Early and Medieval Templates: The South China Sea as a Region

The dynamics of trade and contact in the South China Sea stretch far back into Antiquity. Han Chinese chronicles first mentioned an episodic trade with the Nanyang (Southern Ocean) countries in 140 BCE, with the Han Shu Ti Li Chih laying out these early contacts as being undertaken in both Chinese and foreign ships.

By the Six Dynasties Period (219-580 CE) and the T’ang (618-906 CE), however, most of this traffic seems to have been from the Middle East: coastal inhabitants from Arabia and Persia who specialised in carrying low-bulk, high-value goods (such as resins and spices) from the Indian Ocean, through the conduit of Southeast Asia and the South China Sea, and up the China coasts. However, Chinese continued to travel along the maritime nexus, regardless of who owned the boats. The monk Fa Hsien (337-422 CE) was one such sojourner, outlining Buddhist communities in India and south Sumatra; he is also perhaps the first recorded Chinese to land in Borneo.^[360]

Moving in the other direction, north across the South China Sea, the larger world in which Fa Hsien found himself also started sending trade missions to China at this time, with a Javanese embassy arriving for the first time in 430 CE. and the Chinese list of known area potentates expanding to six, one century later.^[361] The rise of Srivijaya in the seventh century concretised these contacts into a regulated trade, with monsoon-climate forest products being pushed north in exchange for items like ceramics, gongs and ceremonial flags from China.^[362] The travelling Chinese scholar I-ching, who composed his ‘A record of the Buddhist religion as practised in India and the Malay Archipelago 671 to 695 CE’ at the very end of this century, while still in-situ in Southeast Asia, augmented China’s knowledge of the region even more.^[363] It was in these earliest centuries that the first proto-ethnological sketches on the traditions and customs of Southeast Asians appear in Chinese sources, showing a concerted Sinic curiosity about the strange worlds to the south.^[364]

Yet it was only really in the Sung Dynasty (960-1279 CE) that Chinese maritime trade with Southeast Asia substantially grew to become an important national industry.

This renaissance was due to several interrelated factors. First, commerce was institutionalised during these years by the erection of mercantile and shipping offices in a number of important ports along the east and southeastern seaboard, with Hang-zhou, Ming-zhou, Guang-zhou and Chuan-zhou serving as the major sites of activity. This allowed traders to be brought under official protection and jurisdiction, as well as under the careful tax-collecting eyes of the central government. Second, court officials were also sent abroad to renew old mercantile contacts and encourage new ones, fully outfitted with gifts befitting the generosity of emperors who expected substantial South Seas ecological tribute in return. Third, the Sung Court also started ambitious ship-building projects in the southern provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, so that ocean-going junks would be fully outfitted with the most up-to-date technologies for piloting, depth-sounding and direction-finding. The growth of this new industry enabled contact across the South China Sea to a degree that was previously unseen. And finally, kiln-building was also stimulated in these same southern coastal provinces, to provide China with an export industry to pay for the rising volume of biota that was being funnelled north from places like Southeast Asia. The revival of Taoism during the Sung (with its concomitant needs for ritual paraphernalia like scented wood, ivory and mother of pearl) was one reason for this gradual influx of commodities.^[365] Wang Gungwu has identified another factor as the growth of a new leisure class, looking to enjoy the refinements of elite living such as rare birds, aphrodisiacs and gemstones.^[366] Nanyang ecological products were also becoming more and more integrated into the Chinese pharmacopoeia, with area products like bezoar, rhino horns, tortoiseshell and camphor being used as antipyretics, analgesics, diuretics and tonics respectively.^[367] The Superintendent of Trade in Ch’uan-zhou, Chau Ju Kua, wrote in his Chu Fan Chi (1225 CE) that many of these commodities (such as sandalwood and gaharu wood) were sent directly from the Nanyang.^[368] ^{^[369] Commerce grew so fast that at the start of the dynasty that one-fiftieth of Chinese income derived from these exchanges; by the late Sung, however, the taxes on South Seas commodities alone constituted a tenth of all funds in the hands of the Imperial administration.¹¹ Merchants from China sailing across the South China Sea to Southeast Asia hoping to barter for these commodities stimulated a maritime ‘Golden Age’ for overseas Chinese trade.
The killing of much of the Muslim population of Canton in 878 toward the end of the T’ang had already discouraged long-distance Arab shipping in the area, but technological innovations in junk construction simultaneously catapulted Chinese vessels into the forefront of the ocean-going trade. By the middle of the Sung junks could carry up to 600 tons of cargo and 300 merchants and crew in voyages down to Southeast Asia: this in ships over 100 feet long, with beams and depths running thirty feet at the widest points.^[370] As these journeys became more and more frequent, captains acquired specialised knowledge: the distances between various cities, the ebb and flow of local tides, storm and typhoon frequencies, and the location of dangerous shoals and reefs. There were at least two main routes along the Jiao-Guang (‘Eastern Sea Route’) that could take a trading junk to Southeast Asia, in search of the products of the region.^[371] Both left the Middle Kingdom with the northeastern monsoon in winter, with the first moving south along the coasts of the Southeast Asian mainland and returning up through Borneo, the Philippines and eventually Taiwan.^[372] Another alternative, which Mills unearthed from the Wu-pei-chih charts, followed a direct route across the South China Sea in the opposite direction, stopping at Luzon, Mindoro, the Visayas and Sulu before snaking down to the northern parts of Borneo.^[373] In either case, junks seemed to rely less on charts than on portolans or rutters (sailing directions), with specimens published during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (such as the 1304 Nan hai Chih and Ma Huan’s Ying-yai Sheng lan) providing very detailed references.^[374] Archaeological work completed along (for example) the Borneo coasts in the last half-century has drawn a picture for us of how these earliest contacts with China helped organise societies up and down the coasts of the South China Sea.
A significant portion of the evidence is metallurgical; along with Brunei, the Sarawak Delta seems to have been one of the initial regions involved in the international commercial web, based on especially T’ang and Sung Dynasty artefacts unearthed in the region. Decades ago, Tom Harrisson and the Sarawak museum excavators he led found pottery, crucibles and graveyards and Chinese cash-string coins in the Sungei Ja’ong and Bongkisam sites, as well as small gold figurines compatible with schools of Tantric Buddhism.^[375] Extant ceramics, especially, placed the inter-connected delta sites within a dateable time sequence, starting in the early eighth century and then disappearing away from the trade orbit around the time of the fall of the Mongol Dynasty in China (1368 CE). Based on this evidence (or a lack of it after this date), scholars hypothesised the existence of a ‘Ming Gap’ for Southeast Asia’s involvement with the China Trade, across the South China Sea. They pointed to extensive amounts of Ming and Ch’ing wares that were coming to light along the coasts, around the old capital (Kota Batu) at the same time.^[376] But further investigations since these digs in the 1960s have somewhat diluted the ‘Ming Gap’ thesis, as post-Sung export wares have been unearthed in the Delta, although still in smaller numbers than previous years.^[377] The supposition about the rhythms of Sino/Southeast Asian coastal settlement still largely stands in principle, however: the earliest sites in coastal Borneo, for example, were located in Brunei as well as in the Delta, with a later shift in importance to Sarawak, before a final recapturing of dominance by Brunei at the start of the Ming Dynasty. Situated right on the main trade routes of the South China Sea, Brunei and its environs seem to have held a symbolic importance to the Chinese from an early date. P’oni (the Chinese transcription of the city/region) is mentioned in court chronicles in 517 CE (possibly the earliest definitive Chinese record of Borneo, as Fa Hsien’s exact itinerary is still unclear).
Subsequent notices in 522, 616, 630 and 690 CE show us the growth of Chinese contacts with this polity - whatever their exact nature may have been - over the centuries.^[378] By 977 CE two Muslim envoys appeared in the Chinese court as ambassadors of the ‘King of Brunei’, which led to the first direct contact between the kingdoms as chronicled by the Sung.^[379] This Muslim angle to Sino/Southeast Asian interactions continued up until the rise of the Mongols in the later thirteenth century, with likely the oldest Chinese inscription in all Southeast Asia unearthed in a Chinese merchant’s tomb outside of Brunei city (‘Here lies P’u’ ([apparently ‘Abu’, an Islamicised Chinese from Chuan-zhou in Fujian]). The date on the grave stele was 1264 CE.^[380] The founding Ming Emperor commissioned a special piece to be written about the nature of tribute and trade relations with Southeast Asia, this separate from the regular notices printed in the Ming-shih. By this time parts of the South China Sea were already becoming important as ecological-collecting depots, and therefore had grown important to the Chinese court.^[381] Fei Hsian, who journeyed on the Admiral Zheng He’s ships to Southeast Asia, described good relations in his Hsing Cha Sheng Lan, while the early fifteenth century chronicler Wang Ta-yuan (in his Tao i chih lio) also was impressed with the wealth of trade, singling out tortoiseshell, gold dust and aromatic wood exports.^[382] A last evidence of this high regard stands in a grave complex just skirting of Nanjing, where the chief of a Southeast Asian delegation was interred in 1408 CE, after contracting an illness in such an unaccustomed northern climate. The Chinese Emperor closed the court for three days, assigning some of the ambassador’s relatives to remain and to perform the yearly ritual sacrifices.^[383] When further embassies arrived in the early 1400s, heralding the union of area potentates in the east and south of the South China Sea, the region was already vital to the Chinese court. The extended Sulu basin was known to the Chinese as one of the most vital regions in the Nanyang, a market-theatre for all sorts of products native to this arena.^[384]}

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Source: Armitage David, Bashford Alison et al. (eds.). Oceanic Histories. Cambridge University Press,2018. — 338 p.. 2018

Early and Medieval Templates: The South China Sea as a Region

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