The Indian Ocean (21 page)

Kulke claims that in the thirteenth century there was a large Indian settlement, complete with temple, in south China, and Chinese settlements in Cola south India.
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Chinese traded to India, but it seems that many more Indians traded to China. Indeed Polo makes clear that Indian traders had by his time replaced Arabs and were an important community at the main Chinese port, which now seems to be Zaiton, that is modern Quanzhou, rather than Guangzhou (Canton). In a famous passage he wrote that Quanzhou is

frequented by all the ships of India, which bring thither spicery and all other kinds of costly wares. It is the port also that is frequented by all the merchants of Manzi [the surrounding province], for hither is imported the most astonishing quantity of goods and of precious stones and pearls, and from this they are distributed all over Manzi.

Much later, when he got to Malabar, he again wrote, 'Ships come hither from many quarters, but especially from the great province of Manzi. Coarse spices are exported hence both to Manzi and to the west'.
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Quanzhou was located north of the modern port of Amoy, or Xiamen, opposite Taiwan. Muslims had traded there very early on, even from the seventh century, and in 1350 there were six or seven mosques in the town.
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Among the products they imported was rhinocerous horn, which establishes a connection between East Africa and China. Fujian merchants began to venture out only from the late tenth century. Indian merchants had been in Guangzhou by at least the early sixth century.
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From the twelfth century the Kling merchants from south India began to concentrate on Quanzhou, where in the mid fourteenth century they built a large Siva temple modelled on that back home in Madurai. By this time however Chinese traders were taking over the trade between China and Melaka from both Hindus and Muslims. This trade may have been fostered by the awe-inspiring state-directed expeditions of the eunuch Zheng He, to whom we must now turn.

Zheng He erected a tablet which gives a flavour of his pride and sense of superiority. He had inscribed:

We have traversed more than one hundred thousand li of immense waterspaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising sky high, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapours, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds day and night, continued their course [as rapidly as] a star, traversing those savage waves as if we were treading a public thoroughfare....

This chauvinism is reflected even more in another inscription, where he claims that during his voyages 'those among the foreigners who were resisting the transforming influence of Chinese culture and were disrespectful, we captured alive, and brigands who indulged in violence and plunder, we exterminated. Consequently the sea-route was purified and tranquillised and the natives were enabled to pursue their avocations.'
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So also with many modern authors: Mills claims in his introduction to Ma Huan's account of Zheng He's 1433 expedition that the representatives of sixty-seven foreign states, including seven kings, came to China to pay tribute and render homage. At this time, at the height of Ming power in the 1420s, Yong Le's fleet had 400 warships of the fleet, 2,700 coastal warships, 400 armed transports, and the pride of the Ming fleet, 250 treasure ships, each carrying 500 men. Throwing caution to the wind, Mills enthusiastically claims that 'China enjoyed a hegemony over a vast arc of land which extended from Japan to the east coast of Africa.'
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Comparisons have often been made with Portuguese activities at the same time in the early fifteenth century. When the Chinese were travelling all over the Indian Ocean, say in 1422, the Portuguese had not even got to Cape Bojador, 26° N. Zheng He's greatest ships were 400 feet long, while Vasco da Gama's were between 85 and 100 feet. Many senior historians have speculated that Zheng He's fleets had the ability to round the Cape of Good Hope (indeed maybe they did) and proceed north to discover western Europe. World history would have been stood on its head.

The reality is a little less exciting than this. There were a total of six expeditions between 1403 and 1433, sponsored by the Yong Le emperor of the Ming dynasty. These vast fleets travelled all around the littoral of the Indian Ocean, going as far as Jiddah, and far down the Swahili coast. Each had between 100 and 200 ships, and forty to sixty of these were the famed huge treasure ships, which could be 150 metres long. There were maybe 27,000 men in each fleet. However, most of the ships were much smaller, some for example being water carriers. Barker tentatively claims that even the size of the great treasure ships has been enthusiastically overestimated: they may have been only about 230 feet long (though this is still very large for the time).
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They are to be seen as a continuation of the tribute system, with its characteristic mixture of tribute and trade. However, the fleets also engaged in essentially pedling trade in the Indian Ocean, that is, they took goods from one place to another quite apart from any association with tribute. They took southeast Asian sandalwood and Indian pepper to Aden and Dhofar, Indian pepper to Hurmuz, sandalwood and rice to Mogadishu, and rice, probably from Bengal, to the Maldives.
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Perhaps the most important point is that Zheng He (perhaps understandably) has bewitched historians, and led to their ignoring three important matters that place his voyages in context. First, his activities were really a continuation of a long tradition, albeit writ large. Second, the tribute system, so-called, hardly meant Chinese suzerainty all over the Indian Ocean. Third, for much of the time the expeditions engaged in humble Indian Ocean trade alongside many other merchants. We described Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo travelling in private, and very large, Chinese ships, and generally Chinese merchants, often ignoring official prohibitions on overseas trade, dominated the trade from their coast to southeast Asia, and at least up to the middle of the fifteenth century, well after the end of major state expeditions, participated fully in trade from Melaka to the west coast of India but not beyond.

Overall then Chinese merchants, and state expeditions, played a rather small and transient role in the Indian Ocean proper. We can now turn to a discussion of ports, routes and traders in the Indian Ocean up to about 1500.

There are several ways to categorise ports around the Indian Ocean at this time. Some owed much to geography, either because they were located on choke points, or because they had productive hinterlands. Some were pure exchange centres, others had some industry of their own. Some were subordinate to a larger inland state, while others were port city states, or perhaps, to borrow the southeast Asian
term, port polities. We noticed earlier that port cities have connections with the near interior, that is the umland, with their hinterland, and with their foreland, that is the areas of the overseas world with which the port is linked through shipping, trade and passenger traffic. It is this characteristic which means that port cities by definition are cosmopolitan, much more so than the inland. The visitors are very different from inland peasant populations. These are

some of the most enterprising and dynamic individuals, people whose horizons have been broadened by time and exposure, whose skins wear the deep hue of the 'tanning of travel.' They bring awareness of an enlarged macrocosm to their host community, transfusing resident populations with new ideas in the give of foreign expertise and the take of local hospitality.
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Where were the major port cities in the Indian Ocean area in our period? We should start in East Africa. In the far south, Sofala provided gold and ivory from the far interior. The gold was mined or washed in the inland Mutapa state in present day Zimbabwe and brought to the coast to be exchanged for cloth and other manufactures from India and the Middle East. To the north, Kilwa was the great emporium on the coast between roughly 1250 and 1330, from which time date a great mosque and palace, the latter being the largest roofed stone building south of the Sahara until modern times. By 1500 the greatest port city was Mombasa, an important centre of exchange of ivory and gold from the south for manufactures from the west and north. Malindi was a smaller centre at this time, but Mogadishu benefited from its proximity to the Red Sea and Hadhramaut to be another important port. All of these ports on the Swahili coast were autonomous politically, and indeed engaged in much competition and even conflict with each other. The only substantial interior state at this time was the Mutapa empire, and its sway ended far from the coast. None of them were important centres of production: rather they acted as outlets for export goods from the interior, gold and ivory especially. Consequently connections with the interior were of crucial importance. Yet here and elsewhere the major products traded were humble bulk goods carried along the coast in a myriad of small dhows: mangrove poles, cheap cloth, food, even water.

Moving along the coast, Aden was usually a great port city because of its location at the entrance to the Red Sea. It was also very much an exchange centre or echelle, for it was almost an island, cut off as it is from the inland by the mountains which surround it. It had no hinterland. There were several ports within the Red Sea, but the greatest certainly was Jiddah. It had been a major port for many centuries, occasionally helped by government policy. In 1429 the Mamluk sultan even decreed that spices from the east could only be sold in Jiddah, and only to his agents.
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In that century the port was known to the Arabs as the 'Bride of the Red Sea'.
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Portuguese accounts of trade before their arrival make clear Jiddah's central role. Barros wrote that it was the major focus of the spice trade, saying that Jiddah, with
its buildings, trade and commerce, and because almost all the ships that come from India call at it, 'is the most celebrated and noble settlement of all this Arabian coast inside the entrance', and added that 'most of the residents of that city [Jiddah] were merchants, because of the merchandise that flowed through it, both entering and leaving'.
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Elsewhere he described how the goods came down from Cairo, and the ships called at Jiddah. From there the goods went off to the Arabian Sea directly, not calling at Aden, with their times of sailing determined by the monsoons. They left the Red Sea 'in the months of navigation, when the westerlies prevail', and came back with the easterlies.
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The situation in the Gulf varied over time. At the beginning of our period, when the Abbasid empire was flourishing, the largest ships could not reach Basra, let alone Baghdad, because the estuary and the delta of the Tigris-Euphrates were very difficult to navigate. For a brief time, the first half of the tenth century, Sohar was an important port, with contacts up the Gulf and across to Africa. After it was sacked by the Buyids from Oman it was replaced by Siraf, on the east coast of the Gulf south of Shiraz, where large boats were unloaded and their goods taken in smaller ships to the great cities further north. Going south, ships went from Siraf to Muscat and Sohar, then either to Daybul or ports in Malabar, then around Sri Lanka to Melaka, up to Hanoi, and then to Guangzhou. Typically, this trade was at first handled in its entirety by Muslim traders, some Persians but increasingly Arabs, and from about 1000 became more segmented, with Chinese coming some of the way, and Indians also involved as goods were trans-shipped and sold on at one or other of these great echelles.
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The other great port in the Gulf in late Abbasid times, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, was Qeys, Qais or Kish, on a small island down the Gulf from Siraf. Here Indians brought in spices, people from Yemen, Iraq and Fars provided silks and cloths, wheat, barley and millet. There was also a large slave trade, and ivory, gold, wood, skins and ambergris from East Africa. Horses were sent out to the Deccan. Pearls were another export from this major port, while there have been many finds of Chinese ceramics.

Hurmuz, located on the choke point at the entrance to the Gulf, was always an important exchange centre, but rose to greater prominence in the fifteenth century. Most of these great marts were independent of any exterior political authority at this time. They acted as major centres for the exchange of Middle Eastern and even European goods for products from all over the Indian Ocean area. Located on barren foreshores, and deficient even in water, let alone food, most had no major productive role, nor extensive hinterland. Rather they were hinges linking areas to the north with those to the south and east.

As we move southeast from the Gulf we begin to find variations on this pattern. Ports in the area around the Indus delta, the first part of South Asia to be conquered and converted to Islam, drew on a large and quite productive hinterland. Daybul, or Bambhore, at the mouth of the Indus, was a very old emporium which declined from the eleventh century as a result of silting. It was replaced by Lahari Bandar, but then there was also a major port at Thatta from the fifteenth century, located no less than 200 kms up the river from the coast.

The great ports of Gujarat were certainly important centres of exchange, but they were located on the maritime fringe of important production centres for such products as indigo, saltpetre, and especially a vast variety of cotton cloths. Indeed, some of the manufacturing process was done in these very port cities. In our period the greatest port was Cambay, at the head of the Gulf of Cambay. This, like many other ports within and around the gulf, was not an independent city state: rather it was part of the important Muslim sultanate of Gujarat. Here were huge volumes of trade, skilful merchants, and a very well articulated network of production and exchange and credit. For such ports, that is those with productive interiors, connections with the land were obviously crucial, as compared with say Aden and Hurmuz, which being dependent on the exchange of products from all over the Indian Ocean, but not from their interiors, were less concerned about what happened directly inland from them.