China and the Post-Columbus

WorldPart One: Sketches

Largely based on 1493 by Charles C. Mann

Chinese ships: built in enormous dry docks, encrusted with

precious metals, replete with technical innovations—double hulls, watertight compartments, rust-proofed nails, mechanical bilge pumps—that Europe would not discover for a century.

Flagship of commander Zheng He: more than 300 feet long and 150 feet wide, the biggest wooden vessel ever constructed.

Zheng’s grandest expedition had 317 ships. For comparison, the Spanish Armada, then the largest fleet in European history, consisted of about 130 ships, the biggest of which was half the size of Zheng’s ship.

1405-1433: Zheng He’s Expeditions

Comparison

Why didn’t China expand into the Western

hemisphere?

Why didn’t Spain expand further into North America (after all, expeditions reached Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and far North the Western coast)?

Why didn’t the USA continue with its missions to the Moon?

Why don’we speak Chinese?

Private trade: a series of prohibitions and lifted bans. The Ming

dynasty’s (1368-1644) desire to enhance the power of the state

Ban-and-tribute schemes: a way for the government to control international commerce.

The logic of the beaurocrats: because maritime trade was outlawed, the nation didn’t need a coastal force to police that trade.

Smugglers: if business is outlawed, only outlaws will do business

“Merchants were pirates, pirates were merchants”

Literally, wokou means “Japanese pirates”

They filled the southeastern coast, but most weren’t Japanese and many weren’t pirates. The majority of wokou groups were led by Chinese traders who turned to sumuggling after one Ming edict or another eliminated their livelyhoods.

The wokou crews: scholars who had failed to obtain an official post; bankrupt businesspeople; draft dodgers; fired government clerks; starving farmers; disgraced monks; escaped convicts; professional smugglers; a scattering of a few skilled sailors lured by the promise of wealth.

Wokou

Wokou

The Jaijing emperor, 1521-1567 : retreated from duty and

put the empire into the hands of grand secretaries who were more concerned with personal advancement rather than social problems.

Fujian: resource-poor, cutoff by mountains, was worst affected by piracy.

The port city of Yuegang. The county had so much wokou trouble that the chroniclers eventually devoted a special appendix to their regular gazettes, “Bandit Incursions”

Fujian Province

Fujian

Governor Zhu and the 1200 illicit boats, 150 captured and executed

pirate/merchants

Corruption and economic interests

Zhu’s death

Zhu’s absence: pirate gangs seized entire towns, pillaging “until the stench of rotten flesh forced them to leave.” In one city north of Yuegang mor than 20 000 people died after a pirate assoult. Wokou were “burning homes, sizing women and children, and stealing huge quantities of valuables.”

“Officials and common people alike were killed with weapons, their bodies, in huge numbers filled ravines. Government troops dared not oppose them.”

Who is the bad guy?

Began in 1547, when a Dutch merchant/pirate/smuggler

group set up base on Wu Island, just south of Yuegang’s harbor

Dutch was the flag they sailed under, but they were a hodgepodge of Spanish, Portuguese and Ducthc hustlers, and some semi-enslaved Malays.

Zhu Wan, governor of Fujian and Zhejiang: after losing in battle to the Dutch, imprisoned 90 local merchants. The Dutch pleaded for their lives, but all 90 were beheaded. Wu island was abandoned, and the Dutch later roamed the region, preying on the very merchants with whom they had collaborated previously.

Bandit Incursions

Several hundred years before the birth of Christ the Chinese

state began to issue round coins made of bronze. Each coin was worth its own weight in bronze.

In 1161 the Song dynasty introduced the first modern paper currency. Regional governments and powerful merchants had experimented with paper money for 2 centuries, but this was the first nationwide, state-printed banknote. (The first printed money in Europe appeared in 1661)

Flat money: no intrinsic value, and is worth something only because a government declares it is. Contemporary examples are the US dollar, as well as the euro.

Money!

Turning the printing presses on “high”: exercises in hyperinflation from the Song, to the

Yuan, to the Ming dynasties

Copper: depleted mines. Coin values: constantly fluctuating. “Coins received in the morning couldn’t be used by evening” (central China gazeteer, 1606)

The silver standard: silver ingots, often shaped like challow bowls 1-4 inches in diameter, were used by traders. To evaluate the ingot’s purity, they used kanyinshi, silvermasters who charged a fee for the evaluation and routinely cheated all parties.

By the end of the wokou crisis, coins were used in fewer than 1/10 of all market transactions. Ingots were not issued by the Chinese government: anybody who could lay hands on some silver could get it certified—instant money.

In 1571, when Legazpi showed up in Manila, there were 150 Chinese residents there. The discovery of the silver-bearing foreigners in the Philippines was, from a Chinese point of view, a godsend. The Galleons that brought over Spanish silver were ships full of money.

Coins and notes