1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (28 page)

The greatest expansions of world trade have tended to occur when both roles are aligned and commercial ambitions can be enforced, as Findlay and O’Rourke put it, “with the barrel of a Maxim gun, the edge of a scimitar, or the ferocity of nomadic horsemen.” Today violence is less common, if only because powerful weapons are so cheap that all sides have them, and states tend to make do with tools like subsidies to industry, exchange-rate manipulation, and export and import regulations. But still today trade expands when government sees it as a way to project and increase power—witness the recent history of Japan and China.

At the same time, the two roles often conflict, and the conflict leads, as in Manila, to a considerable amount of profoundly fractured cerebration. For Spain, Manila was both a trading post and a projection of Spanish power in the Pacific. Its traders wanted to generate as much profit as possible by importing as much silk as possible; its political rulers, by contrast, wanted to seize Asian lands, convert Asians to Christianity, thwart Dutch and Portuguese ambitions—and have as much of the silver as possible come to Spain, because the state needed it to pay for wars in Europe. Considered purely as a trading entrepôt, Manila should house as few Spaniards as possible—they were expensive to send over and kept dying of disease—and let Chinese people do all the work. To serve best as an imperial outpost, though, the Spaniards needed to ensure that all vital civic functions were in loyal Spanish hands, and minimize the number and influence of the Chinese. Every step to satisfy one imperative worked against the other.

Like the Spanish court, the Ming court struggled to reconcile the divergent roles of trade. On the one hand, silver from the silk trade became a source of imperial wealth and power. American silver helped pay for huge military projects, including much of the Great Wall of China, which the Ming were revamping and extending. And it fueled an explosion of commerce within China, which led to an economic boom. On the other hand, the money that enabled business to grow also set off inflation, which had its worst impact on the poor. And silver was ever a political threat to the dynasty, because it controlled neither the trade nor the source. Alarmingly, the emperors could not restrict the flow of silver into Fujian, even if they wanted to, because of rampant smuggling. In the eyes of the court, the Fujianese merchants were people of dubious loyalty who had created in the Parián an important Chinese city that was outside imperial supervision. They were becoming wealthy and powerful in a way that was hard for the court to control. Little wonder Beijing kept a wary eye on Yuegang!

There is little evidence, though, that Beijing anticipated the worst consequences. As in Europe, so much silver flooded into China that the price eventually dropped. By about 1640 silver was worth no more in China than it was in the rest of the world. At this point the Ming government was tripped up by an error it had committed decades in the past.

When the court had ordered citizens to pay their taxes in silver, it had set up the tax rolls in terms of the
weight
of silver people had to pay, not its
value.
As with Spain, the taxes were not indexed for inflation. As with Spain, the same amount of tax was worth less money when the price of silver dropped. The Ming dynasty had a revenue shortfall. Not having paper currency, the government couldn’t print more money—deficit spending was impossible. Suddenly it couldn’t pay for national defense. It was a bad time to run out of money for the military: China was then under assault by the belligerent northern groups now called Manchus. According to William Atwell, a historian at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the Chinese government’s dependence on the silver trade helped push it over the edge. The takeover by the Manchus—they became the Qing dynasty—took decades and was bloody even by the tough standards of Chinese history. Nobody knows how many millions died.

Atwell’s contentions have been vigorously debated, yet there is little doubt that China’s entry had consequences of a sort rarely discussed in freshman economics textbooks. Flynn and Giráldez point out that China devoted a big fraction of its productive base to acquiring the silver needed for commerce and government. For hundreds of years, China produced silk, porcelain, and tea to acquire a commodity, silver, which was needed to replace the paper notes that the government had made valueless. It was as if to buy a newspaper for a dollar one first had to make and sell something else to get the dollar banknote. Actually, it was worse: the silver stocks had to be constantly replenished, incurring further costs, because the metal was constantly worn away as it passed from hand to hand. (Paper money wears out, too, but costs next to nothing to replace.)

Given the circumstances, acquiring the silver was entirely rational—it provided monetary stability. But it was also extremely costly. “Rather than pull silver out of their own ground (had China contained rich silver deposits, which it did not), the Chinese produced exports to buy silver that was pulled out of the ground somewhere else,” Flynn wrote in an e-mail to me. “Even scholars tend to impute mystical qualities to commodity monies like silver and gold, but we must recognize them as physical products that involve massive production costs. A significant hunk of the GDP of China—then the world’s biggest economy—was surrendered in order to secure a white metal that was produced mostly in Spanish America and Japan. Some people made enormous profits from doing this, but think about what else those resources could have been used for.”

There was a related, equally large consequence: the Columbian Exchange.

¹
By convention emperors were referred to not by their personal names, but by the names of their reigns. For example, the usurping uncle, born Zhu Di, chose Yongle (“perpetual happiness”) as his title, and thus became the Yongle emperor: the ruler during the Yongle period.

²
The Ming dynasty’s predecessors, the Mongol-led Yuan, had tried to do exactly the same thing, forbidding private overseas trade in 1303, 1311, and 1320. In each case the law was soon repealed. The prospect of monopoly was tempting, but the Yuan always found it more profitable—and
much
less trouble—to tax private trade than to run the trade themselves.

³
“Families” is a misnomer. The traders were
gongsi,
which were clan-like groups of related families that often had hundreds of members. I’m reluctant to use the term
gongsi,
though, because it now means “company”—an indication of the familial roots of many Chinese businesses but a source of potential confusion to readers.

⁴
To those accustomed to metal coins, the idea of using shells for money may seem primitive. But they had a signal advantage: unlike the era’s coins, which were often debased or faked, shells could not readily be altered or counterfeited.

⁵
Mercury poisoning was not the sole cause of death. Equally lethal were pneumonia, tuberculosis, silicosis (lesions in the lungs caused by inhalation of silica dust), and asphyxiation (breathing carbon dioxide in badly ventilated tunnels). In 1640 a royal inspector saw three Indians fall into a pit so filled with carbon dioxide that candles couldn’t burn (carbon dioxide, which is heavier than air, pools in low areas). Although the pit wasn’t deep, the workers did not get up. Their bodies were not retrieved; descending into the pit was too dangerous.

⁶
The tip of the peninsula is Sangley Point,
sangley
(a Fujianese word for “traveling merchant”) being a pejorative reference to Filipinos of Chinese descent. A typical use of the term is a Manila church official’s complaint in 1628 about the “great danger” posed by the “swarms of abandoned heathen sangleys.”

⁷
In practice, the picture is complicated by business’s attempts to manipulate government for their own ends, often to the detriment of state policies, and by groups within the state that use power for private gain. Nevertheless, the distinction between trade as a private exchange between willing parties and trade as a tool of state aggrandizement is useful. Indeed, one reason for the conflict between today’s free traders and anti-globalization activists is that the former regard the first role as paramount whereas the latter think in terms of the second.

5
Lovesick Grass, Foreign Tubers, and Jade Rice
(Silk for Silver, Part Two)        

HIDDEN PASSENGERS

Trade brought more than silver across the Pacific. Tobacco may have led the parade. Somehow Portuguese ships brought the species across oceans and borders to Guangxi, in southern China, where archaeologists have unearthed locally made tobacco pipes dating back to 1549.
¹
Little more than two decades later, the plant arrived in the southeast, aboard a silver ship from Manila. Not long after that, it filtered into the northeast, probably from Korea.

Nicotiana tabacum
was as much an object of fascination in Yuegang as in London and Madrid. “You take fire and light one end [of the pipe] and put the other end in your mouth,” explained the seventeenth-century Fujianese poet Yao Lü. “The smoke goes down your throat through the pipe. It can make one tipsy.” Writing not long after the smoking weed arrived in Fujian, Yao was amazed by its rapid spread across the province. “Now there is more here than in the Philippines,” he marveled, “and it is exported and sold to that country.”

Then as now, smoking was made to order for the boredom and inertia of army life. Tobacco was embraced by Ming soldiers, who disseminated it as they marched around the empire. In the southwestern province of Yunnan, one physician reported, Chinese soldiers “entered miasma-ridden [malarial] lands, and none of them were spared disease except for a single unit, whose members were in perfect health. When asked the reason, the answer was that they all smoked.” (Mosquitoes dislike smoke, so smoking actually may have provided some protective effect against malaria-carrying insects.) From that point, the account continued, “smoking spread … and now in the southwest, whether old or young, they cannot stop smoking from morning until night.” As a child in the 1630s, the writer Wang Pu had never heard of tobacco. When he grew to adulthood, he later recalled, “customs suddenly changed, and all the people, even boys not four feet tall, were smoking.”

“Tobacco is everywhere,” announced what was apparently China’s first smoking how-to book. Calling the plant “golden-thread smoke” and “lovesick grass”—the latter a nod to its penchant for hooking the user—the Qing dynasty’s legions of smokers may have been the planet’s most enthusiastic nicotine slaves. An ostentatious addiction to tobacco became the hallmark of the fashionable rich. Men boasted of their inability to eat, converse, and even think without a lighted pipe. Women carried special silk tobacco purses with elaborate jeweled fastenings; to protect their delicate feminine essences from the harsh spirit of tobacco, they smoked extra-long pipes, some so big that they had to be lugged around by servants. A new poetic sub-genre emerged among China’s wealthy aesthetes: the hymn to tobacco.

Puffing fragrance, exhaling the Sage’s vapor;

Bluish tendrils born from the subtle Smoke.

The Gentleman’s Companion, it warms my heart

And leaves my mouth feeling like a divine furnace.

Late-waking aristocratic women slept with their heads elevated on special blocks so that attendants could do their hair and makeup while they were unconscious—it shortened the time between waking and the first tobacco of the day. “The scene is a little hard to imagine,” remarked Timothy Brook, the Canadian historian whose studies of Chinese tobacco I am drawing upon here.

Brook found the tale of the sleeping smokers in Chen Cong’s
Yancao pu
(Tobacco Manual), a learned collection of tobacco-related poetry and prose from 1805. An even more recondite compendium, Lu Yao’s
Yan pu
(Smoking Manual), appeared around 1774. Lu, a former provincial governor, laid down the rules for nicotine consumption in aristocratic circles. Like a modern etiquette handbook, the manual provided a set of smoking do’s and don’ts:

Do
smoke: after waking up; after a meal; with guests; while writing; when growing tired from reading; while waiting for a good friend who hasn’t shown up yet.

Don’t
smoke: while listening to a zither; feeding cranes; appreciating orchids; observing plum blossoms; making ancestral offerings; attending the morning court assembly; sleeping with a beautiful woman.

From today’s perspective, the Chinese courtier’s ornate surrender to tobacco seems absurd, but it had many equally odd counterparts abroad. At the same time that Lu Yao was laying out smoking etiquette, wealthy English were taking snuff (finely ground tobacco stems) in public sessions heavy with ritual. Opening their silver or ivory snuffboxes—“a fetish of the eighteenth century,” as the anthropologist Berthold Laufer put it—fashionable young blades scooped out measures of fresh-ground snuff with finger-length ladles made of bone. Parties fell quiet as groups of men in embroidered waistcoats simultaneously inserted tiny pucks of ground tobacco into their noses, then whipped out lace handkerchiefs to muffle the ensuing volley of sneezes. Mastering the arcana of snuff was, for the addict, worth the bother: snorted tobacco delivers nicotine to the bloodstream faster than cigarette smoke. Few were more enraptured by the ritual than the celebrated London dandy Beau Brummell, who claimed to have a different snuffbox for every day of the year. Brummell instructed his fellow gallants in the subtle art of using only one hand to open the box, extract a pinch of snuff, and stick it in a nostril. The injection had to be accomplished with a rakish tilt of the head to avoid unsightly brown drips.

Snuff mania had few consequences in England other than interrupted party chatter, high laundry bills, and nasopharyngeal cancer. China’s tobacco addiction occurred in an entirely different context, and thus had an entirely different impact.
N. tabacum
was part of an unplanned ecological invasion that shaped, for better and worse, modern China.

At the time, China had roughly a quarter of the world’s population, which had to provide for itself on roughly a twelfth of the world’s arable land. Both figures are imprecise at best, but there is little dispute that the nation has long had a lot of people and that it always has had relatively little land to grow crops to feed them. In practical terms, China had to harvest huge amounts of food—half or more of the national diet—from areas with enough water to grow rice and wheat. Unluckily, those areas are relatively small. The nation has many deserts, few big lakes, irregular rainfall, and just two major rivers, the Yangzi and the Huang He (Yellow). Both rivers run long, looping courses from the western mountains to the Pacific coast, emptying into the sea scarcely 150 miles from each other. The Yangzi carries mountain runoff into the rice-growing flats near the end of its course. The Huang He takes it into the North China Plain, then as now the center of Chinese wheat production. Both areas are vital to feeding the nation; there are no other places in China like them. And both are prone to catastrophic floods.

Song and Yuan, Ming and Qing—every dynasty understood both this vulnerability and the concomitant necessity of maintaining China’s agricultural base by controlling the Yangzi and Huang He. So important was water management that European savants like Karl Marx and Max Weber identified it as China’s most important institution. Creating and operating huge, complex irrigation systems, Weber claimed, required organizing masses of laborers, which inevitably created a powerful state bureaucracy and subjugated the individual. In an influential book from 1957, the historian Karl Wittfogel built on Marx to describe China and places with similar water-control needs as “hydraulic societies.” Wittfogel’s view of these societies can be gathered from the title of his book:
Oriental Despotism.
Europe, to his mind, avoided despotism because farmers didn’t need irrigation. They fended for themselves, which created traditions of individualism, entrepreneurship, and technological progress that China never had. In recent years this thesis has fallen out of favor. Most Sinologists today believe that hydraulic Asia was just as diverse, individualistic, and market oriented as anywhere else, including non-hydraulic Europe. But this image still remains influential, at least in the West, where China is all too often viewed as an undifferentiated mass of workers, moving ant-wise to the directives of the state.

None of the challenges to past thinkers dispute that China had a relative dearth of land suitable for rice and wheat. From this perspective, the Columbian Exchange was a boon, and China raced to embrace it. “No large group of the human race in the Old World was quicker to adopt American food plants than the Chinese,” Alfred W. Crosby wrote in
The Columbian Exchange.
Sweet potatoes, maize, peanuts, tobacco, chili peppers, pineapple, cashew, manioc (cassava)—all poured into Fujian (via the galleon trade), Guangdong (the province southwest of Fujian, via Portuguese ships in Macao), and Korea (via Japan, which took them from the Dutch). All became part of the furniture of Chinese life—who can imagine Sichuan (Szechuan) food today without heaps of hot peppers? “While men who stormed Tenochtitlan with Cortés still lived,” Crosby said, “peanuts were swelling in the sandy loams near Shanghai; maize was turning fields green in south China; and the sweet potato was on its way to becoming the poor man’s staple in Fujian.” Today China is the world’s biggest sweet potato grower, producing more than three-quarters of the global harvest; it is also the world’s second-biggest maize producer.

Epitomizing China’s readiness to experiment was the Yuegang merchant Chen Zhenlong, who came across sweet potatoes (
Ipomoea batatas
) during a visit to Manila in the early 1590s. Probably native to Central America,
I. batatas
had been encountered by Colón on his first voyage; Spaniards had brought the species to the Philippines, where it was quickly adopted by Malays, who already grew the tuber crop taro. Liking the taste, Chen decided to take sweet potatoes home with him. “He bribed the barbarians to get segments of their vines several feet in length,” reported his great-great-great-grandson in
True Account of the Story of Planting Sweet Potatoes in Qinghai, Henan, and Other Provinces
(1768), a book-length essay devoted to bragging about the sweet potato feats of the author’s ancestors. Chen hid the vines by twisting them around ropes and tossing the ropes into a basket. Spanish customs agents noticed nothing. (They weren’t trying to stop the export of sweet potatoes per se, so much as trying to prevent the Chinese from getting their hands on
anything
from which they might derive commercial advantage.) In this way Chen smuggled sweet potatoes into China. “Even though the vines were withered,” his great-great-great-grandson wrote later, “they flourished after he stuck cuttings in infertile ground.”