The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) (11 page)

Some dynasties constructed more than one such capital to administer their domains. The Sui dynasty established three capitals and connected them by roads, canals, and imperial resting pavilions. Sui Wen-ti, who founded the dynasty in A.D. 581, started the Grand Canal to ensure food supplies for the traditional capital of Chang’an, a city that soon grew to rival the size of any contemporary city, including Constantinople.
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Beyond the capital cities lay a vast network of smaller centers. In the third century B.C., Shih Huang-ti, the first emperor to unite China, divided the formerly independent Chinese states into provinces, or
zhou,
each with its own administrative center. Below these developed a vast archipelago of smaller administrative districts, or
hsien.
These centers not only secured the empire, but also dispersed food during famine and provided for the sick and aged.
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Yet Chinese urbanism centered mostly on its great capitals. These were not merely cities of earthly power under Confucian traditions; they also served as “the astral center of the universal order,” the central point of the Middle Kingdom.
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As centers of veneration, they resembled Islam’s holy places, such as Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, but with a distinctly different emphasis. The Muslim holy places were sacred but, after the first century of Islamic history, no longer seats of political power. In China, power and divinity shifted in tandem; where the emperor resided, there was the sacred place.

By the end of the first millennium A.D. and in the ensuing centuries, there emerged in China another kind of metropolis, one based primarily not on political power, but on mercantile values. The first flowering of commercial cities took place under the Tang dynasty, which ruled China from A.D. 618 to 907. By loosening traditional restrictions on trade, most importantly in land, the Tang helped create a new, potentially powerful class of urban proprietors. The commercial pace hastened under the Sung, who took power in 960 and encouraged the growth of trade.

For the first time, China emerged as a transcontinental trading power. After sweeping Japanese and other pirates from the seas, Chinese merchants established a dominating role over trade routes all the way to India. Chinese navigators were the world’s most accomplished, learning the use of the compass, and mapped the seas to as far as the Cape of Good Hope.

By the twelfth century, the Chinese fleet grew to twenty squadrons and over fifty-two thousand men. Chinese economic, cultural, and political influence now spread to a vast expanse of Asia, including Korea, Japan, and much of Southeast Asia.
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Some of their vessels could carry upwards of five hundred people and store a year’s supply of food. Pigs were bred on ships and wine brewed. “The ships that sail the southern seas,” wrote the traveler Chou Ch’u-fei, “are like houses. When their sails are spread they are like great clouds in the sky.”
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The growth of transoceanic business greatly stimulated the development of commercially oriented cosmopolitan cities. A flourishing city by 100 B.C., Guangzhou by the eighth century A.D. had become home to its own powerful Muslim trade community. The Sung established their first customs office there in 971, and for the next century, the port city enjoyed a veritable monopoly of foreign trade. By 1200, Guangzhou’s population had grown to more than two hundred thousand, ranking it among the world’s four or five largest cities.
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Marco Polo marveled at the vast quantity and diversity of the burgeoning urban economy. For every ship that arrived in Alexandria or any Italian port with spices, the Venetian traveler estimated, “a hundred” arrived in Zhangzhou, which had emerged as China’s premier port for trading with South Asia. Spices, drugs, gems, and the handiwork of the Near East, India, and Southeast Asia poured from the piers into the warehouses of Chinese cities. These, in turn, exported China’s crafts products, technology, and silk.
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This represented a potentially auspicious new beginning for Chinese urban history. In the early centuries of the first millennium, rising cities such as Guangzhou, Fuzhou, and Zhangzhou displayed the cosmopolitan mixture then seen in Alexandria, Cairo, Antioch, or Venice. Arab and Jewish traders, living under imperial protection in fan-fang, or foreign quarters, were particularly active; a broad diversity of ideas created a fertile artistic, scientific, and creative climate.
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These coastal cities attached themselves as well to the strong national internal trade network, most notably in the Sung capital of Kaifeng. The streets beyond the Palace City were “dense as fish scales,” lined with bustling shops, drinking houses, and brothels. Significant colonies of Muslims and Jews also settled in the capital. The relaxation of some traditional restrictions of business, such as strict curfews, encouraged the development of a genuine “urban culture,” with two- or three-story commercial buildings, lively popular literature, and various kinds of popular entertainment.
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The Mongol seizure of China in the early thirteenth century, much lamented by nationalistic Chinese, nevertheless accelerated these trends. With a vast empire in their control, the Mongols extended China’s influence across Asia to the edges of Europe. In foreign cities under Mongol control, such as Moscow, Novgorod, and Tabriz, significant Chinese colonies now appeared for the first time.

The Mongols thoroughly terrified their enemies but also spurred trade by providing an unprecedented degree of security over vast expanses of the Asian continent. Under their rule, one Muslim commentator noted, “a man might have journeyed from the land of sunrise to the land of sunset with a golden platter on his head without suffering the least violence from anyone.”
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The Mongol spirit of religious tolerance also promoted widening commercial and intellectual contacts. Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Islam, and other faiths flourished in relative harmony. Mosques, hospitals, and bazaars, administered by Muslim
qadis,
or judges, operated in Guangzhou and Zhangzhou under Islamic commercial and civil law. Many Muslims, and even Europeans like the Polos, rose in the service of the Mongol emperor.
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The growth of cross-cultural trade and contacts also accounted for much of the wealth that accumulated in the house of the great Khan. Although far from the coastal trading cities, the great capital and other major interior cities consumed vast quantities of the luxury goods of India, the Near East, and even Africa. “To this city,” Marco Polo wrote of Kublai Khan’s capital, “everything that is rare and valuable from all parts of the world finds its way.”
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CHAPTER NINE

OPPORTUNITY LOST

At the time of the Polos and, later, ibn Battuta, it would have been rational to assume that the future of cities and civilization lay in the East. Yet by 1600, the urban dynamism of China and Dar al-Islam
—
so evident from the docks and warehouses of Zhangzhou to the Qasaba of Cairo— was beginning to dissipate.

Why did the cities of Dar al-Islam and China squander this opportunity? Part of the problem lay in the very prosperity that so impressed European visitors to the East. Viewed from the perspective of a ruler in Beijing, Delhi, Istanbul, or Cairo in the sixteenth century, European cities would have seemed insignificant and backward. Chinese and Muslim technology, drugs, and tools of all kinds were, for the most part, far more sophisticated than those produced in Europe. The agricultural systems of the East, notably those in China, with its highly evolved irrigation and canal systems, also outproduced those in the West.

The leading cities of China and Dar al-Islam appear to have surpassed their European counterparts in both population and architectural magnificence. The Moguls, descendants of the Mongols who seized control of India in 1526, ruled from a capital, Delhi, that an Islamic historian described as “a garden of Eden that is populated.” Istanbul, the Islamic city that rested on the remains of vanquished Constantinople, possessed more riches and housed more people than any in Europe.
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The magnificence of Eastern capitals further validated long-standing attitudes of superiority. Typical were the attitudes of the Chinese imperial court: The farther one got from the capital city, they believed, one passed from the royal domains to that of princes, then to a “pacification zone,” followed by the realm of “half-civilized barbarians,” and, finally, the region of “cultureless savagery.” Europe, at the far end of the periphery, seemed barely worthy of consideration.
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Elite opinion within Dar al-Islam frequently held equally dismissive attitudes toward foreigners, particularly Europeans. A survey of trade, written in Baghdad in the ninth century, mentioned Byzantium, Central Asia, India, and China as having valuable items to offer; the cities of Northern and Western Europe, in contrast, were useful only as sources of selected minerals or slaves. Remarkably, these attitudes did not much change until well into the eighteenth century, when European military and technical superiority was already becoming manifest.
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The predominance of autocratic power further slowed the evolution of Asiatic and Islamic cities. Even magnificent cities such as Córdoba in Spain or Chang’an in China all but collapsed when the ruling house was overturned.
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Autocratic structure also made the Oriental cities particularly vulnerable to what ibn Khaldun described as the natural “life span” of regimes. Most ruling regimes in the Islamic world, he argued, were derived from virile nomadic peoples who had captured cities to plunder their riches. In the first generation, these nomads—early Arabs, Maghrebian tribes, Turks—often exhibited the high energy and imagination necessary for the building of great empires and cities.

The longer they tasted the luxurious life in long-settled places, the Arab scholar observed, the sooner these rulers inevitably lost both their martial spirit and moral resolve. Pampered offspring generations removed from life on horseback, he suggested, could not be expected to retain the virtues of their rougher-hewn ancestors.

When new nomadic invaders arrived on the scene, the results could prove catastrophic for even the most splendid cities. This was the fate of Baghdad in 1258 when Mongol invaders overwhelmed the forces of the enfeebled Abbasid caliphate. They not only executed the last caliph, along with much of his family, but massacred a large part of the populace. Much of the city was left in ruins. Baghdad was never again “the crossroads of the world.”
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Ibn Khaldun’s notions, drawn largely on examples in the Muslim world, could also apply to Chinese dynasties. At their origins, the Sung, Yuan, Ming, and Ch’in each displayed considerable martial virtue and a capacity for effective rule. Yet over time, the regimes became increasingly weak and corrupt. Legions of privileged bureaucrats, aristocrats, and idle soldiers siphoned off the wealth of empire. This inevitably left the dynastic capitals vulnerable to new nomadic invasions.
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This process of successive enfeeblement is not uniqe to Asian or Islamic societies. Aristocratic classes in Europe also often grew weaker after generations in power. Yet in contrast with the East, Europe’s rising urban merchant and artisan classes provided a vital alternative capable of invigorating the urban economy and often forcing changes in regime.

No such surge of middle-class power took place in Japan, Korea, China, India, or Egypt.
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Everywhere, autocratic regimes undermined the incentive for entrepreneurs through arbitrary taxation, confiscations, and favoritism shown toward court favorites.
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“Attacks on people’s property,” ibn Khaldun noted, “remove the incentive to acquire and gain property.”
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Commercially as well as politically, the capital cities were turning away from the world. Under the influence of neo-Confucianist scholars, China curtailed its bold explorations, to the detriment of its coastal cities.
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Such decisions ultimately would leave oceanic commerce in the hands of European traders based in cities thousands of miles away.
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These debilitating trends in the East developed just as a new capitalist spirit was rising in European cities, first in Italy and later in Great Britain and the Netherlands.
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By the late sixteenth century, some of these cities had become as wealthy as those in the East—and the wind was at their backs.

The Chinese, Indian, and Muslim regimes had little knowledge of, or even much interest in, these developments. Wealthy and powerful, secure in their systems, those ruling the great cities of North Africa, the Near East, India, or China did not generally feel threatened when the adventurers from the West appeared in their coastal towns. After all, these were simply traders from a relatively backward part of the world, producing little valued in either the bazaars or the palaces.

Even the Europeans’ high-masted, tiny ships seemed unimpressive. Yet soon these little vessels appeared with alarming frequency, becoming progressively faster and capable of ever longer trips. By the end of the seventeenth century, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch merchants had gradually seized control of trade with the spice-rich lands of Southeast Asia, capturing as well the lucrative commerce in African slaves, ivory, and gold.