The South China Sea by Bill Hayton Read Free Book Online

Anshi, pioneered reforms intended to increase government income by stimulating trade. In a very early experiment with liberal economics, import taxes were reduced and the management of trade devolved to each port. It was a success: within 20 years, the value of trade had doubled. One other reform had far-reaching consequences. The court lifted its ban on the export of copper money. The currency spread rapidly around the South China Sea trading network and Song coinage became a medium of exchange as far away as Sumatra and Java.
    By 1090 Chinese ships were being allowed to sail abroad from any port, spreading the income from trade much more widely. The move also allowed Fujianese traders to break into a business previously monopolised by foreigners. And just like the foreigners, they too were obliged to follow the monsoons and wait in foreign ports for winds to change. While sojourning they began to put down roots: dedicating temples to their seafaring goddess Mazu and creating embryonic Chinatowns. Nonetheless restrictions remained. Chinese ships were only allowed to be away from port for nine months, one monsoon cycle. They could only reach as far as Sumatra before having to return home. Westward trade into the Indian Ocean remained the preserve of Arab, Indian and Srivijayan ships. However, the more adventurous Chinese merchants began to push onwards to India and the Persian Gulf regardless.
    But at home, the Song court was under increasing pressure. In 1126 it lost control of its northern lands to Jurchen invaders from Manchuria and moved its capital to Hangzhou on the eastern coast. In the resulting crisis it banned Chinese ships from sailing abroad and stopped almost all luxury imports (with the notable exception of the ivory required to make officials’ belt buckles). But even this crisis only lasted, at most, six years before the Song started to liberalise trade once again. Within 14 years trade policies had pretty much reverted to their pre-crisis positions. The imperative to trade was overwhelming. By the 1160s the expat community in Quanzhou had become so large that it required a special cemetery. Many of these traders were Muslim, Islam having taken root in Champa by this time, and they had good connections with both Muslims from the Middle East and China's growing Muslim population.
    The Song Dynasty would last another century. Taken as a whole, the period from the fall of the Tang Dynasty in 906 until the fall of the Song in 1279 seems to have been an early ‘golden age’ of commerce around the South China Sea. Changes in China and India and the growth of Islamic commerce unleashed large increases in trade and wealth creation. 12 The most powerful of the Champa states, Vijaya, prospered at this time. Srivijaya, on the other hand, declined following an invasion from the southern Indian Chola kingdom in 1025. That allowed other ports to emerge along the coasts of Sumatra, Java, Bali, Borneo and mainland Southeast Asia. Islands in the Philippines (known as Butuan and Ma-yi in Chinese texts) start to be recorded as trading entities too. The discovery, in 1981, of a spectacular hoard of golden treasure in the Philippine city of Surigao, on the tip of Mindanao Island, suggests a wealthy Hindu-ised elite was already in place there by this time.
    New commodities were being exchanged, bringing more and more people and territories into the regional, and ultimately global, trading system. But by the end of the thirteenth century, boom seems to have turned to bust. In 1275, Srivijaya's main port, Jambi, was destroyed by raiders from Java. At the same time Mongols were advancing from the north into the Song's territory. The Mongols’ eventual conquest of Fujian and Guangzhou by 1279 seems to have triggered a general decline in regional trade that lasted until they lost power almost a century later. Instead, the Sea became an arena of conflict as the Mongol ‘Yuan Dynasty’ sought influence. Kublai Khan, the ruler of the