Ch 11 - Western Encroachment

China Turns Inward

The Ming Dynasty's preoccupation with aggressive nomad tribes along its northern frontiers forcefully shifted China's imperial strategy away from maritime interests. China withdrew from the world at large just as unbounded enthusiasm began pushing Europe toward a new era of discovery around the world.

While Choson was busily occupied itself with the difficulties of establishing a society and system of government under the Yi Dynasty, China sat at the epicenter of Asia's known world. The vast Middle Kingdom was the focal point and prime mover of major events in the Far East. Whatever happened in China or to China eventually left its mark on China's neighbors.

Geography has dominated China's international relations with the rest of the world throughout its long and impressive history. Nations conducted diplomatic missions, missions of tribute, and virtually all other manner of cultural and commercial trade with China through an intricate network of overland trade routes, most notably the fabled Silk Road and the "Golden Road to Samarkand" which carried Marco Polo to the court of Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century. Whether expanding its realm by conquest or reconquest, or sending expeditions against countries with extensive sea coasts such as the Korean Peninsula or the island states of Southeast Asia, China always focused on territorial access by land. The Chinese displayed little interest in developing a significant naval presence in the world.

China's lack of interest in developing maritime trade and commerce left a vacuum in the South China Sea and during the second century. In the absence of a powerful economic presence in the region, various city-states that existed along the Gulf of Siam (modern Gulf of Tonkin) moved in to fill the void. Sea-borne trade and commercial traffic gradually spread outward from the port of Chao-Chi at the mouth of the Red River. Holding to coastal routes, a maritime trade network slowly developed into a widespread phenomenon by the beginning in the seventh century, when merchant traders from the Middle East first moved into Indonesia. By the beginning of the Christian era in Europe, China already inhabited the majority of the long Asian coastal zone between Choson, Japan and Indonesia and claimed suzerainty over much of the rest. Despite the development of an extensive network of regular maritime trade routes along the Asian coast however, China continued to conduct the vast bulk of its trade with other nations by way of overland routes. For centuries, virtually all sea-borne traffic to and from China remained in the hands of foreign nations.

Persian and Arab businessmen arrived in Indonesia at a time when the Hindu-ruled Sri-Vijaya Empire held sway as the leading commercial power in the region. From its capital city and seaport at Palembang, located at the mouth of the Palembang River in southern Sumatra, Sri-Vijaya became the focal point of a vast maritime empire that firmly controlled all the sea corridors between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Sitting astride the prosperous sea route linking the center of the Islamic Empire in Baghdad with Canton, the port of entry to Tang China, Sri-Vijaya grew to become the first genuine sea power in the Pacific. The arrival of Persian traders from the Middle East in the eighth century and the greatly expanded interest in foreign sea-borne trade by the Tang Dynasty in China did much to bolster Sri-Vijaya's powerful position.

Arabs from North Africa and the Middle East began establishing roots in India in the mid-eighth century. India's Hindu rulers tolerated the Muslim presence principally because Arab merchants and traders kept commerce profitable and successful. By the ninth century, Arab traders successfully opened a second Chinese port at Amoy where ships and merchants from Arabia, Koguryo, and the Ryukyu Islands congregated. Wherever Persian and Arab merchants established trade ports, small Arab communities flourished and enjoyed some small measure of extra-territorial rights. Because of the Arab's nonaggressive behavior, the Chinese not only tolerated their presence, but felt content to leave the management of commercial traffic in their hands. As a result, until the Western world reached the Far East in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the vastly profitable China trade was conducted almost entirely by Persian and Arab merchants.

The major maritime trade routes from the Far East crossed the South China Sea and merged to pass through either the Strait of Malacca or the Sunda Strait. Merchant ships then crossed the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, bound for either the Persian Gulf and the port of Basra or the Red Sea port of Suez. Arabian cargo ships heavily laden with sleek silks from China, spices from Ceylon and Java and ebony from Siam brought luxury goods from the fabled Orient to Europe through the markets and seaports of the eastern Mediterranean.

The Turks and Muslims controlled the European ends of both the land and sea trade routes to East Asia. By the mid-point of the thirteenth century, they had effectively raised a Trade Wall across the Asian continent, a barrier that effectively isolated Europe from the rich markets of the Far East. Although Turkish and Muslim merchants willingly traded with the Europeans in cities like Alexandria, Aleppo and Damascus, they resolutely prohibited the Europeans from proceeding a single kilometer further east. Neither the crusading march of Christian soldiers, nor the diplomatic maneuvering of European statesmen could lower this trade barrier. Like many other earth-shaking events, when the Trade Wall finally came down, it fell as a side-effect that resulted from the major realignment of central Asian empires which occurred during the expansive period between 1250 and 1350.

While the Mongols were building their great Asian empire, the armies of Kublai Khan took control of the Asian continent as far west as the Persian Gulf and the eastern reaches of Europe. Their successful conquest of Persia and Russia actually opened the way for the Christian West to reach India and China by land. Though it had already been heavily traveled for centuries, not until the mid-thirteenth century did the Silk Road first carry Europeans eastward. The Mongols believed in free trade among nations and they not only welcomed the eastward travel of European merchants, but actively protected their caravans against the Turks and Muslims. Marco Polo, foremost among the many travelers along this route, set out on a historic twenty-four year journey through East Asia in 1271. In his travels, Marco Polo visited a greater number of countries in the world than any other man and his many tales and legends of the mysterious East fascinated generations of Europeans. Marco Polo's adventure was the discovery of Asia.

By 1300, merchants, not to mention the Christian warriors of the Crusades, had begun bringing home such luxury goods as spices, silks and dyestuffs previously unavailable in Europe. The introduction of such items created a new demand in European markets, a demand that became the prime motivator for such burgeoning maritime republics as Venice, Genoa and Amalfi, which had each established trading posts in Arab and Turkish lands to profit from the importation of these new luxuries. The commercial middlemen in these port cities, particularly Venice and Genoa, set high prices on goods from the East and skimmed the profits. In time, many European states developed a severe imbalance of trade. They became deeply concerned about the amount of gold flowing south into the coffers of Italian middlemen. To make matters worse, events on the Asian continent were about to change the face of the European economy and world history.

For many centuries, Confucianism had engendered an emphasis on inward thinking among the Chinese. China believed itself to be at the center of the world and showed little interest in uninhabited lands or lands beyond its reach. It felt no impulse to find new sea routes to exotic lands or to discover the unknown. It had no need. It was already there. By the reign of Ming Emperor Zhengzu, China's fishing fleets and the trading junks based in Canton, Amoy, Chuanzhou, and Ningbo had been steadily growing in size. Chinese fleets had developed all the nautical and logistic capabilities necessary to take military force and economic trade in overwhelming volume to virtually any port in the Far East and Southeast Asia. The spectacular voyages of Ming China's Grand Treasure Fleets between 1405 and 1433 brought the Chinese as close they would ever come to being a true maritime power. After 1433, the Ming royal court lost all interest in seafaring activities and exhibited no concept of the potential of seapower. The Chinese Empire, then greater than all of Europe in size and in the volume of its domestic and foreign commerce, after having already proven its capacity to do so, failed to become a maritime power.

The overland highway between Europe and China had been closed since 1405, and European merchants and traders could travel no farther east than the Persian city of Tabriz. Samarkand, the once busy marketplace and major stop along the Silk Road became an Asian ghost town. When the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, they virtually isolated the Europeans from all contact with the Far East. Instead of the once vivid eyewitness accounts of life in China, Europeans had to rely on rumor and the sparse reports of captives and slaves for word from the fabled lands of the East.

The collapse of Mongol domination in Central Asia after the death of Timur in 1405, marked the end of the Mongol era, particularly of the Mongol capacity to keep Central Asia united. The end of a united Central Asia also diminished the trade and cultural contact that once flowed across it between Europe and China. As a result, the scattered tribes of Mongolia became ever more dependent on trade with China alone. The two primary groups were the Tatar tribes ("Tartars" to the Europeans) in eastern Mongolia, and the Oirat tribes of western Mongolia. Whenever nomadic populations roaming the Mongolian steppes and lower Siberia were sparse or divided, the Ming Chinese found them easy to control. Once their numbers reached a critical mass however, and fierce mounted tribesmen began restlessly probing toward the North China Plain, whoever ruled China was obliged to meet that threat to the exclusion of all other concerns.

Between 1410 and 1424, Emperor Zhengzu personally commanded five separate expeditions against the Tatar and Oirat tribes across the Mongolian steppes. One of the high water marks in the Ming preoccupation with the northern threat came in 1421, when imperial strategy forcefully shifted toward China's northern frontier. In that year, Emperor Zhengzu moved the Ming capital from Nanjing to the city of Beijing (the "Northern Capital'' and "Southern Capital,'' respectively), the former site of the Mongol capital at Khanbalik. Situated a scant forty miles from China's traditional northern boundary, the Great Wall, Beijing sat as a guardian near the Nankou Pass, principal gateway leading down from Mongolia to the North China Plain. Beijing became the new seat of power on the site of the old Yuan capital, far removed from the centers of China's population and agricultural production. China's great capital had moved in large part because the volatile nomadic tribes of the north had become a constant military and political component of the Chinese Empire and the emperor decided to make Beijing the capital of the non-Chinese areas of Inner Asia as well.

Over the centuries, China used three strategies to secure its fluid northern frontier during times of aggressive nomad activity. First, it subdued the warring tribes by force and made them tributaries, but war was risky and expensive. Second, it set nomadic tribes against one another, but that required clever, sustained diplomacy. Third, it gave the nomads a stake in Chinese power through commerce, bribes, or royal marriage, but that was humiliating. The Oirats established tribute relations with China in 1408 and almost every year sent missions to the Ming capital. Over the years, these missions grew in both size and scope to become a thinly veiled subsidy program to keep the Oirats in check through a kind of reverse tribute. Groups of as many as three thousand people, including several hundred merchants from Central Asia would pass through the Great Wall at Datong in northern Shanxi Province. They brought their chief native product, horses, as tribute and received imperial "gifts in reply," usually silk and satin textiles.

At the time of Emperor Zhengzu's death in 1424, the mounting threat posed by Tatar and Oirat tribes along China's northern frontier began demanding heavier expenditures for military defense. In the late 1430s, just as the Grand Treasure Fleet voyages were coming to an end, Inner Asia saw a violent resurgence of nomad reunification. A new leader of the Oirats rose to dominate the tribes to the east all the way to the Korean Peninsula. For the next century, relations with the northern tribes was a tense mixture of border raids and tribute missions.

In 1550, Altan Khan, a new leader of the eastern Mongols, led a large strike force through the Great Wall from the northeast and raided and pillaged the area around Beijing for several days before withdrawing. The devastating defeats at the hands of Altan Khan's Mongols and the failure or rejection of other options pushed Emperor Wan Li and his imperial court toward the least imaginative solution to the problem of defending against the northern nomads:  wall building. The Ming dynasty made the unimaginable investment to build what we know as the Great Wall of China. The decision was not so much a measure of Ming wealth and economic power, but of the bankruptcy of their defense policy. During the height of the construction boom between 1572 and 1620, hundreds of garrisoned towers and natural strong points were linked by 2,500 miles of stone-faced wall at a cost that could have run to several million ounces of silver.

The great suzerain power of East Asia began sealing its borders. From behind its physical and intellectual Great Wall, China endeavored to avoid all contact with the unexpected. The Chinese redirected all the energy formerly spent to support the Grand Treasure Fleet expeditions of Zheng He toward enforcing a withdrawal from the rest of the world. The new rulers of China began the return to their ancient isolationism with memories of foreign tyrants still fresh in their minds. Though fully equipped with the knowledge, the resources and the technology to become discoverers of the world, China withdrew from the world at large and sealed its fate to become the discovered.

China turned inward on itself at a time when the growing demand for luxurious Asian commodities was fueling a continued promise of wealth and a determination to expand and strengthen European markets. Closing the Silk Road to China provided an unexpected benefit to Europe in the form of an increased incentive to search for alternate routes to Asia by sea. With unbounded enthusiasm, Europeans sought to extend their own influence around the world. Explorers and adventurers soon began discovering sea routes to everywhere and ushered in a glorious era of exploration known as the Age of Discovery. The closure of the Silk Road and China's preoccupation with warring northern nomads set in motion a series of events that led to the most ominous phenomenon in the long history of East Asia, the arrival of the West.