Changing Patterns: The Early Modern South China Sea
A new stimulus began slowly to change South China Sea trading and political contacts in the sixteenth century, one that signalled a shift in earlier commercial relationships and the beginning of new systems befitting a complicated, emerging world.
European ships began to touch down in both China and Southeast Asia, first only a few Portuguese carracks and caravels, but later the traders, explorers and representatives of a range of maritime polities (England, Spain and Holland), one after another.[385] Coercive policies were eventually put forward by all of these countries, as each attempted to nudge commerce to benefit their own distant exchequers. A Ming dynasty memorial from 1530 CE recounted the evolving state of affairs as being dangerous; already dark clouds were seen to be on the horizon.[386] The anxious tone of the memorial was certainly justified, as numerous Southeast Asian polities that had earlier shipped tribute to China now dealt with the more aggressive trade impetuses of various European powers. This was certainly a gradual shift. But the general violence and predation that spread along the maritime pathways of the South China Sea eventually changed the nature of the sea routes. In the case of Southeast Asia, and the polities that had traditionally participated in this trade, these changes were to be significant over the longer term and encompassed the ways in which many regional peoples led their everyday lives.It has already been shown that Southeast Asia was known to the medieval Chinese through a series of essays and court records, which tabulated the region’s growth in the international maritime orbit of the Sung and Yuan era. Inscribed in the form of records of tribute, these notices don’t tell us much about the character of regional cities, and even less about urbanisation in the South China Sea as a result of the trade with China.[387] Via Chau Ju Kua, the aforementioned superintendent of trade in Chuan-zhou, we certainly do know that the walls of some Southeast Asian ports were built of timber, and that the populations could be relatively large.
These things imply the presence of local logging, not just for urban wall construction but also for building of houses.[388] For this to have happened on a scale for Chinese chroniclers to notice, and to specifically comment on these issues, the scope of these urbanising activities must have been sizable, with concomitant effects such as deforestation. Still other Chinese sources stated that area kings wore Chinese silks on formal occasions, and that there had been miscegenation going on with Chinese traders for quite a long time.[389] All of these descriptions give us useful clues to longer-term processes that were happening in the region, and which seem to be have been deemed important enough to put into documents by Chinese observers from afar.However, it was only with the arrival ofWestern observers in the early 1600s that more solid descriptions were left on how the trade of the South China Sea spurred the gradual urbanisation of cities in the region. The Venetian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta, who visited Southeast Asia in the early 1520s after Magellan’s death in the Philippines, left an eyewitness account of growing ports, complete with the trappings of transregional trade. Pigafetta’s ship was sometimes met by indigenous vessels whose sides were decorated with gold, which then led them past brick walls (implying the existence of kilns) into palaces defended by cannon.[390] Cushions and carpets were laid down for their comfort, while silk trappings and Chinese banners were common, as well as locally mined gold and precious stones. Palace windows revealed phalanxes of guardsmen, all equipped with ‘cutlasses and shields’, and elephants came marching into audience halls, casting Chinese ceramics as presents.[391] Currency from China was sometimes used as regional tender too, with the measures and weights of the Middle Kingdom sometimes regulating transactions in the markets of area ports.[392]
A half-century later, with the Spanish now embedded in several parts of the South China Sea, an anonymous Spanish account gives us further information - strategic here - on the dynamics of urban sultanates.[393] Because of widening trade radials, some cities were now casting their own cannon-shot of heavy cast iron, in fact importing the raw materials from offshore islands where the ores occurred plentifully, and naturally.
Harpoons, pikes and lances were also being forged, allowing local metallurgical industries to keep active, while gunpowder was imported from Chinese merchants, usually via Siam. Spanish ships would attack, occupy and ultimately surrender a number of South China Sea ports all in the next few years, but what is vital for our purposes is to acknowledge the accumulation in local cities of cutting-edge technology and material wealth, all through regional contacts in the trade with China. Metallurgy, mining and the acquisition of precious metals were all happening on an increasingly large scale, asSoutheast Asian ports used their local environment both for construction, and for defensive purposes.
Sinic visitors and subjects were a vital part of the population balance of South China Sea ports, all to the south of China. In late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century chronicles, they appear as pilots, captains, pepper merchants and ambassadors, as well as debtors and slaves on the run.[394] And by the late eighteenth century, a large commerce with ‘sister emporia’ to the north like Macao was developing, with scores of ships plying between the two regions to conduct the lucrative trade in Southeast Asia’s natural products.[395] William Millburn, an English East India Company scribe, noted a few decades later (in 1813) that commerce with China was still vital, though the same English writer chronicled that although Spanish dollars were now the main currency of some area ports, Chinese copper cash was still accepted.[396] The age- old imports of trade continued to come down from the coasts of China (iron bars, glassware, gongs and coarse cutlery), all paying for the biota that Southeast Asian cities collected in her ports. In fact, as shipping, warehousing, packing and storage centres, numerous South China Sea entrepots had sprouted up along many of the region’s rivers, all at least partly in response to Chinese trade.[397] Unusual (and possibly even unnecessary) before the trade with China became ubiquitous, these complexes would eventually develop into multi-functional, complex exchangecentres geared towards the amalgamation of South China Sea products.