Bin Yang | Small, Remote but Significant
編者按：本文選自楊斌教授新書《Discovered But Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, C. 1100-1620》第一章。作者授權刊發。
Chinese scholars, whether imperial or modern, seem never to have concerned themselves much about the Maldives. Compared with other medieval polities across the Indian Ocean including Ceylon, Chola, Kollam, Cochin, Ma’bar, or Bengal, the Maldives did not receive any Chinese attention until the era of Wang Dayuan. Decades later, the Zheng He Fleets followed in Wang’s footsteps to visit this island kingdom and brought its tributary envoys all the way to Beijing. More information was obtained through Chinese agents in the Zheng He Fleets, but from 1600 onward, mention of the Maldives simply disappeared from Chinese writings.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, China was beset by both internal and external turmoil. While the slogan “Learn from the West” pushed Chinese people to pay attention to the outside world, this exhortation mainly referred to studying major western powers and the fates of certain colonial victims such as Ethiopia and Poland. Not surprisingly, the Maldives remained in obscurity in Chinese scholarship during this period. I only learned of the name of this island country myself from a middle school geography textbook in the 1980s, and hardly retained any impression of its features except for its being an archipelago. While occasionally paying some slight attention to the Maldives when studying the Sea Silk Road, Chinese scholars have consistently failed to realize its significance in the history of maritime Asia, let alone in Chinese history.
And yet, the Maldives has been widely acknowledged outside China as having commanded a strategic location and been an active participant in the east-west maritime interactions from medieval to modern times. What has remained almost entirely unknown is that, this small and remote group of islands even if inadvertently made a great contribution to the formation and transformation of Chinese civilization and empire building. First, records drafted on the Maldives demonstrate China’s increasing knowledge of the Indian Ocean and maritime Asia, and recount the golden age of Chinese activities in the Indian Ocean. And second, the presence of Maldivian envoys at the Ming court in Beijing illustrated the expansion of the Chinese tributary world into the Indian Ocean, establishing the imperial image of China as the center of maritime Asia and thus “All under Heaven (Tianxia 天下),” at least as conceptualized by the Ming emperors themselves and shared by their elite scholar-officials.
Was the Maldives, a mere island kingdom among so many, so very important to China, a giant empire far away to the east? Ideologically, it was, especially to Emperor Yongle 永乐 (r. 1402–1422) of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). As a usurper who had seized power from his nephew, Emperor Yongle was as anxious as Kublai Khan to legitimize his throne under heaven. He followed Kublai’s practice of dispatching Chinese envoys to maritime Asia including the so-called Western Ocean (Xiyang 西洋), soliciting tributary missions from various kingdoms. Audiences with tributary envoys from “ten-thousand” kingdoms at his court were dazzling extravaganzas, and the glittering array of exotic peoples from far-flung places all coming to pay tribute to him as the Son of Heaven (Tianzi 天子) at the center of All Under Heaven made a significant contribution to his legitimacy. Any doubt about his throne would surely be disregarded. Tributary missions from the Maldives escorted by the Zheng He Fleets were hence thrilling emblems of Emperor Yongle’s glory, legitimacy, and thus confirmation of the half-factual and half-imagined Chinese world order.
What was the most central but so far overlooked factor in the formation and development of Chinese civilization was the role played by the humble cowrie shell from the Indian Ocean (presumably from the Maldives in the very early period). Few people have noted that cowrie shells originating in the Indian Ocean were transported to northwest and north China via India and Central Asia as early as the Neolithic period and went on to play a crucial role in the state building of the Shang-Zhou period (c. 1600 BCE–256 BCE), the formative and early stage of Chinese civilization. Cowrie-granting was the most frequent ritual adopted by the Zhou kings through which various lords and nobles established, maintained, and renewed their feudal relationship, a fundamental system of the Western Zhou period (1045 BCE–771 BCE). It is no exaggeration to conclude that cowrie shells shaped the formation of Chinese civilization in terms of politics, economy, rituals, and religion. The long-held popular misconception that cowrie shells were China’s first form of money originated with such recorders as Sima Qian 司马迁, the grand historian in the first century BCE, and this error was reiterated all the way up to present day historians, showcasing how cowrie shells helped to shape imperial China.
While cowrie shells did not in fact become a form of money in early China, the two non-Chinese kingdoms of Nanzhao 南诏 (c. 7th century–902) and Dali 大理 (937–1254) roughly based in modern Yunnan, southwestern China, flourished and adopted cowrie money from the ninth or tenth century onward. After the Mongol conquest of Dali in 1254, cowrie money continued there until the mid-seventeenth century. Therefore, the Maldives’ remarkable influence continued in the Chinese incorporation of a frontier province where a variety of ethnic peoples lived. Furthermore, during the Song-Yuan-Ming period (960–1644) cowrie shells were shipped to the Yangzi Delta, in addition to Yunnan. From the Yangzi Delta, this little Maldivian creature was transported both by the Yuan and Ming imperial states and by private merchants to Yunnan in exchange for local goods, such as gold. Therefore, it is fair to conclude that the Maldivian shells to some extent also shaped imperial China’s economy and society
Besides cowrie shells, ambergris, a renowned marine substance originating from the Indian Ocean (including the Maldives, where it was acquired by Zheng He’s Treasure Ships), held significant appeal among the Chinese upper class, particularly during the reign of Ming Emperor Jiajing 嘉靖 (1507–1567, r. 1522-1567). Jiajing's attempts to create elixirs with ambergris as a crucial element afforded a brief respite for the Portuguese. As the only supplier of this Indian Ocean medicinal material, the Portuguese were granted by the Chinese to settle at Macao in 1557, a trading base they failed to obtain through diplomacy, bribery, military assistance in suppressing local piracy, or political submission. Macao in 1557, like Malacca in 1519, Goa in 1511, and Fort Manuel in 1505, illustrate the severe changes brought about by the Europeans, a new force represented by the Portuguese to maritime Asia decades after the retreat of the Chinese Treasure Ship in 1433. Few people, however, have realized that ambergris, whether from the Maldives or not, played a key in creating the new landscape in maritime China. Small and remote as the Maldives was, no other kingdom in the Indian Ocean played such a significant longue durée role in Chinese political, economic, and cultural history.
China’s involvement in Indian Ocean trade was abruptly halted when the Ming state reissued the maritime ban policy in 1433 after the last voyage of Zheng He, and thereafter, no ships were permitted to sail to the Indian Ocean. The archives and charts of the Zheng He Voyages were either burned, destroyed, or went missing. As a result, Chinese scholars missed out on the opportunity to increase their knowledge of the Maldives and the Indian Ocean world, and more unfortunately for latter-day historians, their great body of ontological knowledge gradually became diluted, ambiguous, and even downright erroneous. Not surprisingly, China’s knowledge of the Maldives and the Indian Ocean in the post-1600 era never again surpassed the era of Wang Dayuan, let alone that of Zheng He.
Sources: Texts, Shipwrecks and Maps
The seven voyages of Admiral Zheng He in the Indian Ocean are well known across the world for their astonishing scope and impact. Oddly though, few people have thought worthy of a closer study the Chinese maritime achievements in the pre-Zheng He period that contributed to and provided a solid foundation for the Ming Treasure Fleets. Nor has the drastic curbing of travel in the post-Zheng He period received serious attention, when abruptly, no Chinese ships sailed to the Indian Ocean, even when the maritime ban policy was partially lifted in 1567. These interesting and significant periods are elaborated here in this book.
This book explores the cross-regional topic of Sino-Maldivian interactions to shed fresh light on both maritime China and the Indian Ocean world in the broad context of maritime Asia. By scrutinizing the waxing and waning of China’s maritime activities in the Indian Ocean from the medieval period to the arrival of the Jesuits in East Asia, it crosses the boundaries of China, Southeast Asia, and South Asia, and integrates Chinese, Indian Ocean, economic, and maritime histories, as well as the history of science, technology, and society.
While Albert Gray, with the help of Mr. Bell, compiled almost all non-Chinese texts concerning the Maldives from Periplus to French notes produced at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Chinese understanding of these islands has not been appropriately addressed, especially in the broader context of either the Sino-Indian Ocean interactions or maritime Asia. Unfortunately, mention of the Maldives in early Chinese texts amounts to only a couple of pages, beginning with Wang Dayuan, and these scant notes would have been copied in the following centuries, literally speaking, word for word. Not long after, the copying of these sources stopped altogether as Chinese interest in the region disappeared. “Discovered” and named by the Chinese in the 1330s, this island kingdom would be forgotten in post-1600 China.
Su Jiqing 苏继庼 (1894–1973) and Xie Fang 谢方(1932–2021)were the first Chinese scholars who made pioneering efforts to examine the imperial geographical knowledge of these islands, the former having annotated the Daoyi Zhilue and the latter having collected imperial sources and discussed Chinese knowledge on the Maldives. John Carswell was the first scholar to seriously consider the Sino-Maldivian relationship and Andrew D.W. Forbes provided a bibliographical review on Maldivian history up until the year 1980, together with a collection of Maldivian items sold to the British Museum in 1981, but his Chinese list remains essentially incomplete. Roderich Ptak has made remarkable progress in this respect by gathering and analyzing a comprehensive list of Chinese textual sources produced in the Yuan, Ming, and Qing periods. In his brief but inspiring paper, Ptak has discussed many key issues such as Chinese etymology, official contacts, and navigational routes. In addition, my recent work on cowrie shells casts a spotlight on the role of the Maldives in maritime Asia and in particular China.
In addition to texts, there have been some monumental discoveries in both marine archaeology (especially shipwrecks) and cartography. In 1974, a Chinese shipwreck dated to the end of the Southern Song (1127–1279) was discovered on the seabed in the Bay of Quanzhou. After a comprehensive analysis of the ship and its remains, Chinese scholars concluded that the ship sank on its return journey from Southeast Asia (highly likely from the port of Palembang) and this opinion has been widely accepted for nearly half a century. Recently, however, I have re-examined the remains of its cargo, especially the cowrie shells, ambergris, peppers, and marine animals, and argued that this Chinese ocean-going ship was more probably on its return journey from the Indian Ocean. Due to its paramount significance in understanding China’s maritime history, I would like to propose that this ship be named “Quanzhou I.”
In 1998, the so-called Belitung ship was discovered in Indonesia. This ship, a typical example of Arab-style ocean-going vessels, the earliest of which completed the journey between West Asia and China as early as the mid-ninth century, could have been produced anywhere from North Africa to Gujarat in India. The Belitung ship belonged to the “stitched ship” type, which the Maldivian people also commonly constructed and used during the medieval period. Thus, in addition to a few other Chinese and non-Chinese shipwrecks, the Belitung ship facilitates an understanding of maritime connections between the Indian Ocean world (including the Maldives) and China during the Tang-Song period before the advent of Wang Dayuan.
Recently, the Nanhai I, another Southern Song shipwreck, was excavated from the coastal sea off Guangzhou. Unlike the Quanzhou I, the Nanhai I fortuitously had most of its goods extant and thus provides fresh and rich information on maritime China. Exotic items, especially gold ones, have indicated that this Chinese ocean-going ship was bound for some Indian Ocean ports, en route about one hundred years earlier than the Quanzhou I. The two Song ships, the Nanhai I sailing for the Indian Ocean around the 1170s, and the Quanzhou I returning from the Indian Ocean in the 1270s, therefore, have provided first-hand marine archaeological evidence to illustrate the movements of Chinese ships, merchants, and goods between the China sea and the Indian Ocean before the era of Wang Dayuan and Ibn Battuta. The Belitung shipwreck, the Nanhai I, and the Quanzhou I hence present solid evidence to support what Geoff Wade has coined “an early commerce age in Southeast Asia” and beyond, roughly the period of 900–1300 CE, in which commercial activities and networks had crossed maritime Asia and engulfed China, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean world.
Imperial maps made during the Ming-Qing period (1368–1911) can contribute a great deal to the study of ocean navigation, especially the favored routes. The Selden Map of China (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford) followed traditional Chinese navigational charts such as the Zheng He Hanghai Tu 郑和航海图 (The Zheng He Nautical Chart) that was presumably used and updated by Zheng He, and showed the retreat of Chinese activities from the Indian Ocean during the post-1600 period. Meanwhile, other imperial maps made from the early seventeenth century onward, especially official ones, absorbed European geographical knowledge that had been spread to China by Jesuits such as Matteo Ricci (Chinese name Li Maodou 利玛窦, 1552–1610) and Ferdinand Verbiest (Chinese name Nan Huairen 南怀仁, 1623–1688). Very interestingly, the two epistemological systems concerning the Maldives were both marked on some maps drawn by Qing scholars. Unfortunately, the Chinese elite failed to realize that the two places were in fact one and the same Indian Ocean kingdom. The presence, absence, and juxtaposition of the Maldives on imperial maps present a fresh view to understand the waxing and waning of this Indian Ocean Archipelago in the Chinese mindset.
Firmly based on the foundation built by the scholars mentioned above, I attempt in this book to conduct a relatively comprehensive scrutiny of textual and cartographical sources (both Chinese and non-Chinese) as well as archaeological findings, such as shipwrecks and porcelain sherds in the Maldives. Imperial Chinese records consist of official history, private works, miscellaneous essays, stories (that remain an under-explored treasure), and maps produced during the discussed period that have not been sufficiently addressed. Ambitious as it is, this book is expected to illustrate the dynamics of maritime Asia on the eve of the sighting of European sails in these vast waters.
Structure: Parts and Chapters
History is but a narrative that reconstructs the past. By deliberately using “in Chinese history” in the title, I adopt a paralleling, contesting, and thus broadly defining concept of history, as Paul Cohen has done in his classic History in Three Keys, in which the term “history” accommodates the reconstruction of the past alongside experience and myth. Taking the Maldives as a case, angle, and approach, this book aims to kill three birds with one stone. Firstly, by exploiting broadly untapped or unknown Chinese sources this book diversifies and thus enriches the understanding of the Maldivian history and culture. Secondly, by examining the Sino-Maldivian interactions with a cross-regional approach, this book illustrates how this small and remote archipelago (and thus the Indian Ocean world) shaped the state-building of the giant Chinese empire, a theme that has yet to be attempted. There are few such extraordinary asymmetrical relationships between a giant empire and a miniature island kingdom seen in world history. Thirdly, by showcasing the Sino-Maldivian interactions, this book examines imperial China’s maritime activities and thus its knowledge production of the Indian Ocean world before and after the Zheng He era during the period of ca.1100 to 1620. What is behind these three themes is the historical process in which the waxing and waning of maritime China expanded into and departed from the Indian Ocean, paralleling the entrance and exit of the small and remote Indian Ocean Sultanate Maldives in the Chinese world order.
To some degree, this book is inspired by Edward H. Schafer’s The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T'ang Exotics, a classic Sonological work on foreign exotics and their influence in Tang China. The time-period covered in this book starts from ca. 1100, based on a few crucial sources illustrating China’s active participation in the Indian Ocean. After losing the Central Plain (the Yellow River region) in a crushing defeat to the non-Chinese Jin Dynasty (1115-1234), the Southern Song Dynasty then made the Yangzi Delta its political center, and adopted an unprecedented policy shift by encouraging maritime trade, a surging industry that constituted the dynasty’s key financial income. Chinese ocean-going ships, invested in and sponsored by Chinese businessmen, operated by Chinese captains and sailors, and loaded with Chinese cargo and merchants, began to sail to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. As a result, Chinese knowledge of the Indian Ocean reached a new era.
In his Pingzhou Ketan 萍州可谈 completed in 1119, Zhu Yu朱彧 (?-? 1148) shared his first-hand witness of the maritime network based in Guangzhou when he accompanied his father, who was an official there in the last decade of the eleventh century. While he explicitly mentioned Chinese merchants venturing to the Arab empire by sea, Zhu Yu was probably not aware that the maritime epicenter had shifted from Guangzhou to Quanzhou in his time, a tendency more visible in the Lingwai Daida 岭外代答 (Answers for Questions Concerning Out of Range) by Zhou Qufei 周去非 (1135–1189). Zhou recorded navigation routes from both Guangzhou and Quanzhou to the Indian Ocean and his work was based on his own service in Guangxi from 1172 onward. The Nanhai I, highly likely departing from Quanzhou, was probably wrecked in 1166–1174. Considering other textual sources, I believe that the beginning of the twelfth century is a good period to pin as a starting point for this book. By the same token, 1620 makes a suitable closing date, because of the completion in 1617 of the Dongxiyang Kao 东西洋考 (An Examination of the Eastern and Western Oceans), a maritime treatise compiled by Zhang Xie 张燮 (1574–1640) that largely ignored or forgot China’s previous activities in or connections with the Indian Ocean. In addition, being one of the first Chinese maps that reached Europe, the Selden Map of China, completed no later than the 1620s, drew the whole of East and Southeast Asia but paid little attention to the Indian Ocean. Thus, in this book, we draw the action to a close in the 1620s when the Indian Ocean was no longer a part of the Chinese world, whether real or imagined.
The book is divided into four parts, consisting of seventeen chapters. Part I, “The Stage,” consists of three chapters and establishes the setting. This chapter introduces the theme, literature, arguments, sources, and structure of the book. Chapter Two spotlights Quanzhou, probably the largest port city in the world at that time, from which Chinese ships departed for the Indian Ocean. In Chapter Three, Chinese navigation technology, merchant organization, and ships are scrutinized to highlight the background of the voyages of Wang Dayuan.
In Part II, “A Destination,” Chapter Four discusses all the medieval travelers or scholars who either visited the Maldives or who wrote about these islands. Chapters Five and Six examine the different aspects of the island sultanate, such as the Chinese nomenclature of the Maldives, atolls, monsoons, coconut trees. And Chapter Seven turns to discuss the political interactions between Ming China and the island sultanate.
Part III, “The Cargo,” consisting of six chapters, examine the local products and commodities of the Maldives, such as coir rope, dried fish, grains, handkerchiefs, cowrie shells, ambergris, and scented woods. This array of commercial articles not only distinguished the islands, but also made it a pivot of maritime trade. Known by the euphemistic Chinese title of “Dragon’s Spittle,” ambergris was a product of the Maldives (with the Indian Ocean being the major supplier) that began to be consumed widely in Song China (960–1279). During the Ming period, ambergris was highly desired by Emperor Jiajing but was hard to obtain, despite an empire-wide mobilization. The absence of ambergris in the Ming courts caused power struggles, anxiety, desperation, and a golden opportunity for the Portuguese, who adroitly utilized their monopoly of this Indian Ocean resource to seek celestial approval and establish themselves in Macau in 1557.
Part IV, “Reminiscences,” deals with how the Maldivian past has been reconstructed (including the forgetting and romanticizing of it). Chapter Fourteen, “A Ruined Buddhist Past” attempts to reconstruct the Buddhist landscape, at least partially, in the pre-Islamic Maldives of which Chinese travelers such as Wang Dayuan and Ma Huan had no conception. Chapter Fifteen, “Port Marriage,” explores, a special contracted marriage between native women and foreign sojourners that constituted a popular practice in port societies across maritime Asia. Ibn Battuta married four wives in the Maldives, and thought highly of such temporary marriages, a popular maritime custom that spread from as far east as the Timor Islands to as far west as the Maldives. In contrast, Wang Dayuan had nothing to say about his interactions (if any) with Maldivian women, but he praised Siamese women who preferred Chinese men, and despised Timor women who slept with foreign (non-Chinese) men. Such a controversy in the Chinese mindset deserves a critical analysis.
Chapter Sixteen, “A True Romance,” examines how the Sanbao Taijian Xiyangji Tongsu Yanyi三宝太监西洋记通俗演义, a Chinese novel composed by Luo Maodeng 罗懋登in the 1590s, romanticized the Zheng He Voyages and presented its fabricated knowledge on the Maldives and the Indian Ocean world. This novel represented one of the last Chinese epistemological interests in the Maldives. During his stay in the Maldives (1602–1607), the French maritime refugee François Pyrard declared that the giant fishing bird that had so fascinated the Maldivian king was from China. Chapter Seventeen, “An Echo: ‘The China Bird’ in the Maldives,” starts with this episode and traces the circulation of Chinese knowledge with and beyond maritime Asia. While “the China Bird” stood as the last echo of Chinese activities in this remote island kingdom, there emerged the parallel trajectories of European and Chinese cartographic knowledge of the Maldives, both strands making their mark on imperial cartographic works produced in China.
Links, exchanges, and interactions among kingdoms and peoples over time rarely take a linear or cumulative course. They are sometimes disrupted, or they decline, and some are even deliberately dropped. Disconnection essentially constitutes the other side of various interactions. China’s discovery of the Maldives primarily resulted from commercial activities backed up by the market under the Southern Song and the Yuan. China’s rapid increase of its knowledge of the Maldives was an immediate consequence of the Zheng He Voyages, an official campaign made by a state with a strong willingness and capability that as fate would have it could not last long without the appropriate support from the hands of the market. While the force of the market continued to move cowrie shells from the Maldives to China’s southwestern and southeastern frontiers through transit trade, the people at that time hardly had an inkling of the actual origin of this marine substance. Once political zeal cooled down, connections were discontinued. Ming China’s sudden withdrawal from the Indian Ocean and re-issue of maritime ban policy in 1433 expunged former commercial connections with the Indian Ocean, and such a pattern went on until the late nineteenth century. As a result, discovering was replaced with discarding, with fragmentary information on the Indian Ocean being indirectly provided by Europeans. From the Ming-Qing transition onward, with Chinese attention shifting to the Nanyang 南洋 (lit. the “South Sea,” referring to modern Southeast Asia), the age of the Nanyang kicked off, and Qing China embarked on its long eighteenth century of trade and exploration in this region. The Indian Ocean once again became a far-off place, a forgotten world.
