Ch 11 - Western Encroachment

Barbarians at the Gate

From well-established bases in India and Indonesia, Portuguese traders sailed to southern Chinese ports and established initial trade contacts in Kyushu, Japan. By the end of the sixteenth century, European nations created the foundation for a vast trading empire throughout Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

Lured by visions of a land "...most fertile in gold, pearls, and precious stones," Portuguese sailors actively pursued Marco Polo's promises of vast riches and wealth on the Asian continent, a country where "...they cover the temples and the royal residences with solid gold." During the second decade of the sixteenth century, when Portugal extended its reach further across the South China Sea, Portuguese traders in the East Indies began to discover that Europe was not the only market for Indonesian luxury goods. There was an equally active and probably richer market for spices, sandalwood and other aromatic woods on mainland China. Traders willing to venture into the seaports along China's southern coast could fill their cargo holds with highly profitable silks and porcelain, exceedingly rare products in Europe and very expensive goods even in the bazaars of India.

Before Ming China abolished its Grand Treasure Fleets, southern Chinese merchants had conducted a flourishing trade in Southeast Asia as far west as the Malabar coast of India. Beginning in the mid-1430s however, the imperial government strictly enforced new edicts that forbid Chinese subjects from traveling outside China. By 1500, it was a capital offense in China even to build a seagoing junk with more than two masts, let alone set sail in one. Competing with a resurgence of nomad aggression along China's northern frontiers and the need to concentrate military force in the north, China's southern navy and coastal defenses gradually withered to insignificance. Imperial authorities could neither control the movement of foreign ships along China's south coast nor defend its smaller harbors against raids by Japanese and Portuguese pirates. Although visits by foreign merchants to Chinese ports were regarded with great suspicion in official circles, China's local merchants depended on foreign trade for much of their livelihood and welcomed such visits.

Portuguese traders first arrived in China sailing aboard local junks manned by Chinese pilots. Over the next few years, a number of Portuguese traders, some sailing aboard their own ships, conducted a growing business with local Chinese merchants who sailed out to meet them in Lintin Bay, down river from the southern Chinese seaport at Canton. Reports of such trade encouraged Viceroy Afonso de Albuquerque to dispatch a squadron of seven ships under the command of Fernando Perez de Andrade on a special embassy to Canton, China. The squadron sailed from Malacca in 1517, carrying Toma Pires, chief of the Portuguese mission, and a special cargo of gifts and presents for the Chinese emperor. Pires also carried letters from the "King of Portugal" to the "King of China," documents that proposed friendship and trade and requested a site for a factory on mainland China.

Toma Pires, formerly a minor accountant at a royal factory in Malacca from 1512 to 1515, was a highly competent and trustworthy official. An intelligent and accurate observer, Toma Pires knew the East Indies well and, in 1515, wrote the Suma Oriental, the best contemporary account of commercial matters in India, Ceylon, Burma, Borneo, Malacca, Sumatra, Java, the Spice Islands, China, Japan, and the Philippines. The Suma Oriental was treated as a secret document in Lisbon. Although parts of the book were published in 1550, that part of the work that dealt with the heart of the Portuguese spice trade remained unpublished until 1944.

Portugal's reputation among the numerous islands and kingdoms of Southeast Asia ranged from overt respect to outright fear. Prior to the Andrade-Pires mission in 1517, the Portuguese had only negotiated with relatively minor rulers of small states. The Chinese empire of the Ming dynasty was an ancient civilization, vast in physical size, highly centralized and bureaucratically administered. The Chinese were self-sufficient and supremely confident of their unique superiority over other civilizations. They permitted embassies to enter China only for the purpose of rendering tribute and seeking protection. The very idea of a Ming emperor negotiating with other rulers as equals was unthinkable.

Fernando Perez de Andrade's seven ships arrived off the port of Canton, China, without the slightest concept of the mighty nation state they were approaching. True to his naval heritage and wholly ignorant of Chinese customs and culture, de Andrade fired a cannon salute in proper Western style. The arrival of such a formidable armed fleet, was a totally new experience to the Chinese. The cannon's loud report echoed across the silence of the harbor, not only outraging the Chinese sense of etiquette, but violating the code of conduct imposed on foreign ships visiting China.

The Chinese demanded an immediate apology from de Andrade. Toma Pires and his Portuguese envoys were received in Canton with a mixture of wariness and noncommittal civility and housed in the office of the Superintendent of Trading Ships to wait for permission to proceed to Beijing. There they waited for three long years. Finally, in 1520, after official Chinese interpreters mistakenly described their mission to Emperor Wuzong as a regular tribute-bearing mission, the Portuguese received permission to proceed to the Ming imperial capital to deliver their messages. Emperor Wuzong was on tour at the time of their arrival, and the group had to endure another wait of seven months.

Meanwhile, Fernando de Andrade's brother, Simon, returned to Canton in 1520, in command of another expedition. Without Chinese permission, the Portuguese moved ashore on a small island in the Pearl River estuary south of Canton. There they built a factory and a small fortress and began to exercise sovereign rights. China tolerated Portugal's flouting local law and hindering port trade for five years. Highly offended by Portuguese effrontery, the Chinese sent a fleet of war junks against de Andrade's forces in 1522 and destroyed all but three of his ships. Finally, in anger and frustration, they expelled the Portuguese "semi-pirates" from Canton and walled off the Macao Peninsula.

While the Portuguese waited in Beijing, the mistranslation of Pires' letters was discovered and the Chinese learned this was no tribute mission after all. Furthermore, complaints were being received in the imperial court describing acts of piracy and violations of Chinese territory being committed by Portuguese ships along the South China coast. Finally, the exiled Sultan of Malacca, who for years had acknowledged a loose vassal status to the Ming Emperor, sent an embassy to Beijing to report the Portuguese seizure of his capital and to beg for help.

Emperor Wuzong died in late 1521, never having seen Toma Pires. The Imperial court issued a decree that prohibited all trade with Europeans and rushed Pires and his envoys out of Beijing and back to Canton. After some indecision and delay, the Chinese imprisoned the Portuguese and demanded Pires draft a letter to the King of Portugal, instructing him in the name of the emperor to restore Malacca to the sultan. Pires had no authority to make such a request and refused the Chinese demand. His presents for the emperor, already rejected in Beijing, were confiscated. Pires and his entire staff were then manacled and locked in a Canton prison, where Toma Pires lived out the remainder of his life, finally succumbing in 1540.

Unhindered by the barely-surviving fleets of the declining Ming Dynasty, Portugal extended its reach even further into the Far East, seeking to reach "the noble land of Cipangu," reportedly located some fifteen hundred miles off the Chinese coast. China not only provided the first written mention of the existence of the Japanese, but also gave them their very name. In early references, the Chinese called the islanders wa, or dwarfs. Japanese pirates who terrorized the Korean kingdoms of Koryo and Choson were called waegu. Chinese historians referred to the island nation as Jih-pen, "land of sunrise," or "land of the rising sun." When Marco Polo first brought this name to Europe, its Italian approximation became "Chipango." As the name later traveled through Malaya and the East Indies, it acquired a pronunciation more like "Japang" or "Japun."

Europeans knew of Japan's reputation for exotic wealth since Marco Polo's time. As an island nation, Japan enjoyed a cultural and ethnic uniformity and geographic isolation unmatched by any of its neighbors. The British Isles lay not quite twenty-five miles off the French coast and Normandy is clearly visible from the white cliffs of Dover. Kyushu, on the other hand, is more than one hundred miles across the wide Tsushima Strait from Korea's southern coast, far enough that neither is visible to the other. To the Japanese, this relatively minor difference meant that while the Romans, the Danes, and the Normans occupied England, no nation ever successfully invaded the country before 1945. Unlike Europe, with its fractious rabble of warring factions fighting for domination, East Asia was dominated by the self-absorbed and complacent Celestial Kingdom of China, a nation which neither needed nor wished to be bothered with petty foreign adventures. As a result, the Japanese, unlike the British, never faced abrupt changes in their way of life imposed by outsiders whose own culture differed markedly from their own.

In a nation where arable lowlands made up only 20 percent of the total land area, the densely packed Japanese relied for sustenance on an unusually narrow agricultural base. Since the primary functions of Japan's imperial government were to preserve unity and peace, promote virtue, and regulate distribution of farmland and rice, Japan's rulers often went to great lengths to ensure the docility of the peasants. This system completely broke down during the twelfth century, when local lords and officials grew powerful enough to defy the central government and take arms against one another. This rhythmic conflict between feudal and imperial authority ended when the royal court restored unity at the cost of relinquishing real power to a military government acting in the name of the emperor and ruled by a sei-i tai-shogun (great general who subdues the barbarians). Two hereditary shogunates governed Japan from 1185 to 1467, at which time the cycle repeated itself. Local lieutenants grew too strong, rebelled against the shogun's authority, and drove Japan into a civil war that lasted 125 years.

In 1542, a Chinese trading junk en route from Siam to China with three Portuguese traders aboard spent weeks battling a typhoon in the South China Sea. The ship made landfall on the small Japanese island of Tanegashima, just 25 miles off the southern tip of Kyushu. Europeans could not have stumbled onto Japan at a more propitious moment. Anarchy ruled Japan at the time, when powerful daimyo, the ruling lords of western Kyushu, ruled their domains as autonomous states. The divided nation had no functioning central government, hence no foreign policy. Once the Portuguese determined they had arrived in Japan, they quickly discovered the rich treasure to be harvested. Within a year, more Portuguese traders arrived and established commercial trade with local daimyo. Two years after their first contact, the Portuguese began visiting Japanese ports on a regular basis.

The Portuguese trader Jorge Alvarez, who made the first recorded visit to China in 1514, arrived in Malacca in 1547, accompanied by a Japanese fugitive from justice named Yajiro, or Anger (Han-Sir). Alvarez had spent time living in the port of Yamagawa in southern Kyushu. In July of that year, Yajiro was introduced to the eminent Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier, who had been busily preaching the word of God and converting the natives of Malacca and the surrounding islands of Indonesia to Christianity since 1545. A man of intense action, before Francis Xavier started a religious mission among any people, he attempted to learn whatever he could from reliable sources of their philosophy, way of life, religion, intellectual achievements, physical resources and economy. The inquisitive Jesuit learned a great deal about Japan from Yajiro, information that prompted him to ask Jorge Alvarez to document his visits to Japan. Alvarez produced the first eyewitness report describing the topographical, economic and social conditions in Japan. He also described the courtesy of the Japanese, their interest in strangers, and their willingness to listen to argument. These traits, which contrasted sharply with the indifference or contempt commonly displayed by the Chinese, aroused Father Xavier's zeal and triggered the idea of introducing Christianity into Japan.

Francis Xavier's hopes for a fruitful Christian mission to Japan had to wait. The affairs of St. Ignatius Loyola's Society of Jesus demanded his presence in Goa, so Father Xavier sailed from Malacca to India, taking Yajiro with him. While in Goa, Yajiro was baptized and given the Christian name Pablo de Santa Fe. He returned to Malacca in 1549 with the newly converted Yajiro, the spanish priest Father Cosme de Torres and Brother Juan Fernandez. After receiving money and supplies lavishly provided by the Portuguese in Malacca, Francis Xavier and his small party, including Yajiro, sailed for Japan in late June 1549.

The mission anchored at the city of Kagoshima on the island of Kyushu on August 15, 1549. During the first few weeks of his visit, Xavier was received by the daimyo of the province with kindness and courtesy. Virtually all the Japanese with whom he came in contact seemed pleased to see him and expressed interest in what he had to say. With the help of Pablo de Santa Fe, Father Xavier spent his first year in Japan learning the Japanese language and translating the principal articles of Christian faith and short treatises which he used in his missionary work. His university education and knowledge of the natural sciences enabled him to carry on intelligent conversations with Japan's Buddhist monks, a talent that won him respect for his wisdom and scholarship. From such conversations, many monks realized the futility of arguing with Father Xavier, who answered all their questions and ridiculed their fallacies. His preaching made some converts among Buddhist monks and nuns, who began to expose the immorality that prevailed in the monasteries. Soon the whole place was in a state of turmoil and around August 1550, the Buddhist monks banished Francis Xavier from Kagoshima.

Moving to the island of Honshu, Father Xavier carried his gospel into a number of southern Japanese cities. His initial enthusiasm for the reception he enjoyed during the first weeks in country was gradually tempered by a deeper appreciation of the many obstacles he faced in Japan. Despite the friendliness of individual Buddhist monks, Xavier found the deeply rooted religion to be his most formidable obstacle. When he visited the imperial capital in Kyoto in 1551, he discovered yet another major obstacle to his mission;  rampant anarchy and lawlessness. The emperor was utterly powerless to control his subjects, leaving the real ruling power in the hands of the daimyo. Any effort to create a systematic program of conversion from the royal court down to the peasants was clearly a hopeless proposition. Still, he managed to form the nucleus of several Christian communities, which grew dramatically over time.

Father Francis Xavier spent about two-and-a-half years in Japan. When he finally left Japan for Goa in 1552, he left a promising Christian community of a thousand souls in the hands of Father Cosme de Torres and Brother Juan Fernandez. Although he never lost his initial love for the Japanese, Father Xavier began looking for new lands to convert. During his travels in Japan, Xavier heard a great deal about the Celestial Empire and the Chinese people. Despite some reservations about the Chinese, he became convinced that China, and not Japan, was the key to converting the Far East to Christianity.

With the help of some influential friends, Francis Xavier arranged an embassy to travel to Beijing to visit the Ming emperor and obtained an ambassadorial appointment from the Portuguese Viceroy of India. In the autumn of 1552, Francis Xavier sailed from Malacca on what would become his last great adventure. While making his plans for the best way to reach mainland China, he suddenly took ill. His ship anchored at Shangchuan Island, about 105 miles southwest of Macao, and the gravely ill priest was taken ashore, where a crude hut was built to provide him shelter. In the early hours of December 3, 1552, lying in a wretched little hovel with one of his young priests as his sole companion, Francis Xavier's dreams to convert China came to a dramatic and painful end. The forty-six-year-old Roman Catholic missionary, the "Patron of Goa," was dead. His body was returned to Goa for burial, where his remains are enshrined to this day. Considered the greatest Roman Catholic missionary since the time of the Apostles, Father Xavier's incomparable apostolic zeal and his accomplishments in the service of his faith never been equaled. In 1622, the devoted Jesuit priest from Navarre, Spain, was canonized as Saint Francis Xavier.

After years of struggling to gain a foothold in China, Portugal finally established a permanent trading base on the island of Macao in 1557, a colonial position it will continue to hold until December 20, 1999, when Macao reverts to Chinese control. From their commercial stronghold in Macao, Portuguese merchants spread outward and developed other trade connections in Asia. Because Korea's Yi dynasty restricted Japan's trade options with Choson, the Japanese displayed an eagerness to engage in the lucrative Portuguese trade. Although Portugal's principal goal was commercial trade with Japan, virtually every Portuguese trade mission included a group of Jesuit priests, eager to embark on missionary activities begun by Father Francis Xavier.

Although the Japanese found little to attract them to Christianity, the Jesuits had some measure of success in converting a few of the Kyushu daimyo to the new religion. Many of these daimyo no doubt converted to ensure their economic as well as spiritual salvation. Members of the small Omura clan of western Kyushu were the first to convert to Christianity as early as 1562. In 1571, they established the natural port of Nagasaki as the center for Portuguese trade in Japan. Eight years later, daimyo Omura Sumitada actually assigned control of the port to the Jesuits. The Portuguese regularized the annual voyages of their famous "Black Ships" from Macao to Nagasaki, which became the cathedral city for a Japanese church numbering 150,000 souls. With a total absence of European competition, Portugal enjoyed nearly five decades of exclusive trade between Nagasaki and their colony in Macao.

Despite Japanese suspicions that Portuguese influence would bring disruptions to their way of life, many of their contacts with the West proved enriching. The Portuguese Jesuits' extensive missionary activities in Japan led directly to the introduction of the first printing press in the country in 1590. For the next twenty years, the Jesuit Mission Press produced a vast amount of printed material for the Japanese, most of which was laced with Christian doctrine. Perhaps in recognition of their limited knowledge of the native language, the Jesuits made no attempt to translate the Bible into Japanese. Nevertheless, they produced collections of Chinese texts, Latin and Portuguese grammars, a Latin-Portuguese-Japanese dictionary and a Chinese-Japanese dictionary. Although these works had a very limited circulation, they helped spread western culture among the upper class in the Japanese islands.

The Japanese quickly developed a strong interest in and desire for "things European," items such as tobacco plants from the Americas and fascinating new goods such as the clocks and eyeglasses brought by Western trade. The Japanese ruling class showed an even greater interest in western military technology, particularly the firearms that always accompanied the Portuguese on their trade missions. Portuguese arquebuses were the first firearms the Japanese had ever encountered. The rude matchlock muskets they brought with them quickly became known among the warring factions as the "Tanegashima weapon," named for its original port of entry.

Once Japan's warlords grasped the real value of the "Tanegashima weapon," firearms spread rapidly throughout Japan. Far from banding together against the white-skinned foreigners, the daimyo competed to purchase European weapons, build European-style armories and profit from European trade. It is quite likely that the daimyo hoped the missionaries would be followed by even more Portuguese traders from whom they could purchase firearms. By 1558, the Japanese brought the Portuguese cannon onto the battlefield in great numbers. Within a period of twenty years Japanese warlords developed the firepower of their musketeer corps to the point that it became a decisive factor on the battlefield.

The introduction of western military technology, particularly the field cannon, had another effect on Japan;  it led to an increase in castle building throughout the country. Before the arrival of firearms and the cannon, fortifications used by the daimyo were well-built, virtually impregnable stockades. Little castles sat as guardians on strategic high points scattered throughout their domain. In the latter quarter of the sixteenth century however, the destructive firepower of the field cannon forced major changes in castle design and construction. In many respects, Japan's new castles closely resembled contemporary European fortresses. The new castles consisted of a single large central fortress surrounded by concentric circles of broad moats and great earth-backed stone walls. The buildings within the walls were largely decorative white-walled wooden structures, surrounded by the residences of the daimyo's retainers. The small commercial towns surrounding these castles became the economic heart of the daimyo's domain. These strongholds, many of which are still standing, formed the core of most of modern Japan's large and mid-sized cities. The Imperial Palace in downtown Tokyo, the central core of one of these great fortresses, represents a classic example of sixteenth century castle architecture.

After the Spaniards established themselves in the Philippines, Spanish ships began to appear in Indonesia and the South China Sea to challenge the Portuguese trade monopoly. The Netherlands, following its revolt against Spanish rule in 1580, joined England to challenge both Portuguese and Spanish trading rights in pursuit of its long coveted dream to grab a direct share of the East Indies spice trade. By the end of the sixteenth century, these nations had already put into place the foundations of a European trading empire throughout Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

While China deeply impressed Asian nations with its power to give, the European's stunned Asia by their power to seize. From the time European nations first set foot in the East, Asians learned that Western interests went far beyond the mere ritual of recognition. The Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch and the English journeyed into Asia not in search of recognition as sovereign European powers, but in search of whatever it was they felt they lacked. These were voyages looking to increase wealth, to secure the staples and luxuries of the East, and to convert the heathen natives to Christianity. Driven by dreams of wealth, glory and the lure of the unknown, Europeans made their first significant intrusion into East Asia as explorers and traders, then as missionaries, then as soldiers. Future events began casting shadows before them. The European establishment of a secure foothold in the Orient forced China, Japan and Korea to acknowledge that the world was a far different place than they believed it to be.