Renaissance Europe witnessed a small revolution in the realm of history, philosophy, and science. Nevertheless, it is also true as Ptak acknowledges, that a “mirabilia” tradition continued to flourish, at least for some time, in both Europe and the Far East.

VI. The Early Ming-Era Voyages of the Muslim Admiral Zheng He

When in 1368 China was free from Mongol domination under the Ming emperors, the central Javanese Kingdom of Majapahit, with dynastic links with Sumatra, commenced to assert pretensions of control over the archipelago. Referencing the great Ming voyages of the Muslim admiral Zheng He of the early fifteenth century, as Vlekke (1965: 81) explains, the Ming dynasty carried on the Yuan policy of expansion in the southern seas. Ambassadors were sent to Champa and Cambodia and to the newly founded Hindu Kingdom of Malacca and Java. Backed by strong fleets they sought submission on the part of tributaries. Malacca quickly acceded, while Poni (likely Brunei) sought help to overthrow Majapahit’s domination. The period coincided with the presence of Chinese sailor stay behinds—some piratical—congregating in the Malacca Straits leading to a Ming pacification mission against them in the Palembang area of southern Sumatra. In any event, as described, regular tribute mission with the Ming resumed as with those from Malacca in 1411, 1414, 1415, 1419, 1424, and 1433 (829).

As will be explained in Chapter 9, China was then also exerting its commercial presence via its proxy, the kings of Ryukyu, who traded with virtually every maritime-linked polity in Southeast Asia. In 1292 Islamic communities were attested in northern Sumatra by Marco Polo, and within generations Islam would be making inroads along the maritime routes as in Malacca where, in 1400, in a pattern adopted on Java in particular, the ruling Hinduized dynasty embraced Islam, thus creating an Islamic Sultanate.

While it lasted, the Zheng He voyages of the early fifteenth century, seven fleets of large oceangoing junks carrying thousands of sailors (1405–1433 CE), attenuated the system to the Indian Ocean zone including Ceylon, the Indian coast, the Persian Gulf, and the African coast as far south as Mozambique, albeit without dislodging the age-old Asian maritime trade networks. As Wade (2006: 79) argues, the Zheng He expeditions were not about control of territory but were intended to coerce and gain control of ports and shipping lanes and the trade that went with this control. Just as the Song and, in their turn the Yuan, had participated in the Indian Ocean trade, so the Ming under Zheng He adroitly recreated a version of Abu-Lughod’s Thirteenth-Century World System but under Chinese terms.

With the Yongle emperor (1402–1424), the second under the Ming, actively supporting the Zheng He missions, his death amid rising Mongol threats from the north meant that such state-sponsored missions came to an abrupt halt. Nevertheless, China’s maritime links with other countries continued through the imperial tribute envoy system. Under the Ming, as Nie (2014: 27–29) explains, this was an extremely rigorous system of regulations stipulating the number of envoys and ships from each tribute country. Manguin offers the example of Majapahit, which dispatched seventy tribute missions to China between 1368 and 1526. However, in 1371, to prevent anti-Ming forces from colluding with pirates, an order was issued prohibiting private maritime expeditions, while restricting the arrival of foreign merchants in China. Enforcement was weaker between 1457 and 1520, just as a flourishing illegal trade developed especially along the southeast coast of Fujian, far beyond the reach of imperial power. But with the complete rescinding of the ban in 1567, as Manguin (2010: 346) relates, the Fujianese merchants “swept into Java,” with Banten taking over Malacca’s share of the South China Sea trade.

A Zheng He Expedition Imaginary

More than a few Chinese imaginaries drawing upon seagoing voyages to the South Seas or Indian Ocean appeared over the second millennium.[1] One from the Mongol-Yuan era is that of Zhou Daguan, who visited Cambodia in 1296 as part of an official diplomatic delegation. A contemporary of Marco Polo, his Zhenla Fengtu (Customs of Cambodia) remains a key resource for specialists on the Angkorian regime, and the first translations into European languages appeared in the early nineteenth century, followed by that of Paul Pelliot in 1902. No less, ranging back over a century, the early Ming Zheng He expeditions under the Yongle and Xuande (1425–1435) emperors have attracted major scholarly attention, including pioneering attempts at annotation by a distinguished list of Sinologues, albeit few reach nonspecialist audiences.

My intention here is more modest. By selecting representative texts I seek to draw attention to their image-making appeal among Chinese literati or to whomever the texts circulated among in their time at least by noting reprints when they occurred. No doubt as well, as much as they circulated, text and maps matched by graphic images such as of exotic animals or birds or objects brought back from these missions, came to feed into a Chinese imaginary of the southern or Western Ocean “other,” at least as received in palace or mandarin circles. There must have been oral traditions as well, some turning to legends not only along the maritime routes where the Zheng He “treasure ships” passed but back in China as well, whether in the shipyards at Nanjing or among the sailor fraternity or among the marooned sailor communities strung out from the Vietnam coast to Java to the Straits of Malacca (and these are mentioned in some of the commentaries).

One such image-making text is the Ying-yai shenglan (瀛涯胜览) (General Survey of the Ocean Shores, attributed to Ma Huan, a Muslim Chinese interpreter who accompanied Zheng He on the fourth, sixth, and seventh of his expeditions. With Ma Huan’s observations dating from 1433, his book first appeared in 1451. Although the original is not extant, copies appeared in print as in 1522 and 1617. Even if printed versions surfaced only a hundred years after the epochal voyages, we may assume that, along with Fei Xin’s Xingcha shenglan (星槎胜览) or (Overall Survey of the Star Raft, the Ying-yai shenglan joined a small cluster of texts informing elite circles in China as to the geography of the Western Ocean world rivaling or even exceeding the human detail appearing in the Arab and even the Poloean accounts.

Widely known today through the study undertaken by J. V. G. Mills (1970), in turn based on the definitive text established by Feng Cheng-jun first published in 1935, the Ying-yai shenglan was earlier investigated by Duyvendak (1933) and Pelliot (1933). Running to some hundred pages, the text offers elaborate asides on personal observation of some twenty polities ranging westward from Champa, including Java under Majapahit, Palembang, Thailand, Malacca, Aru-Deli (east Sumatra), along with Samudera, Lho Seumawe, Lide, Meureudu, Lambri, Aceh (all in north Sumatra), Ceylon, the “land of naked people (Nicobar and Andamans), Quilon, Calicut, the Maldive and Laccadive Islands, Dhofar, Aden, Bengal, Hormuz, and the “country of the heavenly square,” or Mecca, where the author performed the pilgrimage. With asides on customs, religion, marriage, geography, food, etiquette, and much more, the Ying-yai shenglan provides a rich descriptive tableau matching or possibly exceeding Arab descriptions from earlier centuries of lands practically unknown in Europe at that time. To offer one example, in his description of Aden, as Rockhill (1915: 608) translates, Ma Huan observes, “They have able astronomers. They fix a certain day in spring on which the flowers will bloom, a certain day in autumn when the flowers will fade and fall (the dates for) eclipses of the sun and moon, for wind, rain, the rise and fall of the tide; there are none of these things they do not correctly determine.” But in common with the Arab journeys, many fabulous elements also enter the text, whether out of disdain for barbaric practices or to feed into generalized stereotypes of the barbarian other it is hard to know.

The Zheng He Nautical Chart 郑和航海图 or Mao Kun 茅坤 Map

Of no less interest than text descriptions of the polities visited by the Zheng He expeditions was the production and circulation of a map strip charting one or another of the voyages. Believed to have been completed in 1422, the Zheng He Nautical Chart (郑和航海图) or, as it is better known in Western scholarship, the Mao Kun 茅坤 map, is essentially a woodblock compilation of maps and text tracking the Zheng He voyages up until the time of its completion. Originally appearing as a set of navigation charts published as the last chapter in the Ming-dynasty military treatise Wu Pei-Chih, or Wubeizhi, and with the book compiled by Mao Yuanyi in 1621 and published in 1628; the name of the map refers to his grandfather Mao Kun.

Although earlier investigated by Duyvendak (1933) and Pelliot (1933) and surviving in several library collections globally, Mills (1970) offers a gazetteer of names mentioned on the map along with interpretation. Describing the Mao Kun map as “a cartogram,” as Mills (251) explains, it also served the purpose of a chart with added sailing directions. He also likens it to “a pocket size directory.” As such, it specified “the courses to be followed, the principal land-marks, the time taken in sailing between them, most of the points along the coasts, and other matters.” It is also the earliest Chinese map to give an adequate representation of southern Asia including Persia, Arabia, and East Africa.

Figure 4.1: Wubeizhi, Mao Yuanyi, 1594–1640. Stellar diagram with instructions for navigation from Hormuz to Calicut. Image 22. Source: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, https://www.loc.gov/item/2004633695/.

Figure 4.2: Wubeizhi showing passage through the northern Malacca Straits. The island of Langkawi (龙牙交椅), Kedah River estuary (吉达港), Penang Island (槟榔屿), and Pulau Sembilan (九州). Source: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, https://www.loc.gov/item/2004633695/.

As explained, the map compilation records in Chinese characters a total of 499 place-names along with thirty-four star-heights or elevations (Mills claims to have identified 84 percent accurately). The map records places in the order in which they are represented as viewed from a vessel traveling westward from Nanjing (Mills 1970: 240). Of the forty pages of the map, as Mills (246) calculates, the largest part are devoted to the Chinese world, with lesser numbers of pages focused on Indo-China and the Malaysian and Arab world. The extreme points of the map are Nanjing in the east and Hormuz, Luhaiya in Arabia, and Ma-lin-ti, a possible reference to Mozambique in the west. Among the places marked on the map in Chinese characters are Chenla, Champa, Siam/Thailand, Langkasuka, Temasek (Singapore), Malacca, Sumatra, and Kalimantan. The island of Ceylon is shown together with the east coast of Africa at the bottom. The Indian Ocean has been compressed. Southern Asia is represented by such places as Bengal, Orissa, Kollam, Calicut, Hormuz, and Oman. East African locations include Mombasa and Malindi, albeit misplaced, and Barawa and Mogadishu (both in present-day Somalia).

Dated to 1415–1433, as Mills (1970: 241) supposes, the map was not drawn by one man. Rather, it was produced in an office where a cartographer and assistants corrected and supplemented existing maps in light of new information collected from the voyages. The use of interpreters or even double interpretations is assumed and, as he presumes, there was much conjecture over assigning Chinese names. Acknowledging the opinion of Duyvendak and Pelliot that the maps were not purely Chinese but drew upon Arab nautical charts, at the same time Mills asserts that this kind of strip map was indeed a Chinese invention. As Park (2012: 173–74) embellishes, the cartographers of the (missing) Zheng He charts annotated each port city they identified with the elevation of such stars as the Pole Star or constellations like Ursa Minor (the Little Dipper) in addition to compass directions.

As Mills (1970: 247) explains, “The frequent variations of orientation and scale convert the map into a patchwork of maplets each of which has its own orientation and scale.” The scale can vary from 7 miles per inch in the Nanjing area to 215 miles per inch along parts of the African coast. Notably, the map depiction of Ceylon orients in several directions on the same page. Sailing routes are liberally indicated by dotted lines, including main and subsidiary routes. The map gives stellar altitudes for thirty-four locations, all in India or countries west of India. Many of the readings are more accurate than those made by Arabs, but some also reveal joint Arab-Indian-Chinese consultation. To be sure, many errors of commission and omission creep into these depictions. Notably, the geographical alignment of the Malay Peninsula is ignored, the entrance to the Gulf of Siam/Thailand is totally out of proportion, false islands appear, the configuration of Java is greatly distorted, India appears flattened, and so on. But, relative to European maps of this era, the Mao Kun map’s evocation of the intermediary area of eastern Africa and Arabia is superior (253).

According to W. Z. Mulder (1942: 1) in his time an experienced navigator on the coast of China, “The Charts are undoubtedly navigators’ charts, they give a crude picture of the coast as it appears to the navigators’ eye and the added sailing-directions must have been an enormous help to the mariners using them! The style-less, crisp, business-like wordings of the sailing-directions have to our idea been made up by a mariner, maybe the navigating-officer of the expeditions; we may safely assume that on expeditions of that scale and scope there must have been several nautical as well as other experts on board.”

Needless to say, Chinese scholarship on the Mao Kun map has a long pedigree continuing into the present. In reviewing two examples of “new” Chinese scholarship on Chinese overseas voyaging, those by Zhou Yunzhong (2013, 2015) and Ptak (2015: 205–8) point to the creative way the author has reinterpreted many of the Mao Kun map sequences by way of examination of various “parallel” sources. Ptak does this with respect to the coast of eastern Guangdong, the Pearl River estuary, and the western section of Guangdong with Hainan. He also examines the neglected region around the Anambas and Natuna groups and the entire sea space between the eastern side of the Malay Peninsula and the western shore of Kalimantan. Similarly, he disentangles the data pertaining to the complex maritime zone around the Straits of Singapore. He also demonstrates that Chinese sailors were familiar with the western side of Sumatra and some of its offshore islands. Contrary to some opinion that the coast “opposite” Sumatra and the Maldives might be Australia, Zhou believes it better corresponds to Madagascar or the African mainland. Taken together, Zhou’s original 2013 publication and its 2015 sequel reveal a new priority on the part of Chinese scholars in reexamining not only classic Western-language translations, but the classic Chinese texts themselves.

It is also true, as Nie (2014: 13) points out, that the Zheng He Nautical Chart is an example of traditional Chinese mapmaking. Typical of the genre, it lacks a compass rose or scale. It was painted on a rolled-up scroll. It was executed outside of Western conventions, which is not surprising as the voyages predated the arrival of the eastward-sailing Portuguese. As she explains, the Zheng He chart shows fifty-six compass course routes from Taicang in Jiangsu to Hormuz and fifty-three return routes. These are depicted in Chinese landscape-painting style offering such scenery as depictions of the Yangtze River below Nanjing, the East China Sea and the South Sea as far as the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, East African routes, and the coastal terrain.

Pressure on the Tribute Trade System under the Ming

But still it has to be explained why the tribute trade system that had been perfected under the Ming fell away under the same dynasty. This is all the more surprising, as Needham (1971: 493) points out, because in its heyday, about 1420 CE, the Ming navy probably outclassed not only any other Asian naval force but also that of any contemporary European state or even alliance. With great persuasion, Needham (593) demonstrates through early Ming expeditions to Java, Malacca, India, and the coastal littoral of Africa, the “Portuguese century” of Dias, da Gama, and Albuquerque was equally a “Chinese century” in terms of shipbuilding, maritime exploration, and trade diplomacy. But where the heirs of Prince Henry the Navigator continued to make important nautical innovations, Chinese marine technology, impressive as it was, made no such revolutionary break with the past after the fifteenth century. In any case, for a complex of reasons, part economic (the drain on silver), part technological (new inland water communication in China), as much as a newly determined anti-maritime policy, the Ming navy disintegrated By 1474 only 140 warships remained, with shipyards falling into disrepair. By 1500 it became a capital offense in China to build a seagoing junk with more than two masts. By 1551 even trade in multimasted ships was proscribed (508; 526–27).

But pressure on the tribute trade system also emerged with the defeat in 1511 of the longtime Ming tributary the Malacca sultanate. In another turn of the wheel, the Portuguese then began reconnoitering trade opportunities on the coast of China, temporarily operating out of islands in the Pearl River estuary, including the sparsely populated Macau Peninsula. As recorded in the Ming Shilu (25 October 1530), “During the Zheng-de reign (1506–1521 CE), the Fo-lang-ji [Portuguese], using an alias came mixed together (with other legitimate Southeast Asian tributaries) to offer tribute. They then spread their pernicious influence to the provincial seat.” As recorded, they were driven away by coastal defenses “on the pretext of lack of funds and a lack of goods [the local authorities] proposed re-opening to them” (Wade 2005b). As further elaborated in Chapter 10, in 1557, the Ming ceded the Macau Peninsula to the Portuguese in a formula whereby the Canton authorities were awarded an annual “ground rent” in silver, thus confirming their status as European tributer, though not without travails (Fok 1978; Gunn 1996: 14–18).

VII. Chinese Maritime Prowess and Cartographic Empowerment

It cannot be ignored that, in the wake of the entry of Mongol-Yuan fleets into the archipelago, Chinese trading junks engaging in regional trade virtually made these waters a Mar Sinensus. But bearing in mind Ibn Battuta’s assertion that in the early part of the fourteenth century, Chinese ships were restricted to navigating the Sea of China, when then did Chinese craft first join the long-distance trade across the Bay of Bengal and beyond? Was this before or after the time of the Zheng He navigations? In fact, this question is part of an extended conversation among historians, and there is much misinformation.

Notably, Hourani (1951: 66, 76) found no evidence to support Chinese navigation to India and beyond at least until the late twelfth century. As Manguin elaborates (1993a: 269), “until the last centuries of the 1st millennium A.D. [Chinese] skills were applied to build only riverine and coastal vessels. . . . It was therefore only after the establishment of the Song dynasty in the 10th century . . . that the large oceangoing ‘junks’ later witnessed by travelers began to be built on any remarkable scale.” Manguin (270–71) goes on to discuss the emergence of a hybrid maritime tradition in the South China Sea area, for example, vessels mixing the use of wooden dowels attached to planking and the use of iron, as in the Chinese tradition. Other authors, as with Beaujard (2019: Chap. 1), concede that during the Tang period Chinese ships only rarely ventured into the Indian Ocean, in any case not “beyond the Malabar coast in India, despite advances in maritime technology since the Han dynasty.” While some Arab texts mention “Chinese ships” present at Siraf in the ninth century, I am in agreement with Beaujard that “Chinese ships” could be read as a blanket reference to Persian and Arab vessels connecting with the China trade at such intermediary ports as Kalah/Kedah after the massacre of foreign merchants at Canton in 879, taking advantage of the rise of Srīvijaya. In any case, the evidence for a Song maritime advance into the Indian Ocean zone is stronger than that of the Tang, but, even so, it cannot have been particularly consequential, at least not in the way of the Mongol-Yuan expeditions.

The Chinese Mapping/Gazetteer Tradition

But how did Chinese astronomical prowess translate into general cartographic knowledge or, more specifically, into knowledge of the world, its oceans and continents? By 1500, as Park (2012: 2; 15) has underscored, “the Chinese learned significantly more about the Islamic world, and the Muslims of West Asia and North Africa knew a great deal more about China, than either society had known about each other in the eighth century.” In 770, she continues, “maps of China did not exist in the Islamic world, nor did the Chinese possess maps of the Islamic world.” She offers a Korean “world” map of 1402 (embracing the China-Southeast Asia-India area also suggesting Africa), in turn based upon a Mongol map, to illustrate the jump in knowledge in China during this period (2018). We have already seen that, thanks to their assimilation of Ptolemy and their navigations, Muslim geographers had developed a sense of the coastlines linking the Islamic world and China much earlier than had Chinese cartographers. As noted, the Chinese also were aware of the lode stone and, from circa 1086, commenced to use it aboard ships. Also, as noted, the sea charts produced by the Zheng He voyages of 1405–1433 did incorporate the major sea routes connecting China to the Islamic world. Chinese navigators used the compass, and they made celestial observations. Yet Chinese maps and charts were not Cartesian products and lacked coordinates.

According to Richard J. Smith (1996: 3), whereas from about 1500 onward cartographers in the West viewed space as “bounded, static and therefore measurable,” traditional Chinese concepts of space emphasized dynamism and fluidity investing physical space with “deep, multivalent cultural meaning.” But central to China’s self-image in its dealings with foreign countries (waiguo) was the Sino-centric tributary system and the Chinese concept of superiority over peoples of the world. Not only did the Chinese record textual descriptions of aliens from an early period, but they also produced visual images. As Smith (19–22) observes, the most comprehensive illustrated account produced over many centuries was the Huang qing zhigong tu 皇清职贡图 (Illustrations of the tribute bearing peoples of the Qing) produced in 1731. The list included not only ethnic minorities but also such overseas tributaries as Korea, the Liuqui (Ryukyu) Islands, Annam, Siam/Thailand, Sulu, Laos, Burma, and even, in a confused manner, European countries. Chinese maps also reflected Sino-centricity, with China occupying center place. Not even the introduction during the Mongol-Yuan dynasty of Islamic cartographic influences along with mathematical principles could dislodge the tradition of Chinese cartography of producing maps based on general knowledge acquired on voyages (see Gunn 2003; 124–25).

Having briefly examined Chinese mapping traditions, the question of Chinese navigational skills is also raised. Allowing that this is not a well-researched subject, the Ming-era Shun Feng Xiang Song (顺风相送, Fair winds for escort), serves as a major source on Chinese navigational routes during the first half of the fifteenth century.[2] Allowing for civilizational differences, the scientific approach to navigation adopted by the Chinese was not altogether different from that of the Europeans. In other words, as the Shun Feng Xiang Song suggests, China, or at least groups of navigators, did have a comprehensive understanding of the seas, their connectivity, their currents and winds, their navigational hazards, and their coastlines, with major features of many of them named (see Mills 1979: 72).

The Selden Map

Seldom does vital new evidence in this general area present itself. The recovery or, rather, reexamination of the so-named Selden Map in the Bodleian Library in 2008 (now redubbed Dongxiyang Hanghai Tu (东西洋航海图), or Nautical chart of the eastern and western seas) offers a new optic on Ming seafaring, notwithstanding official bans (see Batchelor 2013, 2014; Brook 2013). Dating from the late sixteenth to early seventeenth century and now regarded as the earliest large-scale nautical map surviving from the Ming era, the clear focus is the coastal region of China, as well as the eastern and western oceanic regions (thus refuting the notion that the Ming was inward looking and isolated). The Southeast Asian region is illustrated with relative accuracy, including the island of Java and the Moluccas and with the Philippines shown in some detail. Japan (Honshu-Kyushu) is not well drawn, but a cluster of trading ports around Nagasaki-Hirado is well denoted. That holds for Manila and the Hội An, or “Cham coast” of Vietnam with these destinations well connected up with the Fujianese junk trade. A distinguishing feature of the map is the depiction of six eastern sea routes and twelve western sea routes radiating out of Quanzhou on the Fujian coast as well as sixty ports on these routes reaching as far as Ormuz. Macau is not denoted. Compass directions for the main stages are indicated.

It should be noted that Chinese navigators sailing to the South Seas through the South China Sea (as it is known today but not in antiquity), avoided the reef-strewn center. In so doing, Chinese maritime activity ran either along the western and southwest margins of the South China Sea via the Hainan Paracel gateway and along the coast to Poulo Condore (Vietnam’s Côn Đảo)—the favored course—or through the Palawan passage connecting with the Philippines and more southerly destinations (as with a junk from Luzon off Timor as reported by the Magellan circumnavigation).

As Nie (2014: 11–12) remarks, the Selden Map breaks with Chinese tradition in a number of ways. Most obviously the map situates China within the broader East-Southeast Asia world region. As such it departs from classical Chinese concepts embedded in tianxia as described. As a merchant map, she asserts, it follows “the Ptolemaic method of looking at the world on a single chart.” If so, that can only be because the author of the map may have consulted Ricci’s world maps to achieve this effect. Although lacking coordinates in the Western tradition, the map itself was adjusted to magnetic declination, offering both compass north and map north as well as nautical scale. Made two hundred years after the Zheng He Nautical Chart, the Selden Map is the “first practical Chinese nautical chart to mark compass bearings and ratios, crucial elements in Western cartography.” In particular, as Nie (54) concludes from an examination of the Selden Map, the web of sea routes connecting China with the world suggests that under the Ming, China was outward looking, seafaring, and capitalist.

As Robert K. Batchelor (2014: 47) remarks of the compass rose and scale bar, “The visualization of these techniques also seems to be an indication of the increasing importance and visibility of mathematical literacy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in East Asia, which took shape variously in terms of accounting, geometric drawing and practices of linear algebra.” Even so, the method of navigation by measuring distance by time offers no radical departure from that of the Shun Feng Xiang Song. Once again, this is a map drawn from raw voyage data including magnetic or compass courses and from distance traveled on each course recorded as the number of watches spent on that course (Davies 2014: 101). In my view it is a hybrid born of East-West contacts, with the likely meeting ground at Nagasaki or the smaller nearby port of Hirado Island, where both the English and Dutch established trading posts (see Gunn 2018a: Chap. 4).

Conclusion

Although this chapter has considered only the maritime silk roads, we can agree with Beaujard (2020: Chap. 1) that, in the period between the sixth and tenth centuries, China was more strongly connected than previously with Southeast Asia, India, and western Asia. From these contacts, the first imaginaries of the Western Ocean world—also embracing the Middle East and the African coast—began to enter Chinese chronicle records. These included “Buddhist imaginaries” or, rather, civilizational exchanges dating back to an even earlier period in the case of Fa Hsien. Yet China was not yet directly connected in this period, and that owed to the agency and maritime prowess of Southeast Asians, Indians, and merchant-sailor groups from western Asia in reaching out to China. It would not be until developments in Chinese marine technology matched by political considerations that China itself pushed south and eventually into the Indian Ocean region. More or less, this coincided with the Song dynasty feeding into the production of the first Chinese imaginaries of the Indian Ocean world.

We have traced two elements or systems with respect to China’s outreach to the maritime world. The first is that of the sea silk road much romanticized back to Sinbad or Marco Polo and, from 2013, politicized as part of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. But alongside the east-west silk road trade, and practically unlike anything seen in world history for its longevity and ability to adapt and morph as kingdoms rose and fell, was China’s tribute envoy system. Touching practically all kingdoms on its immediate periphery, it was sui generis and practically an imaginary in its own right. By this is meant that across different lands and cultures, entourages sometimes accompanied by rulers made the dangerous sea voyage to the China coast before proceeding to the capital. Repeated at fixed intervals over the centuries, they bore gifts, and they fell in with the expected protocol. Accordingly, they were rewarded just as they were enfeoffed. Coercion was seldom an element, although the Yuan invasions of mainland and maritime polities was a major exception. If there were still any waverers, then the Zheng He expeditions of the early Ming era both shocked and awed. Some polities also bought protection, as with Srivijaya and its outposts, but not all. At least from Song dynasty onward, the tribute envoy system of spaced but regular trade missions matched by ceremonial became regular upon a necklace of polities stretching from southern India and Ceylon to Southeast Asia, helping as well to lubricate trade exchanges and general commerce.

Though our treatment of Chinese geography is highly abbreviated, we must also conclude that, notwithstanding Arabo-Persian borrowings through the Mongol exchange and empirical knowledge gathered by emissaries and others in the wake of the Zheng He missions, renditions of the known world, whether cartographic or entering the dynastic record, were Sino-centric and culture bound, practically unchanging even with the arrival of the first Catholic missionaries in Macau. This we saw with Zhao Rugua’s Song-era Zhu Fan Zhi, and we saw it again with Wang Dayuan’s Yuan-era Dao Yi Zhilue, but a mode of apprehension of the barbarian “other” carried through the Ming era as well. Eventually, a powerful Southern Ming imaginary of the Nanyang would arise as a consequence of seasonal Fujianese voyaging, variously radiating out in an arc touching Nagasaki in the northeast, central Vietnam in the west, and Manila and Java in the south and southwest. Even so, with its heartland in the arid north, the Central Kingdom was not always beholden to a maritime trading policy, especially given its preoccupation with historical threats from across the central Asian frontier. Ambivalence also existed in the Ming court as to the value of an open maritime trading policy, especially with the rise of Japanese piracy in the fifteenth century and, in its wake, the arrival on the coast of China of a new unknown in the form of European traders. Even so, the trade continued via the sanctioned Portuguese port of Macau, which weathered the Ming-Qing transition peacefully, as well as under the auspices of the clandestine junk trade with Japan and elsewhere.

1. Paul Pelliot (1933: 240) annotated four such texts relating to voyages to the southern seas under the Yongle (1402–24) and Xuande (1425–35) emperors, namely Yingyati cheng-lan, Sing-tch’a cheng-lan, Si-yang fan-kouo tche, and tch’ao-kong tien lou. Although relating to a longer time frame, Wade (2006: 36–37) lists Zhu-fan-zhi (诸蕃志), an early thirteenth-century work which examines foreign ports and polities (cf. Hirth and Rockhill (1911); Lingwai Daida (岭外代答), a late twelfth-century text with a translation into German language in 1977; Dao-yi zhilue (岛夷志略) with sections of this mid-fourteenth-century text translated into English by Rockhill (1914; 1915a–d) and commented upon by Ptak (1994a); Yong-le da-dian (永乐大典), with Carrie Brown (1978) examining Southeast Asian segments; Xing-cha sheng-lan (星槎胜览), or Fei Xin’s Overall Survey of the Star Raft, recounting his travel impressions on the Zheng He voyages (Mills and Ptak 1996); Ming shilu (明实录) (Wade 1994, 2005b); Wubeizhi charts (武备志图) dating from the period of the Ming maritime missions in the early fifteenth century (Mulder 1942; Mills 1937); Dong-xi-yang kao (东西洋考) early seventeenth century, Chang Tseng-hsin (1991), Shun Feng Xiang Song (顺风相送) and Zhi-nan zheng-fa (指南正法) maritime routiers, or navigation books, which were likely compiled in the seventeenth century on the basis of earlier texts (Mills 1979a).

2. This is MS Laud Or. 145 held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, originally published during the reign of Emperor Wanli (1573–1620) of the Ming dynasty.

5. Japanese Geographic Imaginaries: The Tokugawa Invention of a Japan-Centered International Order

While by definition the tribute trade system was Sino-centric, Japan’s falling off comprises the subject of the present chapter. Obviously, the Mongol-Yuan interlude leading to two abortive invasions of Japan (1274 and 1281) interrupted the tributary trade convention dating back to the Tang dynasty if not earlier. Restored under the Ming with Japan as a subservient member, Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea in the late sixteenth century and his presumption to establish a Japan-centered international order would be a major turning point in the evolution of East Asian interstate relations down until practically the modern era. For most of the next 250 years, at least until the end of the Pax Tokugawa, foreign traders dubbed nanbanjin (loosely “southern barbarian”) along with Koreans, traders from the Ryukyus, and even merchant-emissaries from Ayutthaya were obliged to endorse this conceit dressed up in elaborate court ritual through arduous present-bearing missions by visiting entourages to the “court” in Edo (present-day Tokyo). In other words, far from being a tribute-sending country, the Togukawa bakufu or shogunate positioned itself at the center of a Japan-centered regional international order (see Asano 2005: 185).

In the words of Jurgis Elisonias, “The colorful processions of the exotically garbed envoys from Korea and Ryukyu may have impressed the populace along their route of progress to Edo with the notion that the bakufu enjoyed great authority among foreign nations. In actuality, however, they only masked the fact that after the 1630s Japan had a government that barely pursued foreign relations at all.” Ryukyu’s enforced participation in the system is described as a “sham.” Created out of nothing, “only the facsimile of a formal relationship in which Korea acquiesced sufficed to create for the bakufu its own international order, in which Japan ranked first.” Terming the Tokugawa shogunate’s Japan-centered international order a “self-serving conceit,” Elisonas (1991: 235–300) offers a dismissive evaluation. But does it hold up to scrutiny? Much of this background is well traveled in standard histories of Japan, but this chapter seeks to explore just how other nations and international trading groups were accommodated into the Tokugawa’s conceit of a new international order. We may also wonder whether the spectacle observed in the Tokugawa capital of Edo, where the envoys were both exoticized and kept at arm’s length masked a harder logic.

Though we speak of an East Asian court, some lessons might also be derived from social anthropologist Clifford Geertz’ (1980) understanding of other Asian “theatre-states,” especially the master image of a political life organized around kingship (in Japan, the shogun) versus the Marxist and liberal caricature of oriental despotism. To be sure, the loosely structured Southeast Asian negara-states did not approximate Tokugawa Japan with its more effective administration and warrior traditions, but obsession with status and splendor was a common theme. Geertz (126) does indeed make the comparison with Japan, as with the emperor at the “numinous center” of the state surrounded by priests and other regalia. But it is Geertz’s attention to spectacle and performance that is compelling. As he states of Hindu Bali, at least, “Power served pomp, not pomp power” (13).

The chapter opens with a discussion on Japan’s venerable tribute trade with China reaching back to the Tang and the diplomatic realignments occasioned in Northeast Asia by Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea (1592–1598). With the reinvention of the court system under the Tokugawa, a second section turns to the rituals imposed upon the nambanjin—namely, the foreign missions to Edo traveling out of Nagasaki, such as those mounted by the Portuguese and Dutch. To this end, the chapter comments on the contrived ideological and practical features of Tokugawa’s own central kingdom view of the world with its hierarchically ranked civilized and barbarian nations set against its own standards. This is matched in a third section with respect to the treatment meted out to other Asians (Chinese, those of the Ayutthayan Kingdom, etc.) to fit in with the Tokugawa system. Finally, the chapter broaches the question of Japanese geographic imaginaries with reference to indigenous and imported knowledge.

I. Japan’s Tribute Trade with China and the Korea Connection

With its origins predating China’s Tang dynasty, the tribute trade connecting with Japan was obviously of great antiquity. At the end of the ninth century, Japan was prohibited from sending any more envoys (trade representatives) to Tang China. For about a century, from the 1420s to 1530, the only legal maritime trade with China was conducted in connection with tribute embassies at intervals of three years and, in the case of the Japanese, at ten-year intervals. Following the Mongol-Yuan interlude (1271–1368), Japan rejoined the tribute trade system with the Ming under the Yongle emperor (r. 1402–1424) coinciding with the Muromachi, or Ashikaga, period (1336–1573) when the Shogun (military ruler) Ashikaga Yoshimitsu sent a ship to Ming China in 1401. Trade between the two countries continued until the middle of the sixteenth century, almost 150 years later. Between 1401 and 1547, at least nineteen licensed trading ships were dispatched to Ming China. These were also trading missions that often took years to execute. Sulfur, swords, and other items went to China, with silk and coins traded to Japan. But, even as trading missions, they encompassed political, ceremonial, and cultural exchanges and relationships.

While the history of maritime and cultural exchanges between Japan and, respectively, China and Korea, is beyond the scope of this discussion, one early import into Japan were copper coins. As Delmer Brown (1947: 128–29) explains, gold exports from deposits in Mutsu helped to drive commercial activities between Japan and Song China from 1127 (and with Japan importing Song currency). However, with Japan rebuffing emissaries from Kublai Khan, tribute trade with the island nation entered a hiatus, leading to the two abortive Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281. It would not be until the early Ming period that the tribute-envoy system was restored with Japan.

Nevertheless, as Cheng Wei-chung (2013: 11–14) expounds, central authority in Japan fell apart under the Ashikaga-era bakufu around disputes over shogunal succession. In 1523 daimyos, or lords, of both the Hosokawa and Ouchi clans separately dispatched tributary missions to China. With both claiming to be legitimate envoys and with both trying to vitiate each other’s claims, they even came into conflict in Ningbo, the designated arrival port for Japanese tribute missions. Facing down increasing raids on the Chinese coast by pirates dubbed woukou 倭寇 in Chinese and wako in Japanese, in 1549 the Jiajing emperor decided to sever relations with Japan under the Ashikaga shogunate, while also looking to ramp up coastal defenses.

In any event, only the missions of 1540 and 1549 dispatched by the Ouchi were accepted by the Chinese, even though the Japanese sent several others. By this stage, according to Elisonas (1991: 239), political conditions in Japan had become so chaotic that “there was indeed good reason to question the legitimacy of embassies arriving from that country.” Fundamentally, as John E. Wills (1974: 5.9) interprets the matter, the entire setting of trade and diplomatic relations between Japan and China was being transformed dramatically with the appearance of the Portuguese and the resurgence of wako in East Asian waters, literally making a mockery of Ming coastal defenses. And even in the late Ming, when the restrictions on maritime trade were largely abandoned, the formal policy on proscription remained. Nevertheless, as Wills explains, expansion of maritime trade between 1570 to 1620 kept all the parties happy, with profits enabling China to participate in what he calls the first epoch of the expanding world economy.

The Korea Connection

Unlike the shogunal court, the Choson (Yi) court (1392–1897)—symbolized by the Phoenix throne—was based on the Chinese model, complete with ranked officials, the civil service examination, and other trappings. Allowing for indigenous elements, Choson was a thoroughly Confucianized society. While the Choson court began dispatching envoys to Japan in the 1390s, from the mid-fifteenth century Korea began concentrating its diplomatic and trading activities on the island of Tsushima astride the straits of that name, a trade monopolized by the So family domain of the island. Up until Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea (1592–1598), Japan conducted trade at three designated port towns under the waegwan, or wakan, “Japan House” system. Again Tsushima became an intermediary until the wakan system was restored under the Kiyu Treaty of 1609 (Yoon 2006: 245). In line with the 1609 agreement, this trade took three forms, tributary (shinjo); official, in which the Korean government bought copper, tin, sappanwood, and the like; and private or market trade (Tashiro 1976: 85).

In what Elisonas describes as a turnabout, for the first time in 1636 the Korean court appointed a “diplomatic mission” (tsushinshi) to Japan, as opposed to a “return embassy.” This was a large Korean embassy that traveled to Edo for an audience with Shogun Iemitsu (r. 1623–1651), the third shogun under the Tokugawa. Notably, it then proceeded to Nikko to pay its respects at the shrine of the deified Ieyasu (suggesting both invention and artifice on the part of the bakufu, as there is nothing parallel in the Chinese tradition). This was followed in 1643 by a mission sent to offer congratulations on the birth of Iemitsu’s heir, Ietsuna (r. 1651–1680). Between 1655 and 1811 seven other missions were dispatched to celebrate accessions to the shogunate. As Elisonas (1991: 299) remarks, the twelve official embassies sent from Korea made it the only foreign country with which the Tokugawa regime maintained diplomatic relations (tsushin, as opposed to commerce, tsusho) until the nineteenth century.

According to Korea specialist, James B. Lewis (2010: 17; 22), Choson’s multitrack trade with Tsushima and Japan which developed even prior to the 1590s, was designed to suppress and check Japanese piracy. But even following Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea, the old structures were revived, albeit restricting Japanese envoys to the southern port of Pusan. However, Korean tributary missions to Edo continued until 1876. As with the return mission witnessed by the Dutch in February 1712, Korean missions also linked Japan with continental Asia in the trade in ginseng and furs against Japanese silver (van der Velde and Bachofner 1992: 143). Reciprocally, Korea gained Southeast Asian exotics dispatched from Hakata such as those received via Satsuma from Ryukyu.

II. Accommodating the Nanbanjin

Reaching back to the times when the small island of Hirado 平戸 in present-day Nagasaki Prefecture served as a pivotal point of contact with China, Korea, and the first-arriving Westerners (the Portuguese arriving from Macau), the merchant-envoys fell in line with the shogunal-mandated system of tribute and homage to the court at Edo. The occasion or pretext for the journey was usually the arrival of a new chief merchant or the advent of a new shogun. Failure to follow the protocol was considered tantamount to distrust, disloyalty, breach of the charter, or worse, insubordination on the part of a tributary to his seigneur. The journey not only required considerable time for preparation but also involved elaborate preparation, as with the procurement of expensive and showy gifts (e.g., exotic animals or clocks or other European curios).

The 350-year Pax Tokugawa is obviously a long time frame. With respect to Europeans arriving on Japanese shores, this period embraced the “Christian century,” when a number of daimyo were converted to Christianity. It was also a twilight period when the Portuguese were tolerated but Christian missionaries were expelled. With Nagasaki coming under direct shogunal control, a long period ensued when the two Protestant nations, the English, represented by the English East India Company, and the Dutch, represented by the Dutch East India Company, replaced the Catholic Iberians, with the Dutch carrying on until the advent of Meiji rule in 1868. In any case, European documentation on their participation in the Japanese tribute trade is copious and illustrative.

Portuguese Journeys to Edo

While direct Portuguese contacts with Japan predated the permanent establishment of a trading base in Macau in 1557, it was from the southern Chinese port that the lucrative Portuguese silk-for-silver trade with Japan was regularized, continuing over one hundred years, until the Tokugawa exclusion edicts proscribed entry into Japan of Catholic missionaries, eventually leading to a total proscription of the Iberian trade (and the suppression of Christianity).

With the first Portuguese voyage to Japan actually originating from the Thai Kingdom of Ayutthaya, then hosting a sizable Portuguese community, the Portuguese soon realized the importance that Chinese traders occupied in this trade, as well as the demand in East Asia for such trade commodities as sappanwood and silks. The ability of the Portuguese to insinuate themselves into the Chinese junk trade is also testified by the presence in 1563 at Yokoseura (a port near Nagasaki) of a large Portuguese junk from Ayutthaya. Indeed, by 1584, the Portuguese issued licenses for the Ayutthaya-Japan journey as an important complement to the Macau-Japan voyages (Conceicão Flores 1993: 17–22). Such understandings are important in consideration of future Royal Siam junks sailing to Japan bearing official letters and also fitting into a virtual tribute trade pattern with the shogunate.

Nevertheless, with the establishment of Nagasaki as the major port of call for the Macau ships in 1574, the Portuguese came to be accommodated into the tribute-bearing missions to the shogunal court in Edo. This was not initially the case, as the traders and Catholic missionaries developed close bonds with a number of daimyo, especially on Kyushu island. In this turbulent period of Japanese history known as the Sengoku, or Warring States, the first-arriving Catholic missionaries had been preceded to Kagoshima in southern Kyushu by several Portuguese trading ventures. However, with the consolidation of the bakufu under the Tokugawa, the daimyo increasingly lost their autonomy and themselves became vassals to the center.

Notably, in the interregnum period before the bakufu was settled in Edo, the Portuguese engaged the authorities at different levels. The warm relationship between Hideyoshi and João Rodrigues (commonly known as Tçuzu, the interpreter and author of a famous Japanese dictionary) is illustrative. According to Herbert Cieslik (2016), Rodrigues accompanied Valignano, the head of the Catholic mission in Japan, to Kyoto and took part in a solemn audience with Hideyoshi on 3 March 1591. Very well received, he went on to act as “go-between in all matters pertaining to the relations between the missions and the Government.” For instance, he paid a New Year’s visit to Hideyoshi in Kyoto in 1594 as a representative of the church in Kyoto. As Cieslik explains, Rodrigues carried on even after the death of Hideyoshi, and the records show that he was the official interpreter during the first decade of the Tokugawa regime and visited the court in Edo almost every year in the company of the Portuguese captains, securing many advantages for the mission. These were turbulent times, with persecutions of Christians, but, leaving Japan for Macau and returning with the Portuguese embassy in 1612, Rodriques acted as interpreter in the audience with Ieyasu on 25 September and succeeded at that time in restoring Japanese-Portuguese relations, as well as securing a favorable trade agreement.

Although not well documented, the Portuguese journeys to Edo commencing in 1604 were actually celebrated by artists of the day and can be seen on surviving byobu, or folding screens, a genre of art of the epoch. As the byobu art depicts, richly attired Portuguese merchants accompanied by black slaves arriving in Nagasaki made the journey to Edo in colorful processions bearing rich presents, sometimes including exotic animals (a practice kept up by the Dutch and English, who delivered up elephants). The seemingly outlandish costumes and display including fife and drum music performed by accompanying black slaves added to the spectacle. The journey to Edo also fit the “theater-state” character of the shogunal court as it sought to wrap itself in a cloak of quasi-imperial mystique, even though the real emperor, albeit powerless, resided in Kyoto. Needless to say, such passages to Kyoto or Edo attracted vast crowds heralding the arrival of the “black ships” and the nanbanjin.

Still the illogic of the system was pointed up when, in the wake of the expulsion edicts, bewildered Portuguese sought to return shipwrecked Japanese only to be rebuffed or even murdered, as in 1640. They soon learned that, to be heeded, they had to present themselves as an embassy, as with the arrival of a ship in Nagasaki in July 1647 dispatched from Lisbon by Dom João IV and captained by Gonçalo de Siqueira de Sousa. Ostensibly informing the shogunate of the split between Portugal and Spain (ending the union of two Crowns) but also seeking a resumption of trade, they were again rebuffed. Still, as A. J. R. Russell-Wood (1992: 81) remarks, at least this time around they were treated as representatives of a nation and not as mere merchants from Macau.

An English Journey to Edo

Not only were the Portuguese obliged to make the arduous journey to the ritual center of power, but so were the English and Dutch. In August 1616, following Ieyasu’s death, Englishman Richard Cocks journeyed to Edo to confirm trading privileges in Japan with Hidetaka, the second shogun of the Tokugawa dynasty, who ruled from 1605 until his abdication in 1623. He also brought with him the mandatory presents. No less for Cocks, as with the Dutch and Portuguese before him, this was a highly ritualized and onerous journey. After a long stay in the capital, Cocks received a license but, to his dismay, learned that the English trading operation was confined to Hirado, obliging his upcountry agents to be withdrawn. At the “emperor’s council,” Cocks was informed that China was even more restrictive in its control of foreign merchants than Japan, “allowing the Spaniards and the Portugals no port to enter into, but only Amacau [Macau]; yet being a little point or rock of no importance” (India Office paper cited in Murakami 1889, xxiii, cited in Gunn 2018a: 117).

Cocks was also astute in noting the difference in treatment of the Portuguese in both China and Japan: “Their privileges were far better than ours, in respect they pay no duties but only a certain sum of money for anchorage of their ships, neither were (they) bound to go to the Emperor’s court with any present(s) yearly, as we do [in Japan,] spending more money in going up and down than the [commerce realized by the] anchorage of the ships.” Moreover, “the Portugals of Macau have license to go yearly to the great city of Canton both to buy and sell such commodities as they have, and had boats provided by the King of China to carry them up and down with their goods.” As Cocks concluded, “I wished the Emperor of Japan would make our privileges equal with the Portugals in Macau. Until they answered little, but in smiling sort [of] passed it over” (Murakami 1889: xxiii, cited in Gunn 2018a: 117).

Eventually the Canton Trade System c. 1760 would accommodate the foreigners in China joined by Russian caravans, including envoys and ambassadors arriving overland in Beijing. Cocks might also have pointed to the even earlier Song Chinese practice of hosting Arab and Persian merchants, among others, carried through by the Mongol court. Still, for his impudence, Cocks may have been lucky to make his exit from Japan with just a smile. If we can decode this naive exchange between the English merchant and the shogunate, then the latter were extremely confident in the way that they had extricated themselves from the China-centered tributary system, where foreign states sat in a hierarchy below and relative to China, and supplanted it with their own scaled-down version, at least for visiting nanbanjin, Koreans, and other supplicants.

As Cocks also learned, the tolerant policies of Ieyasu hardly survived his death in June 1616. Under the new anti-Christian edicts, both the Dutch and the English came under pressure. The anti-Christian policies were not just academic but enforced. In any case, with tensions between the English and the Dutch running high, in 1622, Richard Fursland of the English East India Company at Batavia (modern Jakarta), to where the presidency was removed from 1620 to 1626, ordered the recall of the five English ships then in Hirado and the withdrawal of Cocks and his remaining countrymen. This order was received in August of that year (Auber 1834: 392, cited in Gunn 2018a: 117).

The English interregnum in Hirado, as it were, also coincided with the era of persecutions against the Catholics and, by inference, the Portuguese and Spanish. Willy-nilly, such anti-Christian persecutions redounded upon the English, although not directly. Having relinquished their footing in Japan in 1623, the English were not welcomed back. The next recorded visit by the English to Japan was made by Lord Weddell in 1637. Weddell was refused access to English prisoners. The Deshima enclave in Nagasaki, which would serve as a virtual prison for visiting Dutch merchants for the next 250 years, had already been constructed when that visit took place. The next attempt to reopen trade was made by the ship Return, sent by the East India Company in 1673, during the reign of Charles II (r. 1630–1685). Japanese suspicion about the marriage of the king of England to a Portuguese queen tainted this venture fatally. After a three-month sojourn (June–August), the Return made a final exit. Suspicions of Dutch machinations in this matter seem highly credible (Chinese Repository 1838: 217–22, cited in Gunn 2018a: 20).

Dutch Journeys to Edo

From 1633, the journeys to Edo were institutionalized for the Dutch. Failures to attend were met with sanctions or administrative restrictions on trade. Initially, these journeys were undertaken annually, but gradually, as trade between Japan and Batavia fell off, they were undertaken less frequently and, from 1793, were limited to a single visit every fourth year. Traveling on the Nagasaki kaido (highway), the 228-kilometer journey to Kokura in northern Kyushu would take one week, passing numerous stages. Later dubbed the “sugar road,” after that product entered commerce, this would be only the first stage of the route before entering the Inland Sea at Kaminoseki, present-day Yamaguchi Prefecture, a mandatory stopover point for visiting envoys from Tsushima and Ryukyu, along with the Dutch and others making their way to Edo.

We may take the visit by Willem Verstegen to Edo as illustrative. An old Japan hand, Verstegen had earlier served the VOC in Hirado from 1629 and Nagasaki from 1634, returning to Japan on 28 August 1646 as the incoming Dutch captain in Deshima. As described in the Dutch daghregisters, or diaries, he left Nagasaki for Edo early in December to present his credentials to Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu and his successor, Iestuna. Among the gifts for the shoguns were two camels, one civet cat, one cassowary, two cockatoos, a large perspective case, and several kinds of medicine. Verstegen’s account of his journey to Edo is extremely detailed, mentioning place-names along the way, describing the scenery, and reporting on what he saw and heard. After considerable trouble with his live cargo, he finally arrived in Edo at the end of the month. His audience with the shogun took place on 3 January 1647 (Daghregister, 28 October 1646 to 10 October 1647, cited in Gunn 2018a: 215).

Over the years these journeys involved the laborious passage of the Dutch captain and twenty of his countrymen, not to mention a large compliment of Japanese officiants, including interpreters. All accounts confirm that preparations for the journey were long and elaborate. The presents led the way, followed by the living beings to their final destination. This was Nagasakkia, a special lodge close to the Imperial Palace where the Portuguese envoys had also been accommodated (Chinese Repository 1840: 369–89; Michel 1993: 31–39, cited in Gunn 2018a: 215). There is no need to elaborate on this journey in which successive Dutch parties all participated, but to note its key ideological features, as with falling in line with the Shogunate’s imperial presumption and vanities, as well as functions as with securing its privileged trading position in the Deshima enclave in Nagasaki.

III. Accommodating Other Asians

But in what ways were the Chinese and other East Asians arriving in Japan brought into the Tokugawa-centered international order? The first-arriving Chinese junk traders operating out of Hirado and other ports on Kyushu were informal traders, not part of any organized trade. Moreover, by departing from their various home ports in Fujian, they contravened the Ming prohibition on foreign trade. During the long Ming-Qing transition, an increasing number of junks arriving in Nagasaki bore Zheng sailing passes. The Zheng piratical trading networks in turn traced their origins back to Hirado, birthplace of Zheng Chenggong (郑成功, b. 1624, also known as Koxinga, 国姓爷), from where they launched their business, accumulating fleets of junks eventually leading to the overthrow of the Dutch on Taiwan (see Andrade 2008; Hang 2016: 38–41).

By default, the Nagasaki bugyo, or magistrate, and the shogunate fell in with the Ming cause, even supplying mercenaries and weapons. Moreover, elite opinion in Japan held that, as interlopers, the incoming Qing hardly merited support. While this attitude may have carried on even after the defeat of the Ming and the diaspora from Yunnan, Vietnam, and even Japan, the shogunate was obliged to accept the new reality, just as junks started to arrive in Nagasaki from Qing-controlled ports. In any case, it has surprised some that the Chinese arriving in Japan and the Chinese community first established in Hirado and subsequently in Nagasaki stood outside the obligatory journey to Edo system. While the Korean court fell in line, it was no doubt as improbable as it was unrealistic that the central kingdom would deign to submit to the shogunal conceit and unlikely that Japan ever entertained the prospect. Certainly, the Ming and, in turn, the Qing could live without Japan, although its sulfur and silver were much esteemed.

However, Japan remained in thrall of China, notwithstanding the emergence of rangaku, or “Dutch-learning” scholars, many of whom gravitated to Nagasaki. Still, as part of the East Asian cultural complex, the scholarly elite surrounding the bakufu embraced the same neo-Confucian modes of thinking then in ascendancy in China. Cultural borrowing from China continued with the import of books, new Buddhist religious sects continued to be established, especially in Nagasaki, and Chinese learning continued to be celebrated locally with the foundation of a Confucian academy. At a more practical level, these lowly merchants did not represent the official caste. Although bearing trading passes, in many cases they were viewed as little more than smugglers and fortune seekers. The mass of arriving Chinese were simply treated as a problem that had to be managed. Successful Chinese merchant families who put down roots in Nagasaki were ceremonially incorporated into local rituals managed by the Nagasaki magistrate and his circle, in a system involving mutually beneficial tradeoffs without obliging these individuals to journey to Edo. In any case, the Chinese trading community of Nagasaki was not officially countenanced by the Chinese imperial government, and relations with China were not reestablished during the long Edo period, although Ieyasu did consider restoring them. It was only under the Meiji that Japan and China began to exchange consular officials and with the first Qing consul arriving in Nagasaki in November 1887 (Gunn 2018a, Chap. 7).

As Elisonas (1991: 300) comments, “Evidently, the Tokugawa shoguns were unwilling to demean themselves in the way the Ashikaga had, by submitting themselves to China’s standards and entering into vassalage in order to enjoy the benefits of a tributary relationship with the ‘Central Country.’” From a Chinese perspective, as D. R. Howland (1996: 17) has written, the willingness of early Qing emperors to forgo relations with Japan stands in striking contrast to their diplomacy vis-à-vis Vietnam, Thailand, and Java. As examined in a following chapter, that ambivalence also included the Ryukyu Kingdom’s dual tributary relationship with both the Qing and Edo.

The Example of Siam/Thailand

And what of the Thai or Ayutthaya Kingdom, Cambodian, and Vietnamese junk traders? The case of the Royal Thai and occasional royal Cambodia junks arriving in Nagasaki appears to fall between the two models of tributer to the shogunate and trader. But in the case of Ayutthaya as well as the southern Nguyễn and northern Trịnh, the authorities did exchange letters, although neither side had much knowledge of the other’s polities. The contours of the trade from Nagasaki to Thailand is captured by a series of letters written by Shogun Ieyasu to King Ekathotsarot (r. 1605–1620), commencing with a letter dated 22 October 1606 requesting muskets and fragrant wood and ending with a final letter of 1629 to a successor (Theeravit 1988: 17–44). Although a nonofficial Thai party arrived by junk in Nagasaki in 1612 and held an audience with the shogun, the first officially sanctioned Royal Thai junk to visit Japan arrived only in 1616. A series of letters cited by pioneering British Japanologist Ernest Satow (1885: 149) relates to the Thai embassy of 1621 that held a public audience with the shogun in Edo on 13 October. One of the documents is a letter from a Thai official to Nagasaki bugyo Hasegawa Gonroku, stating, “My King is anxiously desirous to cultivate lasting friendly relations between my country and the King of your country, so that traders may enjoy the profit of maritime commerce.” As it happened, on 21 November 1621 the seventy-strong Thai embassy visited the English House in Hirado on their way home from the shogunal visit (Pakse-Smith 1930: 46). Three more embassies ensued, in 1623, 1626, and 1629, to inform the shogun of the succession of a new king, albeit already executed by the time the ambassadors held their audience. Until the rift of relations owing to the advent of a usurper on the Thai throne, according to Khien Theeravit (1988: 24), both sides exchanged not only gifts but friendly sentiments, albeit mutually ignorant of the other’s countries (cited in Gunn 2018a: 148).

Thereafter, representatives of the Thai Crown accompanying the junks arriving in Nagasaki were treated as Chinese and lodged in a special section of the Tojinyashiki, the Chinese quarter in Nagasaki, and so stood outside the protocols to which the nanbanjin were submitted (see Gunn 2018a: Chap. 7). But even without the rituals of the visit to the shogunal court, one gains the sense that nanbanjin and Asians alike were bound to subordinate themselves to local hierarchies represented in Nagasaki by the bugyo himself answering to the bakufu in Edo. Not even the northern barbarians, the Ainu of northern Honshu and Hokkaido, were immune from acts of submission, further confirming the shogunate’s moral though hardly virtuous superiority.

The Longevity of Qing Tribute Trade/Court Protocols

We step back to survey the tributary system under the Qing. As Martin Stuart-Fox (2003: 115–20) explains, it is remarkable that even in terminal decline the Qing resolutely clung to the façade of the tributary system. Setting aside the Russians who, because of geography, held a special relationship with China, all other European missions to Beijing under the Qing, namely the Portuguese (1670, 1678, 1727, 1753), the Dutch (1656, 1663, 1667, 1686), and eventually the British, fell under the strict protocols of the tribute system. Wang Gungwu (2004: 352) confirms that the European interventions eventually rendered the tribute trade system obsolete. Besides the loyal Ryukyu Kingdom, by the end of the eighteenth century, only Vietnam, the Thai Kingdom, and some of the Shan and Lao states still presented tribute regularly. As reported in Western consular dispatches, the last tribute mission by Thailand, sent in 1852, struggled across a land beset with bandits and other hazards, indicating the end of an era. The Lord Macartney affair of 1793, in which the British envoy to the Qing court famously refused to kowtow, merely pointed up how irrelevant the protocol had become to the burgeoning maritime trade. The “hollow shell” of the system persisted for another fifty years, as confirmed by the Amherst mission of 1816, but the need for a new form of diplomacy was already apparent. By then, China confronted the most powerful country on earth.

This is true. However, as Wills (2012: 442) explained, the ceremonial bolstering of the supremacy of the “Son of Heaven” was by no means abandoned (exemplified in our discussion of the Ryukyu Kingdom). Moreover, as Wang Tseng-Tsai (1971: 617) clarifies in a study of the “audience question,” after the fiasco of the Amherst mission, no Western envoy was admitted to the emperor’s presence. To offer some perspective on court protocol in the declining decades of the Qing, specifically relating to the Xianfeng (r. 1850–1861) and Tongzhi (r. 1861–1875) emperors, not all issues brought to a head by the Macartney affair were resolved in favor of Western petitioners, as with the case of Russia, the United States, Great Britain, France, and Holland ostensibly to congratulate the emperor on reaching his majority but with revision of the Anglo-Chinese Treaty of Tientsin (Tianjin) at issue. As the British minister in Beijing Thomas Wade reported on 2 November 1871 of the labyrinthine negotiations with court officials over protocol, he was informed by Great Secretary Wensiang (Wen-hsiang) as to “the impossibility of the Emperor’s rising from the seat to receive the foreign representatives, for the reason that this is the form in which a Chinese Envoy is received by the States dependent upon China.” Reportedly, as Wade answered back, “an Envoy on presentation could not kneel as Lord Macartney had done.” As he further clarified in a report to London, “The question of Audience in reality lies above all Treaties.”

Foreign Ministers sent to China are the Representatives of their own Sovereigns. They come before the Emperor in the place of their own Sovereigns, and not as Ministers of Subjects of His Majesty. The whole question resolves itself into this. The admittance into the presence of the Emperor of a Foreign Minister bearing a Letter of Credence from his Sovereign implies the friendliness of relations between the Sovereign and the Emperor of China is complete. The refusal to admit him implies that it is incomplete. It hardly needs to be added that to promise him admittance under conditions which would be derogatory to the dignity of the Sovereign is virtually to refuse to admit him at all.[1]

Eventually, on 29 June 1873 the envoys gained an audience in line with strict protocol and due ceremony. This occurred in the “purple pavilion” inside the Imperial City but with the Japanese minister gaining a separate audience. Ostensibly, this was because he bore a letter from the “Mikado” and not just a letter of credence. But, more likely, the other ministers deferred to his superior knowledge of Chinese texts and protocol. In any event, as Wade reported, the ministers declined to kowtow or even to bend one knee. As he trumpeted, “The Emperor has for the first time in its history, broken with the tradition; not it may be, with a good grace, but still has broken with its past recal[l]; and while I would anxiously deprecate a too sanguine estimate of its result, immediate or remote, I am as little disposed to undervalue the significance of the change that has been effected.”[2]

To be sure, as Wang Tseng-Tsai (1971: 624–25) explains, this was the first ever audience given by a Chinese emperor in the modern manner. Nevertheless, he deemed it unsatisfactory in many respects. Notably, the place where the audience was held was outside of the palace precincts and was actually the place where tributary missions were customarily received. Moreover, the ministers were disallowed from placing their credentials in the emperor’s hands, and neither did he rise to receive these letters of credence. With the higher-ranked envoy from Japan granted a separate audience, and with the ministers informed of the “immutability” of Chinese ceremonial tradition, we can see in this example the longevity of the imperial system, albeit under siege by states seeking to assert the equality of nations principle (while imperialist at the same time).

IV. Japanese Geographic Imaginaries

We know less about Jesuit astronomical exchanges with Japan except that they also conducted their own attempts at celestial observation and measurement. According to Marcia Yonemoto (2003: 16), the Jesuits used copies of Matteo Ricci’s world map to teach geography at their academy in Kyoto from 1605, with printed copies being published in Nagasaki. In the wake of the Portuguese, the Dutch set up their own small observatory in Nagasaki, and, with their monopoly on trade with Japan secure, they also sought to expand their knowledge of Japanese geography in competition with other European nations, Russia included. Writing at a time when Dutch knowledge was avidly consumed by Japanese literati, visiting Swedish naturalist in the employ of the Dutch Carl Peter Thunberg (1795: 55–57) remarked:

Astronomy is in great favour and repute, [in Japan] notwithstanding they are unable without the assistance of the Chinese and Dutch almanacs, to compose a perfect calendar, or to compute to minutes or seconds an eclipse of the sun or moon.

He was far more impressed with Japanese mapping, however:

Surveying they understood tolerably well, and possess accurate maps of the empire. I have seen special maps of Edo [Tokyo], Miako [Kyoto] and Osaka, and the town of Nagasaki.

In part an exercise of power, as Yonemoto (2003: 9) points out, world maps and globes brought to Japan by European missionaries and traders may well have inspired the Tokugawa to map Japan in its entirety, with compilations of provincial maps accomplished in 1605, c. 1613, 1644, and 1835. With Thunberg acknowledging the risk involved in smuggling out Japanese maps, we may easily surmise that the Tokugawa knew the value of maps and treated them as state secrets. Later-arriving Dutch learned this the hard way, as with the case of the German-born physician and pioneer Japanologist Philipp Franz von Siebold, arrested and deported in 1829 owing to map espionage.

Japanese Mapping

While Japan stood in thrall to Chinese civilizational verities from Confucianism to worldview, indigenous Japanese mapmaking was as advanced as Chinese when it came to administrative controls, but it developed in a different way. With the Portuguese and Jesuits progressively expelled from Nagasaki by around 1645, and with the Dutch remaining until the end of the Tokugawa bakufu, they become the major source of world knowledge for the Japanese authorities in Nagasaki and Japanese literati in general. Japan continued to import Chinese printed materials through the sakoku, or “closed country,” period, and it was via this channel that Ricci’s world map entered Japan. Apparently deceived as to its Jesuit authorship, copies were made and circulated. One that has survived is Chikyū bankoku sankai yochi zenzusetsu 地球萬國山海輿地全圖説. Executed in 1790 by Nagakubo Sekisui on an oval projection, translated into Japanese, and with an unsigned preface, it is also declaimed as the first Japanese world map with latitudes and longitudes (Lukacs 2016).

The geographer and Confucian scholar of the Edo (or Tokugawa) period Nagakubo Sekisui (1717–1801) is often credited as the founder of Japanese geography. Visiting Nagasaki he also made contact with the Dutch, going on to publish maps with latitude and longitude, believed to have been a first in Japan. On the one hand, the Ezo zu (1829), part of the same map “family” as the Tosando Mutsu Matsumae Chisama oyobi Manshu shōran no zu (Map of Mutsu Province, Matsumae, Kurile and Manchuria), c. 1789, offers roads, towns, and grids of parallels and meridians, reflecting some Western borrowing. On the other hand, the Manshu Roshia kyokaizu (1853), a map of the territories of Manchuria and Russia, could not have been drawn without information from the Russian side. It also reveals the extent to which Japanese were prepared to hybridize their maps by this stage. For example, Russian fortresses founded in Kamchatka in 1735–1752 are indicated, their Russian names well rendered in Kana characters. Southern Sakhalin, the Kuriles, Hokkaido, and northern Japan are from Japanese sources. Karafuto is shown as a peninsula and Sakhalin as an island. Mamiya Rinso’s discoveries of 1808–1809 do not appear.

But unlike China, Japan quickly absorbed European, especially Dutch, mapmaking techniques and, undoubtedly, some principles of practical astronomy and navigation, for example, use of the telescope. In the 1730s after Tokugawa Yoshimune (1684–1751) rescinded the ban on non-Christian Western books, European globes, atlases, and other geographical texts began to circulate in Japan. In a short time, Dutch terrestrial and celestial globes were being redrawn and manufactured locally. By the 1770s, treatises on the Copernican system were being translated (Yamamoto 2003: 35). We are here, however, less concerned with the history of indigenous mapmaking, map history, or science in Japan but, rather, just how in the light of newly acquired knowledge Japanese cartography represented (or reimagined) China, its periphery, and, indeed, China’s place in the world. We chose a handful of Japanese maps to make some observations.

Executed in Nagasaki in 1645, the Shoho zu 正保 world map, named after the era (1644–1648), carries the inscription “published at Nagasaki harbor in the Hinoto-Tori or Teiyū year of the Shōhō era” (although likely it is a derivative of an earlier version). An accompanying sheet depicts forty stereotype images of mostly non-Japanese people. Designed with East at the top, two ships, one Western and one resembling a Japanese red seal ship, flank the top and bottom curves. The title is composed of four large characters standing at the top. Aligned north to south, the projection reveals a spherical earth. A prime meridian appears in the expanse of sea separating the Asian and American continents (long before Bering’s revelation). A narrow southern strait between the Atlantic and Pacific is shown on Abraham Ortelius’s Typus Orbis Terrarum of 1564 and on Blaeu’s famous map of the world, and these maps or derivatives could have been sources. Four lines of longitude bisect the globe, converging at the poles. An equator and two parallels offer the appearance of a global grid. Countries and important locations (Malacca) are named, with commentary in characters and with some kana. Jawa and Ko Jawa, or Java Minor, are embedded in a space that suggests an Australia separate from the Ptolemaic encircling landmass.

Undoubtedly, the author of this map drew significantly from a Dutch prototype. It is known that Ortelius, working from Gerard Mercator, extracted the idea of Java Minor from the Marco Polo imaginary as it relates to his return journey via the maritime route. Apparently a scribal error in Book 3 of Polo’s travels substituted Java for Champa (Vietnam) and thus located Java Minor (in fact Sumatra) well into the latitudes of Terra Australis. Attempting to rectify the inconsistencies, Mercator thus added the island of Java Minor to the proto-Australian promontory (see the Geographicus Rare Antique maps website). On this projection, China is marginal alongside the major continents and subcontinents. In fact, this Japanese map of the mid-seventeenth century bears many of the remaining Ptolemaic features characteristic of Dutch maps of that age, at least before the discovery of a Great South Land identified with Australia as discussed in Chapter 6.

While a strong indigenous mapping tradition developed in Japan around regions, over time a concern to map Honshu and Kyushu with respect to neighboring countries also developed. Contacts with rangaku scholars in Nagasaki also made their impact. The maps of Hayashi Shihei, an official of the Sendai domain, are a case in point. Notably, Hayashi was in touch with rangaku scholars during a visit to Nagasaki in 1777. According to Ronald B. Toby (2016: 25), Hayashi produced the first cartographic attempt to specify the limits of Japanese territory, albeit censored and with copies destroyed for his unorthodox renderings. This was Chosen hachido no zu 朝鮮八道之圖 (Map of the eight provinces of Korea), one of five maps accompanying his Sangoku tsuran zusetsu (三国通覧図説 (Illustrated Description of Three Countries) published in Edo in 1785. South is marked to the left, North to the right, but the map is skewed somewhat and marked with faux parallels, lacking numbers. Drawn in a traditional style, it offers pictographically exaggerated river patterns, along with natural features, offering some political points as to capital cities. Inscribed in Japanese characters with matching kana and some hangul, the map is undoubtedly hybrid Korean-Japanese, although the presence of parallels suggest Western influence (University of British Columbia Open Collections).

For Japan, Korea was closer to home and direct contacts ranged back through time. Direct geographic knowledge of China, especially Qing China, simply had to be derivative. So it was with Keiten gatchi Dai Shin koyozu (Map of great Qing dynasty, China) and Nihon kochizu taisei, Sekaizu hen (日本古地図大成 世界図編 or The World in Japanese Maps Until the Mid-nineteenth Century ) by Nagakubo Sekisu, 1785. Striking for its sweep of Qing China, this map also includes longitudes and latitudes written into the map borders (although not enclosed in any graticule grid). Vietnam, Yunnan, possibly parts of Burma and Thailand, Hainan, the Pearl River, and a misshapen Taiwan, all appear in the south and southwest area. Curiously, Macau (Aomen) is not indicated. As numbered in the Chinese style, latitudes span 44 in the north to 21 in the south, which would fit a map from Inner Mongolia to the Guangdong coast, but longitude numbers do not match what is known today. There is a sense that this is a Japanese copy of a Chinese prototype but not necessarily derived from Jesuit mapping. However, the presumption of coordinates could only have come from Western mapping (University of British Columbia Open Collections).

Western imaging of Japan hardly progressed from the age of Marco Polo. Famously, the Polo-era designation of the islands east of China as Zipangu, stuck into the fifteenth century, feeding into erroneous perceptions of an easy transatlantic route to China, as with Columbus. Once again, it was pioneer Portuguese cartographers, particularly Luís Teixeira, who first mapped Japan as a set of a large islands located southeast of the Korean Peninsula depicted as island, and when mapped together with the Ryukyus morphed into a virtual island bridge reaching to Luzon. But the first Western images of Japan also drew upon indigenous knowledge, and the results were hybrid. No such Jesuit mapping exercise followed in Japan, as in China, thanks to the Tokugawa seclusion edicts, and Japanese mapping continued to develop along indigenous lines, adding Hokkaido, parts of the Kuriles and the Russian Far East in the north, and the Ryukyus in the south. As alluded to, having received a gift in the form of a copy of Ricci’s world map, and as interpreted by Dutch from their prison island of Deshima in Nagasaki, the shogunate was awakened to the sphericity of the world and the shape and peopling of the continents (see Wigen, Fumiko, and Karacas 2016).

The Nansenbushu Bankoku Shoka No Zu Map

Notwithstanding the incorporation of geographical knowledge through contacts with the Dutch at Nagasaki, the production in 1710 of Nansenbushu Bankoku Shoka No Zu 南瞻部洲萬國掌菓之圖 (Outline map of all countries of the universe) also reveals the weight of tradition. Although celebrated as the first Japanese printed map to depict the world, including Europe and America, the Nansenbushu map is done from a Buddhist cosmographical perspective. Printed by woodblock, the map was composed by the Buddhist monk Hotan, or Zuda Rokashi (1654–1728), a scholar-priest active in Japan during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and founder of Kyoto’s Kegon-ji Temple. This map conforms to a long tradition in Japan. The prototype is the Gotenjiku Zu (Map of the five Indies, 177 × 166.5 centimeters) drawn by Jukai, a Buddhist priest, in 1364, now preserved in the Horyuji Temple at Nara. The theme of this map is therefore the pilgrimage of a revered priest, Hsuang-Tsang (Xuanzang) 玄奘 (see Muroga and Unno 1962: 49).

Acquired by the Dutch during their annual visit to Edo from their trading base in Nagasaki, a copy subsequently made its way to Europe. According to nineteenth-century French geographer Vivien de Saint-Martin (1857–1858: 575–76), although a “Japanese” map, it was entirely Chinese in origin and execution. As explained, the Nansenbushu Bankoku Shoka No Zu was inspired by the 1653 publication of Journey to the West, or Xiyou ji 西游记, a pilgrimage narrative of the Chinese monk Hsuang-Tsang’s travels to India between 626 and 645 across the silk road region through Mongolia and Tibet in search of sacred Sanskrit writings. With the pilgrim-monk visiting Nalanda and traveling as far south as Tamil Nadu, as discussed in Chapter 4, his experiences are recorded in the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (大唐西域记), compiled in 646, the core source for the Ming-era Journey to the West incorporating popular folklore and other elements, making it one of four of the great Chinese classics. As Saint-Martin (1857–1858: 756) observes, not disfigured by Ptolemaic conceptions, the map strikingly reveals the triangular shape of the Indian peninsula from the mouths of the Indus to the Ganges Delta. Nevertheless, there is an attempt to reconcile Buddhist and modern geography with the acknowledgment of a Europe and an America, however insignificant alongside the core Buddhist world. As a Buddhist map offering a religious worldview, the Nansenbushu map ignores European-style maps circulating in China and even in Japan at the time, like the Ricci world map.[3]

According to Japanese map specialist Ayuzawa Shintaro (1953: 124–25), the special feature of this genre of maps is the representation of an imaginary India and the illustration of the religious world as expounded by Buddhists. In other words, “these maps treat India as the heart of their World, and consequently we can say that they never recognized the European world maps. In their maps the Buddhists connected Five Continents with the Spiritual World where the Spirit of human beings must go after death. In these maps we find confusion of the visionary world and the real.” Writing in 1953, he added, such was the popularity of Hotan’s world map that it is not difficult to find it today. Importantly, he notes—and this is significant if we are to catch the nuance of shifting Japanese imaginaries of the world—until the middle of the nineteenth century, the great majority of the Japanese believed China or India to be the center of the world. Yet some Japanese classical scholars held a contrary view: in reaction to Confucianism and Buddhist thinking, they insisted that Japan or (more precisely) Kyoto, where the real ruler or emperor resided, was the center of the world. As such, they also reacted against the Tokugawa Shogunate that held Edo (now Tokyo) as the center of Japan.

Conclusion

The first-arriving Portuguese and Catholic missionaries in Japan looked to and gained quasi-autonomous daimyo for support. However, with the advent of the Tokugawa, they too were drawn into the rituals and conceits of the new political center at Edo. In fact, their presence might have given impetus to the system whereby the haughty bakufu ranged and ranked visiting envoys and nationalities from within and without the East Asian world. By contrast, China had long accommodated non-Chinese minorities, whether Muslim or European, dating back to Marco Polo and with Russians joining Portuguese even prior to the establishment of the Canton trade system. Not Japan.

Looking back, the Tokugawa were a caste of military dictators who usurped power from the imperial line. As unifiers, they understood the tradition of a centralized capital, yet by making Edo their capital they opened a breach with the past. Thunberg was not naive. Like his predecessors, including the Portuguese, he well understood that the shogun (the Kubo), as “the temporal emperor as generalissimo of the army,” had wrested power for himself, whereas all honors were owed to the Dairi (the real emperor) residing in Kyoto. As he noted, for years after the “revolution,” the Kubo had paid his respects to the Dairi, in recent years this tradition was neglected and then completely set aside (Thunberg 1795).

By inference, a new tradition and a new geographic imaginary was born. The court in Edo was an entirely invented tradition, combining various artifices including Shinto and other essentializing elements but also playing lip service to Confucian doctrines. There was no simulacrum of the old capital of Kyoto, much less the geomantically aligned Ming court with its grandiose architecture, imperial spatiality, and forbidden city center. Neither did the bakufu seek to emulate the Ming court as did the Nguyễn in Hue even with the advent of the Qing or, for that matter, the Confucianized courts of the Choson.

The shogunal court, more impregnable castle than palace, also stood in contrast to the impeccably arranged and geomantically aligned palace-capital of the Ryukyus (such as discussed in Chapter 9), and it was utterly unlike the Heian-era (794–1185 CE) Kyoto and, before it, Nara with its Chang’an-modeled street grid. The shogun was no “son of heaven” ritually confirmed through hoary practice. The Chinese contempt for military—Japan’s exulted samurai caste—actually reversed roles. Neither did the bakufu host a bureaucracy modeled upon the Chinese recruitment system. Yet the bakufu were able to win ethical support from a scholar class who, notwithstanding a keen interest in Western learning, was also immersed in Chinese learning as it continued to be filtered into Japan (via book imports to Nagasaki).

But whereas the Ming and Qing courts were obsessed with astronomy and calendrical calculations, keeping other sciences at a distance, shogunal advisers competed with each other to actually absorb the new knowledge. Famously, such precocious borrowing led to different outcomes in both nations. In China, where late Qing reforms abjectly failed to defend the nation against predatory foreign interventions, true reformers stepped in sweeping away the foundations of the empire. Japan, where shogunal conservatism lagged behind new world currents, the restoration of the imperial line and especially the Meiji emperor’s embrace of modernization and success with early industrialization, offered a role model to Asian reformers and nationalists from Vietnam to China. But for its time, and 350 years is obviously a considerable age, the Japan-centered international order with its selective seclusion policy rigidly in place did prove serviceable to the maintenance of Japan’s cultural integrity, and the status of the Philippines under the Spanish was a constant reminder of the pitfalls of outsider bluster.

1. British Foreign Office (FO) record. FO233-85 Chinese Secretary’s Office Vol. 13, pt. 2 Miscellaneous papers relative to audiences, etc. English and Chinese. 1 January 1864–31, 31 December 1874. “Memorandum on the Question of the Reception of the Foreign Representatives at Peking by the Emperor of China.”

2. British Foreign Office (FO) record. FO233-85 Chinese Secretary’s Office Vol. 13, pt. 2 Miscellaneous papers relative to audiences, etc. English and Chinese. 1 January 1864–31, 31 December 1874. Mr. Wade to Earl Granville, Peking, 7 July 1873, Correspondence respecting the Audience granted to Her Majesty’s Minister and other Foreign Representatives at Pekin by the Emperor of China.

3. For a modern interpretation of the map, see the website of commercial map seller Geographicus Rare Antique Maps 1710.

6. Geographic Imaginaries of an Austral Land

With the northern coastline of the continent of Australia lying but 450 kilometers south of Timor across the Timor Sea, itself host to a number of shoals, the question has been raised in many circles as to pre-European contact with the “Great South Land” or Terra Australis Incognita. Setting aside an Australian aboriginal priority dating back to possible migrations between 65,000 and 40,000 years ago during the last Ice Age when the seas were narrower, or even direct contact between Timor and Bathurst Island lying north of the modern Australian city of Darwin as with a shared Totem culture, or early visits by “Indonesian” fishermen blown off course, as discussed below, assertions of a Chinese “discovery” of Australia have also entered Chinese and European language writing.

Practically unique in the history of world expansion down until the eighteenth—even early nineteenth century—the continent of Australia remained a geographical imaginary, more easily mapped on paper than actually attested through discovery. Certainly that description applied to the Malacca- and sometime Goa-based “cosmographer” Manuel Godinho de Erédia and to a French school of cartography. We have no specific evidence, but it undoubtedly applied to Chinese seafarers reaching Timor and the Timor Sea zone. In sum, this chapter raises the possibility of an Asian discovery of the Great South Land. It tests this against the case of China and, in more detail, against the experience of Sulawesi-based Macassan seafarers. Additionally, it gives credence to prior Portuguese discovery narratives as with those entering the cartographic imaginings of Erédia, placing him ahead of pioneering Portuguese and Dutch voyages plying midlatitude routes eastward across the Indian Ocean. A first section assays European discovery narratives. A second section discusses a body of work produced by Erédia around an Australia discovery. A third section examines real-world Portuguese-Dutch navigations. A fourth section examines contacts made with northern Australia by seasonal Macassan fisherman, while a final section puts to rest the notion of a proven Chinese discovery of Australia while conceding that it remains an imaginary at the same time.

I. European Discovery Narratives

Standard narratives of the European discovery of Australia divide among those who assign priority to the westward-sailing Spanish expedition of Pedro Fernandes de Queirós and the voyage of Luís Vaz de Torres, who, in 1605, navigated the strait bearing his name; or, more definitively to the eastward-sailing voyage of the VOC vessel Duifken, captained by Willem Janszoon, who made landfall on the western part of the Cape York Peninsula in 1606, also mapping the coastline. The notion that it was the Portuguese who, first among Europeans, touched the coast of Australia received a major fillip in the late nineteenth century, with defenders down into the present.

Proponents of this view have looked to interpretations of European maps, for example, the sixteenth-century Dieppe world map rendition of Jave-La-Grande, said to be partly based on secret Portuguese information. Alternatively, they have sought confirmation in the discovery of exotic woods, coins, and objects in various locations in Australia and have examined archival materials (McIntyre 1977; Fitzgerald 1984; Michael Pearson 2005b). A recent artifact discovery is that of an antique cannon, “the Dundee swivel gun,” found in 2010 southwest of Darwin, the administrative capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. Scientifically tested, it is confirmed to be made of metal sourced from the Coto Laizquez mine in Andalusia in Spain. Even so, if the original gunmetal had been melted down and recast, as was local practice in maritime Southeast Asia, then the cannon could still be plausibly of Macassan provenance (anon. 2013).

Again, we may ask, having sailed to the end of the known world, why did the Portuguese stop at Timor? To answer this question, I am tempted to replay a version of the argument that applies to the Chinese case. That is, following the Arab navigators almost everywhere once they entered the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese retraced the known lines of trade, usually with an Arab or Malay pilot on board. No doubt, if Arab trade routes had reached Australia lured by a known trade commodity, then the Portuguese were bound to follow. In fact, Portuguese ships arriving in Timor from Goa or Macau were highly irregular, and frequently they arrived in poor condition after a long and difficult navigation through the straits. Invariably bringing or relieving governors and reinforcing beleaguered garrisons, the Timor voyages were simply not equipped or provisioned, much less sanctioned, for further hazardous explorations.

The Dieppe School and La Terre Australe

Dieppe mapmakers gave special attention to a large landmass entitled “Jave-la-Grande,” located between the Indonesian Archipelago and Antarctica. Figuring in all the Norman mappemondes of the sixteenth century, albeit labeled “land not discovered,” la Terre Australe should not be conflated with Dieppe school renditions of Java la Grande. This is not an island but a vast continent-like region to the south of the Indonesian Archipelago, recalling Ptolemaic renditions of an encompassing southern landmass. Binot Paulmier, sieur de Gonneville, French navigator of the early sixteenth century, was also part of the myth-making about the great southern land. In 1505 he returned to France claiming to have discovered the “great Austral land,” which he also called the “Indies Meridionale.” Although disproved (as he actually sailed westward to Brazil), his ideas would also be revived through the centuries, at least fanning further French expeditions to the Pacific.

Information derived from the French expedition to Sumatra by the Parmentier brothers in 1529 also fed into Dieppe maps, as with the work of Jean Rotz, Indes Orientales (1542). Notably, to the south of Petit Java, he indicates a continent, “the lande of Java,” or Jave-la-Grande. As alluded to, the Rotz map with its depiction of an Australia-like continent south of Java has generated more heat than light in discussions of the European “discovery” of Australia. Such holds as well for the anonymously produced atlas of Nicolas Vallard (1547), also highly derivative of Portuguese cartography. As revealed by a facsimile of a chart from Vallard’s manuscript sea atlas (1547) showing Jave-La-Grande’s (Australia’s) east coast, the image fails to meet a minimum culture test, as with the faux depictions of an Asian prince on horseback sheltered by a yellow umbrella.[1]

Maps 30–41 of Guillaume Le Testu’s Cosmographie Universelle (1556) are also dedicated to la Terre Australe. This is represented as an enormous continent surrounded by an Antarctic sea, “like a spherical dome with uneven edges.” As Albert Anthiaume (1916: 103) commented, there are scarcely any other Norman mappemonde of the sixteenth century that dedicate such attention to this zone. As Le Testu added in a marginal note:

Certain Portuguese going to the Indies were, by adverse weather conditions, carried far south of the Cape of Good Hope. Certain reported some knowledge of this land. Nevertheless, it not having been otherwise discovered, I have merely noted it here, not willing to add credence to it. (Le Testu 2014a, cited in Gunn 2016: 141)

In another note, Le Testu added references to Jave la Grande (Java Major) and la Petite Jave (Java Minor), described as part of an unknown Terra Australis, or Southland, situated under the frigid zone. As he added, some were of the opinion that the lands of the Strait of Magellan and Java Major were joined together, yet he could not verify it (Le Testu 2014b).

In this age of European exploration, Le Testu’s rendition of India intra Ganges “Asie. Mer de L‘Inde Orientale de Ceylon et Sumatra” from Cosmographie Universelle (Fol. 28v) is an improvement upon Ptolemy in allowing for a sea route to India. But still, an elongated Malay Peninsula takes classic form albeit conflated with the insular Java features. In Folio 32v and 36v, Terres Australes. Grande et Petite Java, au sud des Moluccas, the Moluccas are indicated but the Terres Australes appear wildly fictitious, with images of leopard-like animals, Middle Eastern kings, and an archer.[2] Rather than confirming a precocious Portuguese discovery of Australia, Le Testu’s version adds weight to the fictitious imagining of the unknown continent.

II. Manuel Godinho de Erédia’s Australia

While an accidental Portuguese arrival on the coast of Australia cannot be denied and, indeed, has been the subject of much speculation, we nevertheless comb the evidence for a planned reconnaissance, say lured by the prospect of gold. Even setting aside the question of secrecy, the best evidence of Portuguese knowledge of Australia comes from the pen of geographer, or self-styled cosmographer, Manuel Godinho de Erédia, active in the last decade of the sixteenth century and the early decades of the seventeenth. Author of the manuscript “Declaraçam de Malaca e India meridional com o Cathay” (Goa, 1613) dedicated to King Phillip of Spain and with Portugal then under the Iberian Union, Erédia announced himself the “discoverer” of an Austral land, thus becoming the powerful progenitor of an Austral imaginary. Erédia remains a controversial figure practically until today, especially in bequeathing a series of text and map riddles for future generations to interpret. Born of a Portuguese father and a Buginese mother and Jesuit trained from an early age in Goa, Erédia was also a beneficiary of Asian maritime lore acquired from his twenty or so years’ sojourn in Malacca.

With his major writings and maps remaining in manuscript, Erédia was practically forgotten until modern times. The reasons for this are various. But the recovery of his magnum opus “Declaracam de Malaca” reached a new stage in the early seventeenth century when it fell into the hands of Jesuit researchers involved in a project on behalf of the Société des Bollandistes to write a history of the saints, the Acta Sanctorum. However, following the suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773, the manuscript was transferred to the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique. Languishing there under the obscure catalog entry F. Faveri MS.7264, it was rediscovered in 1871 and, with the encouragement of Portuguese diplomats, was published with French translation and commentary in 1882 by Léon Janssen under the title Malaca, l’Inde méridionale et le Cathay: manuscrit original autographe de Godinho de Eredia.[3] Janssen’s publication, it turn, is invaluable insofar as it renders Erédia’s handwritten document into modern Portuguese as well producing a translation into French. Along with his own introduction to the work, it was prefaced by Ch. Ruelens, conservator of the Royal Library of Belgium. In 1930, J. V. G. Mills produced an English translation of the Janssen volume, improving on the former in some regards but also superseding it through the addition of copious notes drawing upon his Malay world expertise (Mills 1930).

Even prior to this initiative, attention was drawn to Erédia by the keeper of the British Library map collection, Richard Henry Major, who discovered a manuscript chart copied from an earlier chart boldly announcing in a title that Erédia was the discoverer of Luca Antara, a synecdoche for Australia. This discovery led Major to publish a set of articles in Archaeologia (1861; 1874a; 1874b) linking Erédia with a prior discovery of Australia in 1601. In so doing, he challenged conventional knowledge that the Dutch has achieved as much with the voyage of the Duifken touching Cape York in 1606. Major also introduced the French maps as supporting evidence. With Portuguese interest piqued by Major’s research, archival searches in Lisbon and elsewhere led to the revelation of a Brussels manuscript exposed at a geographical conference in Antwerp in 1871. Then, at the Geographical Congress held in Paris in 1875, Erédia’s volume in autograph was displayed and discussed by experts, leading to further publications.

In the interim, Major came to realize that copyists could well have inserted some additional information postdating or correcting Erédia. Besides repudiating his earlier claims, Major went further by dismissing Erédia as an impostor (Major 1874a; 1884b). He followed this up in a long appendix to his book titled The Discoveries of Prince Henry the Navigator (1887). In this work, he claimed to have been deceived by the original copyist’s map bearing the title “Nuca Antara was discovered in the year 1601 by Manuel Godinho de Eredia.” As Major (303) declared, this was “ambiguous and misleading,” thus implying “anticipation [of] the credit due only to success.” Thus by proclaiming himself discoverer, Erédia was not a discoverer in reality (that is clear), and neither was he a discoverer on paper. Major literally congratulated himself for having so speedily dissociated himself from his earlier beliefs and publications and, in turn, having spawned a kind of reevaluation literature. As Mills (1930: 270) commented upon the copyist’s map, such distortions include the one-off substitution of the word Nuca for Luca such as consistently employed by Erédia in his Declaraçam de Malaca (Description of Malacca), the addition of text indicating prior Dutch discovery, and the oddity of connecting up New Guinea with the southern land. Still the Erédia copyist has his modern defenders. For example, Portuguese historian João C. Reis raises the question of motive in falsifying the map examined by Major. Given the number of spelling mistakes introduced by the copyist, he could not have been Portuguese. Neither was any use made of the copied map. As noted, the copy came from Madrid and was purchased by the British Museum in 1848. Notwithstanding the various glitches introduced into this copied version, as Reis concluded, the original map was made by Erédia himself, thus establishing the legitimacy of the modern copy of the old map (Reis 1997: 79–118).

In the meantime, French ethnologist-geographer Ernest-Théodore Hamy entered into print in 1878 on yet another Erédia manuscript found in the National Library of Paris. This was his Tradado Ophirico (Treatise on Ophir; 1616), which also appended a short Erédia autobiography (Bibliothèque nationale de France; Mills 1930: 271–85). Writing in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie (1878), Hamy entered his own scrupulous dissection of the entire Erédia oeuvre including his controversial maps, seeking to strike a more nuanced position. As he concluded, Erédia was not the descobridor of an Austral continent as first made out by Major. However, from an early seventeenth-century perspective, Erédia definitely brought to light “interesting” aspects of scientific geography. Thus, he “legitimately” occupied a small place in the history of Austral discoveries.

But what did Erédia say in his text, and what did he demand? First, to answer the question of what he said, Erédia referenced a number of voyages south from Java and islands belonging to the Lesser Sunda chain. To add authority to his tome, he included a letter of 4 October 1601 written by Pedro de Carvalhaes, Portuguese commander of the Ende fortress on Flores. In this account, merchants departing Savu island blown south by violent winds and currents arrived at Luca Veach, or an island of gold (via an island of coconuts and an island of women). Ende was ready to send ships but was dissuaded by Dominican missionaries because of the deadly risks involved. Another attestation from Carvalhaes bearing the same date reported the account of a Javanese prince’s twelve-day voyage south from the eastern end of Java to a place named Lucantara. This was described as a fertile and well-wooded land divided into various kingdoms hosting numerous towns and villages, the inhabitants of which resembled those on Java but spoke a different language. Described as of the perioecian, or same parallel of latitude, as Chile (or 180° antipodean), it can be deduced that its inhabitants were of the same “climate” and race. Another story was that of one François de Rezende, who, sailing a junk lading sandal from Timor, was blown south by a storm to a port of Beach also encountering Javanese-like people. Loading gold and water he returned to Malacca. In yet another account, a Portuguese ship driven south by a storm discovered at 40° south a place populated by flocks of papagaios, or parrots. Like Luca Veach, it appeared to be a continent. In another account, in 1606 a Dutch ship driven 41° south encountered a tribe of Portuguese, themselves descendants of an earlier generation of shipwrecked Portuguese (Janssen 1881–1882: 59–63). In sum, some of these voyages are more credible than others, and all lead to Austral destinations whether continental or insular. The presence of parrots does indeed suggest the sighting of Australia, but some elements as with the shipwreck and island of women, could be lifted from other “discovery” contexts, and practically all the narrated voyages are embellished with fantastic elements. Erédia requested ships for the discovery of gold islands. As he noted, September was the best time to set sail for Malacca, taking advantage of the monsoon (with March to July a stormy season). Spending all November in Malacca, the ships should depart in December for Solor, then leave for Timor, Ende, and Savu in January. Having “wintered” on one of these islands, the ships would return in August–September (99–100). An attached letter of 5 April 1601 from Aires de Saldanha, the viceroy of Portuguese India (1600–1605) commended Erédia to the Crown authorities as worthy of a license to explore the gold islands to the regions “south of Timor” and to take possession in the name of Portugal (within the limits imposed by the Treaty of Tordesillas). Purportedly, he notified the financial administration as to these facts (71–73). Having received the mission order from Saldanha (and the title of adelentado, or governor-general), he sailed from Goa to Malacca ready to proceed south. Nevertheless, as made known, duly obliged him to help prepare the defenses of the Malacca fortress against Dutch and Malay attacks, and with the Dutch commanding the straits of Bali and Solor, “it was not possible to effect the voyage of 1601” (Chap. 10).

As historian Jorge Flores interprets, Erédia went out of his way to inflate his importance or to win false accreditation, as with his various missives directed to vice-regal authorities (starting with Pedro da Gama, a son of Vasco da Gama), to the Spanish monarch (Philip III) during this period of the union of two Crowns, as well as to papal authorities. For example, it cannot really be substantiated, as Erédia claimed, that the king of Spain actually named him as the discoverer of Meridional India (a supposed southern land), or that he was given the grandiloquent title of adelantado and made a member of the Order of Christ (Jorge Flores 2015: 189–93).

Ptolemaic Description and Depiction

Although generally ignored, his fanciful neo-Ptolemaic renditions of Eurasia, including China and the China Seas, are of interest as well. From his base in Malacca astride the straits of that name and toward the southern end of a peninsula around which ships must navigate before crossing from the Indian to the western Pacific Ocean, Erédia as geographer was obviously well placed. Looking back to classical antecedents, he was also concerned to clear up age-old confusion in Europe as to the Ptolemaic representation of the so-called Golden Chersonese, or Golden Peninsula. As Erédia described in his “Report on the Golden Chersonese” (1597–1600), the Golden Peninsula “commences in the narrow Isthmus of Tanaçaram [Tenasserim] in eleven or twelve degrees of North latitude, and then extends towards the Equator till it comes to an end, terminating in the Promontory called formerly Maleucolone, and now Singapura or Ujonrana, which is situated in exactly one degree of latitude.” As he pointed out, the peninsula was celebrated by Curtius, Strabo, Pliny, Pomponious Mela, and others, especially on account of its gold mines. “So Ptolemy in his Geography, in his eleventh Table of Asia calls it the name of Golden Chersonese or Golden Peninsula,” a “quasi-island of gold” (Mills 1997b: 224). Erédia duly enters a rich description of Sumatra, its kingdoms, and especially its pepper and gold ports. Having unpacked Taprobana (often confused with Sumatra) and the real Sumatra in a similar vein, Erédia clarifies the confusion introduced by Marco Polo in rendering Borneo as Lesser Java (245). But, guided by local informants, Erédia also looked south.

Erédia’s Cathay

In an autobiographical sketch attached to his Treatise on Ophir, translated by Mills (1930: 265–66) from mss 4567 lodged in the National Library of Paris, Erédia explained his cartographic method in some detail. As he wrote in third person, “He drew up some very excellent maps of the oriental Indias and of Asia, replacing the old drawings in the world-maps and atlases by new chorographic representations of Catthay and Meridional India,” and duly submitted them to King Philip III of Spain. This is precise, and it is on some of these “redrawings” that we must focus to tease out the true contours of the Erédia imaginary.

Erédia also introduced a set of Ptolemaic or redrawn Ptolemaic maps similar to those that started to appear in late medieval Europe. Among them are Ptholemeo do Indostan de Asia (1613) and Taboa antiga do Cheroneso (1613). In his map Ptholemeo tabula de Asia XI reformada (1613), Erédia reproduces a familiar Ptolemaic template of the Golden Chersonese extending far south of the equator, including a sweeping Sinus Magnus. To this, he grafts on the northern space a well-rendered Korean Peninsula and a four-island version of Japan (Kyushu, Honshu, Shikoku plus the virtually unknown Hokkaido). Obviously unknown to Ptolemy, this is a remarkable instance of creative mapping (and precocious as well for the reasons mentioned above). But what did Erédia know about China and Japan objectively? On the one hand, we may conjecture that he knew Macau, and there is belief that he produced a Macau map, but there is no evidence. On the other hand, it is hardly credible that he knew more about Hokkaido than even the authorities in Edo at that age.

Erédia’s Tratado do Catay (Concerning Cathay, Goa, 24 November 1613) is a sixteen-part treatise embracing topic headings under the rubric Cathay, Christianity in Cathay, Cathigara (Cattigara) (citing Ptolemy Table 12, Asia), Tartar, Land of Darkness, Desert of Demons, Hindustan, Intra-Ganges, Extra-Ganges, and a treatise on the compass. With the exception of the notice on the compass, this is not particularly original; indeed, it is standard fare for European geographers and cartographers of this age steeped in the classical tradition, although it also ignores the new rising evidence-based cartography such as that advanced by Erédia’s contemporaries (as with Goa-based Lázaro Luis and Fernão Vaz Dourado). True, it is informed by Marco Polo, but it ignores Arab geographies and ignores more recent knowledge of China revealed by the Jesuits themselves via Macau or even Manila-based missions connecting with Fujian.

For example, Erédia introduces Cathay, or the Attay of Pliny (lib. 6 cap. 17), or Serica, or a number of other names as issued by Ptolemy, Aristotle, and others derived from the itinerary of Alexander to Magno Persia. Catay, or Atay, at the center is described as a major emporium of the world from Tangut in the north to the Desert of the Demons, to the southern parts of Sim and Mansim, the western part of Tibet and Cotam, the eastern part of Corya, and the “mar oriental” called Mangico or Sinus Magnus (and this is described by its climes, or climates, according to degrees). He notes a takeover by Kublai Khan in 1268. He also notes the construction of a four-hundred-league-long (1,200 mile) stone wall, surrounding five kingdoms, with China by now divided into two provinces (Mills 1930: 76–79).[4]

In Chapter 3, “Concerning China in Attay,” he references Ptolemy’s evocation of China as Mansim or Mangim (Table 12 of Asia), or Sinarum Regiom or land of Sinas. The Greek historian Appian, in Part 2 of his Cosmography, implied that Mangim or Mansim was divided into two provinces. Marco Polo, the Venetian (Book 2, Chap. 70), followed suit in declaring two courts in China. Formerly, the main seaports of Mansim were Quinsay of Nanjing, at 26° north latitude, and Zarten or Zarton, India’s largest spice-dealing emporium, or likely that of Canton at the Tropic of Cancer, because from this port to Zipangri island, or Japan, was a distance of five hundred leagues, as noted by Marco Polo Veneto (Book 3, Chap. 3). The fact that Kublai Khan’s fleets left Quinsay and Zayton for Japan indicates that they were the best-situated ports for trade and commerce (Mills 1930: 76–78). On the location of Cattigara—much conjectured during the age of Columbus—he concludes that it could not be placed in Meridional India of Luca Antara, but rather that the “bay of China” and Cattigara are situated northward in Attay (China) because it is from the northern ports that the ships and mariners and commodities come (79; Gunn 2018b: 186). To answer the question of what Erédia knew about China and Japan, the answer is that he knew far less than did the Portuguese of Macau and the Portuguese of Goa, including Lázaro Luis and Fernão Vaz Dourado, which is perplexing to say the least.

Erédia’s Neo-Ptolemaic Interpretations of the Eurasian Landmass

Modern readers would likewise find it difficult to digest Erédia’s neo-Ptolemaic interpretations of the Eurasian landmass as well as the surrounding seas, for example, his repositioning of the Golden Chersonese. This has been little analyzed if at all, yet I believe it is important to acknowledge the way that Erédia drew upon a European scholastic tradition as part of a Late Renaissance push to evaluate the modern world through “discoveries”—real or hypothesized—matched against classical points of reference. This may appear arcane but, by referencing such European schools of mapmakers as Mercator and Ortelius, themselves part of this tradition, Erédia could also identify with an emerging empiricist tradition of local mapmaking. But unlike his contemporaries in Goa, themselves cutting-edge mapmakers building upon Portuguese and Mediterranean cartographic traditions with Mediterranean roots, Erédia eschewed the Mediterranean portolan map tradition with its characteristic compass starbursts. Rather, Erédia’s maps are hybrid products of a novel kind. Especially, as suggested, he assimilated local knowledge in the way of boldly modifying Ptolemaic templates, especially Ptolemy Table 12, Asia, as it related to the true latitude of the Golden Peninsula. But, in his neo-Ptolemaic interpretations, which most certainly acknowledged an Austral land, Erédia also offered a powerful new imaginary on Eurasia that cannot be ignored.

For example, in his single mappemonde template titled Typus Orbis Terrarum (1613) Erédia deftly grafted Nuca Antara into an encompassing southern landmass. Created by Abraham Ortelius in 1570 under the title Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, some twenty-five editions came out before Ortelius’s death in 1598, and several others were published subsequently. In contrast, Erédia’s Tabula Navigationis Salomonia offers an Indian Ocean template that strongly resembles Linschoten’s map of southern Asia entering print in 1596 (albeit excluding his depiction of Japan and Korea). Additionally, Erédia adopted an Ortelius-type template in the production of his O orbe antigamente estava dividida em 2 partes: Tharsis e Ophir (1613). More generally, his penchant for biblical points of reference, as with the Solomonic Ophir, the subject of an entire treatise, Tratado Ophirico (1620), may have fit the credulous beliefs of the age in islands of gold, but it hardly squared with the more evidence-based information that he also sourced.

However, Erédia’s Atay nunc Catay, Tyri nunc China, Tocari nunc Coria (Map of China and the southern island world along with Japan and Korea, 1613) is perplexing as to its modernity (or cartographic intelligence). Notably, the depiction of Japan (and with Japan labeled “Japon”) departs from the long-enduring turtle-back template of Honshu produced by Linschoten. This he does by including Yeso, labeled as such, and a reference to Hokkaido, literally anticipating its discovery by French and Dutch expeditions in the early nineteenth century. With latitude indicated, Honshu and Kyushu are accurately referenced. Korea is represented as a peninsula and not as an island, as with most contemporary maps, and with the Yellow Sea well indicated. Unless Erédia was privy to special secret Portuguese cartographic intelligence, then that depiction was also decades ahead of his time. In fact, the Korea-as-island fiction was perpetuated by Luís Teixeira, who completed a new map of Japan in 1592, in turn reprinted by Ortelius in his atlas in 1595 and with the insular (Teixeira) form being used for more than four decades by European mapmakers, at least until the production of Blaeu’s atlas of 1655. An elongated Papua in the southeast suggests knowledge of the Torres voyage, but that became an early standard. Could the Japan-Korea-Yellow Sea modifications to Erédia’s Ptolemaic-style maps have actually been inserted in the manuscript at a later date, say during the time it passed through Bollardist hands? I think it is possible.

The Brazil National Library Erédia Map Collection

As we have observed, dating back to the late nineteenth century, scholars have staked and lost their reputations on interpreting Erédia, but interest was further raised by the “discovery” in the National Library of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro in 1946 of his Luca Antara map executed in 1602 and titled Nova tavoa hydrographica do mar de novas teras do sul. While Java and the Lesser Sunda Islands including Timor are well represented on this map, including their approximate latitudes (although lacking longitude), a series of misshapen islands lying 12–20° south definitely suggest a “great south land.” A small subsidiary scholarship has emerged relating to this map, whether or not Erédia was playing out an elaborate hoax to throw rival Holland off course or whether Luca (Nuca) Antara (Malay for “land between the islands”) and islands of gold can be correlated with real places in northern Australia, namely, Bathurst and Melville Islands, respectively. This is the position of N. H. Peters (2003: 31), who claims that there was probably an earlier Portuguese exploration of Melville and Bathurst Islands around 1600 and before that of the Dutch. In making this assessment, he assumes that the Erédia map (1602) is both a general map and a portolan map at the same time. If read as a portolan map, it also reveals traceable bearings. To this end, he advances a novel bearing technique comparing the Erédia antique map with a corresponding modern map of the islands.

Even lesser known is Iava Maior e Nuca Antara, also in the Brazil National Library collection. Cataloged in 1630, it bears an inscription revealing that, in 1602, “cosmographe” Manuel Godhino Erédia was commissioned by the sometime captain of the Malacca fortress, Viceroy Aires de Saldanha, to produce a map of Nusa Antara. A relatively simple map representing the southern tip of Sumatra, Java, and the Sunda Islands eastward to Sumbawa noting a number of topoi, it also highlights a continent-sized southland some 10° south of Java and the Sunda Archipelago. As the inscription notes, this ranges to the 15th degree south. Although unadorned, the Nuca Antara of this map does offer a convincing depiction of northern Australia, accurate as to location. Although Erédia sought to correct Ptolemy where appropriate (as with the true location of Sumatra), he was also credulous as to the presence of gold mines, as in Timor, where he was convinced that gold rivaled sandalwood as a source of riches for local kings. No doubt privy to information that Portuguese on Flores gleaned from local informants or fishermen blown off course returning to Ende, in 1599 he sought approval from the Viceroy (of Goa) Francisco da Gama to venture to Timor, Ende, or Savu with a view to verifying his “discovery” (see Mills 1979: 254–55).

From examination of Erédia’s Nova Tavoa Hydrographica . . . (1602), one maritime route leads southward from Ende, the small island off the south coast of Flores, fortified by the Portuguese (1595–1605), linking up with Timor on a return journey (or vice versa) suggesting a Portuguese mission, albeit unrecorded. Another route, possibly originating in Macassar, passes the Flores-Solor maritime zone, also leading south. Still, this is fantastic geography with respect to the region south of Timor as with the islands of Luca and Ouro. Parallel south-leading tracks are marked as pescadores, or fishermen, undoubtedly the real pioneer navigators of these seas. We might also surmise that Erédia gleaned such data from Malay and/or distant Macassan or Buginese informants arriving in Malacca. The easternmost track south from Timor is labeled “Viagem dos Sinas” (Chinese voyages) and terminates at an island cryptically named IAP and misleadingly labeled Ouro (gold) (ciano e sandale) (between 14 and 15° south). In fact, Frank Urban (2009: 553) may have been the first to suggest that the depiction of this voyage plausibly represents a journey made by trepangers from Macassar and, if so, then they were visiting Australian shores two centuries before conventional dating.

In 1620, letters were exchanged between the king of Portugal and the viceroy of India (Portuguese Goa) regarding Erédia’s proposal for a voyage of “discovery” to the Great South Land” (National Library of Australia MS4406). But nothing came of such a proposal, in any case it was preempted by the arrival of Dutch fleets in the archipelago, thus raising the risks for the Portuguese. As mentioned, Erédia himself was harnessed to the defense of Malacca with the construction of a fort at Muar and Malacca itself coming under attack by Cornelis Matelief in 1606. At some point between 1605 and 1607 Erédia departed Malacca for Goa.

Late nineteenth-century skepticism over Erédia and Portuguese priority in the discovery of Australia has not held back modern scholarship, for example, a work by Kenneth Gordon McIntyre (1977) entitled The Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese Ventures 200 Years before Captain Cook. My own position is that Erédia assembled the best possible intelligence of his time from local sources—both garbled and real—matched by the best traditions of Portuguese geographic and cartographic knowledge of that age (although not necessarily technique), bequeathing in the Nuca Antara map a riddle that can be read as objective statement (Peters) or as exploratory-imaginative (most of the literature). Urban (2009: 55) is undoubtedly justified in summarizing that, “although open to interpretation, Erédia’s map and articles provide some collaborative evidence that the Portuguese knew of voyages by Indonesians to one or more islands south of Timor before Dutch exploration commenced” (cited in Gunn 2016: 144).

III. Portuguese-Dutch Navigations

In any case, Dutch knowledge of the discoveries was fast catching up with that of the Iberians. This was especially evident with Linschoten’s Discource (Latin edition), including the map drawn by Dutch trade advocate Petrius Plancius, in turn sourced to Portuguese cartographic knowledge—namely, Insulae Moluccae celeberrimae sunt ob Maximam aromatum copiam quam totum terrarum orbem mittunt (1598). Noua Guinea is acknowledged in Latin as “Partem autem efse continentis Australis magnitudo probabile facit” (likely part of a continent the size of Australia), literally announcing Australia. As alluded, the Dutch had already sent an exploratory mission from Batavia to the Cape York–Gulf of Carpentaria area of northern Australia, and, over the following decades, a procession of Dutch ships had careened on the west coast of Australia.

Portuguese sources have seldom been examined with respect to Indian Ocean navigations, even by Portuguese authors. In this respect, the A arte de navegar by Manuel Pimentel (1712: 423) is particularly informative. As Pimentel reveals, from the early seventeenth century, the Portuguese were well aware of the southern Indian Ocean route from the Cape of Good Hope to Australia (Terra Nova), albeit with Timor as destination. As he adverted, “Mas devese advertir, que a distancia desde o Cão de Boa Esperencia até a Terra Nova não he tanta quanta mostrão os Cartas” (But it should be noticed that the distance from the Cape of Good Hope until Terra Nova is not much revealed on the charts), setting aside unknown and adverse ocean currents. As he warned (and as well known to the Dutch from the 1610s), the reef-strewn coast of Terra Nova at 27° south was perilous, especially if approached at night. Riding the southerly or southeasterly winds at 22° latitude was optimum before turning north to Timor Island (Babao) at 11°5'. As an alternative to the Malacca Straits, Portuguese navigators setting out from Goa also coursed west of Sumatra, coasting south of Java at 7–8° latitude south, prior to entering the Java Sea via the Sunda or Bali Straits. In his “Report on the Golden Chersonese,” penned between 1597 and 1600, Erédia specifically mentions a number of such Portuguese voyages, including that of António Dias Sumatra, the first by a Portuguese navigator (a reference to the shipwreck of the nau or carrack, São Paulo in 1561), and that of António Rodrigues de Luna (Mills 1930). As with VOC vessels blown off course, the possibility of a Portuguese sighting of the Australian coast cannot be precluded. Only it is not known. We may go further to suggest that if there was such a voyage, then Pimentel would have revealed it, but he did not.

Neither did Pimentel offer cartographic confirmation, although his representation of Sabul, a cluster of five small islets sited south of south-central Timor and surrounded by a line suggesting shoals, also offers an intriguing indication of further Portuguese knowledge of the Timor Sea and beyond (Pimentel 1712: 419).[5] But his is a seventeenth-century map, also revealing knowledge of Holland Nova, or Australia. Moreover, the name Sahull or Sahoel, meaning “shoal,” appeared on seventeenth-century Dutch maps in reference to a submerged sandbank between Australia and Timor, and there are several. It may be coincidence, but Suhail also equates with Canopus in Arabic. On his 1803 map, English navigator Mathew Flinders noted that the “Great Sahul Shoal” was frequented by Macassan trepangers, some of whom he encountered. Today the name Sahul is lent to the broader Australian continental shelf (see Gunn 2016: 144).

IV. The Macassan Connection

Timorese and prehistoric migrations or contacts with aboriginal Australians aside, a more convincing candidate for the first sustained pre-European contact with Australia would be the Macassans, a blanket term that includes Bugis and other ethnolinguistic groups from southern Sulawesi (formerly known as the Celebes). Rather than trading per se, according to season, the Macassans fished and collected marine products, including pearls and turtle shells but especially bêche de mer (trepang in Malay and rendered in Chinese as 海参), highly esteemed in Chinese marketplaces. Besides marine products, the Macassans also returned to Sulawesi with some Australian sandalwood (McKnight 1976: 22, 43–44).

Having mastered dowel-type boat construction, their prauh layer (sailing vessels) were capable of long seagoing voyages, at least running with the wind. Typically, they would sail south with the onset of the northwest monsoon in October–November, crossing the dangerous reef-strewn Flores Sea, passing the Wetar Strait, before coasting the easterly tip of Timor en route to the seasonal fishing grounds in Australia. They returned in May with the southeast monsoon. In the early 1970s, at a time when Macassan boat construction and interisland trade was still active, the author sailed with Macassans in the southern Flores Sea from Sumbawa to Flores Island. Navigation was without compass.

In any case, unlike the Chinese maritime experience, the evidence of the Macassan presence in northern Australia is substantial. Recent studies have documented the Macassan impact on aboriginal Australia from genetic mixing, language imports, the introduction of the dugout canoes, plant introductions (the tamarind tree), and even to such unwanted transfers as cholera infections. As well documented, in 1803 Flinders encountered a fleet of Macassan vessels off Arnhem Land in present-day Australia’s Northern Territory. The Macassan fleets ranged widely from the Kimberly region to the Gulf of Carpentaria, sojourning for the season in temporary dwellings. In Arnhem Land they developed close links with the Yolngu people, who collaborated in the diving, fishing, and preparation of the dried and smoked trepang. Contacts between Malays (but not Macassans) and aboriginal communities continued until the postwar period, especially in the pearl industry. This I observed in Broome in the early 1970s, although the epoch was ringing down. In 1973 and moving on to Snake Bay in the Tiwi Islands—and winning some rare esteem from the Tiwi community—the author was able to converse in Malay with a local tribal elder formerly engaged in the pearling industry.

Contact Rock Art

As matched by Dutch records, Macassans first began arriving on the Australian coast in the 1710s. However, radiocarbon dating of a rock art painting of a Macassan prauh found in northwestern Arnhem Land places their arrival much earlier (Taçon et al. 2010). In the language of May et al. (2013), this is the earliest identifiable “contact art” found in Australia and can be dated to before 1664 CE (and possibly to sometime in the 1500s). Discovered in the Djulirri rock shelter site along with nearly 1,200 individual paintings and beeswax figures, a yellow Macassan prauh is painted beneath a beeswax “snake.” Aboriginal rock art was not static, often embellished, and many hundreds of paintings produced at Djulirri after this date include even steamships. However, the oldest nonindigenous vessels depicted at Djulirri are almost certainly prauh. According to May et al. (87), specific features in Arnhem Land paintings of prauh include depictions of (a) high projections at bow and stern, (b) multiple projections from the bow, (c) tripod masts and rectangular sails, (d) twin rudders, and (e) a deck.

Archaeological research at Macassan sites in northern Australia has revealed that they did bring some trade items, including iron, pottery, and glass. According to pioneer researchers R. M. and C. H. Berndt (1947: 133), archaeological remains including pottery shards, graves, and tamarind trees testify to “a prolonged association.” Intriguingly, however, these long-past events were then still known through oral histories as “great song cycles.” Subsequent archaeological research including that from the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition to Groote Eylandt has also revealed a wealth of evidence in the form of rock art depictions of fishing and maritime scenes including a Macassan prauh painting (McCarthy 1960).

As reinterpreted by May, McKinnon, and Raupp (2009: 381–82), evidence collected by the 1948 expedition included aboriginal bark paintings featuring Macassan prauh. As they well note, because no Macassan prauh dating to the period of contact has been found archaeologically, researchers are obliged to rely on iconographic and ethnographic evidence to understand their construction. With particular reference to the painters of the bark art depictions such as Minimini Numalkiyiya Mamarika (c. 1904–d. 1972), while some prauh may be painted from memory, others were likely to have been inspired by rock paintings, other bark paintings, or oral tradition. Although the bark-painting renditions of prauh are more stylized compared to rock art of unknown date, as the authors conclude, depictions of prauh have “embedded cultural meaning which relates to Groote Eylandt Aboriginal belief systems.” Moreover, they “are not merely depictions of boats for the purpose of illustration, and they are certainly not mere representations of the ‘other’ as many would assume for paintings showing imagery from other cultures.” Rather, the prauh depiction links to “stories of creation, land and ancestors for Australian Aboriginal people in a way that can only happen as a result of long periods of interaction with maritime visitors” (May et al. 2013: 383).

Macassans on Timor

Although Timor Island remained outside of the Javanese-centered Majapahit Empire that touched Sumbawa, Sumba, and Flores in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, Muslim traders were nevertheless drawn into the sandalwood, wax, and slave trade. Notably, in the mid-seventeenth century, Macassan traders established several temporary trading villages on Timor. Such is also suggested in the name of Pante Macassar (pantai meaning “beach” in Malay), a settlement several kilometers from Lifau and a toponym that has endured in Oecusse until the present (see Gunn 1999: 103). Recent research has also attested to the presence in eastern Timor of “Macassan stones” or gravestones, some associated with this early period (McWilliam et al. 2012).

As Dominican sources reveal, in 1640–1641, the year the Portuguese were expelled from Macassar, Karrlikio, the sultan of Tolo in southeastern Sulawesi and father-in-law of the sultan of Macassar, attacked the Portuguese position at Larantuca (see Souza 1986: 109–10). The Macassans then raided the coast of Timor with a flotilla of sailing vessels and six to seven thousand men in an unsuccessful attempt to wrest control of the lucrative trade from the Portuguese. Over a three-month period, Karrlikio’s men heaped “ravages and rapine” upon Timor while also forcing (temporary) conversions to Islam (de Freycinet 1825: 529–30; Gunn 1999: 75). According to George Bryan Souza (1986: 110), with the Portuguese calling upon support from Catholic allies on Timor, they were able to rally against the traditional rulers of the powerful Belos (Belu) Kingdom of south-central Timor, who had opportunistically sided with the Tolo attackers.

As with the Australian case, the date of arrival of the first Macassan vessels on Timor is unknown, but, taking Karrlikio’s “invasion” of Timor in the 1640s as a measure, it most likely came after conversion to Islam sometime in the early 1600s. We might also assume that it came at a time when Chinese traders had reentered the Macassar marketplace. Stated another way, without the Chinese demand for trepang, the enterprise would not have been worth the commercial risk. There is no special evidence suggesting such voyages occurred prior to that general era. Researching Dutch archives, Gerrit Knaap and Heather Sutherland (2004: 24) reveal that, by 1722 Macassan and Buginese boats were sailing to Timor, Solor, and surrounding areas without Dutch knowledge, just as the VOC, entrenched in Macassar from 1669, sought to regulate their activities by issuing trade passes. In 1847–1848, a party of armed Buginese slave raiders arriving in the Lautem area of East Timor resisted expulsion for four months until the Portuguese could raise a major force (Pélissier 1996: 25).

As alluded to, by gathering in a range of tropical and marine products, especially trepang, the Macassan and Buginese trade also entered regional Chinese trading networks, including the Chinese junk trade. We know less about this mechanism, but, presumably, marine products including a variety of shells were not only traded at Macassar and other regional ports but especially Singapore after its foundation. Because this was an organized and capitalized venture, especially in fitting out the vessels and in the recruitment of labor, we would not be surprised if both Macassans and Chinese merchants were involved in raising the capital and extending the credit. Macassans continued their seasonal arrival in Timor until recently. Acting as an interpreter for United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization experts in remote Biaço on the south coast of East Timor in February 2000 (that is, several months after the expulsion of Indonesian occupiers by arriving international peacekeepers), the author was told that, during the Indonesian interregnum (1976–1999), small flotillas of Macassan sailing prauh arrived annually to collect turtle shells and marine products.

V. A Chinese Imaginary of Australia

Having traded as far south as Timor, did the Chinese venture several sailing days farther south to the northern coast of Australia? The question was also posed by Needham (1971: 1986: 152–53), citing the discovery in Port Darwin in 1879 of an early Qin-style Daoist image buried deeply and entwined in the roots of a 200-year-old banyan tree. Prudently, however, he allows that the image could have been brought by Malay voyager. He makes no claims on behalf of the Zheng He voyages or any other known Chinese voyage.

No such skepticism is attached to Wei Juxian’s 1960 book titled The Chinese Discovery of Australia 中国人发现澳洲, which also references the Daoist image discovered at Darwin. As Wei claims, Chinese people were moving “back and forth” from China to Australia since antiquity (although he might be confusing “Chinese” with the southerly dispersion of Austronesians who populated the Indonesian Archipelago). With reference to eclipse records in the Spring and Autumn Annals associated with the State of Lu (722–481 BCE), the fact that they recorded the solar eclipse over the South Sea Islands on 22 February 720 BC “would indicate that the Chinese people had been there before then.” Among other classic evidence of Chinese attestation of Australia, he cites such works as Atlas of Foreign Countries from 265 CE to 316 CE, revealing knowledge that antipodean climatic zones were opposite to those of China. More specifically, he claims that the Ming-era voyages of Zheng He touching Java in 1432 sent his men to Australia to offer sacrifices to the star known as Canopus. As Wei explains, in Chinese belief Canopus is the star that governs the lives of the human race. Known as the God of Longevity of the South Pole, it is also associated in China with longevity and happiness. Understanding that Canopus is in a southern constellation, Zheng He mistook Australia for the South Pole. It is true that Canopus is the second-brightest star in the southern night sky, after Sirius. It is known to many civilizations including aboriginal Australians. In Arab navigational lore, Canopus was used as a rhumb star for sailing south, with a sense of “due south” (Tibbetts 1971: 529). In Chinese, Canopus is called the Star of the Old Man (in 老人星) or the Star of the Old Man of the South Pole 南极老人星. It is represented on the early Tang dynasty Dunhuang star chart, although low on the horizon (Bonnet-Bidaud, Praderie, and Whitfield 2009). While paying homage to Canopus is indeed a plausible theory to explain Chinese astronomical interest in southern polar regions—and this motive cannot be dismissed out of hand—as of the present the evidence of such a voyage is thin, with no document or chronicle accounts, no wreck sites, and no plausible archaeological evidence such as first-contact aboriginal rock art would afford.

Much of the same or even more skepticism applies to the book by Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (2002), inter alia declaring a Ming dynasty Chinese circumnavigation of the globe, and claiming to have traced Chinese voyages made between 1421 and 1423 to both coasts of the Americas, the Arctic, Antarctica, and Australia. Indeed, Menzies recycles some of the folklore put in print by Wei. In the case of Australia, he claims that the Chinese charting of the coastline of the southern continent commenced in the 1420s, naming two Chinese admirals. In the absence of Chinese maps or other evidence, Menzies bases his claim on two of the Dieppe school charts done by Jean Rotz dating from 1542. According to Richardson, while Menzies is correct in accepting that Rotz and the other Dieppe cartographers copied material from Portuguese charts, the notion that the Portuguese had actually copied them from Chinese originals does not hold water. The fallacy of the Dieppe charts in the hands of their interpreters is to transpose Jave-la-Grande to the Australian coastline (a total misfit as can be discerned by even a cursory examination). As Richardson (2004) states, “There is not a single surviving Portuguese map or chart which contains any coastal outlines obviously resembling those of Australia until about 1630, when details from the first Dutch charts leaked out.” With this I agree, and the tenor of the statement is demonstrated below. As Richardson continues, “There are no surviving Portuguese charts really resembling those of Jave-la-Grande’s east and west coasts, either in that position, or anywhere else. Nor is there any other surviving evidence that the Portuguese reached Australia before the well-documented arrival of the Dutch in 1606.” In Richardson’s opinion, Menzies’s “wildly speculative ‘translations’ of toponyms are not conducive to a credible rewriting of history” (5).

Even where the evidence is stronger for the Zheng He voyages, Timor much less Australia is absent from cartographic or written accounts relating to those episodes. An exception, as Ptak (2019) points out, relates to speculation over representation of the coast “opposite” Sumatra as presented on a fifteenth-century map depicting the Zheng He voyages (with Australia conflated with the East African coast). Obviously, the Chinese could have reconnoitered the northern Australian coast if they had cause. But what motive, setting aside the veneration of Canopus, which is visually closer in southern latitudes? I find it easier to dismiss this motive than to make a case for Chinese contact, at least in the absence of firm evidence. From Song-Yuan times, Chinese interest in mounting long-distance voyages was invariably connected with trade and with an eye to cementing tributary relations. The Chinese dealt with polities (or quasi-political centers as in the case of Timor), whether it was Brunei on the island of Borneo, the Srivijaya Kingdom on Sumatra, or the Islamic polities off the Swahili coast of Africa in the case of the fourth Zheng He voyage of 1413–1415. Notably, aboriginal Taiwan across the straits of that name was mostly avoided by Chinese seafarers until the Pax Hollandica was established.

Modern research has revealed that in eastern Timor around Manatuto, Timorese chiefs built defensive hilltop positions as if to defend from attacks from the sea (Chao 2008). Nevertheless, trade with outsiders was there, provisioning in the form of game and fruits was there, and, we can believe, trading networks linking Timor with Java and farther west were well established with local power holders even before Chinese junks sailed these waters. As hunter-gatherers ruled over by chiefdoms, Timorese were hardly candidates for Chinese tributary status though, as suggested, the trade itself may have facilitated the rise of the fourteenth-century Wehali or Belu Kingdom in south-central Timor (see Therik 2004).

If the European experience was anything to go by, the “crocodile coasts” of northern Australia as with the “malaria coasts” of Timor were downright inhospitable, and the natives were not welcoming. But even if landings were made, Australia was outside of established Arab, Indian, Javanese, and other Asian trading networks. Unlike Timor, Borneo, and other islands connected with China’s Nanyang, there was no prior established trade mechanism touching the vast Australian continent, and neither were there identifiable polities above the level of nomadic hunter-gathers.

In fact, direct Arab contact with northern Australia has indeed been suggested with the discovery in 1944 on the Wessel Islands administered as part of Australia’s Northern Territory of five coins dated back to the twelfth century identified with the medieval sultanate of Kilwa. Lying off the “Swahili coast,” the Kilwa Sultanate tapped gold from Sofala and entered the Indian Ocean trade ranging to Persia and India. Even allowing for the possibility that an Arab or other trading ship connected with Arab trade routes was blown off course and was wrecked on these islands it still does not substantiate a trade connection (see Owen 2014).

Conclusion

Whether local fishermen from the Lesser Sunda group or even Chinese junks blown off course, Asians undoubtedly preceded Europeans into the Timor Sea zone. We do not discount Chinese knowledge of an antipodes just as their commercial intelligence brooked no equal from Song times on, if not earlier. In this chapter, we have focused on the life and times of Manuel Godinho de Erédia. As we have seen, working from inside and outside of a Ptolemaic reading of Asian geography, cognizant of major trends in the production of world maps as with Ortelius, and, crucially, drawing upon local knowledge, Erédia served up a powerful imaginary of a “great south land.” Yet, he had practical objectives in mind, not only in winning recognition from vice regal, regal, and church authorities but in calling for ships to mount a voyage of discovery south.

The chapter also raised questions as to the authenticity of the Erédia imaginary, as to whether he deliberately confabulated maps and southern itineraries to embellish his claims, or whether he worked from sound empirical knowledge. We may assay that Erédia’s curiosity as to the existence of a southern continent was quickened with his perusal of such mappemondes as those produced by Ortelius. In at least one of his maps, Erédia modified an Ortelius map template to accommodate his own fanciful rendering of an Australia continent. To be sure, it did not help that Erédia actually promoted Ophir myths as to the faux existence of islands of gold. But such fundamentalist belief was widely shared among Christian believers of that age, not only among Catholic Iberians like de Queros, and even the Dutch, who also searched for “gold islands” off the eastern coast of Honshu in Japan in the mid-eighteenth century. Having stated that Erédia bequeathed a riddle that has perplexed generations of researchers, this chapter has also added fuel to the fire by casting doubt on the authenticity of his modified Ptolemaic maps incorporating geographic data one hundred years ahead of his time.

But in the absence of more concrete evidence as to a specific Portuguese voyage or accidental shipwreck, we would have to agree that, alongside the de Queros-Torres expedition of 1605, it was the Dutch who first explored and mapped significant parts of the Australian coastline. Having said that, it was generation upon generation of Macassans from around the mid-1700s practically down until their expulsion in the early twentieth century, who best came to know the inhospitable northern coastline of Australia. Their prize was bêche de mer, and their market was China. As recent research has revealed, they also seem to have had a deeper association with its indigenous peoples than initially believed, just as aboriginal artists created their own imaginary of the Macassan “other” on rock art of some brilliance. If this theory is correct, then the European “discovery” of Australia was actually an Asian revelation, although not especially Chinese.

1. Outside of the present discussion, the Vallard map has been the object of much discussion in connection with the “discovery” of Australia since the late nineteenth century. See Australasian Hydrographic Society (AHS) website 2014.

2. For a reproduction of the map, see Gunn 2016b: 140.

3. Nevertheless, Eredia’s Informação da áurea Chersoneso, ou Península, e das ilhas Auríferas, etc. was published by António Laurenco Caminha, Ordenações da India do Senhor Rei D. Manuel (Lisbon, 1807).

4. I have been guided by Mills (1930) in this synoptic account, but I have also referred to the Portuguese original.

5. Some of Pimentel’s maps also featuring Sahul are reproduced in Gunn (2016: 132, 135).

Part III: Evidence

7. Connecting Up the Dots on Global Port Cities

Just as the “known world” of the ancient Greeks and Romans entered the histories of Strabo, Pliny, and Arrian, so today archaeologists and others strive to recapture the dynamics of long-distance trade contacts between different civilizations, whether via maritime or land silk road links. Intense local and long-distance maritime activity also spawned port cities and polities. This was particularly the case at the choke points of the archipelago such as at Old Palembang, Malacca, Temasek (Singapore), and Banten proximate the Sunda Strait, but it also had correlates in the Red Sea area funneling the Indian Ocean trade into the Mediterranean.

Because we are dealing with vast space across time, with the rise and fall of civilizations and hegemonic centers, it is important to set down a basic chronology, or diachronic framing, into which we can slot broad epochs and shifts in the evolution of trading ports and polities. One attempt to achieve such a framing was struck by Japanese scholar Ikuta Shigeru (1993), who offers three periods to which I loosely adhere (with the latter two accommodating the entry into Asian seas of Western agents): first, the middle of the second century BCE to 450 CE; second, from 450 CE to c. 1550 CE (with subperiods); and third, c. 1550 CE to the early nineteenth century.

We should have a sound knowledge of the major routes connecting up the termini of the silk roads, both terrestrial and maritime. What is important is that by the second century CE, the Roman Empire’s southern and eastern extensions were in contact with the Old Word of India and China by both overland and sea routes (and this has been archaeologically attested). Abu-Lughod (1989: 43) describes this as the first “nascent” world system, although it would not survive the gradual fall of Rome, however staggered over the centuries. From the ninth century in the wake of the Crusades, with Europe once again reattached to the world system following the turmoil accompanying the fall of Rome, three overland routes east radiated out of the eastern Mediterranean area. As Abu-Lughod explains, these were: (1) the northern route from Constantinople across the central Asian landmass (the land silk road); (2) the central route connecting the Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean via Baghdad, Basra, and the Persian Gulf; and (3) the southern route that linked Alexandria-Cairo with the Red Sea, Arabian Gulf, and Indian Ocean. For various reasons—primarily the Pax Mongolica—by the second half of the thirteenth century, all three routes were open for the first time since the Rome controlled the eastern trade. Here I am primarily concerned to illustrate the sea silk road.

In this chapter, a first section examines port cities of the Middle East–Indian Ocean circuit. Here I also introduce the emergence of a first tier of port cities of the silk/ceramic roads (Ikuta’s First Period), stressing the importance of long-distance trade connecting up Han China with Rome. To illustrate the maritime silk/ceramic roads theme, this section introduces a select number of archaeological research sites especially touching the Greco-Roman trade. A second section brings to attention the rise of Islamic trade ports building upon the Arab maritime commercial tradition that preceded Islam itself. A third section examines the closely linked Southeast Asian circuits of trade, while a final section examines South and East China Sea circuits of trade and commerce. A conclusion returns to an evaluation of the drivers of long-distance trade at the eastern and western termini during China’s prosperous Song dynasty connecting with the dynamic trade-oriented Middle Eastern Abbasid Empire.

I. Port Cities of the Middle East–Indian Ocean Circuit: The Greco-Roman World of Seafaring

By the second century CE, as described in the Greco-Roman text the Peryplus of the Erythraean Sea dating from the middle of the first century CE, Roman sailors were frequenting the eastern coast of India, just as Asian commodities were arriving in larger quantities in the eastern Mediterranean, including (Puteoli) Puzzuoli, near Naples. As described by Enlightenment philosopher Abbé Raynal (1784: 96–99), “All the seafaring and trading nations in the Mediterranean resorted to the ports of Egypt to purchase the productions of India.” A range of Chinese earthenware and bronzes unearthed at archaeological sites in the Mediterranean world suggest that the trade was considerable.

Modern archaeology on Roman artifacts in particular discovered along the maritime silk roads offers major confirmation of the ancient trade at both ends, with marine archaeology confirming Roman trade reaching the coast of Africa perhaps as far south as present-day Mozambique. Mathew Cobb (2015) has also entered this debate. As he explains, the annexation of Egypt by Augustus in 30 BCE meant that the Roman state took over the regulation, monitoring, and taxation of the goods entering and leaving Egypt via the Red Sea. Moreover, as he argues, on the basis of archaeological and numismatic evidence analyzed from sites across Egypt, East Africa, the southern Arabian Peninsula, and India, this peak occurred during the first century CE.

As Higham (2002: 232) writes, the fall of the Indian subcontinent-wide Mauryan Empire (in decline by 150 BCE) did not inhibit the trade and with Indian merchants riding the prevailing winds in both westerly and easterly directions. The Persian (Iranian) and Greco-Roman worlds continued their appetite for oriental goods. The actual conduct of trade was facilitated by silver- and copper-based coinage, Brahmi script used by specialized merchant guilds in both eastern and western ports, and the encouragement of merchant bankers who received interest on the ventures.

A number of archaeological sites bear witness to this trade, and a good overview of past and current research as it relates to the western Indian Ocean and southern Red Sea is offered by Paul J. Lane (2012). By sifting through this evidence, Eivind Seland (2010; 2014) draws a picture of the western Indian Ocean as a main hub of Old World exchange. As he explains in a survey article, a surge of interest and activity has developed in archaeological research across this vast zone since the 1990s, allowing for new synthetic interpretations of trade, connections, and civilizations. But still, as Seland (2014: 388) concedes, “studying connectivity by archaeological proxies is challenging.” Despite recent breakthroughs, a dearth of shipwreck evidence in this zone and the finite number of sites under investigation still raise many issues for interpretation of data. As discussed in the following chapter, only one marine archaeological site falls into Ikuta’s first period, that of a recent wreck excavation in Sri Lanka.

With the Indian Ocean trade feeding into the Persian Gulf ports and the Red Sea, the following section seeks to hint at this connectivity long ago revealed in such texts as the Peryplus of the Erythraean Sea. Today, a reinvigorated marine archaeology frequently references the Peryplus as it picks over the ancient sea silk road sites linking up with the Mediterranean. Practically any trade port along the Red Sea, the Swahili coast, the Hadramaut, and the broad western seaboard of India could potentially yield archaeologists, including marine archaeologists, evidence of this ancient trade. That would include numismatics in particular as with impressive hoards of Roman coins found across a long arc reaching practically to the doors of China and shards of Chinese ceramics no less widely attested as with finds as distant as the East African coast. Red Sea sites have also proven fruitful in yielding items of Chinese trade interest. But because the trade routes led to Rome and its outliers, we should not entirely ignore the Mediterranean.

Mediterranean and Red Sea Ports

Coming under the influence of the Ptolemies, the ancient Greco-Roman port city of Euseperides/Berenice, buried under present-day Benghazi in Libya, not only connected with Rome via Sicily (Göransson 2007) but also with Egypt and the Red Sea. With archaeological research in Benghazi commencing under Italy in the 1930s and carried through in the early 1950s by the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford University (Vickers, Gill, and Economou 1994), I first read the literature on these surveys in the early 1980s, when working with a Helsinki University of Technology team in Benghazi designing a restoration project for the (Arab) bazaar quarter. At that time I recovered black-glazed Greek ware from c. 300 BCE in a sunken lagoon site named after the ancient Greek city of Euesperides along with an unglazed Roman-era earthenware oil lamp of a later period.

I also inspected Roman-era coins from a later period recovered from the Roman Archaeological Site of Cyrene, founded as a Greek city in 631 BCE, which, together with Berenice, Apollonia, Ptolemais, and Taucheira, comprised the Pentapolis of the ancients. Later becoming a Roman province, Cyrenaica was abandoned in the fourth century CE. Subject to excavation under Italian and British occupations (Goodchild 1981), the site underwent further excavation in the last years of the Muammar Gaddafi regime with Italian university cooperation, until war closed in. Unlike some sites in Egypt (as with Cairo-Fustat), no Indian or Chinese trade items had then been attested from the Roman period. Nevertheless, through to the medieval period, Cyrene was connected via the maritime route with Palermo on Sicily and Alexandria in Egypt and other ports, as well as by caravan routes arriving from the south. As Derek Kennet (1994: 276) observes, several sherds of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain dating from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century were found at Barqa, a city emerging during the Islamic period, probably brought to Cyrenaica (the region) from Turkey or Egypt under Ottoman auspices.

Canal of the Pharaohs/Suez

As a shortcut between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, we should not neglect to mention here the ancient Suez, or Necho’s, Canal of the pharaohs alluded to by Aristotle and Pliny and “rediscovered” by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799. Notable in this respect is a University of Southhampton research project launched early in the new century to examine the ancient and medieval harbor at Suez. Located at the northern tip of the Red Sea, the site was the closest point on the Red Sea to the River Nile and the Mediterranean Sea. Known historically as Arsinoë, Cleopatris, Clysma, and al-Qulzum, it is believed that the harbor served as a key staging post for land traffic between Egypt and Arabia in the Ptolemaic, Roman, and Islamic periods. As adverted, the Southhampton project seeks to fill in a gap in our understanding of seafaring and trade in the Red Sea of antiquity and the medieval period (University of Southhampton 2004).

Suakin (Sudan)

While, as discussed, the Indian Ocean trade reaching the Mediterranean engaged Red Sea ports, the trade was further dynamized under Arab and Muslim auspices. Jay Spaulding (2008: 39; 43) has drawn attention to Suakin, an ancient port city, today located in Sudan. As he points out, small islands figured prominently in the history of the East African coast, but, dating back to the Hellenistic age, they also took their place on the Red Sea littoral. As virtual city-states they were distinct from mainland culture but without imposing a total barrier. With its twelfth-century origins as a forward Egyptian trading post, the Red Sea port of Suakin fits the mold. The then-major port of Aydhab was too far north for the predictable pattern of monsoon winds. Settled by Hadramaut merchant immigrants, at the time that the first Portuguese arrived on the scene in 1541—with malicious intent—it was described as a thriving commercial entrepôt.

Massawa/Adulis (Eritrea)

The Red Sea coastline of Eritrea and islands off the port of Massawa are rich in archaeological sites, some of them testified in the Peryplus. War and revolution massively set back the prospects of marine archaeological research on the Eritrean coast (such as I witnessed in Massawa in the early 1970s then under imperial Ethiopian administration although with the countryside controlled by Eritrean liberation groups). As an island Massawa looked out upon the sea from practically every quarter. Even in my time, the waterfront came alive with the morning arrivals of Yemeni dhows. As revealed by various architectural and religious touches, not excluding Coptic as with the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie’s palace, Massawa had not only been under Ottoman and Egyptian occupation but was exposed over a long period to the movement of Sudanese, Yemenis, and other Muslim peoples up and down the Red Sea. Italian rule seemingly acknowledged the island’s identity. The presence in the city of numerous mosques, madrasah, and sacred tombs, led ethnographer Jonathan Miran (2009: 166–216) to describe it as a “sacred Muslim island.” From my own observation, Massawa was also a place of embarkation for the hajj.

In 1997 a shipwreck discovered in the Massawa passage of the Dahlak Archipelago dubbed the “Black Assarca” was partially excavated under the auspices of the Ministry of Marine Resources of Eritrea. According to Ralph K. Pedersen (2000; 2008), who investigated the site firsthand, “The wreck therefore gives us our only surveyed and excavated physical evidence from a shipwreck of the ancient trade that existed between Byzantium, Aksum, Arabia, and India.” As explained, the corpus of material examined, especially amphorae and glassware, indicates the ceramics originated in Byzantine Aila. However, given the absence of a hull, the craft may have been Indian, Arabian, or Aksumite in origin. Moreover, the dating can be estimated to the fifth or sixth centuries only based on the other finds of similar ceramics at Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Mediterranean sites. The Aksum Kingdom (100–c. 940 CE), centered in what is now Eritrea and the Tigray Region of northern Ethiopia, with access to both the Red Sea and the Upper Nile, is well understood to have been an important participant in international trade from the first century CE until the advent of Islam, and its importance is vividly described in long passages of the Peryplus.

Located some 40 kilometers south of Massawa, the port of Adulis is another archaeological site athwart the Red Sea coast. As described by the Eritrean Ministry of Information, as historically known, Adulis was one of the metropolitan cities of the Aksumite Empire. The Peryplus account along with an allusion by Pliny is acknowledged. As explained, control of Adulis allowed Aksum to be the major power on the Red Sea. With the advent of Islam, the capture of Adulis brought to an end Aksum’s naval power and contributed to the Aksumite Kingdom’s isolation from the Byzantine Empire and other traditional allies (Eritrea Ministry of Information).

Long ago identified and as verified by multiple sources, as the ministry’s explanation continues, Adulis was one of the first Aksumite sites to undergo excavation. A French mission to Eritrea under Vignaud and Petit performed an initial survey in 1840 and prepared a map that marked the location of the structures they believed were temples. The first scientific excavations were undertaken by a German expedition in 1906 under the supervision of R. Sundström, who worked in the northern sector of the site, exposing a large structure (Eritrea Ministry of Information).

Neglected under Italian colonialism and Ethiopian domination, in February 2011 the National Museum of Eritrea, the Massawa Museum, and a private Italian research group, with the collaboration of the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and the Catholic University of Milan, resumed excavation at Adulis. As explained by researcher Chiarra Zazzaro (2013; 2017), through a study of the stratigraphic sequences, the project sought to clarify the different phases of foundation, development, and decline of the town. As she declaims, for at least seven centuries Adulis regulated the maritime trade linking the Northern Horn of Africa with the Mediterranean and India, first serving as the major regional market but, from the late fourth and fifth centuries CE onwards, emerging as a port for transhipping goods from India to the Mediterranean. As determined from research in situ, the remains of collapsed walls date from approximately the fifth to seventh century CE, overlaying previous constructions from the end of the second to early fifth century CE.

Nevertheless, according to David Peacock and Lucy Blue (2007), there have always been problems relating to chronology and topography. First, recovered surface pottery is late in date and accords with the African Kingdom of Aksum as opposed to Rome. Second, the Peryplus refers to an island approached by a causeway, suggesting to some that the Adulis site was originally at Massawa, which better fits the description. Still, as the Eritrean Ministry of Information declaims, “Adulis is not only a national heritage of Eritrea but also has global significance. Its significance also lies on its contribution to the rise and fall of the major kingdoms of Axum and others.”

Socotra

The strategically located island of Socotra (Suqutra) at the mouth of the Gulf of Aden, mentioned in the Peryplus, would appear to be connected up with the long-distance trade from the east feeding north up the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. This is confirmed by recent archaeology. In late 2002 Belgian researcher Peter de Geest of the Socotra Karst Project discovered a large number of inscriptions, drawings, and archaeological objects in a cave on Socotra. As further investigation revealed, they date between the first century BCE and the sixth century CE. With the majority of the texts written in the Indian Brahmi script, there are also inscriptions in South Arabian, Ethiopian, Greek, Palmyrene, and Bactrian scripts and languages. A ship drawing reveals an Indian-type craft. This is a pre-Islamic site. No Chinese artifacts are described. Overall, as Ingo Strauch (2012) points out, the research draws attention to the importance of a strategically sited island at the crossroads of the monsoon trade feeding in from India to the east and through to the Mediterranean world to the north via the Red Sea. This corpus of nearly 250 texts and drawings, including that of the ship of indeterminate provenance, clearly merits attention as a major source for the investigation of Indian Ocean trade networks in the first centuries of this era (Robin and Gorea 2002; Strauch 2012). Yet, we should not ignore the devastating impact on the archaeological record in Yemen imposed by war over the past two decades.

The Indo-Roman Trading Station of Arikamedu (Pondicherry), South India

Undoubtedly English-language writing and research on the provenance of Roman coins in India dates back to the first scholarly publications issued in British India. The state of knowledge, as summarized by Robert Sewell (1904), was quite extensive. From his study of coin hoards in mostly south Indian locations, “There seems to have been little trade between India and Rome in the years preceding the reign of Augustus. If there were any it would seem that Indian imports did not include Roman specie.” But that changed when Alexandria, the principal emporium of trade between East and West, came into Roman hands under Julius Caesar in 47 BCE, when Indian spices, muslins, cottons, precious stones, porcelain from China, and the like were in high demand. The trade declined under Caracalla (Augustus) (217 CE) but revived again, though slightly, under the Byzantine emperors.

In any case, as Seland (2014: 369) points out, modern archaeology of the Indian Ocean began at a site (Arikamedu) south of Pondicherry (now known as Puducherry) on the south eastern seaboard or Tamil Nadu coast of India. Commencing with the French investigator Gabriel Jouveau-Debreuil (1940), inter alia locating an intaglio engraved with a portrait of Augustus (27 BCE–14 CE), follow-up research by Indian archaeologists along with research conducted between 1947 and 1950 by Mortimer Wheeler (1955) and Jean-Marie Casel (1949), suggest that the site had been active from the late first century BCE to the first and second centuries CE. Arikamedu itself specialized in bead making for the long-distance Roman trade. Significant artifacts uncovered included Roman amphora, lamps, glassware, glass and stone beads, and gems. Wheeler also found Chinese celadon, identified as belonging to the Song-Yuan dynasty, suggesting that Arikamedu also served as a Chola-era port. But interest in the Mediterranean connection led these researchers to dub the site a veritable Indo-Roman trading station. According to Suresh Pillai (2016), Greek and Roman amphora fragments found at Arikamedu and at several other sites on the southeast coast of India provide tangible proof that Roman ships (undoubtedly departing Egyptian ports) were making the long trip to India with wine, olive oil, and other commodities. Indeed, Roman coin assemblies have been found in a variety of locations on both coasts of India.

Since Wheeler’s time, a number of other ancient seaport sites have been explored and excavated in the eastern Deccan, or Coromandel, coast. These sites include Motupalli in central coastal Andhra Pradesh, Arikamedu (Pondicherry) as well as Poompuhar, south of Pondicherry, Tranquebar still farther south, and at Mahabalipuram, south of Chennai. As P. Krishna Mohan Reddy (2001: 143) testifies, his research on Motupalli was deliberately undertaken “to locate and identify certain ports mentioned in the classical literature as well as in Indian epigraphs.” Revealing evidence of trade relations with Europe, China, and Southeast Asian countries, he also pushes back the antiquity of the Motupalli site to at least the second century BCE. Evidence of trade with ancient Rome is attested by discoveries of European rouletted ware. Chinese contact is attested by Chinese “stamped ware,” and Southeast Asian contacts is attested by “stamped ware.” On their part, A. Sundaresh and A. S. Guar (2011) confirm the importance of the ports in the East-West trade, also attesting from marine excavations conducted at Poompuhar and Mahabalipuram evidence of glass bead trade to Southeast Asia during a very early historical period. More generally, these ancient port cities in India can be referenced against classical Greco-Roman writings such as the Peryplus and the writings of Ptolemy, Pliny, and Strabo. Terrestrial archaeology in present-day Sri Lanka has also attested Roman artifacts.

II. Islamic World Ports

If we are to explain the rise of the Indian Ocean trade, then it is imperative to acknowledge the entry into this commerce of Arabs and, with the advent of Islam, the role of Muslim merchants, whether Arab, Persian, Indian, or others. Their period of activity broadly fits Ikuta’s second period, from 450 CE to c. 1550 CE (with subperiods). Obviously, this is a vast area of investigation but, fitting a synoptic approach, this section seeks to identify the key port or ports of embarkation for the Arab or Muslim sailors or, reciprocally, the terminal Indian Ocean ports of arrival for westward-sailing merchants carrying esteemed commodities often glossed as “spices” from eastern marketplaces.

As mentioned in Chapter 2, the prominence of this or that port servicing the Indian Ocean trade was path dependent upon major geopolitical shifts. At the western terminus of the maritime silk/ceramic roads, the decline of the Abbasids (750–1258 CE), with their capital in Baghdad, and the rise of the Fatimids in Egypt (969 CE) led to a decline in the Persian Gulf trade connecting with Gujarat and shifted Muslim trading activities to the Red Sea (see Kulke 2009: 2–3). As S. D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman (2008: 32) determined from their research into Hebrew-language documents from the eleventh to twelfth centuries recovered in Cairo in the nineteenth century, the eleventh century witnessed “a complete translocation of the Mediterranean trade routes.” The removal of the Fatimid government from Tunisia to Egypt was just part of this change. At this stage Genoa and Pisa were directly tapping into the Levant trade, in turn connected with India and the Far East. As Goitein (1980) demonstrates, the Geniza documents, as they are known, reveal much of the information missing from Arabic and other sources on the Indian trade with Europe during the medieval period, not to mention the specific role played by Jewish merchants from Tunisia and Fustat (Old Cairo), to Yemen and to the Malabar coast of India.

The Great Middle Eastern Terminus Port of Bandar Siraf

It would be apposite to examine the major terminus port in servicing the eighth- to tenth-century Persia-China long-distance trade. As mentioned, the name of this port was flagged by Renaudot in the context of tenth-century Arab voyaging to China (1718: 142): “This mart of Siraf is not to be met with in any of our maps; but it is said by the Arabian geographers to have been in the gulf of Persia, about sixty leagues from Shiraz; and that on its decay, the trade was transferred to Ormuz.” Long lost, Siraf also went through a long phase of European “rediscovery” (Stiffe 1895). According to Ferrand (1922: 14), in the ninth and tenth centuries CE, Bandar Siraf was a major port on the east coast of the Persian Gulf, represented today by the borough of Tahirh (Tahiri), located at 27°38' north latitude.

According to a British Museum description, located roughly halfway along the north shore of the Persian Gulf within a shallow bay partially occupied today by the village of Tahiri in southern Iran, the remains of the medieval city are confined within a narrow coastal strip of about 0.5–1 kilometer wide, with mountain ridges running parallel to the coast rising up immediately behind. With a deep-water approach and sound anchorage, the port offered good protection from the dominant storm pattern. Occupying a barren, isolated position with few dependable sources of irrigation and limited land suitable for farming, the port city obviously could not have thrived without trade or value-added manufacturing (British Museum).

At its height, Siraf covered an area of 250 hectares, with grand multistoried houses set back from the sea. At the center of the city was a large congregational mosque and bazaar and, in the suburbs, an extensive industrial quarter where there is evidence of the large-scale production of pottery and glass. Elsewhere within the city evidence was found of iron working, the manufacture of copper alloy, along with soft-stone, shell, textile, and jewelry work. According to a British Museum scientific research department report, for around 250 years, between the mid-eighth to early eleventh centuries CE, Siraf would have ranked among the world’s most prosperous cities (British Museum).

Excavated between 1966 and 1973 by the British Institute of Persian Studies and the Iranian Archaeological Service, as recorded by director of the project David Whitehouse (1968–1974), large areas of well-preserved architecture were exposed at various locations distributed across Siraf. These included a grand mosque, an Islamic palace, a cemetery, a bazaar area, and living quarters. Several million objects were recovered, with the largest cache of twenty thousand artifacts deposited and registered at the British Museum, albeit with cataloging not commencing until 2007 (British Museum). Archaeological evidence suggests that the historic port was a major marine trade hub during the pre-Islamic era and for the first four centuries following the advent of Islam. Today, Iran’s Siraf port has been included in a UNESCO “Tentative List” (anon. 2019).

Such a cursory description hardly does justice to the scope of the Persian-Chinese exchange going back to the Tang era (618–907) in Chinese history. While Islamic traditions in ceramic production date to the Syria-based Ummayad dynasty (r. 661–750), pottery making surged in Iraq under the internationally oriented Abbasid caliphs. Dating from c. 825 CE and associated with the Abbasid capital of Samarra, imitations of imported Tang Chinese ware were produced with special attention to shapes and whiteness but adapted to the Middle Eastern market. Excavations at Samarra uncovered Chinese white stoneware, porcelain, and other vessels dating from the Tang dynasty. Excavations at Siraf uncovered some thirty kilns from the tenth century, obviously attesting to strong pottery activity (although most finds were Samarra types). The most numerous of Chinese ceramics uncovered at Siraf include various types of stoneware, white porcelain, and greenware. Large numbers of Chinese pottery shards uncovered at Samarra and at the seaport of Siraf reveal the extent of the Indian Ocean trade (see Bloom and Blair [Vol. I] 2009: 440–50).

The Reverse Middle East–China Trade

Needless to say, the Middle East–China maritime trade was two way, according to local conditions along the sea lanes and terminal ports and seasonality. As Ho Chuimei (1995: 9) has explained, while the basic facts about the evidence of Chinese ceramics at Middle Eastern archaeological sites is well known, the reverse traffic in ninth- to tenth-century ceramics exported from the Middle East to East and Southeast Asia is less well explored. While both China and the Middle East produced high-fired glazed ceramics during this era, their technologies and outlooks were “worlds apart.” Notably, what attracted Far Eastern interest was the brilliant glaze colors that the Chinese could not match. Broadly, six kinds of Middle Eastern pottery have been attested in East and Southeast Asian sites, mostly bowls and jars. These are turquoise ware, tin-white ware, luster ware, cobalt blue-and-white ware, splashed green-on-white ware, and impressed green ware. Combing the literature, she found attestations at Mantai in northern Sri Lanka, interior sites in Thailand, the Bujang Valley on the Malay Peninsula, Palembang, the Philippines, central Vietnam, and Hakata and Daizifu (Fukuoka).[1] The major sites in China include Yangzhou and Fuzhou, both directly connected with the trade, with Yangzhou hosting a Persian quarter, as well in Guangxi possibly on an overland route. Turquoise ware vessels dominate, although other transfers cannot be excluded. From chemical analysis, kilns at Basra and Siraf appear to be the major points of manufacture (Ho 1995: 21). However, cobalt imported from Persia added distinction to some Chinese pottery traditions, for example, those emerging in Changsha, Guangdong, and Yangzhou, albeit mostly restricted to the period of intense two-way traffic and so fading away c. 950 CE (33–34).

III. Southeast Asian Circuits

With the evidence accumulating, the surge of interest and activity in marine archaeology in the Mediterranean world has come to be matched in Southeast Asia, with China the most recent active participant (Heaver 2017). Among the first to introduce and interpret such evidence from Southeast Asian sites in a more global or regional sense were Ming scholars Geoff Wade and Sun Laichen author-editors of Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century: The China Factor (2010), including a chapter by Singapore-based archaeologist John Miksic.

As André Wink (2004: 43–57) declaims, almost everywhere in the archipelago there were “river mouth states” with maritime orientations. This especially applied to Cham polities on the coast of Vietnam (Nha Trang; Old Hội An), as well as river port-polities on Borneo as with Old Brunei (Kota Batu). It also applies to central and southern Sumatra, where river mouths connect to rivers some of which snake hundreds of kilometers inland.[2] Defined by infertile or forested hinterlands, low population densities, and restricted economic production, by necessity such polities were trade oriented. Sparing in the use of political-religious monuments, they were also highly ephemeral owing to warfare and environmental factors.

Exploring the Sungai Musi River Road to the Srivijaya Capital of Palembang

As mentioned in Chapter 2, dating back to the first investigations initiated by Dutch colonial-era scholars, the locations of such presumed Srivijaya ports as Jambi on the river of that name and Palembang some 100 kilometers upstream on the Musi River have attracted some attention. In the late 1980s Abu-Lughod (1989: 291–93) flew over in an airplane adding a page on personal impressions, but, two decades prior (December 1968) I navigated the mainstream Musi River channel as far as Palembang in a European-rigged tongkang or twakow.[3]

While it is hard to generalize about traditional Chinese junk types, given the vast variety according to provenance and use (see Sokoloff 1982), the Fujianese family of vessels that appear to predominate in the Straits area do conform to common features. By contrast, the vessels deployed by the Zheng He expeditions and, indeed, the earliest oceangoing Chinese junks were of a northern Chinese Pechili or Kiangsu type (Waters 1939: 62; Cushman 1993: 52–53). Although nonspecific as to type, Manguin (2010: 369) likens Chinese vessels to a “piece of bamboo split in two along its length” with nodal walls as with a transom bow and stern bulkheads dividing the hull into watertight compartments. Characteristically, ship bottoms were rounded, without a keel. They featured a suspended rudder. Iron nails were used to fasten planks, as opposed to wooden dowels or pegs as used in the Austronesian tradition. To an astonishing degree, the description fits the vessel I navigated (although Manguin fails to mention the trademark black-dotted white-rimmed “eyes” on either side of the prow). It is true that accumulated bilge water had to be pumped, as not all was watertight. I allow that wooden dowels or pegs were also used, yet I am not as confident as Manguin (2010: 341) in asserting that this was part of a long hybrid evolution of type as opposed to pragmatic adaptation. Broad beamed (and not V-shaped, as in the Austronesian tradition), the vessel was easy to careen (as was necessitated in the Lingga Archipelago after hitting a drying reef). All that was lacking from the tongkang/twakow was the typical Chinese lug sail with battens. In contrast to vessels of the Arab, Indian, or European tradition, it could not run against the wind and was lumbering in comparison. Constructed from local timber, this was in no sense a hybrid Southeast Asian vessel. All the elements on this craft have been present in Chinese vessels reaching back over the millennium (allowing for the innovation of an engine and modified sails). In contrast to historical boat types as analyzed by Manguin, the tongkang/twakow I describe is part of a tradition imported by later arriving immigrants from China settling in the southern Straits area (Waters 1946).[4]

Entering the Musi River estuary following a stage at Muntok on Bangka Island in the southern Malacca Straits and crossing the northern end of the Bangka Strait, as ancient sailors would have been aware, the ebb and flow of tide is crucial. The tide in the Musi River is predominantly diurnal. The difference between high water (3.9 m) and low water (0.3 m) is significant. During the rainy season the current flows between 4 kilometers per hour between Sungsang and Palembang (JICA 2003). On my voyage, I encountered a Macassan prauh under full sail smoothly proceeding upstream as if transcending the epochs (and we made conversation by shouting across the water).

Wolters (1979: 33–50), who studied the river system with especial reference to the river estuary village of Sungsang contended that eight centuries ago, Palembang was as far distant from the main coast as it is today. This leads him to oppose the commonly held view of a steady process of sedimentation, although conceding that scattered islands in the delta did become connected up by this process. As evidence of Sungsang’s longevity, he draws upon a rich lode of archaeological evidence collected in situ pointing to its history dating at least back to the 1600s. Adding further historical context, he draws upon depictions of the central or “old channel” leading into the estuary and the main course of the Musi River as it appears on the Mao Kun maps illustrating the Zheng He voyages.

My sense then, as now, is that the mangrove-lined banks of the river masked centuries of accumulation of sediment washed down from the Barisan Mountains (which I visited on a trip to the towering volcano Gunung Dempo). I also find support for the constant siltation view in a modern study. According to a consultancy report on the river, the upstream riverbed features predominant hard rock boulder areas, whereas the downstream is formed of sediment brought from the upstream (JICA 2003). In any case, working the tides and winds like the Macassan prauh I encountered, the actual distance from the Bangka Straits to the putative site of the Srivijayan capital would not have been a hardship for navigators. We can also believe that in an early era, Sungsang villagers served as estuary guards and collected tax on passing vessels, as indeed did their uniformed successors in 1968 by way of firing a warning cannon shot across the tongkang’s bows (although in this case they sought to scrutinize the ship’s surat layar, or sailing permit, issued by the Indonesian Consulate in Singapore).

Notwithstanding the research conducted by the pioneer Orientalists, still much skepticism remained as to the actual site of a powerful kingdom holding sway over the Straits. As Abu-Lughod (1989: 292) declares, it was “impossible to believe” that this was the capital of the Srivijayan Empire. (In fact that was my own impression upon arriving in Palembang and surveying Bukit Seguntang.) As Manguin (2004: 1246) explains, “For half a century, however, the terrain at Palembang stubbornly refused to provide enough solid archaeological evidence to confirm that this site had indeed played such a major role in Asian history.” However, that changed in the late 1980s when sites in southern Sumatra eventually began to yield substantial evidence of Srivijaya’s prominence, “thus tilting the balance back to south Sumatra and confirming Cœdès’ earlier hypotheses.” Notably, excavation campaigns mounted from 1988 to 1991 at sites within Palembang city, as well as others scattered along a 12-kilometer stretch of the northern bank of the Musi River and even upstream, confirmed evidence of pre-fourteenth-century settlement combining manufacturing, religious, and political activity supporting a fairly dense population. As Manguin (1993b: 29; 37) summed up, based upon this evidence, “it is therefore now possible to confirm Cœdès’ early assumption: the early capital of Sriwijaya was at Palembang.”

Old Port Malacca

Although Malacca emerges in early modern history as a major trade emporium and obligatory port of call for shipping passing through the straits of the same name, it was unknown to classical Rome. Astride a river providing a sheltered anchorage, of course it may have been known to early arriving Indian or Arab sailors making passage through the straits, but it was merely one of many such places. Its fame did not precede its foundation perhaps tentatively as a Srivijayan outpost but more decisively as a sultanate following the conversion of its putative ruler-founder from Hinduism to Islam.

The primary source on the Malacca Sultanate (1403?–1511), the Malay Annals (Sejarah Melayu) is a literary work composed sometime between fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (although in fact numerous copies and versions exist). As a folksy narrative it relates the reign of the sultans of Malacca starting with Iskandar Shah until its demise at the hands of the Portuguese in 1511 and beyond, including the eventual reemergence of the Malaccan-modeled sultanates in other parts of the region, including Johor, Perak, and Pahang (not to mention Brunei). Part genealogical, the Annals create a putative ancestor to the dynastic line in Alexander the Great.

As passed down by Afonso de Albuquerque, the Portuguese conqueror of Malacca, as well as Tomé Pires, author of the Suma Oriental, Iskandar Shah was actually the son of a Srivajaya prince, Paramesvara (1344–c. 1414), earlier ruling in Singapore (Temasek). However, as Winstedt (1948: 727–29) deduced from his reading of Portuguese, Chinese, and Malay sources, Paramesvara and Iskandar Shah were “the same man before and after conversion to Islam.” D’Albuquerque and Tomé Pires made him a prince from Palembang (that is, Srivijaya, then tributary to Majapahit) who married a Javanese princess. But none of the court titles in Malacca were Javanese, and all Malay tradition gave the Malacca dynasty a Palembang (Srivijayan) origin, and so did the earlier Portuguese histories. So with Paramesvara a Hindu title, conversion to Islam took place during his reign. As Winstedt (727) asserts, “The omission of the name Paramesvara from all Malay accounts is incredible if he were a separate individual, but it is quite explicable if it means that Muslim Malays discarded from their history the Hindu pre-Muslim style of the founder of Malacca,” replaced with a Muslim title.

Malacca and Ming China

Because Malacca was touched by the Zheng He voyages, it is worth elaborating upon the sultanate’s relationship with China. Dating from October 1403, Malacca enters the Ming Shilu 明实录 as a tributary invested by China. According to an entry of October 1405 under the Yongle emperor, Malacca followed the imperial envoy Yin Qing to court to offer tribute and was officially enfeoffed and provided with seals and patents along with silks and clothing. Likewise, a return visit of the Zheng He mission to Malacca was recorded in an entry of 8 October 1407 (Wade 2005b). Elsewhere, the Chinese record that Paramesvara (Megat Iskandar Shah) sent envoys to China in 1405 and 1407, himself visiting in 1411 and again in 1419 especially to seek assurances of protection against pretensions to the lower Malay Peninsula on the part of rival Ayutthaya (Winstedt 1948: 727). Regular entries in the Ming Shilu record the missions of envoys practically down until the eve of Albuquerque’s conquest of the sultanate. The loss of a loyal tributary did not go down well with the Ming but, even with the Portuguese appearing off the coast of China, their response was weak. As translated by Wade (2005b), on 13 January 1521, the Ming Shilu recorded that “Melaka (Malacca) also memorialized requesting help, but the Court did not take measures in this respect.”[5]

The real world of Chinese contact with Malacca can perhaps be best viewed at Bukit Cina, one of the largest burial grounds outside of China, covering an area of more than 43 hectares, reputedly containing some graves from the Ming-era. The site is also embedded in legend, with a reference in the Malay Annals linking Bukit Cina to the reputed place of residence of Hang Li Po, a Chinese princess gifted to Sultan Mansor Shah (r. 1458–1477). The base of the site is also associated with the Perigi Raja, a well reputedly commissioned by the Zheng He mission, in any case of some antiquity (Pintado 1980: 52–54).

To be sure, as Reid (2010: 311–13, 322) clarifies, the gift of princesses from China appears in more than one chronicle version of history besides Malacca, for example, those touching upon Ayutthaya, various polities on Java, and Brunei. Prior to the strengthening of Islamic identities, he contends, such memories give credence to a less-well-recorded Chinese presence in this southern maritime zone dating back to the Mongol-Yuan period. It is credible as well that many of these early Chinese immigrants were themselves Muslims, as testified by Ma Huan, himself a Muslim. Some sources even suggest that Zheng He was the founder of Islamic communities on the Java coast from the beginning of the fifteenth century (see de Graaf and Pigeaud 1974).

The Pax Sinica imposed on Malacca, coinciding with dynastic alliances such as with Pasai on the northeastern coast of Sumatra, facilitated Malacca’s rise as a port where many merchants congregated, including Javanese rice brokers from the northern or pesisir coast of Java, Gujaratis and Chulia Muslims, and many non-Muslim regional traders: Thai, Chams, and even Ryukyu merchants whose final trading journey to the port turned back at news of the Portuguese invasion. Under Islamic control, Malacca was a welcoming port to long-distance Arab, Indian, and other Islamic merchants, but, in this era, they shared the waterways with Chinese fleets and Chinese merchants who began putting down roots. Port activities were controlled by four harbormasters, handling incoming and outgoing boats, collecting duties, and providing warehousing services. Special harbor masters were assigned to facilitate regional and long-distance shipping arriving from the Middle East, Java, the Khmer Kingdom, Ayutthaya, Brunei, or Ryukyu. In the words of Abu-Lughod (1989: 309), such organizational wherewithal on the part of the Malacca Straits emporium neatly encapsulated the contours of the Thirteenth-Century Indian Ocean World System in full swing, albeit destined to become the target for future aggrandizement. As alluded, this would come abruptly in the form of eastward-sailing Portuguese seeking a base from which to secure a monopoly on the spice trade at its point of origin in the Moluccas as well as access to the silk and silver of China and Japan.

The Sultanate of Aceh: Indian Ocean Gateway to Southeast Asia

Located on the northern tip of the island of Sumatra, the Aceh area is believed to be the earliest point of arrival of Islam in the western archipelago, dating back to the eighth century. Indeed, Islam was attested in Aceh by Marco Polo in 1292 on his return journey. When Ibn Battuta set foot in Sumatra in 1345, Aceh was under Sultan Malik Al-Zahir (r. 1326–50). Even so, as recorded in Arab and Chinese accounts, Aceh was preceded by such other polities in northern Sumatra as Lamuri. As studied by Guillot and Kalus (2008), the Kingdom of Samudera Pasai is now believed to be the first in Southeast Asia to convert to Islam and to have hosted rulers of “Turkish” origin. A 1297 royal tomb discovered in Pasai is said to be that of Sultan Malik al-Saleh (r. 1285–1297).

From relatively obscure origins, by 1540 Aceh had achieved prominence especially as a result of the westward export of pepper and spices to the Red Sea. Pepper exports alone amounted to 1,800 tons per annum. Because of this activity, Aceh’s reputation also reached as far as Constantinople, to which it sent an ambassador. More than that, with the arrival of an Ottoman trade representative in 1562, the Aceh sultan entered into a tributary relationship with the Porte, with the Ottomans becoming a crucial supplier of military technology to the Sumatran sultan (Boxer 1969; Reid 1969; Manguin 1999; Casale 2006: 194).

The pepper trade also linked Aceh to Java and farther afield in the archipelago. As rivals, the Portuguese were drawn into commerce and war with Aceh, and it is to Portuguese sources that we look for the first writings on and visual images of Sumatra. At the time of the Portuguese arrival in the Malacca Straits, Aceh was emerging as a major power. The reigning sultan Ali Mughayat Syah (r. 1514–1530) was then launching a series of conquests down the east coast of Sumatra, taking control of such pepper- and gold-producing areas as Deli, Aru, Pedir, and Pasir. In 1524, Sultan Ali defeated a Portuguese fleet under Malacca captain Jorge de Albuquerque. In 1580, the Portuguese Crown even created the office of capitão-mor de conquista do Achem, or the captain-major for the conquest of Aceh (Santos and Manguin 1997: 14). The backdrop to these battles was the contest between Aceh and the Portuguese to control Malacca. With Aceh reaching the height of its naval prowess under Sultan Iskander Muda (r. 1607–1636), it successfully attacked and defeated Johor in 1613. Nevertheless, in a disastrous battle against the Portuguese at Malacca in 1629, Aceh met its match (Lombard 1967; Ricklefs 1981: 30–31).

While Aceh’s prominence stemmed from its strategic location with respect to trading routes across the Indian Ocean and down the Malacca Straits, it also served as a font of Islamic learning and transmission across the Malay world. As Peter Riddell (2001: 139) elaborates, the great majority of theological texts still extant in the Malay world originate from Aceh. These range across theology, dogma, and mysticism, in form of handwritten manuscripts or copies, although none dates before the end of the seventeenth century, leaving a gap of some three centuries in our knowledge of Islamic theological activity in Southeast Asia.

Map 7.1: Trade circuits: Second millennium

IV. The South China and East China Sea Circuits

By contrast with the predominately maritime Southeast Asian sites discussed above, port cities along the China coast, such as Canton (Guangzhou), those of the Fujian triangle, Ryukyu, and Old Port Hakata in Kyushu, may have been more enduring. In other words, some of these cities may have fallen into the pattern described by Hall (2008a: 3–4) as “secondary center networks,” but others were pivotal as trade termini. This was certainly the case with Siraf in the Persian Gulf and Old Port Khanfu, or Canton, in southern China. Having mastered the maritime route from Persia across the Indian seas and through the Malacca Straits, Muslim communities then developed in a crescent of southern Chinese coastal locations.

Old Port Khanfu (Canton)

In Chapter 3, we followed the itinerary of Suleiman the merchant from Siraf to the southern Chinese port of Khanfu or Canfu (Canton), six or more sailing days up the Pearl River. As described, this was “the port where the ships put in, and to which is transported all the merchandise traded by the Arabs to China.” As mentioned by Sulaiman, Canfu (Khanfu) hosted “a Muslim judge for those of his religion, appointed as such by the emperor of China.” This is an important point of reference. As noted, “On holy days he performed the sermon or Kotbat.” Also, as mentioned, the merchants of Iraq or Persia who traded to Khanfu were in no way dissatisfied with the conduct of this judge, because his decisions were deemed “just and equitable” and in line with the Holy Koran (Renaudot 1718: 7). Today, Guangzhou’s Huaisheng Mosque 广州怀圣寺 is located at No. 56 Guangta Road, with its towering thirty-six-meter minaret. The oldest mosque in China, dating back over 1,300 years, it has been rebuilt many times over its history. Its existence adds supporting evidence to the existence of this lost community. Scholars agree that the first Muslims must have arrived in China within the seventh century. I first examined the mosque in 1983 when the minaret still dominated the surrounding landscape (and it just looked antique, restoration or not). I would estimate that originally it would have been closer to the river, which may have changed course over time. Obviously Arab-Persian-Indian Muslims arriving via the sea silk roads built this mosque, and the mosque supported a vibrant Muslim community.

Old Port Quanzhou

While Guangzhou had long been the premium Chinese port of embarkation for long-distance trade, in 1087 the Song established an office to regulate trade at Quanzhou (earlier known as Chinchew 泉州) on the coast of Fujian, which soon exceeded Canton in the collection of tax receipts. It was from Old Port Quanzhou, as noted, that one of its customs inspectors, Zhao Rugua, completed his compendious Zhu Fan Zhi. By the early Ming, Fuzhou and Suzhou would also serve this role. As Schottenhammer (2001: 2–3) and contributors to her edited volume convincingly demonstrate, evidence from Old Port Quanzhou covering trade activities between the tenth and fourteenth centuries during Song and Yuan dynasties offers ample evidence to challenge the notion that an “age of commerce” only began around 1400, linked to a rise in demand from Mediterranean and Chinese markets.

A cosmopolitan place, Quanzhou hosted numerous mosques alongside Buddhist and Hindu temples. These include the Kaiyuan Temple (开元寺), incorporating a temple built in 1283 by the Tamil Ainnurruvar Valanjiyar merchant community dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva also linked to the southern India Chola Empire (Guy 2001). Whether or not preceding the first arrival of Arab merchants in Canton, a mosque was opened in Quanzhou in 1009 and a customs officer appointed in 1087 (Salmon and Lombard 1979: 58). Inscriptions found in local cemeteries include Arabic, Persian, Syrian, and Tamil scripts, attesting to the cosmopolitan nature of the Chinese trading port. Especially during the trade-oriented Southern Song, the director-general of shipping was consistently a Muslim, as Muslims virtually dominated China’s long-distance trade during this period. Although the Mongol-Yuan invasion of the south scattered many Muslim communities, in Ming times Muslims achieved social integration as well as privilege in Han society. Ibn Battuta, who visited Quanzhou, Fuzhou, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou in 1345, left a description.

Students of maritime Asia have long pointed to the preeminence of Quanzhou as a key trading terminus on the central China coast in present-day Fujian Province, one that came to its florescence during Northern Sung (Chaffee 2011: 103–8). Known to Marco Polo as Zaitun (or Çaiton in the French translation), it was known to the Arabs as Shanju or Zaitun, a likely corruption. According to Abulseda (Abu’l-Fida), the Damascus-born geographer (1273–1331), “There is a river as Zaitun and the town is situated near its mouth.” Writing in 1890, Geo Phillips claims that the Ramusio edition of Marco Polo is exact in matching Zaitun with Chinchew (alternatively known as Quanzhou) but not Fuchau (Fuzhou). Yule’s text (1866: 2:217) reads, “At this city you must know is the Haven of Zayton frequented by all the ships of India, which bring thither spicery and all other kinds of costly wares” (and this is matched by the French edition of Polo’s La Description du Monde). As Phillips asserts, the Yule text thus correlates with the Ramusio version of a city and port that existed during Mongol-Yuan times at Changchau (Zhangzhou) and at the entrance of the Zhangzhou River (1890: 1:228).

When in the year 1345 Ibn Battuta arrived at Quanzhou, it was then still under Mongol rule. As recorded in the Gibb (1929: 282) translation, Ibn Battuta attested to the local manufacture of fine porcelain, noting how it was exported to India and farther west. Silk (and silkworms) are attested but not the silk-making process. He also noted the use of paper currency. He observed Muslim quarters in a number of Chinese towns. With Zayton his first port of call in China, he described it as “one of the largest in the world, or perhaps the very largest. I saw in it about a hundred large junks, they could not be counted for multitude. It is formed by a large inlet of the sea which penetrates the land to the point where it unites with the great river. . . . [T]he Muslims live in a town apart from the others.” He described the manufacturing process of large ships in Quanzhou. Once having arrived in the city he was met by a cadi (quadi), or magistrate, and leading merchants including two Persians, Burhan al-Din of Kazerun, an imam or mosque leader, and Sharif al-Din from Tabriz (287). He also traveled from Beijing to Hangzhou and then proceeded to Fuzhou. After returning to Quanzhou in 1346, Ibn Battuta began his return journey, boarding a Chinese junk owned by the sultan of Samudera Pasai on Sumatra.

As with the physical evidence offered by the Kaiyuan Temple, graveyard inscriptions, not to mention Chinese annal accounts, along with Zhao Rugua’s rich compilation of trade and traded items, as revealed in a following chapter, marine archaeology likewise offers important corroborating evidence of Quanzhou’s importance in connecting Song and Yuan China with the overseas trade, long prior to the great Ming voyages of Zheng He.

Old Port Hakata

At the eastern terminus of the maritime silk roads, Old Port Hakata 博多 on northern Kyushu was not directly connected with Rome or other points to the west, whether by terrestrial or maritime routes. Nevertheless, as evidenced by the recovery in Hakata (modern Fukuoka) and the ancient Japanese capital of Nara of ceramic shards linked with the late eighth-century Islamic Abbasid Empire with its capital in Baghdad, it was indeed connected as part of a long-distance trade in luxury goods (anon. 2009). Some 950 archaeological sites have been worked beneath the modern city center of Fukuoka, from Hakata Station toward the Old Port Hakata. Sites built on top of sand dunes facing Hakata Bay flourished from the latter half of the eleventh century up to the end of the sixteenth as Japan’s largest trading port. From the twelfth century, Old Port Hakata also hosted a Chinese district. As modern archaeology at select temple sites in Fukuoka confirms, medieval trade was supported by various Buddhist temple communities.

Conclusion

As we supposed, emporium ports such as Siraf and Old Port Khanfu along with Quanzhou or even Hakata at the end of the maritime line were special insofar as they stood at the opposite ends of a sea link across which such precious commodities as silk, spices, and later ceramics were traded in one direction, and exotic woods, Indian textiles, and natural substances went the other way. The macro-approach adopted in this chapter appears to confirm an earlier vein of writing (as with Abu-Lughod and contributors to the Schottenhammer collection) that the poles of the long-distance trade were like magnets, with mutual attraction feeding the business of commerce and industry so very evident in Song-dynasty China, also coinciding with an initial florescence of commercial activity under the south India–based Chola Empire, further dynamized by the Abbasid dynasty feeding into but also predating Southeast Asia’s proclaimed “age of commerce.”

But between these ports were a cascade of what Hall (2008a; 2008b) describes as “secondary center networks.” According to epoch, as this chapter has identified—and the historical sweep is vast—they included Mediterranean ports like Old Port Benghazi, Alexandria (Cairo-Fustat), Red Sea ports like Massawa or Adulis, ports of the Indian Ocean trade as with ports in Oman, those on the two coasts of India, and ports astride the Straits of Malacca, as those of the Srivijayan Empire including Palembang and, from its foundation, Malacca, reaching variously to the eastern archipelago and the China coast. As demonstrated, recent archaeological investigation has thrown new light upon these ancient ports, some relegated to obscurity and few easily accessible today.

Yet there were other ports and backwaters that we might regard as tertiary center networks, perhaps off the main route, and that description befits the Southeast Asian ports. As described, many fit the description of river-mouth ports, like the obligatory waiting places along the Malacca Straits for the change of monsoon, including the more obscure Srivijayan ports, as with Jambi and Temasek, the little-known Kalah (Kedah), or even China Sea ports as with (Poni) Brunei. For that matter, the description befits even non-ports, as with mandatory stopovers to replenish water on the strategically located Tioman Island en route from the Straits to the southern Vietnam coast. To be sure, the ranking of primary, secondary, and tertiary, as with these ancient trade ports, was never static in any century, given the rise and fall of empires, shifts in trade routes, and ecological and other factors. Still, it is striking that, with the possible exception of Aceh, which adopted advanced metallurgy in the manufacture of cannons, in this age commerce did not translate into industry above the level of craft or signature forms of ingenuity, as with Austronesian boat building. In fact, as attested in archaeological sites across the region, ceramics and other items of local Southeast Asian manufacture, variously Thai, Vietnamese, and Burmese, were invariably manufactured in relatively obscure rural workshops outside of urban centers, much less harbor ports.

1. Ceramic shards linked with the Abbasid Empire have also been uncovered in Japan’s eighth century Nara capital (Asahi Shimbun, 4 July 2009), whether or not arriving via the sea or land silk road route.

2. Besides the Sungai Musi, there are eight other major rivers in southern Sumatra, namely the Rawas, the Lematang, the Kelingi, the Ogan, the Komering, the Lakitan, the Seamus, and the Bating Hair Leko, Of these, the Sungai Musi is the longest at 700 km. Of this, 450 km is navigable. The median width is 200 m (JICA 2003).

3. As described in Webster’s, a tongkang is “[a] kind of boat or junk used in the seas of the Malay Archipelago.” More accurately, it is a generic term used on both sides of the Malacca Straits to denote a cargo lighter. Although coming in various styles, most are Chinese-built, owned, and manned, although the name is from the Malay not Chinese (see Gibson-Hill 1952: 84).

4. According to Gibson-Hill (1952: 89), this vessel fits the description of a twakow, or Chinese-style hull, (formerly) used in Singapore as a sailing lighter to collect firewood from the off-lying islands and subsequently as a power-driven boat. “It is squat and very beamy, almost flat-bottomed amidships, with a narrow, Y-shaped transom bow and a broad, winged transom stern, a toad-like version of the bumboat sampan.” Frequently referred to as a “motor tongkang,” the word should be “motor twakow.”

5. The Mao Kun map from the Wubei Zhi, in turn derived from the early fifteenth-century maps of Zheng He’s navigators and cartographers, portrays Malacca (满剌加) near the top left.

8. The Evidence from Marine Archaeology

In the previous chapter, we announced the importance of an interconnected series of port cities spanning the Indian Ocean trading network from Rome to the China coast, matched where possible with context offered by terrestrial archaeological research. By contrast this chapter shifts the focus to shipwreck and other marine archaeological data with a view to deriving comparative lessons on a number of interrelated facets in line with a general world regional history perspective. As cognate research reveals, by allowing for a longue durée analysis, such a macro-approach can offer informed lessons on early modernity, proto-industrialization, state consolidation, cultural-civilizational exchange, and maritime prowess (see Kimura 2015: 3).

Arguably, as this chapter presents, some of the most exciting research in the field of the historical East-West trade stems from advances in marine archaeological research, major discoveries, and new interpretations. In a large sense such research has revolutionized our understandings of the historical ceramic trade, marine technology of the ship types, the organization behind the trade, the cargoes, and multiple other details. Private investigators and national governments have all become stakeholders in these ventures. Needless to say, mounting such expeditions is fraught with risk, whether financial or legal, just as the stakes are often high for those who venture the capital as well as for the claimants of the sunken prize, both individual as well as national (Ruppé and Barstad 2002).

One point that should be made is that, relative to terrestrial archaeology of which there are many examples, because of costs and risks the number of marine archaeological sites globally is far more restricted, only a handful in the Eastern Hemisphere. Though it has ancient antecedents, marine archaeology really took off only in the 1950s, with the advent of scuba-diving equipment, and the number of known wrecks in the Mediterranean world has quadrupled since the 1970s (Göransson 2007: 208). Even so, as Lilian Ray Martin (2001: 59) writes in her study of Venetian ship archaeology, the number of medieval ship remains in the Mediterranean are “scant,” with the earliest Venetian ship construction treatises only dating from the fifteenth century. To make up for this lacunae in knowledge, she adopts the method of sifting through the pictorial imagery of which Venice is rich to better understand the city’s layered maritime traditions. It is also a method with application to Indian Ocean and China Sea navigation.

In particular, the new interest in marine archaeology/underwater heritage has been signaled by the appearance of such dedicated journals as the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology and the INA Quarterly of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology with a focus upon the Red Sea. As Hyunhee Park (2012: 15–16) writes in her sweeping investigation of Sino-Islamic historical relations, “The archaeological evidence, therefore, helps us understand the conditions of contact that could have facilitated the transfer of knowledge between the two societies at a given period of time.” Still, very few synoptic works on the state of the art of marine archaeology in Asian waters have been attempted. In this sense the works by Seland (2010; 2014) on the archaeology of trade in the Western Indian Ocean, appear to be exceptional.

In recent times, at least two researchers or research groups have sought to compile data sets on East-Southeast Asian shipwreck sites: Kimura Jun (2010), identifying fifteen wreck sites in the China maritime area; and the late Roxana M. Brown (2010), identifying a somewhat larger number in Southeast Asian seas (and all of them dating from what might be called a late medieval epoch). Still, another caveat holds, namely conducive political conditions that would allow archaeological research of any kind have proven elusive across large parts of the Middle East and Southeast and East Asia over certain time frames. However, given that marine archaeology can be harnessed to national as much private interest, as with the recovery of “treasure,” a new impetus to such investigation can be seen across this vast region, where it serves scientific and historiographical ends.

As indicated, the number of maritime archaeological sites globally as well as regionally (East-Southeast Asia) are far fewer than terrestrial sites. But these sites, mostly pertaining to trading vessels (although we have one example of a war fleet), are likely to prove to be time capsules of trade activity and connectivity between port polities, although subject to much research and hypothesizing as well. Restricting our focus to East-Southeast Asia and again using ceramics as a proxy of trade activity, we also learn that a variety of port polities can be identified, along with a variety of merchant groups and shippers, revealing the internationality of medieval trade. First, the chapter elaborates upon the concept of ceramic trade as a proxy for overall trade, as corroborated by terrestrial archaeological discovery. In a second section, the chapter surveys a select number of marine archaeology sites from across the Indian Ocean realm. Third, it examines early modern trade polities in East-Southeast Asia with reference to evidence supplied by European shipwrecks. Aside from Chinese wrecks, this chapter also canvasses examples of “Austronesian” and Arab dhow-type ships, suggesting the regionality of the trade, even prior to the major entry of Mongol Yuan-era shipping into the Nanyang or South Seas trade.

I. Ceramic Trade as a Proxy for Early Trade Activity and the Rise and Fall of Port Cities

With its roots in antiquity, Chinese ceramics entered the ancient sea silk roads as traded items. As Abu-Lughod (1989: 327) has pointed out, shards of Chinese ceramics are to be found strewn along the coastal zones of the Indian Ocean. The same could be said of Southeast Asian waters along with many terrestrial sites. But the first long-distance traded ceramics arriving in Southeast Asia were undoubtedly produced in south India, entering the Indian transfer of the first to fifth centuries CE. The tradition was also carried forward by Muslim traders reaching the coast of China, and, after Abu-Lughod, we hailed this event as helping to define the Thirteenth-Century Indian Ocean World System. To be sure, as developed below, China was not the exclusive producer and exporter of ceramics and earthenware. Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, and Japanese kilns all entered the trade, with each finding its respective market niche and all entering the shipwreck and archaeological record. Important for our study, as Grave, Macceroni, and Lisle (2005: 165) explain, the analysis of specialized ceramic production sites can be a highly sensitive “proxy of political, social as well as economic change.”

The maritime trade in the western Indian Ocean and even the Southeast Asian area continued to be dominated by foreign (Arab, Persian, and Southeast Asian) shipping, at least up until the eighth century CE, when the first large oceangoing Chinese vessels began to appear (although Chinese vessels were by no means dominant until centuries later). With more consequence, the Mongol-Yuan (1271–1368 CE) dynasty initiated the construction of large naval vessels explicitly to enter Southeast Asian waters, a reference to the invasion fleets sent to Japan in 1274 and 1281, Đại Việt and Champa in 1283–1288, and Java in 1292. However, it would only be the early Ming-era expansion of maritime trade as signaled by the Zheng He’s voyages (1405–1424; 1433 CE) that virtually all of the port cities across the two oceans would be linked under Chinese as opposed to Arab auspices. After Needham (1971: 593), this we dubbed the “Chinese century” pending the great Ming withdrawal from the Indian Ocean.

East Asian Ceramic Production Sites and the “Ming Gap” Theory Revisited

In the previous chapter, we alluded to ceramic production in the Chinese and Middle Eastern cores. But with the decline of the Abbasid Empire and withdrawal from the Indian Ocean trade, the center of gravity with respect to ceramic production and associated trade shifted back to East Asia. As attested by early arriving Westerners in China, Jingdezhen in China’s present-day Jiangxi Province, accessible to both resources and the Grand Canal, stood as the world’s largest porcelain production site from 1350 to 1750, alongside such other kilns then active at Dehua (Fujian), Cizhao (Heibei), Yi (Fujian), and Longquan (Zhejiang). The production process in China, as well as the marketing and transport of the prized goods across local, regional, and long-distance markets, engaged tens of thousands of workers at numerous large-scale production sites. It also called down a high degree of proto-industrial activity and organization, although falling short of a capitalist revolution. Alongside a range of sites in China, including coastal Fujian, such other East-Southeast Asian production centers as Champa, Đại Việt, Thailand, Burma, and Hizen-Arita in Kyushu, would follow suit finding regional and long-distance markets, according to their niches (see Gunn 2011: chap 10).

Researchers such as Roxana M. Brown (2000; 2005; 2009; 2010) gave a major impetus to interpreting the often-conflicting evidence relating to a scaling back of early Ming trade. Notably, the Hongwu emperor (r. 1368–1398), the first in the Ming dynasty, declared private trade and overseas travel illegal, thus reversing the Song dynasty policy of open trade with major consequences for exports of much-esteemed Chinese porcelain. Internal strife touching Jengdezhen likewise impacted production and export.

According to Brown (2005: 78–79), the evidence from shipwrecks reveals a substantial shortage of Chinese ceramics in the early Ming dynasty. Notably, the plunge in Chinese exports emerges precisely after the last of Zheng He’s voyages. This “Ming Gap,” as it was earlier dubbed by Tom Harrisson (1958) from observations in Sarawak and Brunei, dates from 1380 to 1487. On the evidence of documented shipwrecks, China maintained a near monopoly in trade ceramics from at least the ninth to the early fourteenth centuries. But, c. 1368 to 1424–1430, the cargoes yielded only 30 to 40 percent Chinese ceramics, plunging to 5 percent in the mid-fifteenth century. A bubble appears again in the Hongzhi period (1488–1505 CE), but a moderate shortage remained until the Ming ban on overseas travel was lifted in 1527. Shortages in the sixteenth century were not as severe as those of the preceding century and not severe enough to lure Burmese and Vietnamese producers back into the market. But, between 1510 and 1580, Thai kilns were strong competitors of the Chinese until China regained its former monopoly.

In particular, the northern region of Vietnam emerged as a major ceramics production site as with the Red (Hong) River from Thăng Long (Hanoi) to Hải Dương Province, along with sites extending into the delta at Haiphong and reaching the historical island port of Van Don, north of Ha Long Bay. It was here during the period of Chinese domination (111 BCE–938 CE) over the early Đại Việt that Chinese artisans set up. As evoked by trade ceramic specialist John Guy (2005:10), the major center of high-fired ceramics at Chu Đậu in Hải Dương Province was a veritable Vietnamese “Jingdezhen.” Firmly under Ly (Li) (1009–1225 CE) state-backed enterprise, the Chu Đậu kilns were specially designed to compete with Chinese wares in the Southeast Asian market. In this maritime zone of intense activity, any number of ports could be identified as servicing the ceramic export trade.

As a maritime-oriented kingdom, Champa also mastered ceramic production and entered the export industry. As Guy (2005: 118) explains, the Cham kilns, capable of producing high-fired glazed ceramics in commercial quantities, were located at various sites near Quy Nhơn in the present-day Bình Định Province of Vietnam. The loss of the major production center of Jingdezhen also had ramifications for Japan, as the Dutch commenced to look to the Arita kilns on Kyushu as an alternative source of porcelain. At the end of the 1650s, kilns in Arita started to produce underglaze blue Chinese-style goods for the Dutch market, with Nagasaki emerging as the key point of export and attracting the Chinese junk trade, linking up with Fujian and other coastal ports (see Gunn 2007; 2013a: Chap. 10).

Map 8.1: Ceramic production sites and junk trade ports, c. sixteenth to eighteenth centuries

II. Key Marine Archaeology Sites across the Indian Ocean

In presenting evidence acquired from marine archaeology across the Indian Ocean, several taxonomies are called upon. From within a Chinese-era taxonomy, sequencing reflects the major dynasties from Tang onward (how else could we explain the Ming Gap?). But because the sites touch the Indian Ocean littoral, we should also be alert to an Islamic calendar as well as major dynastic cycles touching the Indianized ports and polities. But referencing evidence of the Roman-era trade (as much as presenting this writing to an international audience), the Common Era (CE) notation system is the most useful and widely accepted.

Oman: The Ancient City of Qalhat

The Sultanate of Oman is not reticent in publicizing its historic role in the sea silk road trade across the Indian Ocean. Simply, its key location astride the Gulf of Oman leading into the Strait of Hormuz in the north to the Arabian Sea fronting the southern coast of the Arabian Peninsula leading into the Bab-el-Mandeb and the Red Sea bespeaks its importance. Marine archaeological research conducted at the sunken port city of Qalhat in 1998 by members of a Western Australian Museum team have helped to place Oman’s central role in the medieval Indian Ocean trade in perspective (Vosmer et al. 1998), offering a rare example of such research from the Middle East.

Located on the eastern coast of Oman, approximately twenty kilometers north of the city of Sur, Qalhat flourished in the eleventh to sixteenth centuries CE under the rule of the princes of Hormuz. With its strategic location off the east Arabian coast, the port city functioned as a trade center linking the Arabian Peninsula with India and eastward to Southeast Asia and China across the Indian Ocean. Alongside ceramics and porcelain arriving from China and Southeast Asia, exports of horses, dates, incense, and pearls all figured. The ancient city of Qalhat was listed in 2018 as a World Heritage site, and according to a UNESCO summary, since its abandonment the sixteenth century, the city “preserves all characteristics of organization, function and architectural techniques corresponding to the Islamic Period in general and the period of the Hormuz Kingdom in particular” (see UNESCO, Ancient City of Qalhat).

Surrounded by fortified walls that protected houses and shops, Qalhat was attested by Pliny, who described the city as a “trading station” and “port of embarkation for India.” Marco Polo visited in the thirteenth century, referring to it as Calatu, followed thirty years later by Ibn Battuta, who described the city’s bazaars and especially the imposing mosque in glowing terms (Vosmer et al. 1998: 5). Plausibly, the Zheng He expedition visited the city in the fifteenth century. In 1507 the same mosque was attested by Afonso d’Albuquerque, although it was later destroyed by the Portuguese in their zeal to neutralize the Arab stranglehold on the Indian Ocean trade. With Muscat coming under Portuguese control in 1507, its defeat at Arab hands in 1550 saw Oman transformed into a maritime empire sweeping the Swahili coast of Africa and the Persian Gulf area into the following century.

With their underwater research concentrated on the foreshore of the Qalhat site, the Western Australian group comprising scuba diving and remote sensing specialists uncovered ceramic sherds, beads, glassware fragments, and coins sufficient to testify to the port’s active trade through the medieval period. Besides ceramics, a particular feature of the archaeological record was the attestation of numerous lithic objects, including ship’s anchors. Some are identified as “Mediterranean” or Red Sea, and others are identified as Indo-Arabian (long plinth-like stones with strategically placed round holes), and one is identified as a Greek-style anchor. Acknowledging the importance of the finds in helping to ascertain the advanced geometry behind anchor assembly and deployment, the research group dubbed this “the largest collection of stone anchors known anywhere in the world” (Vosmer et al. 1998: 54). The ceramic assemblage discovered included Chinese ceramics of the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, Celadon, Longquan, and Ming; Vietnamese, primarily fourteenth to fifteenth centuries; Thai from Sukhothai, fourteenth to fifteenth centuries; Thai Sisatchanalai, from the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries; Persian sandyware and turquoise; copper coins believed to be Chinese; Hormuzi, thirteenth to fifteenth centuries; Yemeni yellow glazed ware; and one Burmese, unidentified (Vosmer et al. 1998).

Seldom does the archaeological record from across the Indian Ocean reveal such a rich and mixed assemblage of trade items from both East and Southeast Asia. As explored in this chapter, with the first emperor of the Ming dynasty turning away from the free trade policy of the Song, Vietnamese and Thai exporters stepped into the breach created by the Ming Gap. While marine archaeological research amply confirms the importance of the port in the medieval Indian Ocean trade, the record for the sixteenth century reveals diminishing activity, disappearing completely in following centuries. The reasons for the decline of the port city have long resisted clear answers, whether owing to the Portuguese assault or wars at the hands of Arabs of the interior or, as now seems to be most likely, destruction from an earthquake (Ermertz et al. 2019).

The Godawaya Wreck, Sri Lanka

This discussion raises the question of what kind of Indian ships made this journey across the Bay of Bengal. Investigations conducted in 2010 by an international team of maritime archaeologists of a shipwreck off the southern coastal village of Godawaya, Sri Lanka, yielded a concentration of artifacts including quern, or grinding stones, various types of ceramics, and glass ingots. A broad date of the second century BCE to the second century CE is assigned to the assemblage, placing it in the early historical period (Ikuta’s first period). The Godawaya wreck is thus the earliest known and as yet investigated shipwreck in South Asia (Muthucumarana; Gaur; Chandraratne; Manders; Rao; Bhushan; Khedekar; Dayananda, 2014). It is also the second shipwreck discovered in the western Indian Ocean (Seland 2014: 373). The ship may or may not have been trading from India or traveling to Southeast Asia, and much remains unanswered about this wreck.

The Kerala or Taikkal-Kadakkarappally Boat

To address the question of ship type, V. Selvakumar (2011: 208–13) has boldly interpreted evidence to hypothesize a possible Indian borrowing of Austronesian marine technology—namely, “lashed-lug” hull techniques as found on a local wreck discovered on the coast of Kerala. Dubbed the “Taikkal-Kadakkarappally boat” and coming under the auspices of the Kerala State Department of Archaeology, it is the first large watercraft to be excavated in India in a waterlogged deposit. The lashed-lug technique, as described by Horridge (1986: 44–45), has also been attested in the Maldives (including by Ma Huan, who accompanied the Zheng He voyages to the Maldives in 1413 and in 1421) (Manguin 2001: 26). But its discovery on a medieval wreck in India is entirely novel.

For Selvakumar, the lashed-lug hull discovery on the Taikkal-Kadakkarappally boat, along with attestation of certain ceramic traditions of Southeast Asia provenance, suggests a process of borrowing and adaptation, but this should not be surprising given the frequency of Austronesian and Chinese contacts with Kerala on the Malabar Coast of India. Manguin (2001: 45) goes even further using the evidence derived from a study of Maldives shipyards to hypothesize either a long era of Austronesian sailings across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar staging in the Maldives or a veritable shared eastern Indian Ocean tradition of techniques and nautical vocabulary.

The Belitung Wreck

An important link in the discovery chain was the recovery in the late 1990s of the Belitung wreck, a dhow-type ship dating from the ninth century and the first ship in the Arabo-Indian tradition to be archaeologically recovered in Southeast Asian waters. Excavated off Cirebon on the north Java coast in 2004–2005 (and purchased by the Singapore government), the wreck was found laden with quantities of Changsha ceramics dating from the Southern Tang (937–975 CE), known for their distinctive brown and straw-colored glaze (Flecker 2000). It also yielded a wealth of Yue ceramics (olive or brownish-green celadon) with strongly Buddhist motifs, along with a range of glass and other objects with Arabic or Islamic inscriptions possibly of Syrian or Persian provenance, as well as two gold-plated daggers with Sunni Arab inscriptions. With its mixed assemblage of cargoes from China and the Arab world, the provenance of the ship is open to interpretation, though it may well have transited Srivijayan ports athwart the Malacca Straits. For example, Yvonne Tan (2007) believes that the Belitung wreck was possibly not Arab or Indian but rather a lashed lug and dowel craft befitting its Austronesian origins.

The Phanomsurin Ship of Samut Sakhon (Thailand)

As first announced in 2013, a well-preserved ship hull was discovered in Samut Sakhon Province of Thailand in a reclaimed mangrove swamp some eight kilometers from the present-day shoreline of the Gulf of Thailand. Precisely, this was located between the Tha Chin and Chao Phraya river deltas, obviously subject to siltation over the centuries. Named the Phanomsurin ship after the landowners, the twenty-five- to thirty-meter-long hull has the characteristics of an Indian Ocean dhow, displaying the sewn plank technique and thus not of the Austronesian shipbuilding tradition. Recovered artifacts date the ship back to Dvaravati Mon (sixth to eleventh centuries CE). Plausibly the Phanomsurin wreck site was an ancient canal or shoreline amid a mangrove forest reachable from the sea leading to other Dvaravati (Mon) cities such as Nakhon Pathom, then a large moated urban center about thirty kilometers distant.

Excavation by the Fine Arts Department of Ratchaburi National Museum, Muang District, Ratchaburi Province, in Thailand commenced in 2014 and 2015. Press reports (with photos) reveal an almost complete hull structure exposed in the swamp (Fernquest 2014). Among the artifacts discovered inside the ship are earthenware and stoneware, both unglazed from domestic kilns and several pieces of Chinese-style stoneware dating to the Tang dynasty (eighth through ninth centuries). Vegetable material included betel nuts, coconut fruits, toddy palms, rice, halved coconut shells, wood resin, a horn, fish bones, animal bones, and plant seeds.

According to Guy (2017: 183), who examined the ceramic typologies represented on board, they are readily identifiable as belonging to three distinct traditions: Chinese, Mon, and Persian Gulf. Taken together, various items allow preliminary dating of the Phanomsurin shipwreck. Neither the quantities nor the types represented suggest that the ceramics were a commodity in their own right. The Chinese wares recovered at the Phanomsurin site are represented by rudimentary storage jars, associated with Guangdong Province of the late Tang period. Some of the jars have pseudo-Arabic inscriptions incised into the wet clay during manufacture, indicating that they were expressly produced for the use of Gulf clients or for goods destined for them. A number of cord-marked and incised-decoration earthenware vessels were recovered on board, of types widely associated with the Mon culture of lower-central Thailand in the later first millennium. Particularly significant were the remains of a turquoise glazed double-handled jar of Persian Gulf origins. As Guy (184) comments, the “ubiquitous presence of turquoise wares across the long-distance trade routes, from Basra to southern China, signals the pivotal role that Basra, the premier port of Abbasid Baghdad, had assumed by the 9th century as an important source of the glazed ceramics that the Gulf contributed to this long-distance exchange.” Other wares included torpedo-shaped stoneware storage jars widely attested in west Asian sites. Two wares carried inscriptions. One in Chinese on a Guangdong Yue-type green glazed storage jar can be linked with a production site on the Pearl River upstream from Guangzhou. The other is a Pahlavi (Middle Persian) inscription chiseled into a torpedo jar, linking the jar with a Persian merchant owner dated to the eighth century (or prior to the adoption of Arabic script for the writing of Persian).

As to the overall significance of the wreck, as Guy (2017: 192) interprets, the Guangdong Yue-glazed stoneware ceramics locates this cargo in the second half of the eighth century. A such this is the first archaeological evidence that ships originating in the Gulf and participating in the Gulf-China trade were also engaged in regional trading networks of which we have almost no prior knowledge. Of particular relevance to this study, the presence of the Guangdong Yue ceramics on board suggests that the ship appears have already visited Guangzhou. In addition, according to Guy (182), the presence of rattan basketry, an ivory tusk, and deer antlers provides the first evidence in East Asia of maritime trade in such forest products of which Thailand became renown. Overall, the Phanomsurin shipwreck brings into focus the wider engagement of Persian merchants in connecting with not only port cities in China but local ports in both maritime and mainland Southeast Asia (see 191).

The Intan Wreck, a Tenth-Century Underwater Site

Initially found by Indonesian fishermen in the Java Sea (midway between Jakarta and Bangka Island), the tenth-century Intan wreck has turned out to be one of the most important for unlocking dynamics of the intraregional trade in an era prior to Chinese participation. Following an investigation survey conducted by shipwreck specialist Michael Flecker (2000; 2002), the Intan wreck site was excavated by the German company, Seabed Explorations, in 1997. About thirty meters long (or the same as the Quanzhou wreck, as discussed below), the Intan ship hull was pegged together with dowels. It was an indigenous vessel decorated with Javanese icons of Hindu origin, not a Chinese vessel, which were typically built using iron nails. The “Borobudur ship” such as profiled could be an archetype.

As Flecker (2000; 2002) explains, the site turned out to be the oldest Southeast Asian wreck with a complete cargo. Carbon dating augmented ceramic and coin analysis to confirm a tenth-century CE date. Timber identification and structural details indicated that the ship was an indigenous lashed-lug craft. It can only be a hypothesis, but Flecker believes that the ship was bound from the Srivijayan capital of Palembang to central or eastern Java. The recovered cargo was extremely diverse. It consisted of several thousand Chinese ceramics; Thai fine pasteware; base metal ingots of bronze, tin, lead, and silver; Javanese gold jewelry; bronze religious and utilitarian artifacts; Chinese mirrors; Arab glass; iron pots; and a wide range of organic materials.

As described by Denis Twitchett and Janice Stargardt (2002), the Intan wreck provides a time capsule of the particular trade carried out at that time between particular places. Indeed, the range of findings that these two authors read from the data even on domestic Chinese economic issues is astonishing. Four distinct elements of the cargo confirm a date of about 920–960 CE. For their part, Twitchett and Stargardt analyzed a large sample of the silver ingots found in the wreck, originating as salt tax in China but entering the bullion trade between China and Southeast Asia. As these two authors hypothesize, the probable port of lading for the Intan ship was either Quanzhou or Guangdong. It is likely that the ship delivered incense or exotic woods to China. Inter alia, their research points up the importance of metals in the Chinese overseas trade of this period.

The Châu Tân Shipwreck

As it was dubbed by pioneer researcher Nishimura Masanari, the Châu Tân shipwreck was discovered in waters offshore Bình Châu District, Quảng Ngãi Province, of Vietnam in the early 2000s. From evidence of Yue celadonware (celadon and underglaze ceramics of so-called Changsha ware made at the Tongguan kilns in Hunan), the wreck can be dated to the eighth or ninth century CE. Launching his research between 2011 and 2013, Nishimura confronted numerous issues concerning the archaeological value of the recovered artifacts, some of them already in the hands of collectors, especially as to whether the material originated from a single shipwreck or multiple shipwrecks, alongside damage caused by pillaging.

Following Nishimura’s demise in May 2013, site investigation continued under the auspices of the Vietnam Academy for Social Science Institute of Archaeology and its newly created Department of Underwater Archaeology set up in July of that year, along with a Japanese team (Nishino 2017: 109). Their research indicates that the ship timbers came from an eighth- to ninth-century Southeast Asian ship, further confirming the dating of recovered Chinese ceramics to the Tang dynasty. They also confirm that the assemblage of salvaged artifacts is similar to those recovered from the ninth-century Belitung shipwreck. Moreover, while the Belitung ship is believed to be an Arab-type ship, the Châu Tân ship is Southeast Asian (Austronesian), as identified from the lashed-luge hull style, the first example of this technology to be identified in Vietnam (112, 121). Importantly, as revealed by Kimura (2015: 3), while there are similarities with the cargo of the Belitung ship, the Châu Tân ship also included ceramics with incised Chinese, Arabic, and Indic inscriptions, demonstrating that merchants from Southeast Asia, China, and the Indian Ocean were all involved in this trade.

Importantly, as the Japanese team discerned, a number of the inked or inscribed characters on recovered ceramic shards indicate the involvement of Indian Ocean merchants. Most of the inscriptions are in Chinese characters, but some appear to be in pseudo-Arabic script. Although ink inscriptions on ceramic shards were also found in the Belitung shipwreck, they are not texts but Buddhist symbols. The Indic script used on the shards from the Châu Tân shipwreck has been identified as a Southern Brahmic script. For example, the word Ambarak found on more than one of the ceramic shards corresponds to two place-names in modern Iran, suggesting that at least some of the words in the Indic script may be the names of places where the goods contained in the jar were to be delivered. The ink inscriptions from the Châu Tân shipwreck material might be some of the oldest extant specimens of ink inscriptions in Arabic and Indic scripts (Nishino 2017: 117–21). Nevertheless, allowing that more than one ship dating back to the period between the Tang dynasty and the Five Dynasties was wrecked in such a small area offshore Bình Châu, as Nishino Noriko (121) concludes, further examination is essential to determine the nature of the salvaged objects.

The Evidence from Marine Archaeology in East Asia

At the China end of the maritime silk roads, the still-extant Islamic cemetery at the port city of Quanzhou bears witness to Sino-Muslim contacts, especially during the Mongol-Yuan period but also ranging back to the Song. The Southern Song, which essentially lost control over the terrestrial silk road leading through the Pamirs and central Asia, was far more maritime oriented. To this end, the Song established the Maritime Trade Bureau modeled along the lines of Tang predecessors to supervise the maritime trade with bureaus established in Quanzhou, Mingzhou, and Guangzhou. Quanzhou in the more northerly Fujian region was undoubtedly the most connected port toward the end of the Southern Song (Schottenhammer 1998; 2001; Park 2012: 16).

The “Nanhai No. 1” Wreck

Significantly, no Chinese vessels are attested by maritime archaeological evidence from the eighth to the twelfth centuries. Moreover, given the volume of shipping activity on the southern Chinese coastline, the Pearl River delta included, precious little evidence has been collected on the historical maritime trade. One item of interest on display in the Hong Kong Maritime Museum, observed by the author in 2018, is a stone anchor stock dating back to the Song or Mongol-Yuan dynasty, making it Hong Kong’s oldest marine artifact. A large oblong-shaped stone comprising the upper part of an anchor, it was recovered in 2016 off the coast of Sai Kung by a diving team from the Hong Kong Underwater Heritage Group.

Far more valuable in the way of offering new contextualizing data on the long-distance Chinese maritime trade was the discovery in 1987 of the Nanhai 南海 No. 1 wreck off the coast of Yangjiang 阳江 in the Chuanshan Archipelago 川山群岛, 240 kilometers southwest of Guangzhou. The Nanhai vessel also carried ceramics plausibly crafted for the Middle Eastern market (Chan 2007). Found twenty meters underwater and covered in a layer of mud two meters deep, research reveals that the Nanhai No. 1 is an eight-hundred-year-old shipwreck dating from the Southern Song (1127–1279 CE) period. Coming under the auspices of the Chinese National Commission of National Heritage, the ship was raised on 28 December 2017 in its entirety, pending placement in a dedicated museum. From all accounts this was a massive engineering project and apparently a world first. It is simply the largest, best-preserved, and most heavily laden wreck yet discovered in China. With its length confirmed at 22.1 meters and its width at 9.35 meters, it is identified as a Fuzhou-type junk, one of three basic types in ancient China. Although missing the bow compartment, fourteen compartments were intact. An exhibition of the Nanhai No. 1 wreck mounted by the Macau Museum in 2018 includes images and exhibits of tightly packed compartments, for example, porcelain bowls in one, coins in another, all in all a massive and richly laded ship bound for tested markets with discerning aesthetic tastes, truly indicative of the maritime silk road trade.[1]

As speculated, the ship departed Quanzhou, then, as mentioned, the largest port under the Southern Song. Presumably bound for South or West Asia, further analysis of calligraphic elements on ceramics would be necessary to offer more certainty as to market destinations. Besides an array of ceramics and porcelains (by far the largest proportion of the cargo), the artifacts included bronze (including a large amount of bronze coins) and ironwares, gold and silver objects, lacquerwares, cinnabar, and remains of animals and plants. Among the ceramics there were examples of Jingdezhen ware including white glaze, Longquan ware including celadon, Dehua white glaze, and Cizao brown and green glaze.

The Quanzhou Wreck

By contrast, the Quanzhou wreck discovered in 1973 at the estuary of Quanzhou Bay and dated to c. 1275 (the end of the Southern Song period) was found to be carrying a cargo of pepper and aromatic wood, evidence that it was returning from a Southeast Asian destination (Guy 2001: 295). First made known outside of China by Claudine Salmon and Denys Lombard (1979: 58–60) based on their translation of descriptions appearing in Chinese archaeological reviews, this was a two-hundred-ton vessel, 24.2 meters in length and 9.15 meters wide. It was recovered in relatively good condition from under an overlay of 2–3 meters of sand about five kilometers east of Quanzhou and southeast of Houzhou 后渚港, a separate Song-era port but part of the same complex.

As Salmon and Lombard (1979: 63–64) remark, the wreck not only highlights the importance of the Quanzhou port complex but actually confirms much of the evidence relating to trade goods described in the Zhao Rugua’s Zhu Fan Zhi. With the cargo distributed across the ship’s thirteen compartments, by far the most prominent item (around 2,400 kilograms) was an assemblage of aromatic woods including lacquer, sandal, and aloes. But pepper comprised the second-most important item by volume along with such exotics as areca nuts, encens (frankincense), ambergris, cinnabar, and mercury. The presence of cowries and red coral also suggests an Indian Ocean trade link. Some packaged lots were found with attached inscribed tablets indicating individual merchant ownership. Of the various coins recovered, the most recent were dated to 1265–1274 of the Xianshun era, important for dating the wreck, as was the presence of some ceramics, revealing that this voyage was undertaken just twenty years prior to the Sino-Mongol expedition against Java (1293).

Inter alia, the wreck and its preservation offer many lessons as to the importance of Quanzhou as a port in the interocean trade, as confirmed by much local evidence and matched by many studies (Salmon and Lombard 1979; Schottenhammer 2001). Technical aspects of the hull manufacture and caulking techniques—namely, the use of resins (possibly sourced from Satingpra near present-day Songkhla in southern Thailand), is described by Li Guo-Qing (1989). With its largely intact hull, the preservation and installation of the Quanzhou wreck in the Quanzhou Maritime Museum, itself on the grounds of the Tamil-Hindu-influenced Kaiyuan Temple, is important in China. Even so, the Quanzhou wreck is still only part of a mosaic of salvaged or potentially recovered shipwrecks contributing to the bigger picture.

The Mongol-Yuan Wrecks of Kita Kyushu

From 1274 CE Chinese emperor Kublai Khan dispatched fleets of “invasion” ships in a series of attempts to stamp his rule over Japan, Vietnam, Champa, and Java. As recounted by James P. Delgado (2003) of the Vancouver Maritime Museum, in the 1920s Japanese archaeologists began excavating remains of a 12.4-mile-long defensive wall built in and around the ancient port of Hakata in anticipation of the 1281 Mongol-Yuan invasion. In 1980, Torao Mozai, dubbed the “father of Japan’s underwater archaeology” investigated the Takashima site at Imari Bay on the northwestern coast of Kyushu (Kita Kyushu), coming across the square bronze personal seal of a Mongol commander. Among other objects recovered by local fishermen included iron swords, stone catapult balls, spearheads, and stone hand-grinding mills. Excavations of broken remains continued under Hayashida Kenzo of the Kyushu Okinawa Society for Underwater Archaeology. In October 2001 after twenty years of investigation, a wreck site was discovered and excavated. It yielded traces of a vessel 230 feet in length. Analysis of the wood and the granite used in the anchor reveals that the ship originated in China’s Fujian Province. Not a trading expedition but an invasion fleet, the discovery of ceramic explosive bombs is certainly noteworthy. In 2011 and again in 2015 the University of the Ryukyus and the Matsuura City Board of Education discovered two relatively intact shipwrecks from the invasion fleet. Rightly, this was major news in Japan, a country where marine archaeology has hitherto yielded few major results. Kimura et al. (2014) have extended this analysis by examining archaeological remains associated with the fleets and battles both at Takashima Island and on the Bạch Đằng River in northern Vietnam near Hạ Long Bay.

Ming-Era Wrecks: The Java Sea, Turiang, Bakau, and Bình Thuận Wrecks

The first identified wrecks of Chinese junks in Southeast Asian waters are the Turiang wreck of c. 1400 CE found in the Straits of Singapore; the early fifteenth-century Bakau wreck found on the western edge of the Karimata Strait (broadly separating the islands of Borneo and Sumatra); and the Bình Thuận wreck, c. 1608, located in southern Vietnam, containing a cargo of Zhangzhou cast iron and porcelain, with the latter intended for Southeast Asian markets. The Java Sea wreck found off the southeast coast of Sumatra in 1996 carried a large quantity of Chinese and Thai ceramics, and the ship dated to the Yuan dynasty. As Miksic (2010: 396–97) interprets, while there are very few examples of Yuan-period wrecks, it does not mean that the volume of shipping was less than during the Ming.

The Brunei Wreck

Marine archaeology could have political uses as well (reviving past local glory as a prominent trading site or reclaiming a marine archaeological site as local patrimony). To some extent this is confirmed with the 1997 discovery of the Brunei shipwreck some forty kilometers off the coast of Brunei Darussalam. The Brunei wreck recovery commenced the following year, a joint Brunei- and French-government project financed by the French petroleum company that made the discovery. Nothing remained of the wooden ship, but the porcelain cargo survived.

Identified as a Chinese vessel, the underwater wreck yielded a rich array of porcelains manufactured in the Chinese kiln site of Jingdezhen along with semiglazed stoneware typical of pottery made in Thailand, with smaller, more delicate jars, Vietnamese in style. Dated from fifty years after the great Ming expeditions under Admiral Zheng He, or around 1500, conceivably the ship traded at more than one Southeast Asian port. This was at a time when China was isolating itself and had banned all forms of seafaring trade. Altogether some thirteen thousand artifacts were recovered, identified as originating from, variously, Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese kilns, and most recovered artifacts dated from the late fifteenth to early sixteenth century CE. Though other ports cannot be ruled out, the presumed port of destination of the ship was Brunei Bay, leading upriver to the ancient capital of Kota Batu, itself destroyed by Spanish raids in 1580 and 1644.

The Hội An Ship

Discovered in the mid-1990s adjacent Cham Island near the historic port city of Hội An, the Hội An wreck yielded some fifteen thousand intact ceramic pieces along with an additional one hundred thousand incomplete. Dating of the ceramics places them in the range 1380–1499 CE (Miksic 2010: 399). During Ikuta’s second period, Hội An was a major trading port attracting Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Dutch traders, albeit a river site with Cham antecedents (anon. 1993). The “Hội An” ship may or may not have been transiting the port city.

In the words of Guy (2005: 107), the Hội An wreck offers “the most complete profile of Vietnamese export ceramics of this period to date” and is a valuable “barometer” of Đại Việt’s participation in international trade under the later Lê dynasty (1428–1788). Understood to have been produced in the high-fired ceramic production center of the Red (Hong) River, for Guy it points to a well-organized system of production, marketing, and distribution, and it obviously involved strong capitalization with a massive investment of people and resources. The largest group of ceramics found in the Hội An wreck were underglazed blue decorative wares, including certain of quality matching Chinese blue and white. The National Museum of Vietnamese History (as observed by the author) showcases such other wreck artifacts as wine ewers and kendi, along with dishes and urns with striking dragon and kylin (kirin) patterns.

The Hội An ship itself was in the Chinese style, but the evidence (teak timbers and the presence of storage jars from kilns in the Thai province of Sing Buri) suggests construction in Southeast Asia, most likely at Ayutthaya. As Guy (2005) hypothesizes, the Hội An vessel was either returning to Ayutthaya or possibly Java, having laden its cargo at such government-designated ports as Vân Đồn island. More generally, Vietnamese ceramics have been attested at a range of sites in maritime Southeast Asia (Nguyen-Long 1999), Japan, and across the Indian Ocean.

The Vũng Tàu Wreck

Chronologically, the next recorded wreck in Southeast Asian waters, the Vũng Tàu wreck, is that of a lorcha, a hybrid Portuguese-Chinese vessel, wrecked c. 1690 off Côn Đảo, an island group off the southern extremity of southern Vietnam. It was found to be carrying blue-and-white Jingdezhen porcelain for transshipment to Jakarta and Europe (Flecker 2005: 145). Also known as Poulo Condore, the island long served as an important navigational point for Arab and other traders entering or exiting the South China Sea.

As described by Valentin A. Sokoloff (1990: 33), with a Western-style hull and Chinese sails, lorchas were known for their speed. Comprising a fleet of around five hundred vessels, from a very early period, lorchas were built in Macau, Ningpo, Singapore, and Bangkok. Besides their use for commerce, they were employed in pirate suppression, but, at the end of the eighteenth century, the “pirates” themselves assembled large fleets of lorchas. Many operated under foreign flags with foreign “honorary” captains sleeping on board. Lorchas continued to operate on the China coast through into the early decades of the twentieth century.

III. Early Modern Trade Polities in East-Southeast Asia: The Evidence from European Shipwrecks

Yet another optic on the early modern ceramic trade is provided by the marine archaeological evidence associated with European ships engaged in the export of Asian ceramics. Certainly, such evidence fits Ikuta’s third period exactly. The entry of Iberian and, in turn, northern European trading companies into the Asian seas spawned a new constellation of port cities, piggybacking on some established trading polities, while relegating others to obscurity. Nagasaki, Jakarta, Brunei, Malacca, Manila, and Macau all emerged (or reemerged) in this (Ikuta’s) 1550 to early nineteenth century third stage. To varying degrees, all these ports were engaged in the ceramics trade, and Nagasaki was a major export port for Japan-ware (Gunn 2007; 2018a). When Portuguese shipping enters the picture, we also begin to see the rise of Jingdezhen porcelain expressly crafted for the European market and shipped from Macau. Jesuit-ware, as can be viewed in Macau’s Misericórdia, or Holy House of Mercy, Museum, was part of this genre. Alongside much other evidence, including documentary, marine archaeology on European shipwrecks still ongoing is also recognized for its time-capsule revelations.

Apparently, there are only eighty known Iberian shipwrecks globally dating to the early sixteenth century, with only a handful excavated. Perhaps the most important recovery of a Portuguese wreck in recent times is that of the Esmeralda, discovered off the coast of Oman in 1998 and recovered in a cooperative operation with the Omani government. As described by Mearns, Parham, and Frohlich (2016), the Esmeralda, captained by Vicente Sodre, was one of two Portuguese naus from Vasco da Gama’s second voyage to India, left behind to disrupt maritime trade between India and the Red Sea. Wrecked in May 1503 off the northeastern coast of Al Hallaniyah Island, Oman, the artifact assemblage recovered during archaeological excavations conducted in 2013 and 2014 revealed silver and gold coins, ordnance, stone shot, and ceramic shards of Portuguese provenance, along with Hongzhi (1488–1505) Ming-era porcelain, celadon plates, and martaban storage jars. With newer recoveries of Chinese ceramics yet to be analyzed, the data could help to fill in our knowledge of China-Portugal trade even prior to the opening of the Macau port in the 1550s.

The next-earliest Portuguese wreck hitherto discovered in the Indian Ocean area is that of the São João, dated to 1552, leaving a fifty-year gap in knowledge. The chronological record is also filled in by the Fort San Sebastian wreck recovered in 2001 off the Ilha de Moçambique (Mozambique Island). Identified as the Portuguese carrack Espadarte, which sank in 1558 on the return journey from India, the wreck yielded quantities of Ming dynasty blue-and-white porcelain dating from the Jiajing period (1522–1566). In this case, Macau could well have been the export port. Surprisingly, though, the Dutch ship Mauritius wrecked off West Africa (1609), and the Portuguese ship São Gonçalo wrecked off the Cape of Good Hope (1630) reveal Thai and Burmese martaban (jar) assemblages (Grave, Macceroni, and Lisle 2005: 181). To give some perspective on the volume and value of the China trade, the VOC ship Geldermalsen, sailing from Nanjing to Jakarta in 1751, which foundered off Bintan Island adjacent the Singapore Straits was found to be carrying two hundred thousand pieces of porcelain (along with 147 gold bars) when recovered in 1985.

Another example from the seventeenth century is the excavation of the Santo António de Tanná carried out between 1977 and 1979 under the auspices of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology and the National Museums of Kenya, a pioneering event with respect to East Africa. Constructed in Bassein, India, in 1680–1681 and sunk in 1697 in front of Fort Jesus off Mombasa by Arab attackers, major cargo on the vessel included local African-made earthenware. Marine archaeological survey performed in and around Mozambique Island further south on the “Swahili coast” highlights the importance of precolonial trade as well as the need for preservation against treasure hunters and other threats (Lane 2012; Duarte 2012).

One of the most recent discoveries of a Portuguese vessel is that of a four-hundred-year-old shipwreck located in September 2018 off the coast of Portugal near the mouth of the Tagus River leading into Lisbon. According to media reports, in and around the sunken vessel archaeologists found spices, cannons clearly embossed with the Portuguese coat of arms, Ming-dynasty Chinese ceramics, and cowrie shells used as Indian Ocean trade currency. The unnamed ship, which might here be dubbed the Cascais ship after the locality in which it was found, was returning from India. This was the fruit of a decade-long archaeological project supported by the Portuguese Navy, the government, the municipal council of Cascais, and NOVA University of Lisbon. According to project director Jorge Freire, “In Portugal, this is the most important find of all time.” He believes the ship was wrecked between 1575 and 1625, when Portugal’s spice trade with India was at its peak. In 1994, the Portuguese ship Nossa Senhora dos Mártires was discovered near São Julião da Barra Fortress, a military defense complex near Cascais (Demoy 2018).

The San Diego (1600) Wreck

While marine archaeology of Spanish ships in the Western Hemisphere often associated with treasure hunters continues with some activity, far less attention has been paid or success realized on the opposite side of the world. Nevertheless, excavation of the Spanish ships San Diego (1600) wrecked off Luzon and the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion (1639) sunk off Saipan revealed mixed south China and Thai ceramic assemblages, including “heirloomed” or chronological outliers (Grave, Macceroni, and Lisle 2005: 181). Sunk in a battle with a Dutch vessel in 1600, the San Diego wreck was discovered in 1992 by French divers. The recovery was achieved by scientists from the National Museum of the Philippines and the Musée national des arts asiatiques in Paris. Altogether more than thirty-four thousand archaeological items, including shards and broken objects, were recovered from the San Diego site. According to the website of the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology (2016), the assemblage of jars, coins, silver vessels, jewels, armaments, and navigation instruments inform us of the daily life of the crew, including one hundred Spanish noblemen, officers, soldiers, artisans, and sailors, but also native Filipinos and Japanese mercenaries. In the haste to enjoin the battle, the ship was still laden with thousands of blue-and-white porcelains of exceptional quality. Traced to Jingdezhen and Jiangxi, the ceramic assemblage signaled to a present-day observer “un moment privilégié avant la standardisation industrielle” (a privileged moment in time before the onset of industrial standardization.”)

Conclusion

Today, UNESCO honors “underwater cultural heritage.” This includes three million shipwrecks as with the Belitung, the four thousand shipwrecks of the sunken fleet of Kublai Khan, along with sunken ruins and cities, including the remains of the Pharos of Alexandria in Egypt (see UNESCO Underwater Cultural Heritage). This chapter has offered a summary and schema of long-distance and regional East-Southeast Asian trade to illustrate the rise and fall of port polities but also to showcase the bonding across polities that interocean voyaging created. As we found, postwar marine archaeology linked with terrestrial archaeology has not only vastly expanded our research database but has also facilitated—even revolutionalized—many research paradigms relating to world regional history, at least in three dimensions.

First, as attested by a combination of marine and terrestrial archaeology, unlike terrestrial trade routes across Eurasia interrupted by the rise and fall of empires, the maritime trade demonstrated remarkable continuity even across Ikuta’s three periods. Even with the eclipse of Rome, Arabs, Persians, South Asians, Southeast Asians, Chinese, Japanese merchants and sailors and, in their wake, arriving Iberians and northern Europeans reinvented trading routes and ports, less stable in Southeast Asia with the rise and fall of dynasties (such as at the Palembang, Temasek, and Cham sites) but enduring in Quanzhou, Guangdong, and Old Port Hakata. Marine archaeology is just contributing to this study, with perhaps the most exciting finds in the western Indian Ocean area but also for the second and third periods, in East and Southeast Asia.

Second, the ceramic trade, with its major production centers in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Champa, Burma, and Japan, not only contributed to the making of a broader East-Southeast Asia trade complex linked by intricate networks of suppliers, producers, and consumers but stood as an index of early industrial activity. Marine and terrestrial archaeology continues to contribute to our knowledge of complex networks of trade across port polities, linking producers and markets across regional and global space. Stated another way, the intraregional trade in ceramics welded the region like that of no other commodity. It predated and postdated the bullion trade. Although space precluded an analysis, it involved technology transfers (China and Korea to Japan, China to Vietnam and possibly Thailand), and it involved both internal and external outsourcing. It was the lifeblood of the intraregional junk trade, further connecting up with a host of unrelated commodity chains. It catered to the luxury trade, with specially commissioned items, but it was also tailored to meet mass demand, as with the millions of earthenware jars, plates, and chawan, or bowls, entering this trade. Establishing connectivity between such scattered ports calls for a more creative, as opposed to strictly qualitative, investigational approach, yet much can be inferred using ceramics as a proxy.

Third, setting aside the importance of the ceramics industry for early industrialization in the major production centers—Jingdezhen and Arita—the ceramic trade networks reaching the various segments of the regional trading system—the East China Sea, the South China Sea, the Java Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the coasts of India—helped to fire up commerce (ports) and markets (hinterlands) almost everywhere. Alongside the junk trade, as revealed, in this third period, Iberians and northern Europeans invented a new system of interconnected ports at Macau, Manila, and Nagasaki—to name just three—as part of emerging global trade networks.

1. “Treasure from the Deep Sea—Exhibition of Underwater Archaeological Relics of the Nanhai No. 1,” Cultural Affairs Bureau, Museum and the Maritime Silk Road Museum of Guangdong, 19 April to 31 July 2018.

Part IV: Examples/Alternative Realms

9. The Ryukyu Trade Networks Revisited

It appears improbable but for several centuries corresponding to the European Middle Ages or the early Ming period in China, the Ryukyu Islands 琉球諸島 came to play a central role in connecting China to a range of Southeast Asian ports and polities. A small archipelago combining coral reefs and a volcanic arc system stretching south from Kyushu practically to Taiwan, the islands undoubtedly served as a bridge for seaborne travelers to and from China reaching back to the Tang dynasty. While still relatively isolated from the great traditions of East Asia at least up until about the twelfth century, with the development of gunpowder and weaponry in China, a new demand was created for sulfur collected on the Ryukyus. Maritime trade contacts with China expanded accordingly and may have led to elements of state consolidation among competing regional centers, especially on the main island with its harbor at Naha port. Commencing around 1373 and continuing up until the time of the arrival of the Portuguese, the kings of the Ryukyu Kingdom 琉球國 (also known as Luchu or Liuchu 流求 in Chinese) began mounting complementary voyages to China, Japan, and Korea and so indirectly connected these polities with the Southeast Asia trade in tropical zone products. An important feature of the Ryukyu trade was its royal monopoly status. The Ryukyu connection with Ming China fit into the classic pattern of tribute trade, both ceremonially and commercially, involving the delivery of specific goods at Chinese ports at specific times, by specific ships and in prescribed quantities (Richard J. Pearson 1969: 117).

Several features set Ryukyu’s tributary status apart from that of such other polities as Malacca, Brunei, Ayutthaya, or Burma. First was its longevity, with missions continuing to China practically until the downfall of the Qing. Second was the frequency of missions. Third, Ryukyu became known for its dual tributary status, variously sending missions to the Qing court as well as to the Tokugawa bakufu when it imposed its control over the southern archipelago. Setting aside my own reading (Gunn 2018a) and that of Nguyen Van Kim (2003) writing in Vietnamese, few interpretations examine Ryukyu links with maritime and mainland Southeast Asian ports as an ensemble, and it is this broader connection that I seek to highlight in this chapter. First, the chapter explains the indispensable primary sources from which historians have pieced together Ryukyu’s long and distinctive history. A second section situates Ryukyu within the ambit and shadow of the Ming tribute trade. Third, it fits Ryukyu into the Korea trade. Fourth, and in some detail, the chapter examines the broad span of Ryukuan contacts with Southeast Asian ports and polities. Finally, it explains Ryukyu’s subordination to the Tokugawa bakufu and reinvention as a dual tributary stubbornly loyal to the Qing.

I. Precious Documents: The Rekidai Hoan

Much of what we know about the importance of the Ryukyu trade at the intersection of the East China Sea and the South China Sea trade is revealed by the Rekidai Hoan (歷代寶案) or Lidai Baoan (Precious documents of successive generations), or trade documents written in Chinese and compiled for the rulers of the Ryukyu Kingdoms. Altogether this is a 444-year record. As Hamashita (2011: 108) explains, although incomplete, the surviving documents still provide a partial record of correspondence exchanged between 1424 under King Sho Hashi and 1867 under King Sho Tai, just prior to the dissolution of the Ryukyu Kingdom and its incorporation into the Japanese state under the Meiji Restoration of January 1868. The collection thus spans the entire period from the twenty-second year of the reign of Ming dynasty emperor Yongle to the sixth year of Emperor Tongzhi of the Qing dynasty.

By way of explanation, long prior to the rise of tribute-sending states on the islands, the hunter-gatherer populations of the islands had evolved sophisticated defense systems of fortresses known as gusuku, many of which still survive. The gusuku period (approximately from 1050 until 1429) refers to an archaeological epoch on the islands following a shell-mound period and preceding the Sanzan (lit. three mountain) or “three kingdom” period. Primarily built of limestone and sometimes coral certain gusuku have castle-like features suggesting defense functions, but all are believed to have sacred connotations as well (see Pearson 2013: Chap. 7). In 2016 archaeologists excavating at Katsuren, a fortified gusuku site on the main island, discovered two Roman coins dating from the fourth century CE along with one Ottoman coin dated 1687. With Katsuren occupied between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, obviously no direct trade link with Rome or the Ottoman Empire can be inferred. Nevertheless, most experts believe that the finds do attest to an indirect trade link whether via the maritime link or via China (Butcher 2016).

Among documents included in the Okinawa Prefectural Library archive are copies of decrees handed down by the emperors of Ming and Qing dynasties, trade permits issued by the Chinese central government, and official correspondence from the municipal government of Fujian. Copies of outgoing correspondence from the Ryukyu Kingdom have also been preserved, including official letters sent by Ryukyu kings to imperial China and official documents issued by the king to local subjects authorizing travel to China. According to a summary provided by the Okinawa Prefectural Board of Education, the Rekidai Hoan documents principally relate to the diplomatic relationship between the Ryukyu Kingdom and China, originating with contacts initiated by Emperor Taizu in 1372. According to the Board, out of these contacts developed “an envoy-tribute (sappo-choko) relationship in which Ryukyu administrations offered loyalty and goods to the Chinese imperium in exchange for diplomatic recognition and external protection.” As a result, the account continues, “the kingdom became a subordinate member of a regional security and trading alliance dependent upon Chinese military and economic hegemony” (see Okinawa Prefectural Board of Education 2003).

As further explained, the Rekidai Hoan comprises fragments of three different compilations. The first collection (1424–1697) contains forty-two of the forty-nine transcribed volumes that have survived. The second collection (1697–1858) is a complete record of official communication between the Ryukyu Kingdom and Qing dynasty authorities. The third collection (1859–1867) comprises an entire set of thirteen volumes that have survived. An additional collection (1859–1867) contains documents relating to contacts between the Ryukyu Kingdom and such foreign countries as the United States as well as inventories of goods imported on ukan-sen, or crown trading vessels from China (see Okinawa Prefectural Board of Education 2003).

The first collection, commissioned in 1697, contains documents relating to the longest period of the kingdom’s history. Initially, documents were produced in duplicate, with copies held at the Ryukyu seat of government at Shuri Castle in Naha and with replicas stored in the nearby Chinese enclave of Kume-mura 久米村, a village established in the late fourteenth century at a time when the Satto dynasty (c. 1320–1395) of Chūzan, one of three polities formerly on the main island, first initiated a tributary relationship with the Chinese imperium. Arriving from Fujian, the resident Chinese served as experts in support of the Ryukyu Kingdom, also serving as intermediaries between Ryukyu hosts and Chinese suzerains. Steeped in Chinese learning in such skills as diplomacy, astronomy, navigation, shipbuilding, and administration, they were also an elite class at the court. With the abolition of the Ryukyu Kingdom, the documents were distributed among members of leading families and remained concealed until 1933. With the original Rekidai Hoan stored at Shuri until 1867, upon the dissolution of the kingdom, it was then transferred to the Japanese Ministry of Home Affairs in Tokyo (but with the entire record consumed by fire during the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923). Meantime, the Kume collection was itself destroyed in its entirety during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. Thus, remaining copies and transcripts have been collated from private copies including the most complete version, found in a National Taiwan University collection (see Okinawa Prefectural Board of Education 2003).

Of particular interest to students of Ryukyu’s history of long-distance trade activities are the following sets of documents from the first collection of the Rekidai Hoan: ii kaishi (移彝回咨)—diplomatic correspondence with Korea and other trading centers in East and Southeast Asia; ii shi (移彝咨)—letters from Ryukyu kings destined for Korea and other trading centers in East and Southeast Asia; ii shissho (移彝執照)—documents providing leave to board vessels traveling to Korea and the countries of Southeast Asia; and san nan o hei Kaiki bunko (山南王併懐機文稿)—records relating to diplomatic contacts between King Tarumi of San-nan (Ryukyu’s southern kingdom) and Ming dynasty officials, and correspondence between Minister Kaiki and port authorities in Palembang, Sumatra (Okinawa Prefectural Board of Education 2003).

First introduced to an international audience in 1969 by Kobata Atsushi and Matsuda Mitsugu in their privately published English translation of the classical Chinese original (albeit obscure and literary), their analysis of the Rekidai hoan has also greatly helped in restoring the Ryukyu Kingdom’s rightful place in the historiography of the East China Sea and South China Sea.[1] In turn, the Kobata and Matsuda edition has spawned a small interpretative literature still gaining traction as with complementary studies on the Thai Kingdom, Malacca, and Korea (see Piyada 2004; Hamashita 2011; Aman and Aros 2016; Musa 2016).

II. Ming China and the Ryukyu Tribute Trade

Following the establishment of the Ming dynasty in the fourteenth century, a number of polities began to forge links with the new Chinese capital centered on Nanjing. As Wade (2005b: 6) explains, the Ming shilu provides one of the few contemporary sources for Ryukyu during this period, offering several hundred references to Ryukyu, most from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Ming shilu confirms the existence of three polities in the Ryukyu Islands during the fourteenth century, Shannan (Sanzan), Zhongshan (Chuzan) and Shanbei (Sanhoku), each of which was controlled by a political leader the Ming referred to as “king.” All sent envoys to and received envoys from the Ming. The polity of Zhongshan/Chuzan 中山 appears to have emerged by the 1430s as the main political power on the Ryukyu Islands and the sole Ryukyuan polity mentioned in the Ming texts from that time on (Wade 2007: 7).

Throughout the Ming, the number of Ryukyu missions to China exceeded 170, the greatest number of any polity. The frequency of the missions meant that the island polity was not subject to the same restrictions imposed upon other polities in their relations with the Ming (Wade 2007: 13). Ryukyu thus sent nearly twice as many missions as did the Lê dynasty in Vietnam (with 89 missions), which was second in the frequency of tribute missions to China. According to von Glahn (2014: 644–45), even after the Ming sharply curbed the scale of Japanese tribute missions in 1453, Ryukyu still served as “the most important channel for the dissemination of Chinese coin to Japan,” besides becoming the main supplier of Southeast Asian trade goods to both the Chinese and Japanese markets. As attested by archaeological research, coin finds concentrated around the royal capital of Shuri and the adjacent port of Naha—virtually all fifteenth-century settlements—reveal that the majority of these coins were Chinese imports. However, unlike the pattern found in China, Japan, and Vietnam, where Song issues recovered from hoards of this era dominated, the coin finds in Okinawa have been evenly divided between Song and Ming coins. As von Glahn (2014: 647) concludes, the disappearance of full-bodied coins in Ryukyu and the presence of debased or imitation Ming coins along with mumon coins of high iron content produced in southern Kyushu matches the kingdom’s diminished stature in the maritime trading world of East Asia after 1550, a reference to the progressive annexation of the Ryukyus by the Satsuma domain on southern Kyushu.

One other constant in Ryukyu interaction with China reflected in the Ming annals was the sending of students to the Ming capital to study at a dedicated school. As Wade (2007: 18) estimates, the influence of these returning students on Ryukyu society would likely have been “immense.” Importantly, as well, with the consolidation of power over the main island in the early fifteenth century and with the presence of the Chinese traders and interpreters, Ryukyu was well empowered to connect with the Fujianese overseas networks (Wade 2007: 18). In this way, as discussed below, Ryukyu linked with various Southeast Asian polities.

The importance of the Fujian connection with the Ryukyu kingdom should not be ignored. Not only did the Chinese experts and others dwelling in Kume originate from Fujian, but Fuzhou 福州 hosted arriving Ryukyu missions. Fuzhou, on the northeast coast of Fujian Province, located in the lower estuary of the Min River, is also the port from where the Zheng He voyages sailed forth. According to the Okinawa Prefectural Board of Education account, Fuzhou hosted the Ryukyu-kan 琉球館, or special diplomatic quarter of the city reserved for visiting Ryukyu dignitaries in transit to Beijing (or Nanjing during the early Ming dynasty). Visiting students and scholar-bureaucrats from the Ryukyu Kingdom also sojourned in Fuzhou (see Wade 2007: 17–18).

III. The Ryukyu-Korea Trade

According to the Okinawa Prefectural Board of Education (2003), diplomatic links between the Ryukyu Kingdom and Korea were first established as early as 1389 (during the later years of the reign of King Satto, 1350–1395). Initially, these contacts were restricted to the return of Korean shipwreck survivors and victims of wako, as testified in the archives of the Choson Wangjo Sillok (Veritable records of the Joseon dynasty). In the following decades, a tributary relationship developed between Korea and the Ryukyu Kingdom, albeit restricted owing to the risks incurred by the wako, along with actions of Japanese merchants. In the Okinawa Prefectural Board of Education view, the tributary compact as it developed was highly circumscribed, demonstrating the limited protection that the Korean state could offer the kingdom. Nevertheless, dignitaries bearing gifts from the Ryukyu Kingdom were received by the Korean court, and, reciprocally, gifts were offered to Ryukyu monarchs. By the mid-fifteenth century, however, the direct tribute trade had largely been supplanted owing to security reasons. Thereafter, a “proxy communication” was established via Kyushu-based merchant groups. Instead of direct contact, the Ryukyu trade with Korea was mediated via Hakata (today a ward of the city of Fukuoka) or Tsushima Island in the straits of that name providing a lucrative incentive for the Kyushu-based traders to present themselves as Ryukyu Kingdom officials when dealing with Korean clients.

Ryukyu also helped Choson to connect with the island world. As Kobata and Matsuda (1969: 1–7) elaborate, from 1389 Ryukyu commenced sending such tribute goods to Korea as sappanwood (used as a textile dye) and pepper imported from the Thai Kingdom along with local sulfur and horses. But not all of this tribute trade was direct. In fact, much of it was carried on the Korea-bound ships of Japanese daimyo, powerful Kyushu clan chiefs, merchants, and others, and with the tribute goods having been imported from Ryukyu by merchant circles of Hakata and Sakai port (present-day Osaka Prefecture). Up until 1590 when Ryukyu tribute entered Korea via Beijing, Japanese ships often carried the Ryukyu envoys knowing that, as royal trade, they would get better treatment in the disposal of their private trade goods. Hirado, a small but well-connected island trading port in present-day Nagasaki Prefecture, along with Tsushima also entered the tribute trade as a transfer point to Korea. Japanese copper and silk floss also entered the royal tribute trade to Korea and to Ming China.

IV. The Ryukyu–Southeast Asian Trade

It is noteworthy that, over a long period, China financed and otherwise assisted the Ryukyu traders in their oceangoing voyages. As revealed by the Rekidai Hoan, Ryukyu maintained diplomatic or trade relations with Thailand (1425–1570), Palembang (1428–1440), Java (1430–1442), Malacca (1463–1511), Samudera (1463–1468), Patani (1516–1543), Annam (1509), Sunda (1513–1518), and Korea (1431–1468) (see Kobata and Matsuda 1969; Wade 2007; Hamashita 2011).

The Thai Kingdom of Ayutthaya

While the Ryukyu trade touched Java, Luzon, and, as inferred, Malacca, the most important of the Southeast Asian destinations was the Thai Kingdom with its capital at Ayutthaya, where trade started earlier and lasted longer. With contacts between Ryukyu and Ayutthaya commencing in the late 1380s, initially communication between the two kingdoms was carried out by Chinese merchants residing in place. However, with the decline of Chinese influence during the first half of the fifteenth century, Ryukyu merchants took the initiative. As revealed by the Rekidai Hoan, with the exception of an Ayutthayan ship in 1479, it was Ryukyu ships that traveled to Ayutthaya, not vice versa. A total of thirty-eight documents are cited pertaining to voyages from 1425 to 1509. While satin-silk, woven gold satin, and porcelain were the usual trade items, Thailand stood out among Southeast Asian destinations as an importer of sulfur from the Ryukyus. While falling into the tribute trade mold, there were frequent suspensions of missions to Ayutthaya arising from changing political conditions in Thailand. Trade disputes were not unknown as well. In particular, the Ryukyu authorities took offense at Ayutthayan control of transactions in such trade goods as porcelain as well as their monopoly on the sale of sandalwood, pepper, and other local products. In 1425 and again in 1435, the king of Chuzan requested remission in selling porcelain and procuring sappanwood “with the principle that all within the four seas are brothers” (Kobata and Matsuda 1969: 53). Between 1425 and 1564, sixty-one fleets called at Ayutthaya (Sakamaki 1964: 383–89).

As Piyada Chonlaworn (2004: 51–55) points out, since the 1980s much progress has been made in archaeological surveys of Southeast Asian ceramics found in Japan. But of all historical sites in Japan (such as Nagasaki, Fukuoka, and Osaka), Ryukyu’s main island is the place where the most Thai ceramics have been excavated. Most of the pieces are earthenware lids and dark brown glazed jars with four lugs. The rest are small covered jars and bowls. Mostly these earthenware and stoneware items date from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with some dating back to the latter half of the fourteenth century. A particular characteristic of the ceramics excavated on the island is that they are mostly from the Si Satchanalai kilns of northern Thailand. Known as Sawankhalok ceramics, these were produced during the Sukothai period (1238–1438), while those excavated from sites in Nagasaki or Osaka (Sakai city) are from the Noi River kilns in Sing Buri Province (produced during the Ayutthaya period (1350 to 1767).

The Malacca Trade

Besides Ayutthaya, from 1463 Ryukyu kept up trade with a succession of kings and Islamic sovereigns in Malacca, all of whom dispatched tribute envoys to China. The last Ryukyu contact with the Malacca Kingdom was the mission of September 1511 on the eve of the Portuguese conquest. This change in circumstances led to an increase in Ryukyu trade with Patani, a Muslim vassal state of the Thai Kingdom on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula. While contacts between Ryukyu and Patani undoubtedly commenced before that date, the eight extant trade certificates issued for Ryukyu voyages to Patani are for the period 1515–1543 only. By contrast, Ryukyu contacts with the Majapahit Kingdom on Java commenced in 1430, with six extant records covering 1430–1442. Two additional documents relate to voyages to Sunda Kelapa (Old Port Jakarta) dated 1513 and 1518. From 1428 Ryukyu also traded to Palembang on Sumatra, which, as alluded, became a vassal state of Majapahit late in the fourteenth century.

Java/Sumatra

As Kobata and Matsuda (1969: 149) explain, it was actually communities of Chinese residents and exiles in Java and Sumatra that drove the trade with Ryukyu, including China, Korea, and, in isolated cases (1406), direct contact with Japan. From 1443, Java was limited to one tribute mission to China a year, bringing this state in line with other Southeast Asian states involved in the tribute trade system. As discussed below, a Ryukyu attempt to enter into trade with Annam in 1509 did not bear fruit. It should also be observed of the Ryukyu trade with Southeast Asia that, with the exception of Java-bound ships, the master of the ship was typically a native of the Ryukyu Kingdom, even though the ships, their crews, and, crucially, their navigators were Chinese. It is also clear that such vessels were of vastly greater capacity than Japanese oceangoing ships of that age. For example, the voyage of 1513 to Sunda Kelapa carried a crew of 226, and that to Patani in 1515, 209 persons (Kobata and Matsuda 1969: 111).

While supplying Southeast Asia with such commodities as sulfur and horses from Ryukyu, and porcelain, silk, and coinage from China, the Ryukyu traders also carried Japanese gold and gold dust, returning from Southeast Asian ports with sappanwood and pepper, in great demand in China (Sakamaki 1964: 383–89; Ishii 1988: 1–4). But with the arrival of the Portuguese, the rise of piracy, and competition from illegal Chinese traders taking advantage of the deterioration of the Ming, the Ryukyu trade with Southeast Asia came to an abrupt halt, albeit reoriented toward servicing the growing China-Japan trade (Ptak 1994b. 282–92).

Spanish Manila

Although the extant Rekidai Hoan does not record trade with Manila, as Hamashita (2011: 124) found, the parallel record entering Spanish archives offers multiple references to Lequios (Ryukyu) between 1519 to 1738, including political and commercial intelligence. Inter alia, it was recorded that every year between six to eight Ryukyu junks called at Luzon, although they were presumed to be “Chinese.” As he interprets, Ryukyu participation in the bullion trade would have offered a valuable tangent to the even riskier Southeast Asian trade. It may well have been more lucrative as well. Certainly, this is an area that could be further examined from Spanish sources. Otherwise, we are better informed that, during this period, Japanese vessels sailing from Nagasaki also participated in this trade.

V. Dual Subordination: Between the Qing and the Tokugawa Bakufu

Mindful of the importance of Ryukyu in servicing the long-distance maritime trade with Southeast Asia, on the one hand, and trade with China, on the other, the bakufu also sought to bring Ryukyu within its orbit, albeit at arm’s length so as not to prejudice the Ryukyu king’s valuable role within the Chinese tributary trade envoy system. In effect, the Shimazu 島津氏 clan of Satsuma han (in the western part of present-day Kagoshima Province) accomplished this task on behalf of the bakufu. In 1609, the Ryukyu capital was attacked, and with King Sho Nei (r. 1587–1620) transported to the seat of the shogun not as an equal but as a confirmed tributary (Sadler 1937: 246). In making this move, we should not ignore that Satsuma took advantage of the turmoil in China surrounding the Ming-Qing transition.

Such is explained in a report authored by the Qing emissary to the island chain, a reference to the Zhongshan chuanxinlu (中山伝信録) (or Chuzan denshin-roku, as it is known in Japanese). Serving as Emperor Kangxi’s (r. 1661–1722) ambassador to the Ryukyu court, Hsu Pao-kuang (Xu Baoguang), arrived in late 1719 and stayed six months for the investiture of King Sho Kei 尚敬 (r. 1713–1751) prior to returning to Beijing. Running to four volumes, the Zhongshan chuanxinlu reveals much of what we know about the sailing route taken from Fujian to Ryukyu, rituals surrounding the tribute trade, the genealogy of successive Chuzan kings, geography of the islands, bureaucracy, institutions, customs, and languages. As highlighted by Szcześniak (1955: 146–47, the Zhongshan chuanxinlu is richly illustrated by maps. They include depictions of the maritime routes along with insular features, a display of the stars as seen from the archipelago, and a depiction of a typical Chinese ship’s compass and hourglass used for navigation in that era. Imported into Japan, the work became a fount of knowledge on Ryukyu during the Edo period.

In 1752 the French Jesuit missionary Antoine Gaubil sent to France a part-translation into French of the Zhongshan chuanxinlu in the form of a handwritten letter. Earning the reputation as the leading Western Sinologist of his day, Gaubil was then serving in the Manchu court, having first arrived in China in 1722. Entering print in 1758 and going through various editions, Gaubil’s “letter” along with a map entitled, “Carte des Isles L’ieoukieou,” was the first descriptive geography of the archipelago made known to Europe.[2] But whereas the Zhongshan chuanxinlu maps were drafted in the Chinese cartographic tradition, Gaubil imposed coordinates (accurate as to latitude, but inaccurate as to longitude). Along with a necklace of islands, some of them revealed as sources of sulfur, the “Tiaoyu Su” (Diaoyu) or Senkaku Islands as they are known in Japanese, are also indicated. Naha port is identified as is the Shuri Castle, the seat of the Chuzan kings.

As Gaubil (1811: 168) interpreted from his reading of the Zhongshan chuanxinlu, the bakufu also had strategic advantage in mind, as with ordering the kingdom to redirect its tribute from China to Japan, and with similar missives directed to the Spanish in the Philippines, the King of Siam, and the “Europeans of the Indies.” Still, as explained, even after the kidnapping in 1612 of King Chang-ning [Sho Nei] by a Satsuma fleet, Ryukyu continued to serve as an intermediary between Japan and China. In 1663 Emperor Kangxi received tribute and envoys dispatched by King Chang Tche (Sho Shitsu, r. 1648–1668), in turn installing him as a Manchu tributary. To degrees, the Sinic connection grew stronger rather than weaker. This is attested by the opening of a Confucius college, a Chinese language push, the introduction of the Chinese examination system, and the dispatch of Ryukyu students to Beijing (185). Even so, as Gaubil remarks, acculturation with respect to China and Japan was two-way. As described, the houses, temples and king’s palace were built à la Japonais. However, the Chinese ambassador’s residence, the imperial college and the temple of the “Tienfay goddess” (a likely reference to the Fujianese Mazu cult) were constructed à la Chinoise. While Chinese character inscriptions were to be seen in many of the temples and public buildings, there were also inscriptions en langue Japonaise. But whereas accounts and royal orders were written in a mixture of local language and Japanese “characters,” books on morals, medicine, astronomy and astrology were in Chinese characters as were those of religion, although some monks also produced writings in Indian script. With respect to commerce, trade remained robust and with the role of women in the marketplace to the exclusion of males, a particular feature (181). Further drawing upon the Zhongshan chuanxinlu, as Gaubil comments, when in 1708 the kingdom was struck by “plague” or “contagious disease” followed by a typhoon, and misery was “extreme,” Kangxi’s generosity was also “considerable” (173).

In the event, as alluded, Ryukyu continued to play its role as a loyal participant in the tributary trade-system practically down until the end of the Qing era. As Tang Yun (1995: 34) summarizes from his reading of Chinese and Japanese documentation, Ryukyu’s “double subordination policy” actively facilitated its role as intermediary in the Sino-Japan trade. Because its trade goods were complementary with those of Japan, its trade was actually “Sino-Japanese trade in disguised form.” But while the Ryukyu trade continued as a royal monopoly and as an adjunct of the tributary trade with China, the Shimizu clan of Satsuma were major beneficiaries of the Ryukyu Kingdom’s ambiguous “dual subordination” status. As alluded, King Sho Nei was reduced to a kind of vassalage, although he was allowed superficial autonomy with respect to local customs and traditions. Until the kingdom was abolished, this artifice also allowed the Shimazu to breach the shogun’s monopoly on foreign trade with Nagasaki (Sakamaki 1964: 391–403; Watanabe 1970: 6–7). Offering a present-day evaluation, as the Okinawa Board of Education explains, rather than destroying the Ryukyu Kingdom’s tributary relationship with China as passed down by history, the Satsuma invasion of 1609 and the creation of the “dual subordination” system continued to allow China to exert its political, legal, and cultural influence over the islands “still apparent in many contemporary aspects of Okinawan culture.”

But how were the Ryukyu kings brought into the Japanese tribute orbit at the seat of the bakufu in Edo? As witnessed by the Dutch in March 1710 themselves on route from their trading post in Nagasaki to the shogunal court, near Shimonoseki an embassy from Ryukyu passed by on barges of the lord of Satsuma. “These people have a Chinese complexion,” they recorded. Numbering 233, including interpreters and escorts, the party was observed to be under the same constraints, albeit treated like the Dutch as official tribute-trade bearing envoys (van der Velde and Bachhofner 1992: 139). Like the Dutch and the Portuguese before them, they were obliged to conform to the rituals of outward display, such as wearing rich costumes, offering musical performances, performing acts of obeisance, and in bearing gifts. Like the Europeans they were exoticized as envoys of a foreign country. There was also an economic dimension to the realignment of Ryukyu from the Chinese to the Japanese orbit, especially as Satsuma also came to command and subvert the Ryukyu Kingdom’s sugar production industry.

Between 1634 and 1806, the Kingdom of Ryukyu sent fifteen embassies to the Tokugawa shoguns. According to Elisonas (1991: 300), Ryukyu “could scarcely be called a foreign country insofar as Japan was concerned . . . not an independent or even an autonomous state.” In making this judgment, he is referring to the conquest by the Shimazu in 1609 and Ryukyu’s exploitation as a “colony.” Permitted to call itself a “kingdom” and allowed to maintain a tributary relationship with China, he claims, this was merely a “device” that would give it continued trading access to that country. Moreover, in 1636 the Shimazu were ordered to cease referring to their puppet on the islands as a “king” and to call him “provincial governor.” No doubt all of this is true, yet could we not also see it the other way around, as the skillful diplomacy on the part of Ryukyu to maintain its cultural identity by seeking to play off both China and Japan at a period of its history when the old maritime links were severely restricted? Of course, Japan’s early modernization and expansionist ambitions eventually rendered this strategy obsolete, but it worked for several generations.

As discussed in Chapter 5, Japanese mapmaking evolved in line with indigenous traditions. The uses of cartography were well known, and maps were treated as intelligence. We have mentioned Hayashi Shihei. One example of his mapping as it touched Ryukyu in relation to Japan and Korea is Ryukyu sansho narabini sanjurokuto no zu Ryukyukoku zenzu 琉球三省并三十六嶋之圖 (General map of Ryukyu, or Map of the three provinces and the thirty-six islands of Ryukyu Sea routes and distances to Japan and the mainland given). As such, it is one of five maps accompanying his Sangoku tsūran zusetsu. Completely lacking in coordinates and displaying routes by traces in the Japanese manner, it is aligned East at the top and South to the right in the Chinese manner. Nevertheless, it stands outside of Chinese conceptions (at the University of British Columbia Open Collections).

The longevity of the Ryukyu tribute trade with the Qing down to the end of the Tokugawa is captured in documentary evidence, as is the near total chokehold over these ceremonials by the shogunate. With the final investiture mission confirming Sho Tai as king of Ryukyu in 1866 and with the last tributary envoy sent from Naha to China in 1874, up until mid-1875 the Ryukyu clan was still petitioning Tokyo to be allowed to send its emissary to China. Other documents of this time reveal that the Ryukyu clan attempted to keep up gift-giving practices to the Qing each year, for example, celebrating the accession of the Qing emperor (JACAR 1875). Obviously under high duress, King Sho Tai was recorded in a petition as “asking for a letter of guidance and order on release from Ryukyu’s gift giving practice as a result of talks between our government and China, and a letter of response from Matsuda, Minister of Home Affairs Grand Secretary” (JACAR 1878). Other attempts to send a mission were nixed. Forced to abdicate in 1879, Sho Tai died in 1901.

As East Asian history specialist Gavan McCormack (2016) sums up, twice over these years the mutually beneficial relationship was disrupted by violence and the threat of violence, on both occasions emanating from Japan. The first act, as explained, was from the premodern state of Satsuma in 1609, and the second and decisive act was from the modern Meiji state in 1879, which simply incorporated the islands and abolished the kingdom. To be sure, China protested both the Satsuma and the Meiji state interventions. However, as McCormack remarks, as legacies of Japanese militarism and imperialism, in the context of imperialist encroachment, civil war, and general decline of the nineteenth century in particular, China had no way to protest effectively against the Japanese severance of the China link and incorporation of the broader Ryukyu Archipelago (including disputed waters) as Okinawa Prefecture.

Conclusion

The picture we have painted of the Ryukyu Kingdom with respect to its participation in the Southeast Asian trade elevates it to the highest ranks as a maritime nation across the vast sea silk road networks, rivaling even the Arab, Indian, and Austronesian mariners in their prowess and accomplishments. Granted that the ships were constructed by Fujianese shipwrights, granted that the Fujianese lent their navigational skills, there is a great sense that the kingdom itself was in charge of key diplomatic and trade negotiations. This we saw in engagements with such disparate polities as Majapahit on Java and Sumatra, the Malacca and Patani Sultanates, the Ayuthayan court, and those of the Cham coast of Vietnam (complex as well, given that conditions were constantly changing). The Ryukyu Kingdom’s “proxy communication” with Korea established via Kyushu-based merchant groups was another extraordinary innovation. Only a sophisticated record-keeping bureaucracy could manage commercial relations on such a scale. Only merchants with savvy and acute knowledge of market conditions could enter this trade. Risk management was also an understood condition, given the dangers of shipwreck and losses to storms and piracy (though we see few reports of shipwreck compared to the losses of the Europeans).

Especially, as we signaled, the Ryukyu Kingdom was unlike any other tributary in its unwavering loyalty, suggesting perhaps deep acculturation on the part of the ruling elite. This we found in the longevity of missions continuing to China practically down until the downfall of the Qing, as well as in the frequency of missions, and especially in conducting its dual tributary relationship with both the Qing court as well as Edo. To be sure, as with other tributaries, missions to the Chinese court masked trade, and for an island nation poor in natural resources aside from its sulfur, sea products (as with red coral), and horses, the arbitrage afforded by trade in rare and precious commodities from the southern ocean was its lifeblood. Stated another way, the tribute envoy missions plied by Ryukyu with China and the ritual submission implied were unique from across the Sinic world in the way that both (thanks to support from Fujian) cooperated in the Southeast Asian trade.

1. Especially as the Kobata and Matsuda compilation was privately published and remains relatively obscure, Hamashita’s (2011: 107–29) contribution has been to revisit the totality of Lidai Baoan document collections, explaining them to an international audience while also drawing attention to the Ryukyu Kingdom’s historical bridging role at the intersection of two seas.

2. For the original handwritten letter along with imaginative sketch map, see Antoine Gaubil (1689–1759), “Mémoires du Père Gaubil sur le Japon et la Corée,” Bibliothèque numérique – Observatoire de Paris. https://bibnum.obspm.fr/ark:/11287/2bKN3.

10. Configuring Macau on the World Map

As a New World creation, albeit embedded on Chinese soil on Ming Chinese terms, Macau simply did not exist as a world port at the time that Ptolemy conceived his Geographia. Unlike the western and eastern Deccan of India studded with place-names traceable back to Ptolemy, Pliny, and Strabo, the general elaboration of the Sinus Magnus aside, the coastline of Sinae/China was only vaguely apprehended. To be sure, the Polean account, along with poorly understood Arab sources entering translation in Europe in the eighteenth century, began to add the names and general locations of the historical world trading ports of Canton/Guangzhou, Quanzhou, and others in the eastern Fujian triangle, wherever the Persians, Arabs, Indians, and others traded. Still, notwithstanding their priority in Macau under the Ming, the Portuguese remained beholden to mandarin power. Notably, the Ming only reluctantly accepted the loss of its Muslim Malacca tributary to Portuguese domination and never entertained for a moment such a trade-off as conceding the sovereignty of the small peninsula on the western side of the Pearl River estuary. Yet we see a fundamental misconception on the part of arriving Europeans as to local, including imperial, Chinese concepts of space and territorialization. Napoleonic-era French actions at the expense of the court of Hue in Vietnam or the Dutch versus the court of Mataram on Java might offer different models, but in winning permission to permanently settle Macau, the Portuguese arrived as supplicants on Chinese terms and not as aggressors, cannons blazing. As an act of validation, the Portuguese offered “ground rent” in the form of bars of silver to the local mandarins, a system that continued well into the nineteenth century.

Looking back, it seems unlikely that distant Macau would also enter the imagination of the French king Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) and his leading minister working with an Italian-born astronomer dynasty, that of the Cassinis, for two reasons. One was scientific, using places like Macau to better calibrate longitude and to better know the earth. The other was political, to advance French state interest in the Far East and even across the Atlantic, where France also was entangled in the slave trade. The French project of harnessing French Jesuits to state purpose also bore fruit, as with the mapping of China. A first section of this chapter muses upon the exceptional priority accorded Portugal by Ming China ahead of European rivals. A second section offers an excursus on early Jesuit mapping of Ming China, whereas a third section turns to the practical mapping of Macau and its surrounding seas according to European conventions. A fourth section leads with an examination of the Jesuit astronomical project in Macau, a virtual world-mapping exercise based on observed science and mathematical computation. Finally, Macau is examined from inside the Chinese xylographic cartographic/gazetteer tradition by way of offering a counterpoint to European renderings of space.

I. Portuguese Macau Exceptionalism

Understanding what might be called the Portuguese priority in China, notably its occupation of Macau Peninsula and privileged trade monopoly with both Ming and Qing China, is a subject that perplexed later arriving European rivals, just as it concentrated the minds of historians, especially in the nineteenth century, when the Portuguese sought to alter the terms of the contract (see Ljungstedt 1836). But, as French Enlightenment writer Abbé Raynal (1784: 1:133–34) exposed, until the Portuguese arrival, China was “utterly” unknown in Europe. This was true, and Portuguese-administered Macau would be the launching pad for a variety of European religious and other missions entering China from Ming times on. In other words, without the Macau precedent, the knowledge exchange with China, whether from Muslim or Western sources, would have muddled along without the clarity and brilliance it reached under especially the Ming-era Jesuit missions.

As Raynal explains, when in 1511 Alfonso d’Albuquerque overthrew the Malacca Sultanate (and Ming tributary) and, in the name of Portugal, seized the major commercial mart in the archipelago, he met with Chinese ships and merchants “and conceived a high opinion of a nation. . . . He invited the Chinese to continue their commerce at Malacca. From them he procured a particular account of the strength, riches, and manners of their extensive empire, and communicated his intelligence to the court of Portugal” (133).

In the year 1518, a squadron sailed from Lisbon, to convoy an ambassador to China. As soon as it arrived at the islands in the neighbourhood of Canton, it was surrounded by Chinese vessels, who came to reconnoitre it. Ferdinand Andrade . . . suffered the Chinese to come on board, communicated the object of his voyage to the mandarins who resided at Canton, and sent his ambassador on shore who was conducted to Peking. (133)

Writing of the historically documented visit by the Portuguese envoy Tomé Pires to the Ming court and the actions of the Andrade brothers, Fernão and Simão, as Raynal (1784: 1:134) states:

The ambassador was at every moment presented with some new wonder, that struck him with amazement. If we consider the largeness of towns, the multitude of villages, the variety of canals; of which some are navigable across the country . . . we shall not wonder at the surprise of the Portuguese ambassador, who had been accustomed to the barbarous and ridiculous manners of Europe. (134)

Taking note of the piratical actions of Simão Andrade as with building a fort without permission, extorting money, and kidnapping children, the emperor imprisoned Pires, who “died in confinement,” and banished the Portuguese from China for some years. But with a relaxation of policy, the Portuguese were allowed to trade from the nearby island of Sancian (Shangchuan Dao 上川岛). However, as Raynal (1784: 1:176) relates, a pirate named Tchang si-lao:

seized upon the island of Macao, from whence he blocked up the ports of China, and even proceeded so far as to lay siege to Canton. The neighboring mandarins had recourse to the Portuguese, who had ships in the harbour of Sancian; they hastened to the relief of Canton, raised the siege, and obtained a complete victory over the pirate, whom they pursued as far as Macao, where he slew himself.

The emperor of China, informed of the service the Portuguese had rendered him on this occasion, bestowed Macao on them, as a mark of his gratitude. They received the grant with joy, and built a town which became very flourishing, and was advantageously situated for the trade they soon after entered into with Japan. (176)

Hereafter, the pirate story appears as a master narrative in eighteenth-century European works relating to the Portuguese exceptionalism. Recycled in a number of “universal histories” without interrogation, the story was embellished by Carlos Augusto Montalto de Jesus in his Historic Macao (1902) and practically carried through until the present. While never validated by either Portuguese or Chinese documentation, still the account served over the centuries as a sustaining foundation myth for the Portuguese permanent occupation of Macau, generally dated to 1557.

Redrawing the Map of China: The Case of the Dutch Assault on Macau and Occupation of Formosa

While the Spanish, Dutch, and junk-born Zheng clan struggles over the island named Formosa by the Portuguese are much better known in modern world-history writing thanks to such authors as Tono Andrade (2008) and Hang Xing (2015), still the basic facts filtered back to Europe from a multitude of sources. As Raynal (1784: 223) marvels, China was singular in standing up to the generalized European colonial assault on Asia, at the same time redrawing the political map of this part of the world, allowing but a distant Portuguese toehold in Macau. Notably, he wrote, “It may appear somewhat singular that, since the year 1683, when Formosa fell under the domination of China, no Europeans have ever attempted to form any settlement there, upon the same conditions at least, as that of the Portuguese of Macao.”

Raynal (1784: 219–23) also offers a somewhat bowdlerized version of the Dutch occupation of Formosa, their successes, and their eclipse. The backdrop, he summarizes, is the rising Dutch-Portuguese competition globally. As he wrote of the Dutch:

In the year 1601 they endeavoured, and in 1607, they renewed the attempt, to open communication with the ports belonging to the vast empire of China, which, at that time, was cautious of admitting strangers. The Portuguese found means, by bribery, and the intrigues of their missionaries, to get the Hollanders excluded. They resolved to extort by force what they could not obtain by treaty, and determined to intercept the vessels belonging to the Chinese. This piratical proceeding did not answer their expectations. A Portuguese fleet sailed from Macao to attack the pirates who thought proper to retire. The inequality of their numbers the impossibility of refitting in seas where they had no shelter, and the fear of disgracing their nation in the eyes of a great empire, whose good opinion it was their interest to preserve, all these considerations determined them to decline the fight: but this was only for a short time. (219–20)

In large part, this is a historically accurate reference to the Dutch raids on Macau launched in 1601, 1603, and 1607, along with the Dutch invasion of 1622, which represented the first real attempt to capture the city, part of a multiship armada under Admiral Cornellis Reijersen launched by the Java-based governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, Jan Pieterzoon Coen. But having failed with major losses of ships and men at the hands of Portuguese, Jesuit, and black slave defenders,

they sent that which they had employed against Macao to form a colony in the Pescadore isles. . . . The Hollanders had determined to abandon a settlement they had despaired of making useful, when, in the year 1624, they were invited to fix at Formosa, and had assurances given them that the Chinese merchants would be allowed full liberty to go there and trade with them. (220)

In fact, the Dutch were expelled from the Pescadores, or Penghu Islands, in the Taiwan Strait owing to their piratical ways, before settling on what was then a sandbar, near the modern city of Tainan in south-western Taiwan. Describing Formosa (Taiwan) as an island opposite Fujian province but not “subject to the dominion of the Chinese whose genius does not incline them to conquest,” Raynal (1784: 220–21) then describes how the Dutch took advantage of the situation to establish a fortified trading base and colony.

The Hollanders without difficulty informed themselves of every particular that prudence suggested, thought it most advisable to fix their settlement on a small island that lay contiguous to the larger one. This situation afforded them three considerable advantages, an easy defense, if hatred or jealously should incline their neighbours to molest them; the convenience of a harbour formed by the two islands; and the facility of maintaining a sage communication with China during the monsoons; advantages, which they could not have found in any other position they might have chosen.

In short time the island became the center of all the correspondence that was carried on between Java, Siam, the Philippines islands, China, Japan and other countries. And in a few years was considered the most considerable mart in India. (221)

But the tables would be turned in the general chaos generated by dynastic change in China. As Raynal (1784: 223) then narrates, Equam (Iquan), or Zheng Zhilong 郑芝龙, a junk captain-merchant of obscure birth turned pirate, defended his part of Ming China against the Tartars (Qing). But, decoyed to Beijing, he was seized, imprisoned, and died. As introduced in Chapter 5, Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) sought revenge. As history records, Zheng laid siege to the Dutch stronghold of Fort Zeelandia for nearly a year before forcing the Dutch commander, Frederic Coyette, to surrender in February 1662. The following year, a Qing admiral led an invasion force across the Straits to dislodge the independent kingdom that had been established by rebels who fled the mainland. With Coyette escaping back to the Dutch stronghold on Java and “degraded” (demoted), attempts made to recover Fort Zeelandia proved unsuccessful, obliging the Dutch to conduct trade from Canton “on the same conditions, and under the same restrictions as other nations.” The double Dutch humiliation, as with its failed attack on Macau linked with its eclipse on Formosa/Taiwan, washed over Macau, with the Portuguese emerging secure through the era of the transition from Ming to Qing.

II. Early Jesuit Mapping of Ming China

Starting with Matteo Ricci and Michelle Ruggieri, early Jesuit mapping of China took double form. Obviously, the Jesuits were intrigued to know and map Chinese space, both mentally and according to mathematical principles. This they did as they traveled across China from Macau in stages to Nanjing and Beijing. On the way they also collected local lore, gazetteers, and examples of local mapping. Certain of this cartographic information arrived back in Europe, just as missionaries arriving in China would feed back letters to Rome (later published as “Jesuit letters”). In what may be hailed today as a monumental civilizational transaction, Ricci and Ruggieri added another element to East Asian conceptions of the world outside of Arab-Mongol contacts and information gleaned from the Indian Ocean area by the Zheng He voyages—namely, the gift of newly crafted European “world maps,” especially those emerging from the Low Countries. Although China was the intended beneficiary, copies also reached Korea and Japan. Neither did the Jesuits neglect to introduce mechanical clocks and timepieces—much admired for ornamental value—but actually carrying with them the seed of universal time (see Tang Kajian 2005, Chap. 8).

Ricci’s Pioneering Mapping Exchange

Notwithstanding the important Islamic exchanges with China, it was actually Ricci who, in 1602, was commissioned by Ming emperor Wanli (1572–1620) to produce a world map, Kunyu Wanguo Quantu 坤舆万国全图 (A map of the myriad countries of the world). A collaboration with Li Zhizao and Zhang Wentao, this was a first in China with the exception of a 1584 woodblock print made in Zhaoqing (near Guangzhou) and some other images identified by researchers. Overall, the sets of maps produced by Ricci ranged from terrestrial to celestial, with a strong pedagogical approach. As Eleonora Emili (2010: 119) writes, the fact that various editions of Ricci’s world map were made in Zhaoqing, Nanjing, and Beijing “is tangible proof of the emergence in the East of notions of Western Renaissance cartography.” For the first time Ricci had given them an instrument with which to understand the five continents (not just the coast of Africa), the sphericity of the earth (as revealed through mathematics), plus extensive empirical knowledge of the world.[1]

China centered and with various annotations, Kunyu Wanguo Quantu also included lunar charts and scientific tables documenting the movement of the planets. Still, in line with strict Vatican orthodoxy, Ricci’s inset “diagram of nine planets” offered a version of a geocentric solar system. Certain fantastical elements are also entered, as with a “country of dwarfs” and Malacca described as a land of flying dragons. Versions of this woodblock map also reached Japan and Korea. It was the first map in China to reveal the Americas alongside the known continents. The exception was Australia, folded into a Ptolemaic Great Southern Land (Magellanica) stretching along the Southern Hemisphere (see James Ford Bell Library 2014).

As widely acknowledged (Needham 1959: 583), Ricci’s flattened sphere projection with parallel latitudes and curving longitudes closely followed Abraham Ortelius’s Typus Orbis Terrarum of 1570. But reoriented, with China placed toward the center of the map, it also confirmed China’s Middle Kingdom status, thus honoring the son of heaven. The world maps of Gerard Mercator and Pieter Plancius are also seen as sources. Otherwise, as Needham (1959: 583) hedges, while Ricci certainly introduced the American continents to China along with the general alignment of the known continents, it is not exactly correct to say that he introduced correct latitude and longitude to China. In the case of latitude (as suggested by French Jesuit Sinologue Jean-Baptiste Du Halde), different lengths of gnomon shadows had been known in China for many centuries, and the measurement of one degree of latitude had been known since the time of I-Hsing. In any event, the measurement of correct longitude would await the invention of the pendulum clock and, for mariners, the sea chronometer.

According to Lee Siu-Leung (2012), a preponderance of names on the Ricci map are not found on the Ortelius map (and 63 percent of those on Asia). This should not be surprising, as Ricci drew from Chinese chronicles/gazetteers in drawing the map. As Lee mentions, almost all the names relating to China and Central Asia are taken from Chinese sources dating back to the Han dynasty, including uncommon names for the remote southwest and northeast of China (drawn from early Ming sources, including names linked with the Zheng He voyages). As Lee argues, while Ricci’s rendition of Europe is actually outdated, it is far richer on the Americas (even more so than those of Ortelius or Mercator) and Africa. In the latter case, Ricci shows nations existing between 1380 and 1460, coinciding with the emperors who commissioned the seven Zheng He voyages (1405–1433). As Lee (330) concludes, the geography of the map was actually that of Zheng He with names added by Ricci, “a map based mostly on Chinese information collected during Zheng He’s voyages.”[2]

Michelle Ruggieri

As the first European missionary permitted to enter and stay in mainland China, Michelle Ruggieri departed Macau in 1583, visiting a number of provincial cities in southern China. In the meantime, he sought to draw a complete set of atlases to describe all fifteen provinces under the Ming dynasty. Never officially printed, the atlases were found in the National Archives of Rome in 1987 and formally published in 1993. Though many plates were lost, those remaining are preceded by a general linking map of Ming China including Hainan Island and a less developed Formosa along with indication of the Ryukyus. According to an archival description, Ruggieri grasped the extraordinary importance of the use of cartography by the Chinese for administrative purposes, a technique then unknown in Europe (Sardo 2013).

It is important that the China atlas in forty folios drawn by Ruggieri on a province-level basis was the very first executed by a European and received in Europe. As with the Chinese map example, it is easy to see that Ruggieri drew up or incorporated Chinese cartographic knowledge or received assistance from locals. Concluded in 1606, as Jin Guo Ping (2013: 67–71) has explained, Ruggieri firmly based his atlas upon the Da Ming Yutong Wen Wu Zhusi Yamen Guanzhi (The general official hierarchy of the civil and military office of the great Ming dynasty), as suggested by the title, an atlas with text on China. Accompanied by extensive written descriptions, the atlases also served to introduce to Europe the geographic locations of rivers, agriculture and mining zones as well as educational and cultural features of the different provinces of China, especially illustrating the importance of the southern region. In doing so, Ruggieri revealed the huge size of China, compared to the descriptions of Marco Polo’s idea of Cathay. Macau (in various spellings) appears a number of times on the map, although Ruggieri edited out a pejorative notation on the Da Ming version, relating to the Portuguese administered territory. Noting its location “near the sea,” Macau was said to suffer from the “evil presence of foreign barbarians,” remarking as well that the local inhabitants “are good for nothing.”

Martino Martini (1614–1661)

One of the most important of the seventeenth-century Jesuit maps of China was Novus Atlas Sinensus by the Italian Jesuit Martino Martini. Arriving in Macau in 1642, he was then based in Hangzhou, surviving the Manchu invasion by switching loyalty to the newly installed Qing. Departing China in 1651 and duly arriving back in Europe, Martini successfully networked with printers, leading to the production of his Novus Atlas Sinensis appearing as part of volume 10 of Blaeu’s Atlas Maior (Amsterdam, 1655). Undoubtedly, as discussed by Theodore N. Foss (1994: 133), Martini’s work was not simply a copy of a Chinese original but derivative of other Jesuit works while also incorporating information derived from late Ming gazetteers. As such, his maps were provincial maps, as with Quantung imperii sinarum provincia duodecima/[tiré du P. Martini]; excudit Joannes Blaeu. By adding geographical information such as administrative centers, Jesuit residences, mines, and so on, his atlas gained an enviable reputation in its time as simply the best, and Martini is hailed in China today as the father of Western geography of China. Martini’s map in turn would be reworked by Flemish Jesuit and pioneer Confucius translator, Philippe Couplet (1624–1693), appearing in his Tabula Chronologica Monarchiae Sinicae; 1686), albeit outdated by adhering to the Ming-era delineation of provinces.

Michal Piotr Boym

Another Jesuit entering this field was Polish-born Michal Piotr Boym (1612–1659), who, departing Lisbon in March 1643, first arrived in Macau in 1644 before entering the missionary field in Hainan in January 1647 (Miazek 2009). Sometimes dubbed the Polish Marco Polo owing to his wide-ranging travels, Boym is known for his pioneering studies of Chinese physiology, nature, as well as cartography. Offering a contrast to Martini, Boym was delegated envoy to the Southern Ming Yongli emperor (r. 1646–1662) to solicit help from Rome to parry the advance of the Qing. Bearing a letter from the Ming pretender dated November 1650, Boym duly conducted the arduous mission, escaping imprisonment by Portuguese Qing loyalists in Goa on the way back from Europe to China, and dying somewhere in Guangxi, having again made his way east via a circuitous route through Vietnam again to avoid the Portuguese.[3] Boym’s illustrated Atlas of China (1665), including an introduction to the Great Wall of China from his Mappa Imperii Sinarum, brought to Europe perhaps the best yet rendition of Chinese space. His hybrid Chinese provincial maps incorporating evocations of Chinese nature, for example, fruit plant types, along with mineral resources, were superimposed—at some point in time—with compass roses, rhumb lines, and coordinates, although inaccurate. According to Walter Fuchs (1952: 72), Boym’s atlas is more or less based upon the Kung-yǖ-t’u of c. 1555. Chinese characters added to the map were probably written by the young Chinese Christian convert who accompanied him to Europe. With the apparent exception of a single map published by Nicolas Sanson d’Abbeville, Boym’s atlas remained unpublished (Foss 1994: 138).

We could go as far as to say that, for local literati, Ricci’s world map offered to China, Korea, and Japan not only a new conception of China’s place in the world but also their first understandings of the world region, as filtered through a Jesuit optic. Even so, the Jesuits faced down powerful neo-Confucian opposition at court, meaning that Sino-centric views of the universe were not so easily reversed. If anything, Ming cartography and geographic representations retreated into familiar cultural patterns, although the Jesuits would be invited back under the Qing. Having returned to Europe, it was actually Ruggieri who brought with him the first real post-Ptolemaic, post-Polean representation of China, in this case Ming China. Obviously as well, he learned from China not only the art of provincial mapping but the true nomenclature, size, shape, and relative scale of the country along with its coastline, nearly two hundred years before the next major Jesuit mapping exercise.

III. The Jesuit Astronomical Project in Macau

Because of its advantageous location off the coast of southern China and its access for the first-arriving members of the Jesuit fraternity, Macau became one of the cities on a global grid where systematic astronomical observations could be made. As well documented, the Jesuit missions subsequently arriving in Beijing were affiliated with the Ming and later Qing mathematical and astronomical academies. More generally, the Jesuits saw the advantage in obtaining access to Asian courts, as in Thailand and China, through demonstrations of astronomical prowess by, for example, predicting eclipses and so validating their presence. However, by the late 1660s, the French court sponsorship had taken the Jesuits in hand as part of their diplomatic-military push to establish relations with the Ayutthayan court (see Gunn 2018b: 167–69).

Astronomical measurements taken in Macau by the first-arriving Jesuits, like Matteo Ricci, were not entirely fruitless exercises. Fed back through Jesuit letters to Europe, a major set of letters assembled in Paris in 1691 were excerpted by the journal of the French Royal Academy of Science, Mémoires de l’Academie des Sciences, founded in 1666 by Louis XIV. They were also commented upon by Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1671–1712), author of a landmark work published in 1667 on observations of Jupiter and Saturn. In 1669 Cassini had moved from his native Italy to France at the invitation of Jean-Baptiste Colbert then serving as secretary of state for the navy, where he helped to set up the Paris Observatory, which opened in 1671. For the rest of his career, Cassini served as astronomer to Louis XIV. Other members of the family, including his son Jacques Cassini (1712–1756), carried on the tradition, with César-François Cassini de Thury (1714–1784) becoming director of the Paris Observatory in 1771.

At a juncture when the French court was sponsoring demonstrations of Jesuit astronomy at the Ayutthayan court, France would also pay close attention to parallel and coordinated activities on the part of Jesuit astronomers in Macau. With Jesuit Guy Tachard remaining in Thailand, in July 1686, five other Jesuits, de Fontaney, Bouvet, Gerbillon, Le Comte, and de Visdelou, departed by the sea route to Macau but were turned back by bad weather and navigational difficulties. Denied entry into Macau by the Portuguese, they chose another route and destination. On 19 June 1687, boarding a Chinese junk they bypassed Macau for Ningbo (in Zhejiang), arriving in February 1668. Called to Beijing by the emperor, Fontaney moved on to Nanjing (making astronomical observations, as he also did in Thailand). Making several return trips to Europe, Fontaney also became an informant in scholarly circles on matters Chinese (Michaud 1816: 207).

Pioneer Astronomical Observations in Asia and the New World

The quest to measure longitude on the part of Europe went hand in hand with the establishment of empire, in which the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns also engaged. Outside of Europe, measurement of longitude for cartographical purposes was achieved in the Spanish Empire in Mexico City in the 1540s and in Peru in the 1580s. With no great precision, astronomical observations were made in India in 1593 by Jesuit Christopher Clavius, and Goa continued to be an observation post for Jesuits traveling eastward through to Macau and China. On 11 December 1685, an eclipse of the moon was registered by the German Jesuit Paul Clayn (Klein) at Manila (Mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences, Vol. 7, 1725). The telescope was not the only instrument necessary for such observation; so was the clock or timepiece necessary to accurately register longitude or east-west position as expressed in degrees and as matched against other recorded meridians.

In Macau, the very first recorded celestial observation was made by Ricci, who observed two eclipses in or just before 1583 situating the peninsula at “more or less” 124° east of the Canaries, or 113°36' east of Greenwich, an error of 4°46' (Randles 1984: 15). This compares to the modern longitude of Macau of 113°55' east, as measured against the Greenwich meridian, but if adjusted to account for the usual prime meridian adopted by the Jesuits, at the Faroe Islands, Ricci’s calculations might be adjudged fairly accurate. Ricci may or may not have carried a timepiece, but the first clocks were installed in Macau at least prior to 1591 (Tang 2016: 258). In Beijing on 15 December 1610 at a time when the Jesuits were seeking to win favor at the court, the Italian Jesuit Sabatino de Ursis observed an eclipse and, along with the Dalmatia-born Jesuit Johann Uremen, calculated the longitude of Beijing, although without great accuracy (Randles 1984: 14–15). In 1612, Uremen and the Italian Giulio Aleni also calculated the latitude of Macau. Writing two hundred years later, as the Russian navigator Adam Johann von Krusenstern (1813: 294) commented that it was achieved with “considerable precision,” putting it at 22° 23' north.

Jesuits Noël and Thomas

Two Macau-based Jesuits, both from the Low Countries, were critical to the French astronomical interest in Asia. One, François Noël, is better remembered as a translator of Chinese classics. According to a short biography by Paul Rule (2003: 189), Noël arrived in Macau on 9 August 1685, crossing into China in 1687. The other, Antoine Thomas, left Europe four years prior to Noël and was ten years his senior in the Jesuit ranks, then holding the rank of vice provincial. Thomas, a Belgian mathematician, would later go on to serve as vice president of the Bureau of Mathematics in Beijing and would subsequently participate in the Qing negotiations with Russia at Nerchinsk (Oliveira 2012: 496–98).

En route to Macau on 16 June 1685, Noël observed an eclipse of the moon while anchored on a ship in the Straits of Malacca, and Thomas observed the same eclipse in Macau. Earlier, according to Rule (2003: 142–45), Noël had collaborated with Thomas on a project to upgrade maps of Thailand, Macau, and Japan. Eventually, both Noël and Thomas were caught up with the Rites Controversy, a dispute among Catholic missionaries over the religiosity of Chinese rituals, with Noël charged to make the arduous sea and land voyage to Rome to plead their case. Both would make astronomical observations in Macau, with Thomas preceding Noël (see Gunn 2018b: 172).

As explained in the report , “Observations de la Hauteur du Pole en plusieurs Villes de la Chine, par la Pere Noël,” Noël observed the midday sun with the quarter circle (quadrant) in various parts of China (Hoai-Ngan, Ningpo, and Macau) (Mémoires 1725). The height of Polaris, or the North Star, he recorded at Macau was 31°12'0". As known, the Pole Star is a visible star in the northern sky useful for celestial navigation and observation because of its apparently fixed position. Accordingly, its angle of elevation can also be used to determine latitude.

As Noël continued:

I have not been able to observe the latitude and longitude of all the towns and villages in China through which I passed; but just to give an idea of their position, less imperfect than usual, I have taken note of the longitude of Macau, and the latitude observed in several villages, and I have concluded closer and closer the longitude of other (towns) by the distance separating one from the other, and location using a compass, which at Macau tends to decline to the northwest a little more than a degree, or less, and not all in some parts of China. (allowing that he had not been able to measure (magnetic) variation thoroughly). (Mémoires 1725: 186)

He also attached a table for longitudes and latitudes of a small number of places across China following Father François Noël. He used the longitude for Macau (138°30' east) as the base for other locations (Mémoires 1725: 92).

Comparative Analysis

Having calculated Macau’s latitude, at 8:30 p.m. on 8 November 1612 with a view to determining longitude, Aleni and Ureman observed the eclipse in Macau. In Nagasaki, Jesuit Charles Spinola, soon to become a victim of the Tokugawa suppression of Christianity, also observed the eclipse at 9:30 p.m. Thus, the difference in longitude between the meridian at Macau and Nagasaki was established at 1 degree. The difference in longitude between Paris and Nagasaki was established at 126°26'. Thus, the longitude of Nagasaki was established at 148°56' (Mémoires 1725).[4] This compares with the modern measurement of 129.8777° east and, if adjusted to the Faroe Islands prime meridian, might also be seen as relatively accurate.

Still more observations were made of the Pole Star at the Jesuit College in Macau on 17 July 1685. On this occasion, the observation was made by use of a large-size gnomon, a form of calibrated sundial. As determined through various calculations, the height of the Pole Star (its latitude) was determined at 22°12'14". This observation was 1'16" different from the result obtained using a smaller gnomon at the time of the solstices (Mémoires 1725).

On 30 November 1686, Father Noël observed the commencement of the lunar eclipse of Macau, having corrected for time. Simultaneous observations made in Paris (29 November) allowed calculations of differences in the meridians between Paris and Macau (7°25'45"). In the meantime, observations made by Jesuit astronomers in Avignon allowed the calculation of the difference between Avignon and Macau (7°16'22"). The difference between Madrid and Macau was calculated at 7°51'9". Following their hypothesis, the longitude of Paris was taken at 22°30'; therefore, the longitude of Macau was determined at 133°56' (Mémoires 1725). With this methodology in hand, the Cassini project went on to size up China, the easternmost extent of the Eurasian continent, and practically the world. Though unstated, the use of clocks at all these points of observation, Macau included, would have been imperative to synchronize such an operation (see Gunn 2018b: 172–76).

IV. Macau Mapped According to European Conventions/Macau and Pacific Ocean Exploration

For eighteenth-century navigators pushing the frontiers of exploration across the vast Pacific Ocean—including a remaining ship of the James Cook voyage, the La Pérouse expedition, and the Russian expedition mounted by Krusenstern—Manila and Macau were the only friendly ports in the hemisphere. Their maps, charts, astronomical observations, and hydrographic soundings of Macau as well as the South China Sea and beyond were also part of the cartographic revolution, ushering in an age of colonization of Australia and the Pacific Islands, alongside aggrandizing on the sea periphery of China, and in Vietnam and in the Taiwan Strait, when it came to France. As such, maps and sea charts were portable and translated into national power, hence the high risks and huge expenses in fitting out voyages of exploration.

William Bligh (1754–1817), part of Cook’s third voyage (and famed for the mutiny of the Bounty), visited Macau in December 1779 on the Resolution. Arriving from Hawaii (where Cook was killed), Bligh produced a detailed map of Macau, including depth soundings. The following month, the Resolution conducted “nautical observations,” including the latitude and longitude measurements of Macau determined at, respectively, 22°12'0" north and 113°47' east, along with Taipa Roads where the ship anchored, determined at 22°9'20" north and 113°48'34" east. With Greenwich adopted as the prime meridian, these measurements are easy to compare with modern-day coordinates. The Bligh voyage navigated with the assistance of a map executed by Alexander Dalrymple, which they confirmed as accurate by making a great number of lunar observations upon departing Taipa for the journey home (Cook 1842: 1534–36).

In January 1787, the French navigator and explorer of the Pacific Jean-François de Galaup, Count La Pérouse, arrived in Macau, heading up the Boussole and the Astrolabe. Immediately making contact with Governor Bernardo Alexis de Lemos, he requested permission to establish an observatory (La Pérouse 1807: 323). Appointed by King Louis XVI, La Pérouse headed a high-power expedition. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki (2014) points out, armed with an array of scientific instruments, the expedition brought Enlightenment knowledge wherever they sailed. Unlike any other visitor to Macau, the La Pérouse expedition was also on display. In February, as recorded, they set up their observatory in Macau’s Augustinian convent. From there, through observation of distances of the moon and sun, they were able to “verify” their clocks (vital for the accurate measurement of longitude) and so calculated Macau’ longitude as 111°19'30" east (relative to Greenwich and comparing well with Macau’s modern coordinates). The La Pérouse expedition was equipped with marine chronometers produced by Ferdinand Berthoud. The chronometer showed the time in the port of departure, and this was compared to local time when the sun was exactly overhead, at true midday. All that was then needed was to calculate the difference to obtain the longitude, in other words, the exact position of the ship.[5]

As La Pérouse wrote from Macau on 3 January 1787 in a discussion on the specific astronomical and trigonometrical skills of his crew:

The Spanish chart of the Great Pacific Ocean which I have the honour of sending you, and on which I have traced my route from Monterey to China, is shamefully defective. I add to it the others merely to prove, that our knowledge of that immense sea, has been stationary for two centuries, from the galleons from Manila having always followed the same track, without ever deviating ten leagues. (La Pérouse 1807: 323)

He wrote from Macau on 5 January 1787 of his intention to sail to Kamchatka as soon as “fair weather commences.”

During the three or four days I have been at anchor in Macao, I have procured some little information, and am led to understand, that the different channels between China and Japan, the coast of Tartary and the Kurile islands are full of shoals; that the currents are strong, and the fogs are almost perpetual. (La Pérouse 1807: 405)

This proved to be correct. In fact, the La Pérouse expedition proceeding north from Macau via Cavite in the Philippines was epochal in the way of charting new geographic realities on the coasts of China, Japan, Korea, and Tartary (the Russian Far East), including the Kuriles and Sakhalin Island as far north as 52° latitude. Entering the strait that bears his name, the French navigator trumped the Dutch voyage of de Vries of 1643 north to the Sea of Okhotsk by proving the insular character of Yezu (Hokkaido). On this journey, a major feat of navigation, the two ships voyaged east of Taiwan before entering the East China Sea. They then sailed past the Ryukyu Islands, navigating though the Tsushima Strait before entering the Korea Sea / Sea of Japan and the “Channel of Tartary.” Hugging the fogbound coasts separating Qing domains and beyond, they then entered into the Sea of Okhotsk before arriving at the Russian outpost on Kamchatka. Having acquired critical intelligence, this was dispatched to Paris overland via Siberia. This was fortuitous for France, given the disappearance of the expedition off the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific in 1788 along with the clocks taken on board the Astrolabe. It is not without interest, as Morris-Suzuki (2014) relates, that in their navigation, the La Pérouse expedition was assisted by an Ainu map of western Sakhalin and the Amur River. But for the Ainu world, the La Pérouse expedition came at a crucial moment in their lives, as the Japanese and Russian Empires came into collision in a peripheral zone of the Qing world where people outside of “civilization” ranked low.

The Changing Map Profile of Macau and Coastal China

In this early modern period of colonial expansion, Europeans were mapping up and down the coast of China, drawing coastline profiles, and scouting harbors.[6] Needless to say, European shipping was technologically advancing while beginning to render many ancient local sailing practices and routes redundant, although not absolutely (speaking as one who has traveled by sail on Chinese and Indonesian sailing craft). In the case of Macau, this era produced the first modern map images, though still impressionistic. Importantly, some offered soundings of depth, just as the morphology of Macau or, at least the Inner Harbor and Taipa Roads, was changing through siltation. We could go as far as to say that, by the nineteenth century, Macau seamlessly entered the world ocean map graticule via hydrographic surveying at a time when Hong Kong’s superior anchorage sunk the Portuguese colony’s historic role as exceptional port of call and point of entry into China and the Chinese world. Many of these maps are well known and reproduced in many publications on Macau, so my notes are cursory.

Needless to say, the local Chinese and Portuguese knew Macau Peninsula and surrounding islands and waters best. Given that boundary issues bedeviled relations between Portugal and Republican China in particular, both sides may have regretted the failure to produce better maps. As Macau governor José Carlos da Maia asserted on 1 June 1914, at a time when the Portuguese legation in Beijing raised the matter, “a delimitation is necessary.” As he continued, “without delimitation, it would be impossible to realize improvements to the port, impossible to regularize the border region otherwise subject to Chinese provocations, impossible to prevent unrest on Coloane, impossible to adjudicate on the question of the Porte Interior and the eastern slope of Lappa, and otherwise impossible to quarantine Macau from the infestation of pirate operations in the West River” (Gunn 1996: 105).

One hundred years on, the “pirates” are human traffickers, and illegal entry remains an issue, as does the need to better develop reclaimed land and attend to satellite development on Montanha (Hengqin Dao 横琴岛). In fact, China never signed a Macau border agreement with Portugal, and, unlike Hong Kong under British colonial rule, Macau has never had jurisdiction over its coastal waters. Indeed, the Macau Special Administrative Region of China, as the Portuguese-administered territory became in December 1999, only entered negotiations over management of jurisdiction over its “customary” coastal waters with Beijing in September 2015.

In any case, from the late eighteenth century, Portugal produced increasingly sophisticated hydrographic maps of Macau, including the Inner Harbor and adjacent islands, although scale and complete graticule grid with labeled longitude and latitude did not make an appearance until the past century. For instance, Mappa da Barra de Macau by Costódio E. Azevedo Rendo of November 1772, according to the pilot of the ship Nossa Senhoradores, aligned Macau within a delicately drawn grid of vertical and horizontal lines, geometrically aligned but unnumbered. The map is aligned north-south but, contra convention, with south on top. A scale is indicated. Taipa Grande, Taipa Pequino, and Coloane are included, though their military occupation would be in the future. In other words, this may be the first mathematical map of Macau.

The foreign mapping of Macau also continued, indeed never stopped if we consider early English and Dutch imaging of Macau. As I have written elsewhere (Gunn 2003: 140), Macau as the European gateway to China became the object of imaginative imaging down through the centuries. We could name the naive sketches of Macau produced by Peter Mundy, who arrived in Macau with the fleet of English captain John Weddell, or the graphic produced by Jacob van Meur titled Makou (1665), a vista of Dutch ships pounding Macau’s fortifications, answered by deadly Jesuit fire, a fanciful rendering of a historical event which took place on 21–24 June 1622.

The Amsterdam-based cartographer and watercolorist Johannes Vingboons (1616–1670), better known for his 1639 map of Manhattan, also produced Vogelvlucht op de stad Macao (Bird’s-eye view of the city of Macao, 1640). The image shows a peninsula with a walled city, churches, dwellings, a monastery, and a fort. Outside the city one can discern a number of houses and a church. Roads, town layout, the border gate, and shipping all appear in view when magnified. In the 1665 version, an added rice-paper caption offers a key to twenty-two features. The detail is richer. A grassy foreground at the base, the island opposite Macau Peninsula, artistically suggests an aerial view, but the border area is trimmed. Drawn in Amsterdam from observations made by crews of VOC ships, this is not a scientific map and lacks scale and coordinates. The map may have had VOC intelligence interest in mind.

The eighteenth century brought a change of emphasis and interest. For example, Jacques Nicolas Bellin (1703–1772), official hydrographer of the French king known for his cameo maps of world cities, also mapped the China coast. Specific to Macau, Bellin’s Carte des isles qui sont à l’entrée de la rivière de Canton, executed in Paris in 1744, offers no grid except for a single indication of latitude of 22° north, at a point south of Macau, and longitude of 110° east of the Paris meridian for a point some kilometers east of Macau. Bellin also produced coastal maps of China as with Carte de l’Isle de Cheu-Chan ou Isle de Chusan de la province de Che-Kiang avec les costes et isles voisines of the area east of Ningbo in the Chinese province of Zhejiang, located across the bay from Shanghai. Or, more grandly, Carte des isles du Japon et la presqu’isle de Corée avec les costes de la Chine depuis Pekin jusqua Canton (1745) as well as general maps of China, probably derivative of Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, as with L’Empire de la Chine . . . 1748 (but taking longitude from Faroe rather than the Jesuit convention of the Beijing meridian). In 1764, Bellin returned to compose Plan de la ville et du porte de Macao, published in Atlas maritime. A bird’s-eye view of Macau Peninsula and surroundings, the map is scaled (in the ancient French unit of toises) but devoid of coordinates.

Macau was also surveyed by Captain Peter Heywood of HMS Dedaigneuse, with a chart published by the hydrographic office of the British Admiralty in 1840. The map, China, Macau, 1804, offers scale (in sea miles). This may be a first of its kind outside of Portuguese auspices. The map is aligned true north but lacks a grid. Of particular note is the number of soundings (in feet) taken in the Inner Harbor and around Taipa Roads. Noting “Macau Outer Roads,” the English words record, “much less water now than when this survey was made,” thus suggesting an update of data between the date of publication (1840) compared to when the survey was made (1802). Macau Peninsula is well imaged, with a dozen or so prominent buildings and landmarks named. Longitude and latitude of the flagstaff on Monte Fortress are given, according to James Heywood Horsburgh of the British East India Company and two other indecipherable sources.

V. Macau in the Chinese Xylographic/Cartographic Tradition

Having given consideration to Jesuit conceptions of China from their base in Macau, we wonder how Macau itself fit into this Chinese space. Roderich Ptak (2009) for one has drawn attention to the plethora of Ming and early Qing texts dealing with Macau’s geography, population, history, and internal affairs. Certain fall into the genre of literature, others into the genre of fangzhi, or gazetteer. More recently, Tang Kajian (2016) has entered this field, tapping a wide range of little-known sources, including impressions of Macau on the part of visiting Chinese officials reproduced in local gazetteers. Among the literary are those that poetically acknowledge Macau/Aomen as jing hai 镜海, or “mirror of the sea,” or a multiplicity of names mostly associated with the waters that surround it (Clayton 2009: 323). Among the gazetteers, a number deal with Xiangshan, the region now known as Zhuhai 珠海, but also contain information on the Macau Peninsula. In fact, the Xiangshan Xianzhi (The chronicles of Xiangshan County) were block printed from 1548, through the Ming and Qing periods.

A Gazetteer of Macau

There are many Ming and early Qing descriptions of Macau. Few map images from the Chinese side exist, but, in a chorographical sense at least, the labors of two Qing officials in picturing Macau stand out—namely, the Qianlong-era functionaries Zhang Rulin and Yin Guangren. On his part, Zhang Rulin, who became vice prefect for coastal defense of Canton, had made frequent visits to the Portuguese-administered city between 1744 and 1746. Their account, the Ou-Mun-Kei-Leok (Aomen jilue) (澳门记略), attributed to 1751, offers keen insights into Chinese geographical methods and much knowledge of the time.

Besides setting down a great deal of data on Macau under foreign rule, Aomen Jilue (A monograph of Macau) also included poems that had the dual function of witness reports and text embellishment. Notwithstanding its title, however, a surprising portion of this work drifts off into a description of other locales in Southeast Asia either connecting with Macau or China at large. By association, Macau is virtually othered as some southern tropical port of the Nanyang. Thematically, the poems include travel descriptions and embassies of officers sent to Asian countries with which China maintained relations at the time. These include the Kingdom of Champa (practically eclipsed at this time by a resurgent and expanding Nguyễn Vietnam), Malacca (also eclipsed by Portugal as a tribute-bearing sultanate prior to setting up in Macau), Vietnam, Java, the Philippines, and other “tributary” states. The work also comments on cultural exchanges with the people arriving in Macau from the Great Western Ocean, Portugal, Spain, and Holland.

Well known in Macau studies, the work has gone through successive translations into Portuguese (e.g., Luís Gonzaga Gomes’s Monografia de Macau, 1950), with numerous annotated Chinese versions. More than a dozen traditional and modern translations exist, besides that of Gomes. The work also carries a number of illustrations of prominent buildings and images of people, some reprinted in my 1996 publication, Encountering Macau, as well as a Portuguese-Chinese vocabulary list. As Ptak (2009: 198, 229) explains, the Aomen jilue is based on both original data and information drawn from earlier sources. For his part Ptak uses part of the text to draw out data concerning birds in Macau. However, as he found, not all elements of this work can be traced to Chinese sources, as some parts owed to such Jesuit sources as Giulio Aleni and Ferdinand Verbiest.

Seventy years later, Peter Thoms (1824), a figure better known as printer for Robert Morrison’s bibles and dictionaries, also located Macau with reference to Chinese texts and gazetteers. Short on geography, as his purpose was to provide an overall picture of tax collection down to the hsien (xian), or district, level, he also reproduced a province-by-province descriptive gazetteer of China. Specific to Guangdong Province, “there are nine cities denominated Foo, ten of the second class called Chow, and sixty-eight districts. The number of civil officers deployed through the province is 622.” Guangzhou presided over fourteen districts. “The district Heung-shan-hsien, in which Macao is situated, is under the jurisdiction of Kwang-chow-foo. It is distant from Canton 220 li, or 70 miles. Its taxes amount to 34,509 taels. Its granary receives annually 50,000 shih of grain. The Hsien magistrate’s income is 1,000 taels; he has an assistant officer called Tso-tang, who resides at Macao, his income is 80 taels, but he enjoys privileges, which make it a lucrative situation” (Thoms 1824: 314–15).

A printer extraordinaire, typesetting some dozen of his own books in Macau alongside the massive three-volume Chinese-English dictionary compiled by Morrison, Thoms also trained local apprentices, helping to establish the typographic press in Macau and Guangzhou, where the first English-language newspapers in China were issued. In a short time, the Macau-trained printers, including many Macanese, fanned out to the new British colony of Hong Kong and foreign settlements in Xiamen (formerly known as Amoy) and Shanghai. From these locations, serving as typesetters and editors, they launched a veritable print revolution in the Andersonian (1983) sense. While the xylographic press continued to coexist down until recent times, with the new metal-based typography, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, the new-style Chinese-language newspaper was born alongside a new print readership, or community, actually.

Conclusion

As this chapter has demonstrated, historic Macau fit many spaces according to perception. For early arriving Portuguese it may well have been a harbor site on the Pearl River estuary within the broader Sinus Magnus dating from antiquity, more or less confirmed by Marco Polo, and investigated by informants in Malacca, particularly cartographer Francisco Rodrigues, even before the first Portuguese arrival. For Chinese, Macau may have been the “mirror of the ocean,” a poetic allusion befitting its gateway location on the edge of the pristine sea leading to distant locations but also a welcoming feature for long-distance traders edging their way through a labyrinth of islands seeking an entrance to the “gateway of China” at the mouth of the Pearl River estuary.

Once established, the Portuguese wasted no time in fitting Macau into their own version of thalassocracy, connected up with a string of fortaleza, studding a crescent around the Indian Ocean. The Estado da India was a space through which the caravels traded, bringing governors, soldiers, some settlers, merchants, sometimes slaves, and cargoes of trade goods in high demand (as with sandalwood from Timor). It was serviceable for more than three hundred years until collapsing under its own irrelevance, though also revived as a form of modern colonialism in the nineteenth century and surviving until the present in heritage, language, identity, and even blood, as with the Macanese community of Macau along with the myriad other creolized societies around New World–Old World seacoasts spawned by this historic association.

As we observed, along with three or four other global New World cities, Macau was a privileged site for trained astronomers of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to determine especially longitude. With the Dutch occupation of Portuguese-controlled Malacca in 1641, that city also lost its status as a vantage point for celestial observation. Skill in the use and assembly of instruments—telescopes as well as timepieces—required much support and, hence, this science was practically a monopoly of the Jesuit order. The other fact that comes to mind is that the French Crown knew this and, as demonstrated with the French diplomatic-military push on Thailand, sought to use the Jesuits as diplomatic tools. But another facet, as revealed by Cassini’s intervention, was that astronomical observations taken from strategic sites like Macau allowed a more general understanding of the true size of the Eurasian landmass, and, though unstated, such critical geographic information would serve France’s late push into Asia in the wake of the Dutch and Portuguese, including China and Indochina by the mid-nineteenth century. We may conclude of Jesuit measurement of Macau’s coordinates that, in line with the science of the times, their readings for latitude were relatively accurate, although it would be eighteenth-century European explorers who finally calculated the port city’s longitude with accuracy.

The mathematical mapping of Macau undoubtedly built upon long decades of study and investigation. It also gained impetus under the Lisbon-based Commissão de Cartografia, which, from its inception in the late nineteenth century, began the systematic mapping of Portuguese colonial possessions. The Plano hydrographico do porto exterior de Macau (1903) was undoubtedly state of the art for its time. Produced by a group of naval officials under the commissão, Macau, or at least the entire Outer Harbor, was set in a perfectly geometrical latitude and longitude grid (referenced against the Farol de Guia or Macau’s Guia Lighthouse, the first on the China coast). This was a metric map with the scale 1:1,000. As a hydrographic chart, the emphasis was upon the sea contoured according to depth, with soundings recorded in meters. Folded into hydrographic charts of the entrance to the Pearl River, Hong Kong waters, and the South China Sea, Macau was finally connected—arithmetically and geometrically—to the world in the age before GPS.

To strike a point, notwithstanding the gateway role of Macau in introducing cartesian knowledge to China, neo-Confucianism reproduced resilient time-bound descriptive geographies that stood outside of map coordinates. In the case of Macau, this is all the more surprising, as Ricci measured longitude there accurately several hundred years prior to these accounts. Moreover, the triangulated Jesuit mapping of China had then been accomplished under Emperor Kangxi (r. 1661–1722), although evidently unknown to provincial officials at a time when the maps were being mass-produced in Europe, as with the maps of China prepared by d’Anville, with some of them published in Du Halde’s Description de l’empire de la Chine (1735) (see Gunn 2018b: Chap. 7).

Although the physical record has not always survived, we can be sure that over history a Chinese imaginary on Macau amassed in chronicles, official memorials, memorandum penned by mandarins, poetry, maps, and gazetteers. As we examined, Macau also fell into a Chinese gazetteer tradition, and this was emblemized by the Monografia de Macau issued in woodblock in the xylographic tradition, a work that still resonates among historians of Macau. Yet we are surprised that Macau was also imaged not only for its foreignness but as a place connected to the sea and beyond. The author of this work did not even keep a focus upon Macau but used Macau as a narrative digression on places associated with the Nanyang, no matter how anachronistic with reference to such disappeared kingdoms as Champa. But even today, Macau constantly reinvents itself according to economic and political conjunctures.

1. As documented by Emili (2010: 121), Ricci created the following maps, Yudi Shanhai Quantu [Map of earth’s mountains and seas, Zhaoqing, 1584]; Shanhai Yudi Quatu [Complete geographic map of the mountains and seas, Nanking, 1600]; Kunyu Wanguo Quantu [Complete map of the myriad countries of the world, Peking 1602]; Liangyi Xuanlan Tu [Mysterious visual map of the entire world, Peking 1603]; Jingtian Gai [An exact description of the constellations throughout the heaven, Peking, 1601]; Riqui Dayu Diqui Diqui Daqu Yuequi [The sun is larger than the earth and the earth is larger than the moon, Peking after 1606–1607].

2. This may be the case as far as Ricci’s Chinese sources are concerned, especially on the part of his collaborators, but arguing in favor of a Zheng He priority in global exploration and knowledge is in the world of fantasy. It is also in line with the book authored by amateur Sinologist and controversialist Gavan Menzies in his 1421: When China Discovered America (2003), cited approvingly by Lee and discussed elsewhere.

3. Boym’s achievements, including a rare showing of duplicates of his maps, were showcased in the exhibition Between Science and Art: The Marvels of Asia in the Eyes of the Polish Jesuit Michal Piotr Boym, SJ, at the Sir Robert Ho Tung Library, Macau, November–December 2014.

4. According to Krusenstern (1813: 294) and Sasaki (2003: 36), Spinola estimated (autumn of 1612) that Nagasaki was located at a longitude 15° east of Macau, at 127°31'55" east, becoming a standard in Japan for more than two hundred years.

5. In turn, La Pérouse praised British Royal Navy captain P. G. King for determining with precision the latitude of both Manila and Macau (following the British Admiralty “hydrographer” Alexander Dalrymple, copied by director of the French Compagnie des Indes chart publication office, D’Après de Mannevillette (La Pérouse 1797).

6. See, for example, Victor F. S. Sit (2012). Undoubtedly the richest collection of printed maps on Macau, Sit also expertly integrates them into a Macau history narrative. Even so, the maps selected remain outside of a meta-geographical approach to cartography that would relate them back to schools of mapmakers and their national projects.

Afterword

Returning to the trope of imagined geographies, we have offered multiple examples where both cartographic and chorographic representations reflect the world seen through the prism of civilizations. Many betray a loyalty to centers of empire or seek to honor their lords or patrons. Others have the presumption of superior technique or come in the guise of science. Still, others reflect aesthetic conventions. Maps matched by descriptive texts frequently evoke ownership or control, and some are suggestive of imperialist designs whether over water or land. We have to admit than in an age before imperialism and imperial geography, geographic space was a far more fluid concept in line with civilizational and religious verities. No one owned the borderlands—often badlands—and no one but pirates owned the seas. But in the age of imperialism, matched by the science of trigonometric measurement, geodesic survey, and the setting down of fixed coordinates and boundaries, geography appeared as its handmaiden.

Both ancient Rome and China knew measurement of distance just as the Arabs, and, in their wake, the Europeans knew navigation and their place on the globe. Europe also knew the classical or Ptolemaic world through recovered or reconstructed texts from the late medieval period. Such was the spell exerted by the Alexandrian that the classical template carried through practically into the early modern period (and even as a guide when it came to the disambiguation of the Australian continent from an encircling Great South Land) (see Gunn 2018b). The enigmatic figure of Manuel Godinho de Erédia is emblematic of the late Renaissance European mind-set in his fidelity to the classical imaginary of Asia even as he worked to fill in the blanks on the map and to create his own image-forming maps and texts.

Neither were Arab geographies immune to the spell cast by the Alexandrian, even if navigators knew the Indian Ocean route to China far better. Notably, while the al-Idrisi world map was not outside of Ptolemaic conceptions, it also improved upon the Greek tradition. As with the evocations of the Sinic world bequeathed by the merchant Sulaiman or the reference to Silla or Korea by Ibn Khordadbeh, so we realize that the Arabo-Persians demonstrated precocious geographical knowledge of this part of the world from at least the ninth century. Even so, while Arab and Persian prowess in navigational skills, celestial observation, measurement, and mathematics was demonstrated, cartographic empowerment from within a mathematical tradition as evolved in Europe was another matter. Neither did Arab descriptive geography develop much beyond that bequeathed by the exceptional Ibn Battuta.

Just as Europeans and Arabs hewed to their civilization-bound imaginaries, so did China. From Song times, even obscure “ports” on distant Timor Island were logged, and the African coast also entered the Chinese lexicon. As a bureaucratic kingdom of long antiquity, China both mapped and recorded the ritual coming and going of foreign embassies and tribute missions. As we have seen, ranging back to Wang Dayuan’s Yuan-era Dao Yi Zhilue, itself building upon Song-era models, Chinese geographies amassed an amazing amount of critical data touching upon all the major polities spanning the Indian Ocean world system. However, as with the Arab and European itineraries of that era, they also propagated powerful imaginaries around the trope of the “barbarian” other. Chinese chronicles of history, such as the Yuan Shilu and Ming Shilu were not immune to this bias, especially given their seemingly unchanging Confucian worldview. Even so, we suspect that, as with the first Arabs, Persians, and Indians, followed by Europeans arriving in the China Seas, the Nanhai sailors overcame their wonderment—and sometimes dismay at repugnant practices—to log critical real-world navigational data and maritime lore necessary for future voyages. At least this seems to be the case with no-nonsense Rekidai Hoan documents compiled over an extensive period by the Ryukyu kingdom. It also appears to be evidenced by the drafters of the Selden Map.

I. Alternative Realms

To be sure, the vast Eurasian space on which this book focuses can hardly be equated with the Middle Eastern world called up by Said. Rather, as discussed in Chapter 1, the act of reclaiming the centrality of an eastern world in the corpus of world history entails much rewriting, rethinking, and decentering. As this book has confirmed with respect to the maritime world, commercial exchange was not the only concern. Rather, new synergies were effected in the way of sometimes major cultural and civilizational transfers, as with the Sanskritic transfer to Southeast Asia and, with particular reference to the “Sinbad” routes leading east, Islamicization.

Neither can we discount degrees of Sinification bonding—although not necessarily binding—the Central Kingdom and the “Sinic” world of East and Northeast Asia, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and the Ryukyu Kingdom included. In this light the tribute-envoy system is not comprehensible without reference to the periodic voyaging of merchant envoys and return missions. In the hands of royal chroniclers, religious practitioners, sailors, and others, powerful imaginaries emerged across this arc long before the age of Western imperialism.

As our survey of maritime and terrestrial archaeological sites across the complete arc of the maritime silk and ceramic roads revealed, practically everywhere we find evidence of one or another of these civilizational transfers. Having taken cognizance of the circuits of trade linked by places of commerce, many of the port cities we have described were magnets for immigrant classes bringing money, skills, and labor. As administrative centers, such cities came to host sophisticated religious and governmental institutions. Their masons constructed defensive walls, palaces, temples, churches or mosques, and other distinguishing architectural features. Their marketplaces attracted silks and textiles and other value-added products entering the trade circuits, along with a range of natural products in demand (often generically termed “spices”). Their artisans built and repaired ships. Others specialized in metallurgy, including weaponry. Ruling classes drove demand for luxury items, and they paid in cash. With exchange at the heart of commercial operations, currencies circulated, whether in the form of cowrie shells, minted copper coins, gold, or silver. Merchant classes of many ethnicities often took the form of guilds offering credit to suppliers delivering the goods, and with profit in mind. Literate classes of scribes recorded the transactions. Schools and places of learning serviced the bureaucracies. Invariably subordinate to empires, as intimated, the port cities were also subject to the rise and fall of dynasties, environmental factors, epidemics, or warfare.

Where there was continuity in indigenous or folk tradition, there was change as well, especially in the political centers. Many but not all of the Hinduized charter states in both mainland and maritime Southeast Asia came to embrace Mahayana Buddhism from around the ninth century, with Theravada Buddhist influences expanding over the centuries. Islamic conversions of Hinduized polities touched Java from approximately the thirteenth century, and, with the singular exception of Hindu Bali, all the polities falling under the sway of Majapahit from Malacca to Brunei followed suit. As well noted, the Chinese dynasties made their weight felt as well not only on the frontier zones but across the seas. Thus civilizational and cultural contacts across this grand oceanic corridor were not only west-east or east-west, but north-south in the sense of a grand hybridization of indigenous and exogenous cultures or a fusion of the native and the imported.

Nothing better exemplified the linking of Asian states and polities into a coherent regional complex of producers and consumers than the ceramic trade networks. Unlike silk and textiles, ceramics are durable (and so, along with metal, are the most tangible artifacts recoverable from archaeological sites). The production and quality of earthenware including ceramics around the globe is often viewed as an index of civilization, just as the aesthetic and technical quality of Chinese ceramics over time and across a diversity of marketplaces was unequaled (allowing that the Abbasids not only imported Chinese ceramics but emulated and improved them, as with adding turquoise blue). As widely noted, ceramics in particular can serve as time capsules of long-lost or poorly recorded exchange networks, just as the expanding field of marine archaeology helps us to understand the nature of these exchanges, from provenance to geochemistry. Coins, as with Roman coins, obviously hold a different valence but even more so than ceramic shards, they can be accurately dated, and we are surprised at their attested distribution from one end of the sea silk road to the other. Relative to the land silk roads, and allowing for significant political events occurring in both the Middle Eastern and Chinese cores, the maritime trade demonstrated remarkable continuity even across the eras.

II. The Rise and Fall of the Thirteenth-Century World System

Following such pioneer studies of the long-distance maritime trade as those of Hourani, Abu-Lughod, and Schottenhammer, we gained a better appreciation of trade activities from the tenth through fourteenth centuries coinciding with China’s Song and Yuan dynasties, on the one hand, and the Middle Eastern Abbasid dynasty, on the other. Matching the Arab traveler descriptions and, as testified by both marine and terrestrial archaeology, the Thirteenth-Century World System conjoining cores at disparate ends of the Indian Ocean circuits was dynamic as it was ongoing. To this end we assigned a locomotive role for China in the Thirteenth-Century System allowing as well the existence of a Middle Eastern core standing at the western termini of the Indian Ocean trading regime. As mentioned in Chapter 1, major changes to the system were occasioned by the rise and fall of the Mongol Empire with respect to the land silk roads reaching western Europe. Certain of these changes were also mirrored across the sea silk roads, putting an end to an era, not excluding the congruence between trade routes and the Black Plague c. 1340.

There were other changes as well. Internal disturbances under China’s Tang dynasty led to a retreat of Arab traders from Canton and the emergence of an unspecified stopover port in the northern Malacca Straits known in Arab sources as Kalah/Kedah. Temporarily, at least, these events left a kind of vacuum with respect to the China coast trade. The virtual disappearance of the Palembang-based Srivijaya and its outlier Temasek is another reminder that Abu-Lughod’s Thirteenth-Century World System had run its course. The long-standing contest between the Cham and the Khmer Empire likely did not greatly impact the outside world, but the Đại Việt assaults on the Cham capital of Vijaya in 1471 would indeed invite the Ming to take sides.

The special place of the East Asian core in the Thirteenth-Century World System is also understandable if we define it in terms of the arbitrage opportunity existing in the marketplace. Across so many ports and markets leading to Rome in one direction and Chinese ports and markets in the other, perceived or real price differences were determined by the supply and demand of commodities. Although joined by others, China especially was the prime producer and exporter of coveted silks and ceramics. According to dynastic cycles and economic rhythms, Chinese demand for a range of tropical products that could not be met locally was insatiable. Coinciding with the advent of the Southern Song dynasty, China was the magnet pulling in trade, connecting up by stage the Sinbad routes from such Persian Gulf termini as Siraf with ports of the Fujian triangle of which Quanzhou was preeminent. Reciprocally, once China had perfected long-distance sailing and navigation techniques, we begin to observe a new dynamic with the Mongol-Yuan seaborne expeditions reaching Southeast Asian waters. More dramatically, as this book has underscored, the entry of the Zheng He fleets of the early Ming period into the Indian Ocean signaled a veritable “Chinese century” ahead of European hegemony, although a lost opportunity at the same time.

Our discussion also brought into focus a number of intermediate ports and royal centers, especially in maritime Southeast Asia. But as Abu-Lughod (1989: 303) points out, these were peripheral to the world system because industrial goods were neither produced nor processed there. In contrast to the Middle East and Chinese cores, the Southeast Asian maritime port cities offered little more than comprador activities. None we instanced were Chinese “colonies,” and even Macau under joint Portuguese-mandarin administration maintained an astonishing autonomy over a long time (and still does). Moreover, as Abu-Lughod (1989: 357–59) points out, in a fifty-year period the system began to unravel and, by the fifteenth century, only small parts of the system retained their vigor. Although the entry of the early Ming-era fleets of Zheng He into the Indian Ocean offered some respite for the newly created Malacca Sultanate, their no less dramatic withdrawal after 1453 practically marked the end of an era.

Notwithstanding the Ming prohibition on overseas trade, the shift of the capital to Beijing, and a general concern with threats from the steppe, there was still renewed maritime activity via the Chinese junk trade with Nanyang. Outside of strict state sponsorship, this was a semiprivate activity especially on the part of Fujianese merchant guilds gathering pace with the arrival of the Spanish in Manila and the Dutch on Java. Even earlier, and dating back to the Zheng He voyage era, Chinese communities settled on the pesisir, or northern coast, of Java. Others gathered in the southern Malacca Straits area, some of them piratical. But it would be the turbulent transition between the Ming and Qing eras that led to creation of relatively large-scale Chinese diaspora communities, especially in southern Vietnam. If we are to look to a Southeast Asian “age of commerce” beginning around 1400, then we should not overlook such external stimuli.

III. Autonomist or Borderless Histories?

In referencing the Saidian narrative of overcoming Western domination and appropriation of Eastern space and honor going back to ancient Greece, we made major caveats with respect to distant and mostly unknown Asian polities and civilizations at least prior to the Mongol conquests and the rise of the Ottoman Empire (allowing of course for an Islamic priority in knowledge back to the ninth century as evinced by Muslim travel accounts).

In the real world of the late nineteenth century and, out of British and French imperial rivalry, came an efflorescence of schools of geography. “Out of such schools,” as Said (1978: 219) scornfully acknowledged, “came the commonly held view of the Orient as a geographical space to be cultivated, harvested, and guarded.” Said was mostly concerned with France and Britain in the Levant, but he also referenced French designs on Indochina, and he was correct in consideration of simultaneous Qing claims to stewardship of Vietnam. Ironically, it was Ho Chi Minh who traveled to Paris in 1949 to seek a transaction with France to help expel Chinese forces from his recently declared Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Gunn 2013). They went anyway (but returned in force in 1979 with far greater firepower in the midst of the “Third Indochina War”), and with the two nations still at loggerheads over ownership of parts of the South China Sea. Today, Japan and China contest rocks and waters in the East China Sea, while Japan and Korea joust over marine features in their contiguous seas. In each contest, powerful legitimizing forces are at play around nationalism and imaginaries drawn from, or dressed up as, history.

While to be sure, not all Orientalist stereotypes have withered outside of critical social science and postcolonial studies, it is also true that national histories have tended to fill the void, problematic all the same in consideration of their usual bounded perspectives. As we observed, the intellectual fashion of highlighting an autonomist “Southeast Asia” is one that superseded an earlier tradition of subsuming region to external influences, in some versions absolutely. In another turn of the wheel, borderless studies with some married to civilizational exchanges, have thrown up their own desiderata (albeit also vulnerable to overlooking the truly endogenous character of state formation and other specific cultural and linguistic attributes).

It is not only China that holds to historical and geographic imaginaries, but so does the world’s third most populous nation—that which emerged out of Dutch colonialism—the Republic of Indonesia. Over the decades the Jakarta government has found myths surrounding the part-terrestrial-part-maritime Hindu-Buddhist Kingdoms of Srivijaya and Majapahit particularly serviceable to legitimize territorial claims upon such distant archipelagic outliers as the islands of Timor, Borneo, and New Guinea, and even the seas around Great Natuna Island in the southern part of the South China Sea. With Srivijaya more or less contemporaneous with the capital of the ancient Khmer Empire, so the vast Angkor temple complex has served as a powerful imaginary for all modern regimes in Cambodia with respect to the loss of ancestral territories to both Thailand and Vietnam, and with ownership of the Angkor temple complex bitterly contested with Thailand under French colonialism and, indeed, until today with respect to outliers. For some Muslims distant memories of Islamic caliphates likewise call up powerful imaginaries with emulators from Iraq to the southern Philippines. Ipso facto, strict allegiance to the Dar al-Islam, or the world of Islam, troubles some modern nations in their quest to impose a single national identity.

Another Southeast Asian island regime attuned to the uses of history is the modern nation-state of Negara Brunei Darussalam. With numerous imports from the Malacca Sultanate, the system was Hindu in origin, as suggested by the symbolism of the color yellow retained in royal flags and standards, or in the naming of officials, or in other royal regalia dating from a pre-Islamic era (D. E. Brown 1970). At the center of the realm stood the raja or sultan, a hereditary ruler who could confer titles and appanages. This was—and remains—a highly stratified system matched by honorific titles and linguistic etiquette (Gunn 1997). In Brunei today, Malayness, officialized Sunni Islam, and the correct interpretation of Malay monarchy are instilled as part of national culture. As with Aceh, today a semiautonomous province of Indonesia, so in contradistinction to local norms of tolerance around “Malayness,” Brunei has introduced sharia law.

Neither do we doubt that Arab nations seek validation of their past golden ages through archaeology or though historical reconstruction. As alluded, in the early 1990s the author boarded a ship in Muara Harbor in Brunei owned by the sultan of Oman and lent to UNESCO with commemoration of the maritime silk roads in mind. We recall that, on 12–16 October 1971, the shah of Persia hosted the 2,500-year celebration of the Persian Empire in the tent city of Persepolis to showcase his realm and to link it with the glory of the founder of the Achaemenid or first Persian Empire c. 600–530 BCE. Among the select group of guests to this extravagant occasion was Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. By the end of the decade, both the Ethiopian and Iranian monarchies had ceased to exist.

While the Chola kings have long been celebrated in local-level temples in southern India, why the Chola Empire is not even more remembered or celebrated in modern India today likely owes to a history of tensions between the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu and the political center in New Delhi. This is all the more so given Tamil claims for homeland around shared language, religion, and history. Nevertheless, as part of a nation-state, Tamil history could also be serviceable to national pride. For example, in November 2014 the Indian Navy stepped in to commemorate the one thousandth anniversary of King Rajendra Chola’s coronation with a series of activities in tandem with the National Maritime Foundation and the Tamil Nadu state government. Reportedly, as the then-governor of Tamil Nadu made it known, the commemoration sought “to symbolize the achievements of the Chola Navy, whose ships have sailed and conquered lands in South-East Asia, which is present day Java, Sumatra and Malay Peninsula” (anon. 2014).

In the East Asian realm, as described, the Tokugawa were singular in seeking to create their own version of a tribute-envoy system. Yet, as an artifice or invention, practically the only East Asian element in the contrived shogunal court version was the journey to Edo by the ambassadorial party and ritualized acts of obeisance. Essentialized as tradition, it is hard not to believe that the treatment of the foreign envoys was a ploy on the part of a “theater-state” to win international legitimacy for itself at the center of a new East Asian international order. As Geertz (1980) found in his classic study (of Hindu Bali), for the merchant groups eager to get their hands on Japanese gold and silver, the shogunal spectacle in Edo was not just a masquerade but deadly serious.

More so than Japan and Korea, the small island kingdom of Ryukyu appeared to be far ahead in its vision of a maritime world, one that encompassed variously the complex winds and tidal systems of the East China Sea, the South China Sea, the Straits of Malacca, and the Java Sea. Practically no other island realm of the age accomplished as much in the way of trade activities across mainland and maritime Southeast Asia, albeit brought to an end with the Portuguese assault upon the Malacca Sultanate. To be sure, Ryukyu looked to Fujianese shipbuilders and navigators to assist their activities, just as the kingdom accepted its tributary status in the East Asian model. As the documentary record reveals, the kingdom acquired acute commercial and political intelligence on all the concerned major and minor ports and polities of the age like none other, just as its fleet of ships lubricated commerce across the region. Loyal like none other to the Central Kingdom through the Ming-Qing transition, the Ryukyu Kingdom’s connivance in a dual tributary arrangement with both China and Japan strikes us as extraordinary in its boldness and artifice. Whether this was a hedging strategy in the language of modern international relations theory, or whether an imaginary from within tradition as creatively interpreted by a scholarly elite, it was still outstanding.

The harbor ports of the China coastline, including those of the Pearl River estuary known to the Arabs and Persians and to Europe through the Polean narrative, may appear irrelevant today, notwithstanding the powerful imaginaries they spawned in Renaissance and post-Renaissance Europe. In this sense we highlighted Macau as an arena of civilizational contest, curiosity, and exchange. In this quest, the Jesuits were champions—not just as missionaries but, among other accomplishments, taking measure of Macau on the world map and assisting the Qing to map their terrestrial empire. As such, Macau would serve Europe as a survey platform and a point of reference. The Qing could now demarcate where czarist Russia left off and where British, French, and Japanese imperialism were encroaching. Each shared geographic imaginaries and with each in expansionist mode (the Qing in Tibet, Mongolia, and borderlands on all fronts where British and Russian imperialism had not preceded them, and with Japan in the Ryukyus at the expense of the Qing and in the little- or unknown Hokkaido ahead of Russia in Sakhalin).

We could multiply such examples of historical precedent leading in two or three directions. One is the defensive reaction or response, as with displays of localism, ethnic pride, identity politics, national aggrandizement, irredentism, ethnocentrism, or racism. Another is civilizational accommodation, as with borrowing, incorporation, or localization. A third, actually feeding into a cultural studies paradigm, is where the indigenous fuses with the borrowed to create something authentically new and hybrid. Still, as this book has attested, we have ranged over all three possibilities in multiple sites and areas. Doubtless, the reader can come up with their own examples and interpretations.

If there is a serious takeaway from this discussion, then we could do no better than to cite William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Act 2, Scene 1), “What’s past is prologue,” implying that the weight of the past sets the context for the present. This, no doubt, is a sage reflection, but we are also better equipped today to acknowledge that the past is socially constructed. As with aboriginal rock art, classical Indian epics, semi-fantastical Arab itineraries, Chinese chronicle views of the “other,” various traditions of mapping including the discovery geography of a Malacca-born Eurasian cosmographer, royal centers and “theater-states,” not excluding the vanity of the shogunal court in Edo, as this book has dared to suggest, from a classical age civilizations have indulged in imagining their worlds in highly creative ways.

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Index

A arte de navegar

Abbasids; caliphate; empire

Abd-ur-Rassaq

Abu ’l-Fida (Abdulseda)

Abu-Lughod, Janet; on Palembang

Abu Zeid (Zayd)

Aceh

Acri, Andrea

Adulis; excavation of

Africa; markets; north; Swahili coast; west; in Wubeizhi

Aksum; emperor; naval power

Al-Biruni

Albuquerque, Afonso de

Albuquerque, Jorge de

Aleni, Giulio

Alexander the Great; romances

Alexandria

Alexis de Lemos (governor)

Ali Mughayat Syah (sultan)

Al-Idrisi; map

Allen, Robert C.

Al-Mamun

Al-Mas’udi

Al-Ubulla

Al-Ya’qubi

Amherst mission

Andaya (Watson), Barbara

Anderson, Benedict

Andrade, Ferdinand

Andrade, Simão

Andrade, Tono

An Giang; archaeology site

Angkor; empire; kingdom; Thom. See also Cambodia

Annales school

Annam; in Rekidai Hoan; and Ryukyu trade. See also Vietnam

Anthieume, Albert

António de Santa Moura, José

Arab (Arabian); astronomy; geographies; Gulf; language/script; merchant accounts; navigation; Peninsula; and Roman trade; Sea; pilot; ships/shipping; traders; voyages; in Wubeizhi

archaeology; in Australia; of Indian Ocean; marine; as validation

Archaimbault, Charles

Arikamedu; Chinese celadon at; Roman trade. See also Pondicherry; India

Arita; ceramic exporter; kilns. See also Kyushu

Ashikaga; and Ming; Yoshimitsu

Australia; aboriginals; Chinese discovery of; coast; Dutch discovery of; Macassan sites in; Northern Territory; Portuguese discovery of; prehistoric migrations to

Austronesia(ns); boats; dispersion; language; maritime traditions; ship; technology

Ayutthaya; court; emissaries from; and Japan; kingdom; and Malacca; royal letters; and Ryukyu. See Thailand

Ayuzawa Shintaro

Baghdad. See also Iraq

Bakau wreck

bakufu; and Ryukyu. See also Japan; Tokugawa

Bali; as “theatre state”

Balkhi school

Banten

Barbier de Meynard, C.

Barendse, R. J.

Basra

Batchelor, Robert K.

Batemburg, M.

Beaujard, Philippe

Beijing; court in. See China

Belitung; Châu Tân wreck compared; wreck

Bellin, Jacques Nicolas

Bellina, Berenice

Bellwood, Peter; and Austronesian dispersion

Berenice. See Euseperides

Berg, C. C.

Berndt, R. M. and C. H.

Berthoud, Ferdinand

Bình Thuận; wreck

Binot Palmier sieur de Gonneville

Black Assarca

Blaeu (family)

Blench, Roger

Bligh, William

Blue, Lucy

Bollandiste; Sociétés de

Boonyarit Chaiswan

Borneo

Borobudur; relief; ship. See also Java

Bouvet, Joachim

Boym, Michal Piotr

Brahman; -ism; temples; transfer. See also India

Braudel, Fernand

Brau de Siant-Pol-Lias, Xavier

Britain; Admiralty; colonial rule; imperialism; India; Institute of Persian Studies; Library; Museum; Qing, envoy to. See England

Brown, Delmer

Brown, Roxana M.

Brunei; archaeological research in; Bay; court of; Hinduism; Islam; and Malacca; Old Port; pottery; raja; River; and Ryukyu; sultan/sultanate; wreck

Buddhism; ceramic motifs; images; Indian; kingdoms; Lao; Mahayana; mapping conception; monks; networks; pilgrimage map; pilgrims; sects; socialist; symbols; Theravada

Bugis (Buginese); and Australia; slave raids. See Macassar (Macassans)

Burchhardt, John Lewis

Burma; as ceramics exporter

Burningham, Nick

Cairo; Hebrew documents; historian; manuscript; Old. See Fustat

California School

Cambodia; royal junks to Japan

Canfu (Khanfu), sacking of. See Canton

Canton (-ese); Arab retreat from; Trade System. See Guangzhou

Casel, Jean-Marie

Cassini (family); and measurement of China

Cattigara

ceramics; exports; as “proxy”; “roads”; trade

Ceylon (Sri Lanka); archaeology in; Buddhism; in Wubeizhi

Chakrabarti, Pratik

Cham (Champa); Island; kingdom; and Malacca; Mongol attacks on; seafarers

Chandler, David, P.

Chang Wei-chung

Chang, Wen-Chin

Chao Ju-kua. See Zhao Rugua

Charles II (king)

Chauduri, K. N.

Chaunu, Pierre

Châu Tân wreck

Chenla, in Wubeizhi

China (Chinese); annals/chronicles; astronomy in; audience with emperor; Belt and Road Initiative; centrism; ceramics/export; coast; coastal map profile; core; currency; diaspora; discovery of Australia; gazetteer; geography; heritage; industry; inscriptions, 188; Islamic networks in; Jesuits in; junk trade; kilns; language; literati; maps/mapping; marine technology; maritime expansion; market economy; as Middle Kingdom; monetary policy; monks; Muslim traders in; Nationalist; navigation; People’s Republic of; philosophy; porcelain; and Portugal trade; Republic; rites controversy; and Ryukyu; science; shipwreck; Siraf merchants to; trade; tributary system; unequal treaties with, voyages

Chola; empire; kings; naval expedition; rise of. See India

Choson; court. See Korea

Christianity; Catholic(s); missionaries

Chuzan; king. See Ryukyu

Cieslik, Herbert

Clark, Hugh

Clavius, Christopher

Clayn (Klein), Paul

Clement V (pope)

Cobb, Mathew

Cocks, Richard

Coclanis, Peter

Coedès, George

Coen, Jan Pieterzoon

Colbert, Jean-Baptiste

Columbus, Christopher

Condominas, George

Confucius (-ism); academy; neo-; scholar

Conrad, Sebastian

Cook, James (captain)

Coomaraswamy, Ananda

Copernicus

Coromandel. See India

Couplet, Philippe

cowrie trade

Coyette, Frederic

Crato, Nuno

Curtin, Philip

Cyrene (Cyrenaica)

d’Albuquerque, Afonso de

da Gama, Francisco

da Gama, Pedro

da Gama, Vasco

Dahlak Archipelago

Đại Việt; Mongol attacks on. See also Vietnam

Dalrymple, Alexander: map

da Maia, José Carlos

d’Anville, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon

Dao Yi Zhilue; evaluation of

Dar al-Islam. See also Islam

Darwin, Charles

de Fontaney, Jean de

Defrémery, C.

de Geest, Peter

Delgado, James P.

Deng Xiaoping

de Queros, Pedro Fernandes; expedition

Descartes, René

Deshima. See also Nagasaki

de Ursis, Sabatino

de Visdelou, Claude de

de Vries, Maarten Gerritszoon

Deydier, Henri

Dias, Bartolomeu

Dieppe School; world map

Djulirri; rock shelter. See Australia

Dong Son. See also Vietnam

Dourado, Fernão Vaz

Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste

Dutch; colonialism; East Indies; Edo mission; fleets; Formosa occupation; in Japan; “learning”; Macau attack; mapping; market; and Mataram; Portugal competition with; science; ship; voyages. See also Dutch East India Company; East Indies; Holland

Dutch East India Company (VOC); copper trade; trade passes

Duyvendak, J. J. L.

Dvaravati (Mon)

East China Sea; circuits

Ebn Wahab

École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO)

Edo (Tokyo); Asians at; Dutch journey to; mapping; period; and Ryukyu; shogunal palace at. See also Japan

Egypt; ports; and Roman trade

Ekathotsrot (king)

Elisonias, Jurgis

Elvin, Mark

Emili, Eleonora

England (English), imaginaries; in Japan; king of; merchants; mission to Edo; navigation at Australia; and plague; trade with China. See Britain

English East India Company. See Britain; England

Erédia, Manuel Godinho de; and Ptolemy

Eritrea

Estado da India. See Portugal

Ethiopia; emperor; script

Eurasia; steppe; in Western mapping

Europe(ans); ascendancy; core; discovery/narratives; expansion; geography; hegemony; maps/mapmakers; market for Chinese-ware; middle ages; navigation; rivalry; shipping; shipwrecks

Euseperides; archaeology in. See Berenice

Fa Hsien

Fairbanks, John F.

Fatimids

Fei Xin

Feng Chengjun

Ferrand, Gabriel

Finlay, Robert

Five Dynasties. See China

Flecker, Michael

Flinders, Mathew

Flores, George

Formosa; Dutch mapping of; Dutch occupation of. See Taiwan

Fort San Sebastian wreck

Foss, Theodore N.

France; colonialism; court; Enlightenment; ethnology; expedition; geographer; government; imperialism; Indochina; king; in Levant; mission to Eritrea; navigator; petroleum company; Royal Academy of Science; royal library; Sinologue; and Thailand; and Vietnam

Francis, Peter

Frank, Andre Gunder

Freire, Jorge

French, Howard W.

Friedman, Mordechai A.

Frohlich, B.

Fuchs, Walter

Fujian; coast; fleet; government; navigators; and Ryukyu connection; in Selden map; shipbuilders; “triangle”; vessels. See also China

Fukuoka; Buddhist temple communities; Chinese district; Persia ware at; Thai ceramics at. See also Japan; Kyushu

Funan. See also Oc Eo

Fursland, Richard

Fustat

Galland, Antoine

Gaubil, Antoine

Geertz, Clifford

Genghis Khan

Geniza documents

Gerbillon, Jean-François

German(y), mission to Eritrea; scholar; translation

Gibb, H. A. R.

Gil, Moshe

Gills, Barry K.

Gipouloux, François

Glover, Ian C.

Goa; astronomy; Eredia in

Godawaya wreck

Goitein, S. D.

Gomes, Luís Gonzaga

Grabowski, Volker

Grave, Peter

Greece; -Persian; -Roman

Greenwich

Guangzhou. See also Canton

Guar, A. S.

Guillot, Claude

Gujarat(is); in Malacca

Gupta. See also India

Guy, John

Hadramaut

Haile Selasie (emperor)

Hainan; mapped; missionaries in; in Wubeizhi

Hakata; archaeology; Bay; Old Port. See also Fukuoka

Hall, John Clifford

Hall, Kenneth R.

Hamashita Takeshi

Hamy, Ernest-Théodore

Han; and Rome; and Vietnam. See China

Hang Xing

Hangzhou

Hanoi

Harris, John

Harrison, Tom

Harun al Rashid

Hasegawa Gunroku

Hayashida Kenzo

Hayashi Shihei

Hean (era). See Japan

Heng, Derek Thiam Soon

Henry the Navigator. See Portugal

Herkand (Herkend)

Heywood, Peter

Hidetaka. See Japan

Hideyoshi; invasion of Korea. See Japan

Higham, Charles

Hindu(-ism); -Buddhism; kingdoms; images; raja

Hippalus

Hirado; Chinese community at; English House; English ships at; piracy; in Selden map; and tribute trade. See Japan

Hirth, Friedrich

Hoabinhian culture

Ho Chi Minh

Ho Chuimei

Hội An; foreign traders at; in Selden map; ship

Hokkaido; mapped

Holland; administrators; in Aomen jilue; archaeologists; imaginaries; Pax; researchers. See also Dutch

Holt, John Clifford

Hong Kong; as British colony; harbor; Maritime Museum; pottery; Song anchor in; Underwater Heritage Group; waters

Hongwu (emperor)

Hongzhi (emperor); “bubble”

Honshu; “gold islands”; Japanese mapping of; in Western mapping

Hormuz; ceramics; kingdom; prince; Strait of; in Wubeizhi

Horridge, Adrian

Horsburgh, James Heywood

Horton, A. V. M.

Hourani, George F.

Howland, D. R.

Hsuang Tsang (Xuanzang)

Hsu Pao-kuang (Xu Baoguang)

Huang Chao

Husseinmiya, B. A.

Ibn Battuta

Ibn Khordadbeh

Ibn Majid

Iemitsu (shogun). See Tokugawa

Ietsuna (shogun). See Tokugawa

Ieyasu (shogun); death of; and trade agreement. See Tokugawa

I-Hsing

Ikuta Shigeru; periodization

India (Indic; Indo-); art/artisans; British; Buddhism in; coast; colonies; cotton exports; dynastic cycles; epics; epigraphs; “farther”; influences/transfers; -ization; kingdoms; languages; literary sources; merchants; navigation; Navy; ports; Roman coins in; sailing craft; scholars of; script; seals; sea route; southern; subcontinent; textiles; trade; in Wubeizhi

Indian Ocean; archaeology; circuits; enclosed; littoral; National Maritime Foundation; navigation; ports; Portuguese navigation; in Roman era; shipping; studies, system; trade; voyages; western coast; and world-system; in Wubeizhi

Inglis, Douglas

Intan wreck

Iquan

Iraq. See also Baghdad

Iskander Muda

Iskander Shah

Islam; advent of; arrival in Southeast Asia; calendar; caliphate; cartography; conversions to; courts; geographies; in India; -ization; kingdoms; as merchants; networks in China; period; scholars; ships; sultanate; Sunni; in Timor; trade; world; world ports

Jamil Ali

Jansen, Léon

Janszoon, Willem (captain)

Japan; archaeology; astronomy; as ceramics exporter; and “Christian century”; and Dutch; economic historian; emperor; empire; geographic imaginaries; imperialism; and Jesuit exchanges; and Kublai Khan invasions; mapping; mercenaries; merchants; militarism; Ministry of Home Affairs; monetary policy; red seal ship; and Ryukyu; tribute trade with China; in Western mapping

Java(ese); agrarian, in Aomen jilue; coast; courts; Dutch in; in Iava Maior; in Malacca; Ming diaspora in; Mongol invasion of; in Nova Tavoa; pesisir coast of; and Qing; in Rekidai Hoan; rice brokers; Ryukyu contacts with; in Selden map; trade; in Wubeizhi

Java Sea; shipwreck sites

Jayarvarman II. See Angkor

Jesuits; astronomy; College; letters; maps/mapping; mapping under Ming; mathematics; missions to China; Sinologists

Jew(ish), merchants

Jiajing empire

Jingdezhen. See also China

Jin Guo Ping

João IV (king)

Johor; sultanate

Joseon (dynasty)

Jouveau-Debreuil, Gabriel

Kalus, Ludvik

Kangxi (emperor); emissary to Ryukyu

Karang Brahi Inscription

Karashima, Noburo

Karna (king)

Karrlikio; invasion of Timor

Kashgar

Kearney, Milo

Kedah (Kalah; Quedda); in Chinese mapping

Kennet, Derek

Kerala, boat; State Department of Archaeology

Kern, Hendrik

Kertanegara

Kesavapany, K.

Khanfu (Canfu); Arabs/Persian/Indians attested; Old Port. See Canton

Khien Theeravit

Khmer; empire; epigraphy; warriors. See also Cambodia

kiblah

Kilwa Sultanate

Kimura, Jun

Kiyu Treaty. See Korea

Knapp, Gerrit

Kobata Atsushi

Konbuang. See Burma

Kondratiev, Nikolai

Korea(ns); court, embassy; emissaries from; and Japan connection; mapping; mission to Edo; in Persian geography; and in Rekidai Hoan; Ryukyu; trade; in Western mapping; world map

Kota Batu; Spanish raids on. See Brunei

Kota China; spice trade. See Sumatra

Kota Kapur Inscription

Kra Isthmus

Kublai Khan; invasion fleets. See also China; Mongols

Kulke, Herman

Kuriles; mapped

Kyoto; mapping; temple

Kyushu; archaeology; ceramic production sites; Japanese mapping of; merchant group; -Okinawa Society for Underwater Archaeology; sugar road; in Western mapping. See also Japan

Laccadives

Lafont, Pierre-Bernard

Lambri (Lamuri)

Lamreh site. See Lambri

Landmann, Alexandra

Lane, Paul J.

Laos; Buddhism; megalith; monarchy; Ramayana; Plain of Jars

Lape, Peter

La Pérouse, Jean François de Galaup; expedition/voyage; in Macau

Lazarro Luis

Lê (dynasty). See Đại Việt; Vietnam

Le Comte, Louis

Le Tetsu, Guillaume

Lee, Samuel (Rev.)

Lee Siu-Leung

Legge, James

Lene Hara. See Timor

Leren, stele

Lewis, James B.

Li Guo-Qing

Li Thi Thien

Li Zhizao

Lieberman, Victor

Lim Tse Siang

Linschoten, Jan Huygen van

Lisbon. See Portugal

Lisle, Leanne

Liu, William Guanglin

Lo Jung-pang

Lombard, Denys

Louis XIV (king)

Louis XVI (king)

Low Countries. See Holland

Lu, State of. See China

Lunde, Paul

Luzon; junk; in maps; and Ryukyu trade; shipwreck

Ma Huan

Ma Je Ka Na (Abdul Majid Hassan)

Macartney affair. See China

Macassar (Macassans); and Australia; boat construction; fishermen; prauh; stones; on Timor; trepangers. See Bugis (Buginese)

Macau; and China; coastal waters; Dutch assault on; gazetteer; historian; Inner Harbor; Jesuit astronomy in; longitude; mapped; Museum; Outer Harbor; and Pacific Ocean exploration; Peninsula; port; and Ricci; and Portugal; pottery; silk-for-silver trade. See also China

Macceroni, Michael

Madagascar; in Wubeizhi

Magellan, circumnavigation; Strait

Maghreb

Magnus Sinus

Majapahit; invasion of Borneo; empire; kingdom; and Ryukyu kingdom trade. See also Java

Major, Henry

Malacca; attacks on; as China tributary; Dutch occupation; Eredia in; fortress; harbormaster; Hinduism; and Ming; Old Port; Portuguese conquest of; in Rekidai Hoan; Ryukyu; seafarers; Sultanate; trade; in Wubeizhi

Malacca Straits; and A arte de navegar; port; Portuguese arrival in; visual image of

Malaya (Malay); Annals; language; inscription; Old; modern; oral tradition; ports; proto-; world

Malay Peninsula; in Wubeizhi

Maldives; shipyards; in Wubeizhi

Malik Al-Zahir

Malleret, Louis

Malthus, Thomas Robert

Mamiya Rinso

Manchu, court; invasion; tributary. See also Qing

Manchuria; map

Mandeville, John of

Manguin, Pierre-Yves

Manila; astronomy at; galleon; port; under Spain; in Selden map. See also Philippines; Spain

Mannevillette, Jean-Baptiste d’Après de

Mansor Shah (sultan)

Mantai

Mao Kun map. See Wubeizhi

Mao Yuanyi

maps; Japanese; projections; scale; Western. See cartography

Martin, Lillian Ray

Martini, Martino

Massawa; museum. See Eritrea

Matalief, Cornelius (admiral)

Mataram; and Dutch. See Java

Matsuda (minister). See also Japan

Matsuda Mitsugu

Matsuura City Board of Education. See also Japan

Matusin, Omar

Maury, Alfred

Mauryan empire

May, Sally K.

McCormack, Gavan

McIntyre, Kenneth Gordon

McKinnon, J. F.

McNeil, William H.

McPherson, Kenneth

Meadows of Gold (Muruj al-dhahab)

Mearns, D. L. D.

Mecca

Mediterranean; archaeology; cartography; ceramics; and Islam; jewelry; marine archaeology in; markets; parallels; ports; scuba diving in; trade routes

Meiji; emperor; restoration. See Japan

Menzies, Gavin

Mercator, Gerard

Middle East; as Chinese market; core; pottery; research; turquoise

Miksic, John

Mills, J. V. G.

Ming; academies; as anti-market; anti-Ming; and Ashikaga; ban on overseas trade; capital; cartography; ceramics; and “Chinese century“; “command economy”; court; defenses; demography; diaspora; emperor; “gap”; and Islam; and Japan; and Jesuit mapping; loyalists; map/mapping; market economy; navy; pacification mission; porcelain; and Portuguese priority; prohibition of trade; and Qing transition; and Ryukyu; seafaring; shipbuilding; shipwrecks; southern; specialist; texts on Macau; traders; tribute trade; voyages. See China

Ming Shilu; and Malacca

Miran, Jonathan

Mitterauer, Michael

Mokyr, Joel

Mongol, court; empire; envoys; conquest of China; empire; invasion; invasions of Japan; invasion of Java; khanate; rule; and Vietnam. See also China; Mongol-Yuan

Mongol-Yuan; dynasty; expedition; fleets; invasion of Kyushu; naval development; sea battle; sea invasions; South Seas priority. See also China; Mongol

Montalto de Jesus, Carlos Augusto

Morrison, Robert; dictionary

Morris-Suzuki, Tessa

Morse, H. B.

Mozambique; Island; in Wubeizhi

Mughals; empire

Mulder, W. Z.

Mundy, Peter

Muromachi. See Japan

Mus, Paul

Muscat

Mỹ Sơn

Nagakubo Sekisui

Nagasaki; bugyo; Chinese diaspora in; Chinese junks at; Chinese quarter; Chinese trade/merchants at; Dutch at; eclipse at; Fujian trade; kaido; longitude; mapping/map production; Prefecture; port; Portugal trade at; in Selden map; silver trade; silk; Thai ceramics attested at. See also Japan

Nanhai No. 1 Wreck

Nanjing; Japanese in; in Wubeizhi

Nara; Persian ceramics attested at; temple

Needham, Joseph; on “Chinese century”; on Ming; on Song

Ngô Văn Doanh

Nguyễn (dynasty); in Aomen jilue; court. See also Vietnam

Nguyen Van Kim

Nichol, Robert

Nie, Hongping, Annie

Nishimura Masanari

Nishino Noriko

Nöel, François

Oc Eo

O’Connor, Sue

Okinawa; Battle of; as Prefecture of Japan: Prefectural Board of Education; Prefectural Library. See Japan; Ryukyu

Om, Prakesh

Oman; government of; sultanate of; in Wubeizhi

Ortelius, Abraham

Ottoman(s); caliphate; coin; naval power; trade with Aceh

Pacific Ocean; French exploration of; south; Spanish chart; western

Pagan

Palembang; excavations at; as Majapahit vassal; Mongol invasion of; in Rekidai Hoan; and Ryukyu correspondence; Persia ware attested at; as Srivijaya capital

Parham, D.

Paris; meridian; National Library; Observatory. See France

Park, Hyunhee

Parmentier, H.

Peacock, David

Pearson, Michael

Pederson, Ralph K.

Pelliot, Paul

Perdue, Peter C.

Perrit, Daniel

Persia (Persians); ceramics; coins; commerce; empire; geographies; merchants; monarchy; navigation; ruler; texts; trade with China

Persian Gulf

Peryplus of the Erythraean Sea

Peters, N. H.

Petit, A.

Phanomsurin ship

Philippines; Ming diaspora in

Philipps, Kim M.

Phillips, Geo

Phillip III

Pillai, Suresh

Pimentel, Manuel

Pires, Tomé

Piyada Chonlaworn

Plancius, Petrius

Pliny

Pollock, Sheldon

Polo, Marco

Pomeranz, Kenneth

Pomponius Mela

Pondicherry. See Arikamedu

Portugal (Portuguese); and Aceh; in Aomen jilue; and Australia; authors; cartography; charts; on China coast; and China trade; conquest of; crown; diplomat; documentation; Edo, journey to; exploration; fleet; and Goa; imaginaries; Japan, embassy to; and Macau; Malacca Straits, arrival in; queen; ship/shipping; shipwrecks; traders to Japan; traders to Timor; voyages

Ptak, Roderich

Ptolemy; depiction; description; geography; maps

Qin. See also China

Qing; British envoy to; Bureau of Mathematics; court; diplomacy; knowledge; and Macartney affair; Macau texts; and Portugal; Russia negotiations with; Ryukyu emissary to; tribute envoy system. See also China; Manchu

Quanzhou; Arabs in; Bay; Buddhist and Hindu temples at; cemeteries in; Indians in; inscriptions; Maritime Museum; mosques in; Muslim quarter; Old Port; Persians in; in Selden map; shipbuilding; temples in; as terminus

Quanzhou wreck

Rajendra Chola I

Ramusio, Giovanni Battista

Raupp, J. T.

Ray, Himanshu Prabha

Raynal, Abbé

Reddy, P. Krishna Mohan

Red River; kilns; Valley

Red Sea; archaeology of; ceramic finds; India trade; littoral; ports; and Roman trade

Reid, Anthony; and “age of commerce”; and Malacca history

Reijersen, Cornellis

Reinaud, Joseph Toussard

Reis, João C.

Reiske, Johann Jakob

Rekidai Hoan; Southeast Asia; and Thailand

Renaudaut, Eusèbe

Rendo, Custódia E. Azevedo

Reynolds, Frank

Rezende de, François

Ricci, Matteo; celestial observation in Macau; worldmap

Richardson, W. A. R.

Riddell, Peter

rock art. See Australia

Rockhill, W. W.

Rodrigues de Luna, António

Rodrigues, Francisco

Rodrigues, João

Roger II (king)

Rome; coins/objects; empire; era; and Indian Ocean; and Malacca

Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent

Rotz, Jean

Ruelens, Ch.

Ruggieri, Michelle

Rule, Paul

Russel-Wood, A. J. R.

Russia(ns); at Beijing; empire; Far East

Ryukyu(ans); archipelago; Chinese books in; and Chinese merchants; dual subordination of; embassy to Edo; emissaries from; kan; kingdom; Korea trade; in Malacca; and Manila; map/mapping; marine products; ocean-going ships; plague in; pottery; Southeast Asia; sugar industry; Thai ceramics attested at; trade; tributary relationship; women in marketplace. See Okinawa

Sachau, Edward

Sachsenmaior, Dominic

Sahai, Sachidanand

Said, Edward

Sailendra

Saint-Martin, Vivien, de

Sakhuja, Vijay

Saldanha, Aires de (governor)

Salmon, Claudine

Samudera Pasai; in Rekidai Hoan

San Diego wreck

Sanguinetti, B. R.

San-nan (kingdom)

Sanskrit; transfer

Sanson d’Abbeville, Nicolas

Santarém (Viscount)

Satow, Ernest

Satsuma; han; invasion of Ryukyu. See also Japan

Satto (dynasty). See also Ryukyu

Sayyid Dinn

Schottenhammer, Angela

Seland, Eivind

Selden Map

Selvakumar, V.

Sen, Tansen

Sengoku (Warring States)

Senif; Old Port

Sewell, Robert

Shah Rukh

Shakespeare, William

Sharif al-Din

Shimazu (domain). See also Japan; Satsuma

Sho Hashi (king)

Sho Kei (king)

Sho Nei (king)

Sho Shitsu (king)

Sho Tai (king)

Shuri; archaeological research at; castle. See also Ryukyu

Siam. See also Ayutthaya; Thailand

Sil(l)a. See Korea

silk roads; terrestrial; trade in

Sinbad; route

Singapore; government; National Library

Singapore Straits; in Wubeizhi

Singasari

Siquera de Sousa, Gonçalo de

Siraf; and China; excavation of; merchants

Siu, Helen F.

Smail, John R. W.

Smith, Adam

Smith, Richard J.

So, Billy K. O.

Socotra; Karst Project

Sodre, Vincent

Sokoloff, Valentin A.

Song; anchor; appraisal; Arab/Persian emissaries to; ceramics; currency exports; imaginary; maritime trade/office; navigation; Northern; Southern. See also China

Songkhla

South China Sea; circuits

Southeast Asia; “age of commerce”; Arab trade; boundaries; ceramics market; circuits; history; kingdom; mainland; marine archaeology in; maritime; markets; in Persian geography; polities; ports; research on; and Ryukyu; supply chains

Souza, George Bryan

Spain (Spanish); crown; empire; galleon trade; and Islam; and New World; and Philippines; shipwreck

Spaulding, Jay

Spinola, Charles

Srivijaya; archaeology of; capital; invasion of Java; period; ports. See Sumatra

Stargardt, Janice

Strabo

Strauch, Ingo

Stuart-Fox, Martin

Su, Jilang

Suakin

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay

Sui. See China

Sukhothai; ceramics; period. See Thailand

Sulaiman; voyage

Sumatra; kingdom; pepper coast

Sundaresh, A.

Sundström, R.

Sun Laichen

Sutherland, Heather

Suárez, Thomas

Szcześniak, Boleslaw

Tachard, Guy

Tagliacozzo, Eric

Tai; belief system; -Lu; manuscripts; script. See also Thailand

Taikkal-Kadakkarappally boat. See also India; Kerala

Taiwan; and Dutch; Strait. See Formosa

Taizu (emperor)

Talang, River; Talang Tuo Inscription

Tamerlane

Tamil(s); in Quanzhou; scripts; trade guilds

Tamil Nadu; coast; governor. See India

Tan, Yvonne

Tang. See China

Tang Kajian

Tang Yun

Teixeira, Luis

Temasek; archaeology of; in Wubeizhi. See also Singapore

Thailand; archaeology in; Buddhism in; as ceramics exporter; crown; embassy to Edo; and France; kiln sites; in Malacca; mapped; and mission to Qing; and Persia-ware; and Ryukyu. See also Ayutthaya; Sukhothai

Thomas, Antoine

Thoms, Peter

Thongchai Winichakul

Thunberg, Peter

Tibbets, G. R.

Tibet; mapped

Timor; and Chinese junk trade; Macassans on; sandal; voyages

Timurid (dynasty)

Toby, Ronald B.

Tokugawa; exclusion edicts; and mapping of Japan; Pax; and Ryukyu. See also bakufu; Japan

Tongzhi (emperor)

Torao Mozai

Torres, Luís Vaz de; expedition

Trần (dynasty). See Vietnam

trepang; and China market; and Chinese merchants

Trịnh (dynasty); relations with Japan. See Vietnam

Tsushima; and tribute trade

Turiang wreck

Turkey (Turks); geographical knowledge

Twitchett, Denis

Ummayads

Urban, Frank

Uremen, Johann

Valignano, Alessandro

Vallard, Nicolas

van de Meulen, J. K.

van Dyke, Paul

van Leur, J. C.

van Meur, Jacob

van Rongkel, P. S.

Vaz Dourado, Fernäo

Venice; and plague

Verbiest, Ferdinand

Verstegen, Willem

Vietnam; bronze; as ceramics exporter; court; Democratic Republic of; and Han; Institute of Archaeology; kilns; language; Ming diaspora in; and Mongols; pottery; and Qing; and Ryukyu trade; in Selden map; state consolidation. See also Đại Việt; Trần; Trịnh

Vignaud, Jean

Vijaya

Vijayanegara

Vingboons, Johannes

Vink, Markus P. M.

Vlekke, Bernard

von Glahn, Richard

von Krusenstern, Adam Johann

von Siebold, Philipp Franz; and map espionage

Vũng Tàu wreck

Wade, Geoff

Wade, Thomas

Wallace, Alfred Russel

Wallerstein, Immanuel

Wang Dayuan; and Temasek description

Wang Gungwu

Wang Tseng-Tsai

Wanli (emperor)

Weddell, John (captain)

Wei Juxian

Westenenk, Jan Constantijn

Wheeler, Mortimer

Whitehouse, David

Wills, John E.

Windstedt, R. O.

Wink, André

Wolters, Oliver W.

Wong, R. Bin

Wubeizhi. See Mao Kun map

Xi Jinping

Xuande (emperor)

Yang Tingbi

Yemen; ceramics; dhows

Yi (dynasty). See Korea

Yi (Fujian)

Yijing

Yin Guangren

Yin Qing

Yonemoto, Marcia

Yongle (emperor)

Yongli (emperor)

Yoshimune

Yuan. See also China; Mongol-Yuan

Yuan Shilu

Yule, Henry

Zabaj

Zago, Marcello

Zayton. See Quanzhou

Zazzaro, Chiarra

Zhang Rulin

Zhang Wentao

Zhao Rugua. See Chao Ju-kua

Zhejiang

Zheng-de (emperor)

Zheng He; and Australia; expedition; fleet; imaginary; nautical chart; sea charts; voyages

Zheng Zhenggong; family; piracy; sailing passes

Zheng Zhilong

Zhou Daguan

Zhou Yunzhong

Zhu Fan Zhi; Africa in; Middle East in; South Asia in; Southeast Asia in

Zuda Rokashi

Table of Contents

Synposis

Author Biography

Endorsements

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

Plates

Introduction

Part I: Writings

Chapter 1: Writing a Decentered World Regional History

Part II: Imaginaries

Chapter 2: An Indian Imaginary

Chapter 3: Arab Geographic Imaginaries

Chapter 4: Geographic Imaginaries from the Chinese Tradition

Chapter 5: Japanese Geographic Imaginarie

Chapter 6: Geographic Imaginaries of an Austral Land

Part III: Evidence

Chapter 7: Connecting Up the Dots on Global Port Cities

Chapter 8: The Evidence from Marine Archaeology

Part IV: Examples/Alternative Realms

Chapter 9: The Ryukyu Trade Networks Revisited

Chapter 10: Configuring Macau on the World Map

Afterword

References

Index