1492: The Year Our World Began (27 page)

Of all Zheng He’s acts of political intervention, perhaps the most significant—in terms of long-term consequences—was his attempt to set up a Chinese puppet kingdom to control the trade of the Strait of Malacca, the vital bottleneck in the normal route between China and India. He chose to elevate Paramesvara, a bandit chief who had been driven from his own kingdom and had established a stronghold in the swamps of what is now known as Melaka, on the Malayan coast. In 1409, Zheng He conferred the seal and robes of kingship upon him. Paramesvara traveled to China to pay tribute in person and established
a client relationship with the emperor; Chinese patronage turned his modest stronghold into a great and rich emporium.

Zheng He’s own perception of his role seems to have combined an imperial impulse with the peaceful inspiration of commerce and scholarship. A stela he erected in 1432 began in a jingoistic vein: “In the unifying of the seas and continents the Ming Dynasty even goes beyond the Han and the Tang…. The countries beyond the horizon and from the ends of the earth have become subjects.” That was an exaggeration, but he added, more plausibly, in deference to traders and geographers, “However far they may be, their distances and the routes may be calculated.”
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An “overall survey of the ocean’s shores” was one of the fruits of the voyages. Copies of the charts survive thanks to the fact that they were reproduced in a printed work of 1621. Like European charts of the same period, they are diagrams of sailing directions rather than attempts at scale mapping. Tracks annotated with compass bearings show the routes between major ports and represent in visual form the sailing directions Zheng He recorded, all of which have the form “Follow such-and-such a bearing for such-and-such a number of watches.” Each port is marked with its latitude according to the elevation of the Pole Star above the horizon, which Zheng He verified by means of “guiding star-boards”—ebony strips of various breadths held at a fixed distance from the observer’s face to fill the space exactly between the star and the horizon.

But the Chinese naval effort could not last. Historians have debated why it was abandoned. Part of the answer, at least, is clear. The scholar-elites hated overseas adventures and the factions that favored them so much that, when they recaptured power, the mandarins destroyed almost all Zheng He’s records in an attempt to obliterate his memory. Moreover, China’s land frontiers became insecure as Mongol power revived. China needed to turn away from the sea and toward the new threat. The state never resumed overseas expansion. The growth of trade and of Chinese colonization in Southeast Asia was left to merchants and migrants. China, the empire best equipped for maritime
imperialism, opted out. Consequently, lesser powers, including those of Europe, were able to exploit opportunities in seas that Chinese power vacated. It became possible for the Ryukyu Islands to be unified as a thriving emporium for the trade of China and Japan with Southeast Asia. Sho Shin ruled the islands from 1477. He disarmed the warlords, sent bureaucrats to China for education in Confucian principles, and imposed internal peace.

In many ways, it was to the credit of Chinese decision makers that they pulled back from involvement in costly adventures far from home. Most powers that have undertaken such expeditions and attempted to impose their rule on distant countries have had cause to regret it. Confucian values, as we have seen, included giving priority to good government at home. “Barbarians” would submit to Chinese rule if and when they saw the benefits. Attempting to beat or coax them into submission was a waste of resources. By consolidating their landward empire, and refraining from seaborne imperialism, China’s rulers ensured the longevity of their state. All the maritime empires founded in the world in the last five hundred years have crumbled. China is still here.

Ch’oe Pu’s diary reflects the successes and limitations of Chinese Confucians’ “soft power,” as modern political theory would call it. Ch’oe Pu was aware of similar struggles and exchanges of prejudice between Confucians and their Buddhist rivals in Korea. He was such a pious Confucian, so respectful of the rites for the dead, that he refused to doff mourning, even when it might have exempted him from peril of his life, as when his companions were afraid of slaughter—either at the hands of brigands unintimidated by the sight of Ch’oe Pu’s official uniform, or by Chinese peasants who mistook the Koreans for Japanese pirates. He declined to pray at a river shrine, which he regarded as superstitious, despite the advisability of deferring to local customs. His contempt for Buddhism was excoriating. He denounced the futility of monks’ prayers and rejoiced at the news of secularizations of monasteries because “the abolished temples become people’s houses, the destroyed Buddhas be
come vessels, and the heads that once were bald are now hairy and fill the army’s ranks.”
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He spoke to his Chinese hosts in terms that were calculated to flatter, but which also reflected two long-standing prejudices among Korea’s elite: willingness to defer to China, and anxiety to imitate the Chinese. “In heaven,” he admitted,

Ch’oe Pu learned to make a water wheel he saw in China because “it will be useful to Koreans for all ages to come.” But when interrogators asked for military intelligence, he was evasive. When they asked the distance to Korea, he exaggerated. When officials asked him how Korea had managed to repel earlier Chinese attempts at conquest, he sidestepped the question and emphasized his country’s strength.
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In his day, Korea was experiencing a Confucian revival parallel to China’s—only more fragile. After a spell, in the previous reign, of royal dependence on Buddhist advisers and lavish patronage of Buddhist temples, Ch’oe’s royal master, Sŏng-jong, who came to the throne in 1470, restored Confucianism, much as the Hongxi emperor did in China. Yet when Chinese dignitaries visited Korea, it struck them as an exotic and barbarous land, more notable for its differences from China
than for the continuities Koreans strove to contrive. In 1487 an ambassador arrived in Korea from the court of the new emperor of China. “The ministers,” he reported back, “with pins in their hair, stand like ibises in attendance, while old and young gather on the hills to see…. The stone lions bask in the sun that rises from the sea. In front of the Kwang-wha Gate they sit east and west, high as the towers, wonderfully hammered out.”
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He watched acrobats masked as lions and elephants in a palace painted red, with green glass windows, in the audience chamber.
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The level of mealtime hospitality impressed him: five layers of honeyed bread, honey and flour cakes piled a foot high, rice soup, pickled relish, soy, rice wine superior in aroma and flavor to Chinese millet wine, beef, mutton, pork, walnuts, dates, mutton sausages, fish, and lotus roots to sweeten the breath.
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He lectured the Koreans on Confucianism, in a way one suspects must have annoyed his hosts: “We proclaim the ceremonies of the Book of Spring and Autumn which says, ‘The various states must first see to the rectitude of the individual man.’”
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In the long run, the lecture was to little avail. Chong-jik, the minister who put the policy of reviving the ceremonies into effect in Korea, died in 1492. After the king’s death in 1494, his successor reversed the policy, beheaded Chong-jik’s exhumed body, and scourged and exiled other leading Confucians, including Ch’oe Pu.

Japan—the other country Columbus hoped to open trade with—was in no condition to contemplate taking the initiative in reaching out to the rest of the world. Ch’oe Pu, who so admired China, had less respect for Japan. The riches of Japan, he thought, would seem to a Korean like “ice to a summer bug.”
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But the country’s problems were not fundamentally economic. Japanese rice could be harvested two or three times a year. Large amounts of copper, swords, sulfur, and sappanwood were exported to China. Japan used Chinese coins, minted, for reasons no one has ever fully been able to explain, from copper produced in Japan. The size and distribution of cities—concentrated, as usual in Japanese history, in the teeming heartland of southern Honshu and northern
Kyushu—suggest that rural production was high and the systems of commerce and communications could dispense large amounts of food efficiently. Kyoto had reputedly two hundred thousand inhabitants before ruinous civil war broke out in the late 1460s. Tennoji in Kawachi province and Hakata in northern Kyushu had over thirty thousand people. More than twenty other towns had more than ten thousand.

Japan’s problems were political. Though Japanese statesmen regarded China as their model, in practice the country was very differently managed. The emperor was a sacral, secluded figure, spared the vulgarities of politics by hereditary vicegerents known as shoguns. Control of Kyoto ensured fabulous revenues for the shoguns’ government. They could afford to neglect the rest of the country. Provincial power was delegated to or usurped by the warlords as the price of peace. But peace in the hands of a warrior caste is always precarious. Trying to forget “the trials of this world,” the poet Shinkei described the effects: “Even within the powerful clans selfish quarrels broke out between lord and retainer and among the rank and file, in which men of various stations fell in great numbers. And though they battled day and night, pitting their might against each other in their various territories, nowhere was the outcome ever decisive.”
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While squabbles of the aristocracy overspilled into violence, members of the military class known as samurai made common cause with peasants oppressed by the warlords’ need of money. Together they formed masterless leagues of self-defense that erupted in rebellion. They were, according to the poet-priest Ikkyu, who was a propagandist for the shogunate, “demons with red faces, their hot blood aroused,…turning the whole city into a den of thieves and striking fear in the people as they endlessly looted for treasures. And thus it came about that the people grew weary, the capital fell into ruin, and of the myriad ways of civilized men nothing remained.”
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From the late 1430s, the eastern provinces were steeped in constant warfare: “As the months stretched into years, myriads perished, their bodies torn by the sword as men fell upon each other in their madness, and still the strife showed no signs of
letting up.” A reforming shogun’s attempts to reassert central authority ended in his assassination in 1441. Fifteen years of effective interregnum followed, while his successors were minors. When the shogun Yoshimasa reached maturity, he struggled to recoup power. In 1482, after the failure of all his efforts, he wrote that the daimyo, or warlords, “do as they please and do not follow orders. That means there can be no government.”
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Meanwhile, in 1461 drought struck

In 1467 the two most powerful warlords came to blows, ostensibly over the succession to the shogunate, and were forced to flee when their armies ravaged the capital. “All, high and low, were thrown into utter confusion and scattered in the four directions, their flight swifter than flowers in a windstorm, red leaves beneath the tree-withering blast. Within the capital, it had become a veritable hell.” The poet Ichijo Kaneyoshi fled devastation so total that “only layers of cloud cover the remains,” while bandits scattered the contents of his library—“the dwellings of hundreds of bookworms…that had been passed down for over ten generations.”
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The following ten years were the most destructive in Japan’s long history of civil wars.

“How terrible it is,” wrote the poet Shinkei, “to have been born in the last days of such an utterly degenerate age.” The calamities seemed to him “to presage the world’s destruction.”
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Moralists blamed the indifference and self-indulgence of the ruling classes, or the aloof lifestyle
of the shogun, or the supposed influence of women at his court, or the corruption of his ministers.

Yet wars, though they warp morals and wreck lives, can stimulate art. A renaissance was under way,
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with painters and poets who looked back half a millennium for their models and perhaps for escape. In the longueurs of war, fighters competed to write Chinese verses. The shogun Yoshimasa dabbled while Japan burned. His character has puzzled every historian who tried to tackle it fairly. He treated the events of his day as if they were none of his responsibility. In the earliest years of the war, his own poetry expressed optimism amounting to insouciance:

Pessimism followed, amounting to despair, but deeply dyed with egotism.