Chinese Port Citie JWH

"The Sea Common to All": Maritime Frontiers, Port Cities, and Chinese Traders in the Southeast Asian Age
of Commerce, ca. 14001750*

Craig A. Lockard
Journal of World History, Volume 21, Number 2, June 2010, pp. 219-247 (Article)
Published by University of Hawai'i Press DOI: 10.1353/jwh.0.0127
For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jwh/summary/v021/21.2.lockard.html
Access Provided by Pondichery University at 01/20/11 2:51PM GMT
Sea Common to All : Maritime Frontiers, Port Cities, and Chinese Traders in the Southeast Asian Age of Commerce, ca. 14001750*
craig a. lockard
University of WisconsinGreen Bay
The
God has made the earth and the sea, and has divided the earth among men and made the sea common to all. Sultan of Makassar (Indonesia) to the Dutch ambassador, 1659 1
The Early Modern Asian Maritime World and Economy According to an expression common in Southeast Asia, the water unites and the land divides. This expression came to mind when I visited the old seaport of Hoi An (known to the French as Faifo), some twenty miles south of Da Nang in central Vietnam, in 2007. The cities of Da Nang and Hoi An are located on a narrow coastal plain created by siltladen rivers and separated from the districts to the north and south by rugged coastal mountains that sweep down to the South China Sea.
* This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Seventeenth Annual World History Association Conference in London, England, 2529 June 2008. It is offered in memory of Professor G. William Skinner, a pathbreaking scholar of the Chinese in Thailand and of Chinas socioeconomic history, who passed away in November 2008; Paul Wheatley, whose studies of Asian historical geography, especially of Melaka and other premodern cities, greatly influenced a younger generation of scholars; and Chen Chingho, the pioneering historian of Sino-Vietnamese connections and the Chinese in Vietnam. 1 Quoted in Heather Sutherland, Geography as Destiny? The Role of Water in Southeast Asian History, in A World of Water: Rain, Rivers and Seas in Southeast Asian Histories, ed. Peter Boomgaard (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), p. 27.
Journal of World History, Vol. 21, No. 2 2010 by University of Hawaii Press
219
220
journal of world history, june 2010
This topography of mountainous land broken occasionally by narrow river valleys, coastal plains, lagoons, and a few broad deltas (such as the Pearl, Red, Mekong, and Chaophraya) is common in large parts of Southeast Asia and southern China, as anyone who has traveled along or flown over these coastlines can attest. Water especially seawater heavily influenced the life and outlooks of the coastal peoples, fostering a maritime-oriented culture that provides an excellent geographical framework for understanding transregional history and connections.2 This orientation toward seas and rivers has led some historians to refer to a water frontier, a single region stretching from the Yangzi delta in central China southward through Vietnam and parts of Cambodia and Thailand to both coasts of the Malay Peninsula. Others, influenced by Fernand Braudels sweeping study of the Mediterranean basin, refer to the South China Sea, Gulf of Siam, and Java Sea after about the tenth century as an East Asian counterpart to the Mediterranean, or, connected through the Straits of Melaka, as an annex to the maritime Silk Road of the Indian Ocean. Hence, it can be seen as one long maritime avenue, with diverse subbranches, from the Yellow Sea to Arabia and the East African coast that transcended political boundaries. Not all historians find the Asian Mediterranean analogy compelling, partly because the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, which reverse themselves every six months, generally limited trading ships to sailing west or north half the year and east or south the other half, in contrast to year round shipping on the Mediterranean. But, as the French historian Denys Lombard wrote, wanting to understand Southeast Asia without integrating a good part of southern China into ones thinking is like wanting to give an account of the Mediterranean world by abstracting Turkey, the Levant, Palestine and Egypt. 3
2 See Peter Boomgaard, In a State of Flux: Water as a Deadly and a Life-Giving Force in Southeast Asia, in Boomgaard, World of Water, pp. 13; Charles Wheeler, Re-thinking the Sea in Vietnamese History: Littoral Society in the Integration of Thuan-Quang, Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37, no. 1 (2006): 142; Charles Wheeler, A Maritime Logic to Vietnamese History? Littoral Society in Hoi Ans Trading World c. 1550 1830 (Conference Proceedings, Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges, held at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 1215 February 2003), p. 5; Barbara Watson Andaya, Oceans Unbounded: Transversing Asia across Area Studies, Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 4 (2006): 685; Jennifer L. Gaynor, Maritime Ideologies and Ethnic Anomalies: Sea Space and the Structure of Subalternity in the Southeast Asian Littoral (Conference Proceedings, Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges, held at Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 1215 February 2003). 3 Quoted in Nola Cooke and Li Tana, eds., Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750 1880 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), p. 2. See also Cooke and Li, Water Frontier, pp. xixii; Leonard Bluss, Visible Cities: Canton,
Lockard: The Sea Common to All
221
From this angle Southeast Asia and southern China, linked by the seas, become part of the same canvas of interaction as well as of a cohesive trade network that also came to include southern Japan and the Ryukyu Islands. Unlike the post-Roman Mediterranean, the East Asian Mediterranean had one dominant political and economic power, China, which had connections with numerous smaller states. This huge but politically fragmented and often sparsely populated region around a sea common to all spawned a fluid multiethnic and dynamic transnational economic zone and flexible political boundaries in which waterborne commerce and the string of ports that facilitated it were essential. This canvas of interaction also linked the mainland with the Southeast Asian archipelagos (Indonesia and the Philippines) in a myriad of exchange relationships. In the water frontier many people traveled as much by boat as by land, and quite a few looked to the sea and maritime trade, smuggling, raiding, or piracy for survival. A Chinese Buddhist monk who visited Hoi An and central Vietnam in 1695 wrote that there is no way to go between two [neighboring districts via land ] . . . If you want to go to another [district] you must leave the port by sail onto the sea and, following the mountains, proceed to the other port. 4 It has been said of the maritime trading and fishing peoples of southern China that they made fields from the sea. The same was true of many peoples of Southeast Asia, including Chams, Javanese, Bugis, and Malays. Some scholars refer to the coastal peoples as littoral soci-
Nagasaki, and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 4, 9; Kwee Hui Kian, Pockets of Empire: Integrating the Studies on Social Organizations in Southeast China and Southeast Asia, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 27, no. 3 (2007): 616617; Heather Sutherland, Southeast Asian History and the Mediterranean Analogy, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34, no. 1 (February 2003): 13; Gaynor, Maritime Ideologies, p. 2. John E. Wills, The South China Sea Is Not a Mediterranean: Implications for the History of Chinese Foreign Relations (keynote lecture, Conference on Chinese Maritime History, Taipei, Taiwan, August 2006), published in Zhongguo haiyang fazhanshi luwenji 10 (2008): 124; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing History Backwards: Southeast Aian History (and the Annales) at the Crossroads, Studies in History 10, no. 1 (1994): 131145; Angela Schottenhammer, ed., The East Asian Maritime World 1400 1800: Its Fabrics of Power and Dynamics of Exchanges (Weisbaden: Harrosowitz Verlag, 2007). K. N. Chaudhuri has employed Braudels approach in his various works on the Indian Ocean. 4 Shilian Dashan, quoted in Charles Wheeler, One Region, Two Histories: Cham Precedents in the History of the Hoi An Region, in Viet Nam: Borderless Histories, ed. Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), p. 178. See also Cooke and Li, Water Frontier, pp. xixii; Wang Gungwu, The China Seas: Becoming an Enlarged Mediterranean, in The East Asian Mediterranean: Maritime Crossroads of Culture, Commerce and Human Migration, ed. Angela Schottenhammer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008), pp. 722; Roderich Ptak, The Gulf of Tongking: A Mini-Mediterranean? in Schottenhammer, East Asian Mediterranean, pp. 5360.
222
eties, their locations and porous frontiers acting as filters where the salt of the sea meets the silt of the land and acquaculture was the norm. Littoral peoples, reflecting a symbiosis between land and sea, often have had more in common with each other than with their neighbors inland. The major rivers, such as the Chaophraya in Thailand, brought huge interiors close to the sea and to the world beyond. In these centuries water provided the cheapestand frequently the onlymeans to transport bulk commodities on a large scale, and it was often the most secure way over long distances. Hence, the proximity of the sea drew Southeast Asians into long-distance trade.5 It was not just water that linked the distant shores but seafaring peoples, including traders. The maritime traders congregated in ports, the interface between land and sea that linked the hinterland to the wider world. Ports that were blessed with especially good location, usable harbors, adequate warehouse facilities, and ample supplies of food and water became entrepts, supercenters for trade. These ports were not necessarily final destinations but mostly median points in an ever-changing political and economic environment. Port centers, whether in Asia, Europe, or Africa, comprised ethnically and culturally diverse communities, and many had officials of foreign birth or ancestry, who knew the cultures and languages of the foreign merchants, to supervise the trade. These ports fostered not just economic but also cultural exchange, as Rhoads Murphey argues: A port city is open to the world . . . In it races, cultures, and ideas as well as goods from a variety of places jostle, mix, and enrich each other and the life of the city. 6
5 Peter Reeves, Frank Broeze, and Kenneth McPherson, Studying the Asian Port City, in Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th20th Centuries, ed. Frank Broeze (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), p. 48; Wheeler, Re-thinking the Sea, p. 132; Michael N. Pearson, Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems, Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 353354; Philippe Beaujard, The Indian Ocean in Eurasian and African World-Systems Before the Sixteenth Century, Journal of World History 16, no. 4 (2005): 411; Ian Brown, Economic Change in South-East Asia, c. 1850 1980 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 277. 6 Rhoads Murphey, On the Evolution of the Port City, in Broeze, Brides, p. 225. See also Leong Saw Heng, Conflicting Centres, Feeder Points and Entrepots in the Malay Peninsula, c. 1000 b.c.a.d. 1400, in The Southeast Asian Port and Polity: Rise and Decline, ed. J. Kathirithamby-Wells and John Villiers (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1990), p. 26; Bluss, Visible Cities, pp. 89; Denys Lombard, Introduction, in Asian Merchants and Businessmen in the Indian Ocean and the China Sea, ed. Lombard and Jean Aubin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 5; Haneda Masahi, Asian Port Cities, 1600 1800: Local and Foreign Cultural Interactions (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2009); Frank Broeze, Gateways of Asia: Port Cities of Asian in the ThirteenthTwentieth Centuries (London: Kegan Paul, 1992); Eric Tagliacozzo, An Urban Ocean: Notes on the Historical Evolution of Coastal Cities in Greater Southeast Asia, Journal of Urban History 33, no. 6 (September 2007): 911 932; Anthony Reid, The Structure of Cities in Southeast Asia, 15th 17th Centuries, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 11, no. 2 (1980): 235250.
223
This article examines three of the most important Southeast Asian entrept ports during the early modern era: Melaka in southwestern Malaya, Hoi An in central Vietnam, and Ayutthaya in what is now central Thailand. This article also addresses one key component of this maritime frontier population: the opportunistic and adaptable Chinese merchants and sailors, mostly from Fujian province in southeastern China, who went to Southeast Asia to trade between around 1400 and 1750, with or without official Chinese government support. They constructed a trade diaspora, an interrelated net of commercial communities from the same ethnic group that formed a trade network. Such diasporas, linked by common culture, language, and organization but also mobile, were globalizing economies long before modern times.7 Most of these Chinese spoke a version of Hokkien, the major dialect of central and southern Fujian province and, since the 1600s, of Taiwan across the straits, which was settled largely by Hokkien migrants. The mountainous, agriculturally poor Hokkien districts of Fujian, including the ports of Quanzhou (also known as Zaitun), dominant from the ninth to sixteenth centuries, and then Xiamen (Amoy), which rose to prominence in the seventeenth century, were a frontier region considered of little importance by the agrarian-minded and distant Chinese government. It was easier for other Chinese to reach the Fujian coastal cities by sea than over the high mountain passes. Yet Fujian was an important segment of the maritime frontier of central and southern China. Quangzhou became home to thousands of foreign merchants and their mosques, Hindu temples, and even churches. The Hokkiens adapted their society to cope with overpopulation and land shortage. Enterprising Hokkien merchants established businesses in Chinese ports from Guangzhou in the south to Tianjin in the north.8
7 Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 13; Ina Baghdiantz McCabe et al., eds., Diaspora Entreprenurial Networks: Four Centuries of History (Oxford: Berg, 2005), pp. xviiixxii, 29; Yokkaichi Yasuhiro, Chinese and Muslim Diasporas and the Indian Ocean Trade Network under Mongol Hegemony, in Schottenhammer, East Asian Mediterranean, p. 78. 8 On the Hokkien merchants and the Chinese context see John Chaffee, At the Intersection of Empire and World Trade: The Chinese Port City of Quanzhou (Zaitun), EleventhFifteenth Centuries, in Secondary Cities and Urban Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm, c. 1400 1800, ed. Kenneth R. Hall (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2008), pp. 99121; Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 119124; John E. Wills Jr., Contingent Connections: Fujian, The Empire, and the Early Modern World, in Qing Formations in World Historical Time, ed. Lynn A. Struve (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 167203; Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), pp. 3336; Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History
224
Sailing in large and versatile junks, many with three masts, some Hokkiens traveled regularly between Southeast Asia and China, others sojourned or settled down permanently in Southeast Asian seaports to solidify and expand the trade connections, and a third group came to specialize in trade links between Southeast Asian ports or between Southeast Asia and the Ryukyu Islands or Japan. The junk traders were knowledgeable about market conditions and customs in various ports of call and were able to adjust their tactics to local conditions. Most of the Hokkiens were linked by ties of kinship and business to other Hokkien communities around the South China Sea, consolidating the trade diaspora. They were by no means the first Chinese to trade or settle in Southeast Asia; this process had been going on for centuries, albeit in small numbers, and regular Sino Southeast Asian maritime trade had certainly begun by the ninth century. Chinese merchants were already prominent in various Javan ports by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.9
of the Chinese Diaspora (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990), p. 13; Tan Chee-Beng, Socio-Cultural Diversities and Identities, in The Chinese in Malaysia, ed. Lee Kam Hing and Tan Chee Beng (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 3940; Wang Gungwu, China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1992), pp. 80 87; Wang Gungwu, Merchants without Empire: The Hokkien Sojourning Communities, in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350 1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 400421; Ng ChinKeong, Trade and Society: The Amoy Network on the China Coast (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1983); Sarasin Viraphol, Tribute and Profit: Sino-Siamese Trade, 16521853 (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1977), pp. 4344, 5254; Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), pp. 911; Bluss, Visible Cities, pp. 1417; Hugh R. Clark, Frontier Discourse and Chinas Maritime Frontier: Chinas Frontiers and the Encounter with the Sea through Early Imperial History, Journal of World History 20 (2009): 134; Angela Schottenhammer, ed., The Emporium of the World: Maritime Quanzhou, 10001400 (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Chang Pin-tsun, The Formation of a Maritime Convention in Minnan (Southern Fujian), c. 9001200, in From the Mediterranean to the China Sea: Miscellaneous Notes, ed. Claude Guillot et al. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998), pp. 143155; Chen Dasheng and Denys Lombard, Foreign Merchants in Maritime Trade in Quanzhou (Zaitun): Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, in Lombard and Aubin, Asian Merchants, pp. 1923. 9 Sutherland, Geography, p. 35; Wang Gungwu, A Short History of the Nanyang Chinese (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 1979), pp. 113; Wang Gungwu, The Nanhai Trade: The Early History of Chinese Trade in the South China Sea (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1998); Viraphol, Tribute, pp. 79, 126; Kernial Singh Sandhu and Paul Wheatley, The Historical Context, in Melaka: The Transformation of a Malay Capital, c. 1400 1980, ed. Sandhu and Wheatley (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1983), 1:3940; Waikeung Chung, Western Corporate Forms and the Social Origins of Chinese Diaspora Entreprenurial Networks, in McCabe, Diaspora, pp. 287312; Yasuhiro, Chinese and Muslim, pp. 8387; Kenneth R. Hall, Multi-Dimensional Networking: Fifteenth-Century Indian Ocean Maritime Diaspora in Southeast Asian Perspective, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49, no. 4 (2006): 454481; Kenneth R. Hall, Local and International Trade and Traders in the Straits of Malacca Region: 6001500, in Globalization in
225
The Hokkiens from Quangzhou were among the pioneers, sometimes enjoying official support, sometimes cleverly evading or ignoring sporadic imperial restrictions on trade. Fearing enemies at home and abroad, the Ming dynasty (13681644) banned Chinese emigration and private maritime trade from the 1470s to 1567 but could not prevent Hokkien traders, often with the connivance of local officials and leading families in Fujian, from circumventing the poorly enforced ban. As a contemporary government report put it: powerful families traded overseas with large ships. Scoundrels secretly profited from it. 10 After 1567 licensed private trade with Southeast Asia by Hokkiens, mostly from Xiamen, was allowed, while official, highly formalized trading visits by foreign ships, their cargoes considered tribute by the Chinese court, were carried out through Guangzhou (Canton). Many governments employed local Chinese merchants to lead or accompany their tribute missions to the Ming court. Some prominent Fujian-based trading families had interests and agents in a variety of Southeast Asian ports. The Chinese involved with Southeast Asian trade carried with them and benefitted from a kind of sociocultural capital that allowed them to organize themselves around loyalties such as family, surname, lineage, home village, and dialect. Over the centuries some Chinese who settled or sojourned abroad, and often married local women, served as cultural brokers between China and Southeast Asia and fostered hybrid communities; a few even became government officials in and diplomats for their new communities. Others assimilated into the dominant society, losing all connection to their Chinese roots.11
Pre-Modern India, ed. Najendra Rao (New Delhi: Regency, 2005), pp. 92142; Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Realtions, 6001400 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003); Tansen Sen, The Formation of Chinese Maritime Networks to Southern Asia, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49, no. 4 (2006): 421453; Pin-tsun Chang, The First Chinese Diaspora in Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century, in Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in Asian Maritime Trade, c. 1400 1750, ed. Roderich Ptak and Dietmar Rothermund (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991), pp. 1320; Roderich Ptak, Chinas Seaborne Trade with South and Southeast Asia, 12001750 (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1999); Derek Heng, Sino-Malay Diplomacy from the Tenth through the Fourteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009). 10 Quoted in Kuhn, Chinese among Others, p. 9. See also Wang, China and the Chinese Overseas, pp. 8387; Brook, Confusions, p. 121; Roderich Ptak, Ming Maritime Trade in Southeast Asia, 13681567: Visions of a System, in Guillot, From the Mediterranean, pp. 154191. 11 Anthony Reid, Flows and Seepages in the Long-Term Chinese Interaction with Southeast Asia, in Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese, ed. Reid (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1996), pp. 2830; Hui, Pockets, pp. 631 632; Bluss, Visible Cities, pp. 1417, 2829; Geoff Wade, Engaging the South: Ming China and Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 51 (2008): 606608, 628; Hall, Multi-Dimensional, pp. 456462.
226
Nor was this the beginning of Southeast Asian engagement with Eurasian maritime trade. Trade routes long connected the societies of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean through the Straits of Melaka and its entrept cities and states such as Srivijaya, based at Palembang in southeastern Sumatra. By 1000 c.e. maritime trade was becoming even more important in the eastern hemisphere. Both the Chinese and Arabs proved particularly skillful in seagoing technology and were increasingly active in Southeast Asian trade. Chinese established trading communities from Japan to India. The exchange of products between China and various Southeast Asian states continued to grow, fueled in part by Chinese population increase and hence demand for imported goods; between 1400 and 1600 Chinas population doubled from 75 million to 150 million.12 This Southeast Asian trade became part of a much larger commercial network around the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, commerce that linked China, Japan, the Ryukyu Islands, Vietnam, Champa, Cambodia, Siam, Luzon, and Indonesia in the east through Malaya and Sumatra to Burma, India, Sri Lanka, Persia, Arabia, Egypt, and the East African coast as far south as Mozambique, and through the Red Sea and Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean societies.13 By the early 1400s some Southeast Asian societies were expanding economically and becoming more closely linked to maritime trade, entering what Anthony Reid has termed an age of commerce that extended through much of the 1600s, during which both local Southeast Asian (especially Malay and Javanese) and foreign merchants (Chinese, Indian, Arab, Persian, and, for a time, Japanese, as well as, after 1511, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, English, and French) were active in the region, acquiring, exporting, importing, and transporting manufactured goods and natural resources. These changes transformed Southeast Asia from a transfer point to a core in the Eurasian trade
12 Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 147; Hall, Multi-Dimensional, pp. 454477; Yasuhiro, Chinese and Muslim, pp. 73102; Heng, Sino-Malay. 13 On this trade network see Craig A. Lockard, Southeast Asia in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 3436, 6273; Craig A. Lockard, Societies, Networks and Transitions: A Global History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), pp. 378380, 414415, 553555; Patricia Risso, Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995); Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003); K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Milo Kearney, The Indian Ocean in World History (New York: Routledge, 2004); Kenneth R. Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development in Early Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), pp. 194231; Beaujard, Indian Ocean, pp. 391410.
227
network.14 Some historians think Reids formulation is too narrow and suggest that, after a short economic downturn in the mid 1600s, trade continually increased from the 1690s into the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Reid emphasized cities rather than agrarian societies.15 Some Southeast Asian societies prospered from agriculture rather than trade, and, as Barbara Watson Andaya has argued, both trade and the reliability of food supplies were essential for economic growth.16 Reid argues that the seven famous naval expeditions led by the Chinese admiral Zheng He, a Muslim from south China, through Southeast Asia to South Asia and then farther west, as far as Arabia, Persia, and East Africa, between 1405 and 1431 impressed Southeast Asians with Chinas wealth and power while stimulating maritime trade and intensified ChineseSoutheast Asian exchange, hence helping foster the age of commerce.17 Today Chinese all over Southeast Asia, including in places never visited by Zhengs fleets, celebrate his legacy, building temples and statues to honor the admiral.18 In the wake of the voyages, Chinese copper coins and local coins modeled on them became the basic lubricant for the increasing commercialization of Southeast Asia.
14 On the age of commerce thesis, see Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450 1680, 2 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988 and 1993); Reid, An Age of Commerce in Southeast Asian History, Modern Asian Studies 24, no. 1 (1990): 1 30; Reid, Economic and Social Change, c. 14001800, in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, ed. Nicholas Tarling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1:460504; Yasuhiro, Chinese and Muslim, pp. 9193; Sutherland, Southeast Asian History, p. 5. 15 Some major critical assessments of Reids thesis include Barbara W. Andaya, The Unity of Southeast Asia: Historical Approaches and Questions, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 28, no. 1 (1997): 6171; Lieberman, Strange Parallels, pp. 1521; Lieberman, An Age of Commerce in Southeast Asia? Problems of Regional CoherenceA Review Article, Journal of Asian Studies 54, no. 3 (1995): 796807; Heather Sutherland, Contingent Devices, in Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space, ed. Paul Kratoska et al. (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005), pp. 2229; Sutherland, Geography, p. 40; Sutherland, Southeast Asian History, pp. 5, 1011, 13. Reid now accepts that a new phase of commercial expansion characterized the years from 1760 to 1840. Reid, A New Phase of Commercial Expansion in Southeast Asia, 17601840, in The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies: Responses to Modernity in the Diverse States of Southeast Asia and Korea, 1750 1900, ed. Reid (New York: St. Martins Press, 1997), pp. 5780. 16 Andaya, Political Development between the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, in Tarling, Cambridge History, 1:402455. 17 Reid, Flows and Seepages, pp. 2628. See also Sutherland, Geography, p. 38; Wang, China and the Chinese Overseas, p. 60; Wade, Engaging, pp. 582588, 622; Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 140533 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), pp. 8889, 183185; Ptak, Ming Maritime, pp. 165170; Edward L. Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 14051433 (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006). 18 See Leo Suryadinata, ed., Admiral Zheng He and Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2005); Wade, Engaging, p. 629.
228
Chinese influence and maritime activity in Southeast Asia expanded considerably in this era. Trade with China and across the Indian Ocean increased, sparked by growing demand for Southeast Asian commodities, and more ports developed. In many of the ports merchants became a more powerful group in local politics. The populations of these ports were cosmopolitan, a mix of local people and outsiders from diverse backgrounds who were open to the outside world and accepting of cultural differences. After the Ming forbid Chinese emigration, many Chinese in Southeast Asia opted for acculturation to or assimilation into local societies. Some Chinese settlers blended Chinese and local languages and customs to forge new hybrid cultures. The age of commerce was an era of sustained urban growth in Southeast Asia, with major trade entrepts becoming some of the largest cities. Revenue from trade became more important than agricultural taxes in many coastal states.19 This age of commerce, and the open sea traffic that it fostered, brought considerable prosperity to many of the traders and the local peoples with whom they dealt. As the sultan of Melaka, Mansur, wrote to the king of the Ryukyu Islands in 1468 extolling the benefits of maritime trade relations: We have learned that to master the blue oceans people must engage in commerce and trade. All the lands within the seas are united in one body. Life has never been so affluent in preceding generations as it is today. 20 During the age of commerce Melaka, Hoi An, and Ayutthaya all had important trade (and sometimes political) links with China and all developed resident communities of Chinese, mostly Hokkien, merchants in these centuries. These Chinese settlers became the basis for distinctive hybrid communities blending Chinese and Southeast Asian cultures. Melaka Melaka, located along a narrow coastal plain facing the Straits of Melaka, was founded in 1403 by a Sumatran prince and soon became a leading trading city, an international clearinghouse for east-west trade, and the capital of a major Malay Muslim sultanate and later empire.
19 Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 2:62; Kenneth Hall, Coastal Cities in an Age of Transition: Upstream-Downstream Networking and Societal Development in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Maritime Southeast Asia, in Hall, Secondary Cities, p. 198; Andaya, Oceans Unbounded, pp. 684685; Bluss, Visible Cities, pp. 3233; Hall, Multi-Dimensional, p. 476. 20 Quoted in Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 2:10.
229
Melaka was easily accessible to ships traveling to and from China or India with the annual monsoon winds. The citys layout was familiar to sailors all over Asia. The city flanked both sides of a sluggish river and stretched along a shore backed by defensible hills, where the royal palace was situated. The city plan reflected the social structure of the city, with the royal palace walled off from the commercial quarters. Malays lived at the foot of the hill, whereas the business district flanked the riverside. Wealthier merchants lived nearby in grand houses. Merchant ships could dock at the river mouth or just offshore, protected by several small islands. The city shops offered textiles from India, books from the Middle East, cloves and nutmeg from Maluku (the Moluccas), batiks and carpets from Java, silk and porcelain from China, and sugar from the Philippines. Gold was so plentiful that children played with it. Melaka certainly qualifies as part of the water frontier, with only a small hinterland suitable for farming, coastal districts dominated by mangrove forests, and a long history of varied peoples moving and migrating along the coasts and sluggish rivers by boat. Thanks to personal and political alliances Melakas rulers were able to extend the citys effective hinterland for procuring forest, agricultural, sea, and mineral products for local use some two hundred miles. Fifteenth-century Melaka, with its low customs duties and a free trade policy, served as the key entrept at the eastern end of the Indian Ocean trade network and the link between the Indian Ocean and South China Sea trading systems, the hub for goods moving north, east, or west. A Portuguese observer called Melaka a city that was made for merchandise, fitter than any other in the world. Commerce between different nations for a thousand leagues on every hand must come to Melaka. 21 The emergence of Melaka coincided with the rise of the Ming dynasty and its outward-thrusting foreign policy and promotion of economic exchange, a policy reversed by the mid 1400s. China apparently took the initiative to engage the new state. Admiral Zheng He and his fleet repeatedly visited Melaka, forging an alliance with the sultan
21 Tom Pires, quoted in Paul Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese: Studies in the Historical Geography of the Malay Peninsula before a.d. 1500 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1961), p. 313. See also James Anderson and Walter Vorster, In Search of Melakas Hinterland: On Provisioning the Emporium in the FifteenthNineteenth Centuries, in The Rise and Growth of the Colonial Port Cities in Asia, ed. Dilip K. Basu (Berkeley: Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, 1985), pp. 15; Lim Heng Kow, The Evolution of the Urban System in Malaya (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1978), pp. 1216; George Cho and Marion W. Ward, The Port of Melaka, in Sandhu and Wheatley, Melaka, 1:623625; Luis Filipe F. R. Thomaz, Melaka and Its Merchant Communities at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century, in Lombard and Aubin, Asian Merchants, pp. 2539; Hall, Multi-Dimensional, pp. 466470; Tagliacozzo, Urban Ocean, pp. 916917.
230
and making the port a base for their exploration of the Indian Ocean, sometimes docking for months at a time to repair boats and assess their journeys. Zheng reportedly found a small community of Chinese there, though some may have been sojourners living aboard their ships or in hotels. However, some may have lived on or at the base of Bukit China (China Mountain), on the fringe of Melaka city and later the site of the major Chinese cemetery. Local but unprovable stories suggest that some Melaka Chinese may be descended from a few of Zheng Hes sailors who elected to remain in Melaka and marry local women, as sometimes happened elsewhere, rather than return to China. The Chinese community, most likely chiefly Hokkien along with some Cantonese, may have grown into a few hundred permanent or seasonal residents during the 1400s, although they were always vastly outnumbered by the merchants from Java (some probably Muslims of Chinese ancestry) and various parts of India, especially Gujeratis and Tamils. Most foreign groups had their own neighborhoods, and by 1500 many Chinese lived just north of the river along the seafront. They probably organized the sort of business partnerships, often lubricated by family ties, that became common among Southeast Asian Chinese.22 By the later 1400s the port probably had some 50,000 to 100,000 people and was Southeast Asias largest city. Like many entrepts, Melaka was famously cosmopolitan, attracting trading ships from many lands and at least 15,000 foreign merchants speaking some eighty-four languages in temporary or permanent residence. These came from all over the Indian Ocean basin and Indonesia but also included Vietnamese, Chams, Okinawans, Japanese, and Muslim Filipinos (some perhaps of Chinese ancestry). The sultan appointed four merchants, usually including one Chinese, from the leading expatriate communities to the post of shahbandar (harbormaster), charged with supervising trade
22 John R. Clammer, Straits Chinese Society: Studies in the Sociology of the Baba Communities of Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1980), p. 123; Tan Chee Beng, The Baba of Melaka: Culture and Identity of a Chinese Peranakan Community in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Pelanduk Publications, 1988), pp. 2832; Kernial Singh Sandhu, Chinese Colonization of Malaya, in Sandhu and Wheatley, Melaka, 2:9496; Victor Purcell, The Chinese in Malaya (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 1819, 2425; Purcell, The Chinese in Southeast Asia, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 236237; Johannes Widodo, A Celebration of Diversity: Zheng He and the Origin of the Pre-Colonial Coastal Urban Pattern in Southeast Asia, in Suryadinata, Admiral Zheng He, pp. 114118; Wade, Engaging, pp. 593, 619, 621; Levathes, When China, pp. 107111, 183185; Wang Gungwu, Community and Nation: China, Southeast Asia, and Australia (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1992), pp. 96100, 131142, 147157; Ptak, Ming Maritime, pp. 166170, 174177; Hall, Multi-Dimensional, p. 469; Hall, Local, pp. 124126; Chang, First Chinese, p. 18.
231
and presenting visiting merchants to the prime minister. This ethnic diversity, the centrality of free trade, and the prominence of foreign residents has prompted some historians to refer to Melaka as one of the worlds first globalized citiesits streets as cosmopolitan as those of any city in the world today.23 While the permanent Chinese population may have been small in the 1400s, Melaka maintained close commercial ties to China, and many Chinese ships came to the crowded harbor. A Portuguese observer in the early 1500s, Ruy Araujo, estimated that eight to ten junks came to Melaka every year from China, bringing perfumes, silks, satins, jewelry, iron, sulfur, fine porcelains, cooking utensils, and cannonballs to exchange for spices, pepper, opium, jungle products, and specialized woods. Huge Chinese demand for pepper brought great profit to Melaka, which was the middleman for pepper exports from Sumatra and Patani (a port in southern Thailand). Pepper bought in Melaka could sell in China for three times the price it was purchased for. Trade with China was highly profitable for the Melakans and the merchant community as well, with profits of up to 300 percent, higher than for trade with any other region in the Malaka trade network. For example, trade with the Coromandel Coast of southeast India and Bay of Bengal earned only around 80 90 percent profit.24 Yet, by the early 1500s tensions between some traders, among them Chinese, and the Melaka sultanate, beset by rivals and anxious for more revenues, seem to have grown. The sultan sought to conscript Chinese junks for combat against rival ports. According to Portuguese accounts, which may or may not be accurate, the Portuguese fleet that reached
23 Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade, pp. 129132; Hall, Coastal Cities, p. 182; R. O. Whyte, The Ecological Setting, in Sandhu and Wheatley, Melaka, 1:96; Sandhu, Indian Settlement in Melaka, in Sandhu and Wheatley, Melaka, 2:178184; Luis Felipe Ferreira Reis Thomaz, The Malay Sultanate of Melaka, in Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and Belief, ed. Anthony Reid (Ithaca. N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 71; Thomaz, Melaka and Its Merchant, pp. 2532; Hall, Multi-Dimensional, p. 469; Jorge M. Dos Santos Alves, The Foreign Traders Management in the Sultanates of the Straits of Malacca, in Guillot, From the Mediterranean, pp. 131142; O. W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999), pp. 208, 210; D. R. Sar Desai, The Portuguese Administration in Malacca, 15111641, Journal of Southeast Asian History 10, no. 3 (1969): 501512; Leonard Andaya, Leaves of the Same Tree: Trade and Ethnicity in the Straits of Melaka (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), pp. 6881; Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Andaya, A History of Malaysia, 2nd ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), pp. 4246. 24 Muhammad Yusoff Hashim, The Malay Sultanate of Malacca: A Study of Various Aspects of Malacca in the 15th and 16th Centuries in Malaysian History (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1992), pp. 187, 199; Wheatley, Golden Khersonese, pp. 313315.
232
Melaka in 1509 was greeted by Chinese ship captains, who warned them to be careful in Melakas streets. By these same accounts, Chinese merchants, angry at the sultan, aided the Portuguese war fleet of Admiral dAlbuquerque in 1511 and encouraged the attack that ended the sultanate and resulted in Portuguese rule.25 Historians are uncertain as to the relationship, if any, between the small number of Chinese settlers during the sultanate era and the Chinese subculture in Melaka today known variously as Baba, Peranakan, and Straits Chinese, whose culture mixes Chinese traditions with a Hokkien-influenced Malay language and hybrid cuisine.26 British observers noted in the nineteenth century that Baba men favored Ming-style clothes, and even today Baba women wear a modified version of Malay dress. This suggests that the community arose between 1400 and the mid 1600s, when the Qing dynasty (16441912) replaced the Ming. Yet few Baba families can trace their ancestry back beyond the eighteenth century, although a few Chinese graves in the Bukit China cemetery are older, perhaps dating back to the 1500s or 1600s.27 Very little is known about the Babas before 1700. Various observers have speculated that the Hokkien men in Melaka married or cohabited with local women, among them Balinese slaves, Bataks from Sumatra, and perhaps Malays, giving the community mixed origins, but there is little solid evidence to substantiate the speculation.28 Since few women emigrated from China before the nineteenth century, such a situation is certainly plausible. However, since few Babas are Muslims, Chinese who married Malays may have been assimilated into their wifes Muslim faith and Malay cultural identity. Baba society is probably more a product of cultural synthesis than biological mixing. While the Baba identity and language has faded in recent decades, they maintained sharp differences, and largely saw themselves as separate from other Malaysian Chinese until the mid twentieth century.
Purcell, Chinese in Malaya, pp. 2224; Sandhu, Chinese Colonization, p. 96. On the Baba Chinese in Melaka see Felix Chia, The Babas (Singapore: Times Books International, 1980), pp. 110; Chia, Ala Sayang! A Social History of the Babas and Nyonyas (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 1983), pp. 215; Clammer, Straits Chinese, pp. 210, 2021, 100101, 122126; Clammer, The Straits Chinese of Melaka, in Sandhu and Wheatley, Melaka, 2:155173; Khoo Joo Ee, The Straits Chinese: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Pepin Press, 1996), pp. 1740; Pan, Sons, pp. 169172; Tan, Baba; Tan, Socio-Cultural, pp. 4951. 27 Purcell, Chinese in Malaya, pp. 2122; Purcell, Chinese in Southeast Asia, p. 238; Tan, Baba, pp. 32, 42. 28 Chia, Ala Sayang, p. 3; Chia, Babas, p. 2; Clammer, Straits Chinese, pp. 122126; Tan, Baba, pp. 3442; Tan, Socio-Cultural, p. 49; Sandhu, Chinese Colonization, p. 98; Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2003), p. 70.
26 25
233
After the Portuguese took over Melaka in 1511 they offered few incentives that might attract Chinese merchants, but some Chinese ships still came. There was enough of a community for the Portuguese to appoint a headman (kapitan), a rich Fujian-born Hokkien merchant named Tay Kie Ki (also known as Tin Kap), for the Chinese. This set a pattern for colonial governments in Melaka and elsewhere to administer the Chinese through kapitans drawn from the most prominent merchants. A Chinese neighborhood, known as Kampong China (Chinese Village), emerged alongside the Melaka River.29 In 1678, the Dutch, who captured Melaka from Portugal in 1641, found 852 Chinese in and around the city, probably including some non-Chinese wives and concubines, out of a total city population of around 3,000. Like the Portuguese, the Dutch appointed kapitans for the Chinese. Their first appointment, Fujian-born Li Jun Chang (popularly known as Li Kap), is believed to have founded the citys first Chinese temple in 1645 and acquired Bukit China for his community. Yet, while the Dutch sought to promote Chinese agricultural enterprises in Melaka, they also wanted their colonial city of Batavia in Java to be the major regional entrept and hence largely discouraged Chinese trade in Melaka.30 But after two centuries of economic stagnation under intolerant Portuguese policies, during which the Chinese population rarely exceeded 1,000 and could not legally own land, and then monopolistic Dutch rule that diverted entrept trade to Batavia, Chinese economic activity in Melaka began increasing only in the early 1800s, resulting in a larger influx of Chinese settlers. Most of the leading Baba families now lived on several streets adjacent to the river and oceanfront, many in magnificent houses reflecting Dutch or Chinese architectural styles. However, by then the river had silted up and Melaka lost its once preeminent position as a trade entrept to Penang and then, after 1819, to Singapore, sealing the fate of Melaka. Many Melaka Chinese, including some of Baba (Straits Chinese) background, migrated to these two British-controlled ports, a movement that accelerated after Britain acquired Melaka from the Dutch in 1824. Perhaps 700 Baba families remained in Melaka by the 1860s. The Baba became a small
29 C. S. Wong, A Gallery of Chinese Kapitans (Singapore: Ministry of Culture, 1963), pp. 12; Tan, Baba, p. 32; Sandhu, Chinese Colonization, pp. 9697; Kuhn, Chinese among Others, pp. 5859; Ptak, Ming Maritime, pp. 177179. 30 Chia, Ala Sayang, p. 3; Purcell, Chinese in Malaya, pp. 2629; Purcell, Chinese in Southeast Asia, p. 241; Tan, Baba, p. 33; Sandhu, Chinese Colonization, pp. 9798; Wong, Gallery, pp. 23; Sarnia Hayes Hoyt, Old Malacca (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 24; Dianne Lewis, Jan Compagnie in the Straits of Malacca, 16411795 (Athens: Center for International Studies, Ohio University, 1995), pp. 1718.
234
but influential minority of the Chinese in Melaka and identified closely with British colonial rule. While Melakas glory faded, the Chinese eventually became the dominant ethnic group in the city, the Baba and non-Baba together numbering some 2,160 by 1750, 4,000 in 1826, and 66,000 by 1970, by which time they constituted 75 percent of the citys people. The majority are Hokkien-speakers.31 Today Melaka remains a charming but secondary city in Malaysia, outshined by Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh, Johor Baru, and Penang, although it still attracts many tourists. Hoi An Located in the estuary several miles upstream from where the Thu Son River meets the sea in Quang Nam province, Hoi An first became prominent as a seaport in the seventeenth century. However, it had probably emerged earlier, at least by the early 1500s, when the area was still controlled by Chams. The Nguyen family, rivals to the Trinh family who dominated northern Vietnam, had established a rival state in central Vietnam and took over the Hoi An region from the Chams in 1602. This state, Dang Trong, was eventually based at Hue, some seventy-five miles north of Hoi An, and came to encompass much of what is today central and southern Vietnam by the mid 1700s. While most historians of premodern Vietnam have stressed the agrarian nature of Vietnamese society generally, some are now challenging this model by emphasizing the considerable links, especially in central and southern Vietnam, to the water frontier and maritime trade. One of these revisionist historians, Charles Wheeler, argues that the rise of Hoi An as an international port is closely tied to Southeast Asias age of commerce and the new Nguyen state. Nguyen leaders saw foreign trade as a key to their survival against the more powerful Trinh state, a source of revenues, weapons, and information. Hence, the Nguyen rulers chose Hoi An, close to longstanding maritime trade routes and nearer to both China and Japan than Ayutthaya, as their chief port of foreign trade and guaranteed merchants a safe haven; Hoi An means landing of safe haven. Nguyen officials sent letters to Chinese and Japanese merchants, inviting them to trade at Hoi An. As a result, the mutual interest of the Nguyen monarch and the foreign merchants ensured Hoi Ans rise. The coastal trade connected central
31 Chia, Ala Sayang, p. 6; Hoyt, Malacca, pp. 2325; Tan, Baba, p. 34; Sandhu, Chinese Colonization, p. 129; Manjit S. Sidhu, An Introduction to Ethnic Segregation in Melaka Town, in Sandhu and Wheatley, Melaka, 1:3335.
235
and southern Vietnamese society to the wider world. Goods from many places were brought to Hoi An warehouses for reshipment.32 The earliest foreign traders in the district may have been Chinese and Japanese pirates who used rivers of the then poorly governed Vietnamese coast as bases. Because the native Vietnamese were not very active in seafaring, this left a niche for more Chinese and Japanese to settle in Hoi An. For the Hokkien Chinese the central Vietnamese coast closely resembled Fujian in topography and climate and must have seemed familiar. Since China had ended direct trade with Japan in the 1550s, both Chinese and Japanese had an incentive to meet each other in Hoi An and other ports to exchange Chinese silk for Japanese gold.33 Between the 1500s and 1700s Hoi An was the busiest port in what is today the nation-state of Vietnam, the city a great fair, as one historian described it, where the Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and Vietnamese exchanged goods. Ships came from other Southeast Asian ports such as Ayutthaya, Batavia, Manila, and Phnom Penh as well. Hoi An was at the center of a far-flung trade network and typified the South China Sea world. For some decades Hoi An was the top Southeast Asian destination for Chinese and Japanese ships, making it not just a Southeast Asian but also an East Asian port.34 However, as
32 Wheeler, Re-thinking the Sea, pp. 124127; Wheeler, One Region, p. 168. See also Wheeler, Maritime Logic, pp. 119; Nguyen Chi Thong, A Seventeenth Century Port City in Vietnam: Autonomous History in the Absence of a Single Centralized Kingdom, in Recalling Local Pasts: Autonomous History in Southeast Asia, ed. Sunait Chutintaranond and Chris Baker (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2002), pp. 136137; Keith W. Taylor, Nguyen Hoang and the Beginning of Vietnams Southward Expansion, in Reid, Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era, p. 50; Li Tana, A View from the Sea: Perspectives on the Northern and Central Vietnamese Coast, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37, no. 1 (2006): 83102; John Whitmore, Vietnam and the Monetary Flows of Eastern Asia, Thirteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, in Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, ed. John F. Richards (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1983), pp. 378379; John E. Wills Jr., Introduction, in Eclipsed Entrepots of the Western Pacific: Taiwan and Central Vietnam, 1500 1800, ed. Wills (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002), pp. xxix, xxxi. The fullest treatments in English of early modern Hoi Ans history can be found in Charles J. Wheeler, Cross-Cultural Trade and Trans-Regional Networks in the Port of Hoi An: Maritime Vietnam in the Early Modern Era (PhD diss., Yale University, 2001); and Chen Chingho, Historical Notes on Hoi-An (Faifo), Monograph Series 4 (Carbondale: Center for Vietnamese Studies, Southern Illinois University, 1973). 33 Wheeler, One Region, pp. 188, 180; Wheeler, Re-thinking the Sea, pp. 142, 146; Tran Khanh, The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), p. 180; William D. Wray, The Seventeenth-Century Japanese Diaspora: Questions of Boundary and Property, in McCabe, Diaspora, p. 73. 34 Reid, Flows and Seepages, p. 38; Anthony Reid, Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1999), p. 93; Wheeler, Re-thinking the Sea, pp. 134, 142; Wheeler, Maritime Logic, pp. 4, 7; Li Tana and Anthony Reid, Introduction: The Vietnamese Southern Frontier, in Southern Vietnam under the Nguyen:
236
Wheeler argues, Hoi An also owed its prominence to its connections to the longstanding Cham and Khmer people of the region as well as the growing Vietnamese population in the hinterland, whose products, including manufactured goods, Hoi An merchants sold to foreign traders, in the process increasingly Vietnamizing central and southern Vietnam and strengthening the Nguyen state.35 Like the people of Melaka and the Straits, the people of Hoi An and the surrounding region traveled by boat as much or more as by land, along the rivers, lagoons, and coasts. By the early 1600s Hoi An had two districts along the riverside, one for the Chinese, mainly Hokkiens but also some Cantonese, and another for the Japanese. Most buildings in these quarters were two stories high, with shops, warehouses, or workshops on the ground floor and living quarters on the second floor. There were reportedly some four thousand to five thousand Chinese in Hoi An by 1642 and nearly six thousand by 1768. Some of the permanent Chinese residents were commercial representatives for junk owners, some were handicrafts manufacturers, and others were merchants, innkeepers, grocers, tailors, druggists, and restaurant owners who mainly served Chinese customers. A French visitor in 1618, Christofore Borri, described the city: it is a fairly large [city] as one part belongs to the Chinese, another to the Japanese; they live separately, each having their own governor. The Chinese living according to the laws of China, the Japanese to those of Japan. This seems to be two different cities. 36 The annual sevenmonth-long trading system began during the dry season, when local people brought local products to Hoi An for sale, including raw and processed silk, spices, rice, and wood. Soon ships from China arrived with paper, books, porcelain, silver bars, tea, arms, saltpeter, sulfur, lead, and lead oxide. When the ships arrived makeshift markets were set up,
Documents on the Economic History of Cochinchina, 16021777, ed. Li Tana and Anthony Reid (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), p. 3; Li Tana, Nguyen Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1998), pp. 7677; Chen, Historical Notes, p. 13; Whitmore, Vietnam, pp. 379380; Kennon Breazeale, Thai Maritime Trade and the Ministry Responsible, in From Japan to Arabia: Ayutthayas Maritime Relations with Asia, ed. Breazeale (Bangkok: Foundation for the Promotion of Social Sciences and Humanities Textbooks Project, 1999), pp. 3032. 35 Wheeler, One Region, pp. 166, 169171, 188189. 36 Quoted in Nguyen, Seventeenth, p. 137. See also Li and Reid, Southern Vietnam, p. 30; Purcell, Chinese in Southeast Asia, p. 183; Reid, Flows and Seepages, p. 39; Li, Nguyen Cochinchina, p. 33; Whitmore, Vietnam, p. 198; Chen, Historical Notes, pp. 1418, 36; Wray, Japanese Diaspora, p. 78.
237
with women operating many of the stalls. Women, some married to Chinese, also operated eateries and inns. Hoi Ans Chinese merchants monopolized the gold trade, obtaining gold from the nearby area and exporting it. Chinese also operated sugar mills in the interior. Visiting Chinese and Japanese ships would check in with their respective governor (town chief ) upon arrival to have their cargoes inspected and be assessed taxes for the Nguyen treasury.37 Japanese merchants had become more active in Southeast Asia in the 1400s and 1500s. Many of the Japanese who arrived in the early 1600s were Christians who left Japan after the Tokugawa shogunate began persecuting Christians. Some eighty Japanese households resided in the city in 1633. The Japanese pagoda-bridge that delights tourists today was built in 1639. After the Tokugawa shogun ordered the Japanese migrants home and restricted foreign trade in 1635, some Japanese left Hoi An. By 1651 some sixty households remained, and, cut off from their homeland, the community was increasingly integrating with the larger Vietnamese and Chinese population. The Nguyen rulers, reacting against growing French pressure for more influence, persecuted Catholic Japanese in 16641665, impoverishing once wealthy merchant families and prompting most of the remaining Japanese to leave. By 1695 only four or five local Japanese families remained, and they were gradually absorbed into Sino-Vietnamese urban society.38 Yet, the city remained a crucial intermediary for the China-Japan market. Chinese junks sailed from Hoi An with Chinese and local goods and landed in Nagasaki, returning with Japanese goods. Hoi An remained the most important Southeast Asian port for Japans foreign trade from 1650 until the mid 1700s.39 With the Japanese population reduced, the Chinese became even more dominant in trade. During the mid and late seventeenth century Chinese fleeing the new Manchu-imposed government in China, many of them Ming loyalists, migrated to Hoi An, often taking over Japanese-owned businesses. Reportedly some fifty junks carrying three thousand Ming soldiers arrived in 1679. The Nguyen emperor sent
37 Tran, Ethnic Chinese, p. 18; Wheeler, Maritime Logic, pp. 910; Anthony Reid, Diaspora Networks in the Asian Maritime Context, in McCabe, Diaspora, p. 355. 38 Nguyen Van Xuan, Hoian (Danang: Danang Publishing House, n.d.), pp. 13, 19, 21; Li, Nguyen Cochinchina, p. 65; Chen, Historical Notes, p. 13; Wills, Introduction, p. xxxi. 39 Li and Reid, Southern Vietnam, p. 3; Lieberman, Strange Parallels, pp. 415416; Reid, Charting, pp. 9495; Chen, Historical Notes, pp. 1216, 2324; Reid, An Age of Commerce, p. 10; Whitmore, Vietnam, p. 382; Wray, Japanese Diaspora, p. 74.
238
many of them on to the Mekong delta, where they helped to found a new southern port, Sai Gon. Ming refugees built some of the better known Chinese assembly halls, temples, and monasteries in Hoi An. Some of the better-educated served the Nguyen court as administrators of maritime trade. The Ming refugees and their descendants in Hoi An were known as the Minh Huong Xa (the community that burns incense to the Ming).40 Wheeler has noted the significance of Buddhism to the Hoi An Chinese and other Chinese merchant colonies in the seventeenth century. The oldest still existing temple, the Guangdi temple, was built in 1653 and, like most of the others, was adjacent to the main market area. In the 1690s Shilian Dashan, a visiting Buddhist monk from China, reported that many Hoi An Chinese wore Ming-style clothes, not unlike the Baba Chinese men of Melaka, and most married local women. He also noted that the local women married to Chinese men had become quite skilled traders in their own right.41 By 1750 some seventy to eighty Chinese junks came annually to Hoi An to trade, and the Chinese community may have numbered some ten thousand. A French visitor, Pierre Poivre, who sojourned there in 1749 1750, observed that Chinese junks and local boats could berth easily and load and unload right at the quay but that the river was too shallow for most European boats. The city, he reported, had many Chinese shipping agents, and Chinese accounted for most of the Nguyen kingdoms merchants.42 In the later eighteenth century Hoi An experienced a similar decline to that of Melaka, as the city was badly damaged by civil wars and rebellions, and the river and estuary silted up. As many as half of the population may have died and some of the citys buildings were destroyed during the Tay Son Rebellion of the late 1700s. A French map from 1787 reported that the river is quite inconvenient; a shoal in the water makes it shallow and navigable only to small vessels [while] the bay of Da Nang . . . is accessible for big merchant ships and
40 Nguyen, Hoian, pp. 27, 29; Reid, Flows and Seepages, p. 43; Charles Wheeler, Missionary Buddhism in a Post-Ancient World: Monks, Merchants, and Colonial Expansion in Seventeenth-Century Cochinchina (Vietnam), in Hall, Secondary Cities, pp. 210 211; Li, Nguyen Cochinchina, p. 31; Chen, Historical Notes, pp. 3555; Wills, Introduction, pp. xxxivxxxv. 41 Wheeler, Missionary, pp. 211, 214216, 222; Li and Reid, Southern Vietnam, p. 38; Chen, Historical Notes, p. 16; Wills, Introduction, p. xxxv. 42 Li and Reid, Southern Vietnam, pp. 77, 94; Chen, Historical Notes, pp. 18, 26; Whitmore, Vietnam, pp. 384385; Wills, Introduction, p. xxxv.
239
the sea port offers very good conditions. 43 This decline impoverished the parts of central Vietnam that depended on the port of Hoi An and diminished Nguyen finances. Yet, thanks to its proximity to Hue, the Nguyen capital, the city enjoyed a temporary revival in the early 1800s after the Nguyen suppressed the Tay Sons and established control over all of Vietnam. Many Chinese returned to Hoi An. However, by the later nineteenth century Hoi An had been eclipsed by cities such as Da Nang, Hai Phong, and Sai Gon, and many Chinese left for those more dynamic trading ports.44 Today Hoi An remains unique in Vietnam, a small tranquil city whose population derives from Chinese and, to a lesser extent, Japanese as well as Vietnamese and perhaps Cham ancestry, producing a distinctive cultural mix. The descendants of the seventeenth-century Chinese, who still operate many of the shops, are proud of their fourhundred-year history in Hoi An and of their many beautiful pagodas, temples, clan houses, and historic residences. The city, a popular tourist destination, is known for its relaxed pace, old world charm, and unique dialect and food, both a mix of Vietnamese and Hokkien influences. Ayutthaya The Siamese state of Ayutthaya emerged in 1351, with its capital city of the same name located on a vast rice-growing floodplain at the confluence of the Chaophraya, Lopburi, and Pasak Rivers, just north of present day Bangkok. Although much flatter than central Vietnam, the Chaophraya-Menam delta, where Ayutthaya arose, with its maze of streams and canals, is part of the water frontier. Its position on a wide navigable river that could accommodate large ships and its proximity to the nearby Gulf of Siam, a few dozen miles downstream, were crucial to the citys rise to prominence as an international entrept. Chinese had been settling in Siam for centuries and U Thong, the founder of Ayutthaya as King Ramathibodi I, may have come from a local Chinese merchant family. In the early 1400s, a later king, Intharacha, changed the terms of trade to favor the Chinese, perhaps as a direct response to the rise of Melaka as a rival port, intensifying Sino-Siamese trade. Although earlier historians considered Ayutthaya a hinterland
43 Quoted in Nguyen, Seventeenth, p. 140. See also Wheeler, Re-thinking the Sea, p. 153; Chen, Historical Notes, p. 27. 44 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, p. 422; Chen, Historical Notes, pp. 2830.
240
state, recent studies identify it with the coast and commercial power. From the beginning Ayutthaya was involved in maritime commerce and developed a regional empire, extending influence into Cambodia, some of the Lao states, and parts of the Malay Peninsula, bringing it into sporadic conflict with Melaka. Ayutthaya exported many local products, including rice, raw cotton, forest products, deer hides, elephant teeth, rhinoceros horns, and dried fish, while mostly importing manufactured goods such as Indian textiles and Chinese porcelain. Zheng Hes Ming fleets visited Ayutthaya in 1408 and 1421, reflecting close Sino-Siamese diplomatic and trade ties. Between 1369 and 1439 Ayutthaya sent sixty-eight tribute missions to China, far more than any other port, and provided more varied tribute to the Chinese emperor than any other state. In 1424 the local Chinese community helped finance a large Thai Buddhist temple.45 The Portuguese conquest of Melaka in 1511 benefitted Ayutthaya by eliminating a fierce trade and political rival while prompting many merchants, alienated by Portuguese policies, to transfer their attention and operations to Ayutthaya.46 Ayutthayas regional ambitions led to war with a powerful neighbor, Toungoo Burma, whose army invaded and ravaged the capital in the 1560s. Eventually recovering from this disaster, Ayutthaya soon flourished and was opened to merchants and creative people from all over Eurasia, and it became, like Melaka, a globalized city. The capital, on an artificial island in the Chaophraya River, became known to Europeans as the Venice of the East because of its canals filled with barges and ships from around Eurasia as well as floating markets where hawkers peddled goods from small sampans.47 Ayutthaya may have become the largest city in Southeast Asia by the 1600s, far bigger than the more typical littoral ports of Hoi An
45 Chris Baker, Ayutthaya Rising: From Land or Sea? Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34, no. 1 (2003): pp. 4162; Charnvit Kasetsiri, The Rise of Ayudhya: A History of Siam in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 6870, 8182; Charnvit, Origins of a Capital and Seaport: The Early Settlement of Ayutthaya and Its East Asian Trade, in Breazeale, From Japan, pp. 6871; Charnvit, Ayudhya: Capital-Port of Siam and Its Chinese Connection in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, Journal of the Siam Society 80, no. 1 (1992): pp. 7579; Breazeale, Thai Maritime, pp. 1826; David Wyatt, Ayuthaya, 140924: Internal Politics and International Relations, in Breazeale, From Japan, pp. 8486; Ayutthaya, Metropolis of the East, Bangkok Post, 5 April 2008; Chang, First Chinese Diaspora, pp. 1819; Hall, Local, pp. 113114. 46 Reid, Charting, pp. 9094. 47 Abbe De Choisy, Journal of a Voyage to Siam, 16851686, trans. Michael Smithies (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 172; Donald F. Lach, Southeast Asia in the Eyes of Europe: The Sixteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 531; Wolters, History, p. 216; Viraphol, Tribute, p. 8.
241
and Melaka. The walled downtown was ringed by settlements for various foreign residents, including Chinese, Malays, Chams, Japanese, Indians, Arabs, and Persians, but the Chinese seem to have been the largest group. Perhaps three thousand to four thousand Chinese lived there by the 1680s, mostly Hokkiens but also some Cantonese and Teochiu speakers from Guangdong Province. This pattern, with foreign merchants in separate quarters, was common in Southeast Asian ports, including Melaka and Hoi An. The Chinese and other key foreign settlers with their own neighborhoods, including the Japanese and Persians, had their own community leaders. The several hundred Japanese, who included many mercenary soldiers as well as merchants and artisans, were led by a tin merchant, Kimura Hanzaemon, between 1642 and 1671. However, with few Japanese women and repatriation to Japan impossible, most married local women, ensuring the eventual assimilation of the Japanese community into local society. In contrast to most of the foreign groups, who mostly lived in the suburbs, many Chinese lived within the city walls, along a street (called by the English China Row) that abutted the river anchorage and was lined by shops, stone or brick two-story houses, and public markets.48 A French visitor in the 1680s described the densely populated street as full of shops of tradesmen, artificers, and handicraftsmen . . . [the houses are] very small . . . covered with flat tiles, and have large doors without any proportion. 49 Some Chinese made furniture, housewares, or liquor. The Ayutthaya Chinese also had theater troupes and boasted some doctors, including the royal physician. In the 1500s Chinese junks came to Ayutthaya, and Siamese junks, some six or seven a year, mostly manned by Chinese crews and captains, went to China to trade. Some Chinese remained private traders while others worked with state officials in exchange for special privileges. Siamese rulers viewed the Chinese as linchpins of the countrys overseas commerce and apparently never considered Chinese in their realm to be foreigners, recog-
48 G. William Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1957), pp. 1213; Dhiravat Na Pombejra, Crown Trade and Court Politics in Ayutthaya During the Reign of King Narai (165688), in KathirithambyWells and Villiers, Southeast Asian Port, pp. 128130; Dhiravat, Ayutthaya at the End of the Seventeenth Century: Was There a Shift to Isolation? in Reid, Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era, pp. 257260; Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, A History of Thailand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 13; Breazeale, Thai Maritime, pp. 2628, 3841; Viraphol, Tribute, pp. 43, 46; Wray, Japanese Diaspora, pp. 78, 8589. 49 Quoted in Derrick Garner, Ayutthaya: Venice of the East (Bangkok: River Books, 2004), p. 48.
242
nizing them as nobles and commoners, which fostered acculturation and even assimilation.50 In the 1500s the Portuguese and in the 1600s Dutch, French, and English merchants were regular visitors, and some Portuguese became permanent settlers with their own neighborhood in the city. Portuguese was widely spoken by government officials. But a French attempt to dominate the kingdom in 1688 resulted in the ejection of all of the European traders and diplomats except the Dutch for some decades, which benefited the Asian merchants, especially the Chinese, whose trade improved.51 No doubt the longstanding ties between private Chinese merchants and Siamese officials helped the Chinese to sustain and then improve their position. A report in the late 1600s noted that nearly half of the ships in Ayutthayas harbor were Chinese owned. The local Chinese and Dutch traders were keen trade rivals, and eventually the Chinese used their influence to restrict Dutch activity.52 Earlier studies suggested that the changes fostered by the 1688 crisis, including a new king and a more restrictive trade and foreign policy, harmed Ayutthayas maritime trade, but recent studies question this.53 A French visitor in the 1680s, Father Tachard, wrote that Since all nations are well received in Siam, and each is allowed to live in the free exercise of their religion, there is scarcely a single nation that is not found there. The Chinese are the ones who do the most trade; besides that of China they also engage that of Japan. The Siamese king hath also several [Chinese junks] manned by Chinese. 54 Most royal ships
50 Skinner, Chinese Society, pp. 1415; Purcell, Chinese in Southeast Asia, p. 89; Choisy, Journal, p. 178; J. W. Cushman, Siamese State Trade and the Chinese Go-Between, 1767 1855, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 12, no. 1 (March 1981): 47; Kasian Tejapira, Pigtail: A PreHistory of Chineseness in Siam, in Alternate Identities: The Chinese of Contemporary Thailand, ed. Tong Chee Kiong and Chan Kwok Bun (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 2001), pp. 5253. 51 See Charnvit, Rise, p. 80; David K. Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History, 2nd ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 93104; E. W. Hutchinson, 1688: Revolution in Siam: The Memoir of Father de Beze, S.J. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1968); Ayutthaya, Metropolis of the East; John E. Wills, Chinas Further Shores: Continuities and Changes in the Destination Ports of Chinas Maritime Trade, 16801690, in Ptak and Rothermund, Emporia, pp. 5457; Stefan Halikowski Smith, No Obvious Home: The Flight of the Portuguese Tribes from Makassar to Ayutthaya and Cambodia during the 1660s, International Journal of Asian Studies 7, no. 2 (January 2010): 128. 52 Dhiravat, Crown Trade, pp. 134, 137; Skinner, Chinese Society, pp. 1011; Jennifer Wayne Cushman, Fields from the Sea: Chinese Junk Trade with Siam During the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1993), pp. 9799. 53 Dhiravat, Ayutthaya, pp. 250272. 54 Quoted in Purcell, Chinese in Southeast Asia, p. 90.
243
had Chinese captains. Indeed, much of the royal trade was shipped in Chinese vessels, which gave Ayutthaya an advantage in the China trade since the junks were classified by the Qing government as private and Chinese rather than as bearing tribute for the emperor, giving the traders more freedom of action to trade in China. Yet, at times rapacious Siamese officials could cheat and harass Chinese ship captains, especially in the early 1600s. Chinese ship captains often shared kinship ties with their crews.55 Despite some temporary restrictions imposed by the new Qing dynasty in China, the volume of Siam-Chinese trade increased by the early 1700s and, as before, involved both royal-sponsored and private Chinese traders. Some Chinese traders in Ayutthaya operated as both court and private traders, their junks sailing to and from China, Japan, Vietnam, Java, and the Malay Peninsula. The maritime trade accounted for a third of royal income. Like the merchants of Hoi An, Chinese in Ayutthaya sent ships to Nagasaki to maintain Southeast Asian and Chinese trade links with Tokugawa Japan, which had shut off contact with Europeans except for a small Dutch trading post in Nagasaki Bay. Hokkiens dominated the Ayutthaya-Nagasaki trade as junk captains, seamen, and as shipping agents at both ends. Several thousand Chinese lived in Nagasaki. Between 1635 and 1723 up to nine Chineseoperated Ayutthayan ships went to Nagasaki each year. Some brought much-prized Japanese copper and silver back to Ayutthaya. This triangular Sino-Siamese-Japanese trade enhanced Ayutthayas economic ties to China.56 Unlike Melaka, mainly an intermediary terminus for distributing goods grown or produced elsewhere, Ayutthaya, like Hoi An, exported both local and foreign goods. The Chinese adapted well to economic change, political upheavals, and Siamese society. By the early 1700s some twenty thousand Chinese
55 Cushman, Fields, pp. 3, 97104; Viraphol, Tribute, pp. 23, 3443; Breazeale, Thai Maritime, pp. 2425; Charnvit, Origins, pp. 6971. 56 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, pp. 289191; Reid, Charting, p. 95; Garner, Ayutthaya, p. 17; Dhiravat, Ayutthaya, pp. 262263. On the Chinese presence at Nagasaki see Patrizia Cariotti, The International Role of the Overseas Chinese in Hirado (Nagasaki) During the First Decades of the XVII Century, in New Studies on Chinese Overseas and China, ed. Cen Huang et al. (Leiden: International Institute for Asian Studies, 2000), pp. 3146; Chen Chingho, Chinese Junk Trade at Nagasaki at the Beginning of the Qing Dynasty, New Asia Journal 1, no. 3 (1960): 273332; Breazeale, Thai Maritime, p. 24; Charnvit, Origins, p. 77; Viraphol, Tribute, pp. 1013, 23, 4041, 5869; Bluss, Visible Cities, pp. 4450; Wray, Japanese Diaspora, p. 81; Wills, Chinas Further Shores, pp. 7276; Marius B. Jansen, China in the Tokugawa World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 911, 2329.
244
lived in the kingdom, the majority of them in the capital, including merchants, accountants, warehouse operators, and seamen. The foreign community, including the Chinese, was governed by an official of Chinese ancestry who headed the Phrakhlang Sinkha (Ministry of External Relations and Trade). Non-Chinese merchants accused this official of favoring his fellow Chinese. Several other Chinese served in high government office, including that of chief justice. One Chinese merchant wrote that The inhabitants [of Siam] accept the Chinese very cordially, much better than did the natives of any other country; therefore, Siam is a country that is really friendly to the Chinese. 57 As in Hoi An thousands of Ming loyalists fled to Siam in the mid and late 1600s, some of them Hokkiens but others speakers of the Teochiu dialect from eastern Guandong Province.58 Like other foreign settlers, such as the Japanese and Portuguese, the Chinese also intermarried or cohabitated with local Siamese or Mon women, fostering a hybrid community. Indeed, after the city of Ayutthaya was once again destroyed by Burmese forces in 1767 and the dynasty collapsed, it was Taksin, the son of the Teochiu merchant Zheng Yung and a Siamese mother, who would briefly found a new dynasty, only to be displaced by the Chakris (the present ruling dynasty), whose founder (Taksins sonin-law) also is believed to have had Chinese ancestry, in 1782.59 By the 1700s the Chinese had by far the strongest position in Siams trade as well as in that of the new capital, Bangkok. By 1767 the Chinese in Siam numbered some thirty thousand and were becoming more occupationally diverse. Massive Chinese immigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of it from Guangdong province, rapidly increased the Chinese population. As a result, the Teochius came to greatly outnumber the Hokkiens. One factor was that the Chinese government increasingly directed foreign trade to Guangzhou in the later 1700s, marginalizing Xiamen-based Hokkien merchant houses. The rise to power of Taksin, who favored his fellow Teochius, may also have been a factor. Over the generations many Chinese in Siam intermarried with local women and /or adopted aspects of Thai culture, forming the Sino-Thai elite that still has a strong role in
57 Quoted in Skinner, Chinese Society, p. 8. See also Skinner, pp. 1415, 18; Baker and Pasuk, History, p. 18; Charnvit, Rise, pp. 6768; Dhiravat, Ayutthaya, p. 259; Viraphol, Tribute, pp. 4748; Bhawan Ruangsilp, Dutch East India Company Merchants at the Court of Ayutthaya (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 1314. 58 Skinner, Chinese Society, p. 12. 59 Purcell, Chinese in Southeast Asia, p. 91; Dhiravat, Ayutthaya, p. 260; Lieberman, Strange Parallels, p. 290.
245
the economy and even in politics. Chinese identity in modern Thailand is complex, with many ways of being Chinese, from the mostly assimilated who raise and educate their children as Thai to the heavily acculturated Sino-Thai, who mix Thai and Chinese traditions, to those who strive to maintain Chinese culture, language, and religion.60 Legacies The view of the sea as common to all was shared in this era by both the Hokkien merchants and sailors from the South China coast, essential components of the maritime world, and the coastal peoples of Southeast Asia, who engaged with the water frontier. Entrepts such as Melaka, Hoi An, and Ayutthaya played crucial roles in this world of maritime trade and the resulting Sino Southeast Asian connection that was maintained by Hokkien merchants and seamen for hundreds of years. Long before the era of Western dominance, Asian merchants, among them Chinese, had linked these cities and their hinterlands to the hemispheric trade nexus. Like other port cities around the world, they were places of economic exchange as well as cosmopolitan gateways for the import and export of people, goods, and ideas. Although the ports of Melaka, Hoi An, and Ayutthaya had declined dramatically by then, Chinese trading activities and networks picked up in the second half of the eighteenth century as maritime trade began changing in emphasis from luxury goods, such as spices and gold, to bulk goods such as rice.61 Increasing numbers of Chinese migrants and traders ushered in what the historian Carl Trocki termed a Chinese century in the Southeast Asian economies from around 1700 into the mid 1800s, by which time there may have been one million Chinese in Southeast Asia.62 Thousands of Chinese junks sailed up and down the China coast and to Japan and Southeast Asia by 1700. Increasing numbers sailed to and from Guangzhou rather than Xiamen. The Chinese owners of merchant ships established even closer relations with those Southeast Asian states, such as Siam and Vietnam, that were not yet under European control or domination. Rather than traveling between
60
See Skinner, Chinese Society; Tong and Chan, Alternate; Virphol, Tribute, pp. 175
176. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, p. 291. Trocki, Chinese Pioneering in Eighteenth-Century South Asia, in Reid, Last Stand, pp. 83102; Reid, Introduction, in Reid, Last Stand, p. 12.
62 61
246
China and Southeast Asia, increasing numbers of Chinese ships carried goods from one Southeast Asian port to another, such as from Surabaya in Java to Melaka, playing a key role in the interregional trade. Chinese enterprise was the driving force in this regional trade, but it was neither the beginning nor the end. Goods now changed hands many times through a string of terminals before arriving at Chinese ports.63 This trade, whose roots go back to at least the 1400s and often much earlier, incorporated and even depended on the water frontier stretching from southern China to the Malay Peninsula. Between 1800 and 1940 millions of Chinese immigrated to Southeast Asia, many as merchants, many more as laborers; eventually they became the backbone of the Southeast Asian economies. But, unlike in the age of commerce, there was less tendency to assimilate into local cultures that were (except for Thailand) now dominated by European governments. Today some 25 million ethnic Chinese live in Southeast Asia, part of an overseas Chinese population worldwide of nearly 40 million.64 Ethnic Chinese dominate the retail trade in most Southeast Asian cities and towns. By the 1800s the Hokkiens, the pioneers of this migration and of the maritime trade, were increasingly challenged by the Teochius, Cantonese, and Hakkas for predominance in various Chinese communities. Yet, the Hokkiens also remain the most affluent of the Southeast Asian Chinese and more likely to operate large business enterprises. But the water frontier is no longer so porous nor the ethnicities so fluid. The culturally mixed Baba Chinese of Melaka, Chinese-Vietnamese of Hoi An, and even the much more numerous Sino-Thai of Thailand seem increasingly anachronistic in an era of solidifying ethnic and national boundaries rather than the fluidity and hybridity of an earlier, more culturally flexible era. The Babas tend to assimilate into the mainstream Chinese community, many Hoi An people of Chinese ancestry now view themselves as Vietnamese, and many Sino-Thai identify more with Thailand than with Chinese traditions. Modern visitors to Melaka, Hoi An, and Ayutthaya, all named World Heritage sites by UNESCO but long past their prime, can only guess at the key roles these cities once played in Asian commerce. Melaka
63 Reid, Flows and Seepages, p. 45; Nordin Hussin, Trade and Society in the Straits of Melaka: Dutch Melaka and English Penang, 1780 1830 (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2007), p. 38; Li Tana, The Eighteenth-Century Mekong Delta and Its World of Water Frontier, in Nhung and Reid, Viet Nam, p. 151; Trocki, Chinese, pp. 83102. 64 Kuhn, Chinese among Others, p. 2.
247
is a picturesque and appealing city but a commercial backwater today, with few relics of its pre-Portuguese past except in the local historical museum. Even the citys well-preserved Portuguese- and Dutch-era buildings are increasingly dwarfed by modern office blocks and malls, much to the disgust of historical preservationists. Hoi An remains a charming tourist destination, its quiet streets, old world flavor, and handicrafts shops appealing especially to backpackers, but it has long been overshadowed as a commercial hub by Da Nang to the north and Sai Gon to the south. Nonetheless, the houses, museums, and temples convey some of the flavor of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century city. Old Ayutthaya lies in ruins, destroyed in the 1700s by invading Burmese armies and then looted of its building materials by the new Chakri dynasty downriver in Bangkok and never rebuilt. All that can be seen today in the historical park adjacent to the modern city are the ground plans, building foundations, and a few restored buildings, which have disappointed some historians. Little of todays Ayutthaya communicates the former splendors of the royal palace, temples, and vibrant business district of the once great city. Modernity and nation building has reduced the role of the sea and increased the role of the land and of the air in economic and social exchange. Although Singapore, Bangkok, and Hong Kong remain vibrant and open to the world like their Early Modern counterparts, few regional ports are as economically crucial today as they once were and most serve many functions, including tourism, unrelated to foreign trade. And littoral society has also declined with the replacement of junks by huge freighters and container ships, and the rise of commercial fishing.65 Today a traveler can speed along a divided toll road from Melaka to Kuala Lumpur or Singapore, drive along a new highway through a tunnel under the steep mountains separating the Hoi AnDa Nang area from Hue to the north, or take a tour bus to Ayutthaya after flying into nearby Bangkok from cities all over the world, a symbol of how the land no longer divides and the seas no longer unite people as they did centuries ago.
65 See Pearson, Littoral Society, p. 370; Murphey, Evolution, pp. 225227, 242 243; Tagliacozzo, Urban Ocean, p. 928.

Chinese Port Citie JWH

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Descrizione originale:

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Chinese Port Citie JWH

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

"The Sea Common to All": Maritime Frontiers, Port Cities, and Chinese Traders in the Southeast Asian Age

of Commerce, ca. 14001750*

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by Pondichery University at 01/20/11 2:51PM GMT

journal of world history, june 2010

Lockard: The Sea Common to All

journal of world history, june 2010

Lockard: The Sea Common to All

journal of world history, june 2010

Lockard: The Sea Common to All

journal of world history, june 2010

Lockard: The Sea Common to All

journal of world history, june 2010

Lockard: The Sea Common to All

journal of world history, june 2010

Lockard: The Sea Common to All

journal of world history, june 2010

Lockard: The Sea Common to All

journal of world history, june 2010

Lockard: The Sea Common to All

journal of world history, june 2010

Lockard: The Sea Common to All

journal of world history, june 2010

Lockard: The Sea Common to All

journal of world history, june 2010

Lockard: The Sea Common to All

journal of world history, june 2010

Lockard: The Sea Common to All

journal of world history, june 2010

Lockard: The Sea Common to All

journal of world history, june 2010

Lockard: The Sea Common to All

Potrebbero piacerti anche