I agre keep Song alive in all of China and I see China industrializing earlier or around the same time as England.
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Why Was China Passive In The Indian Ocean?
- Thread starter Tordenskjold
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Redhand
Banned
Chinese court politics changed after 1433 and Zheng He dying. The Ming started to look at consolidating land expansion in Asia rather than continuing to send out huge treasure fleets. Their economy never relied on the seas as the Dutch and Portuguese economies did. Tax collection and internal tariffs were the way that the Ming made their yearly revenue, and the trade fleets were seen as a needless distraction by many in the imperial court. The northern frontier as always needed watching and tending to.
I don't know how much a role this might have played but traditional Confucian values looked down on merchants who were among the bottom of the social ladder. To be fair the best way to make money was to take the state exams , land a cushy government job, then retire early and drink wine and write poems
Or become a merchant then a pirate then an admiral then have your son become the King of Taiwan.
As I understand it the Chinse view of Europe/India/Africa etc. was along the lines of:
China is civilization, and civilization is china. It is surrounded by assorted barbarians, not all of whom are crushingly poor and ignorant savages (but most are). Some merchants who are even more money-hungry and uncouth than the rest of their ilk have earned reasonable sums of money by dealing with these barbarians, but not anything particularly impressive (a few tons of silver here and there). Therefore barbarian-trading is unworthy of the attention of the emperors officials, but if his subjects wish to indulge that's fine, so long as they pay their taxes.
Whereas the european view of India/China (and to a much lesser extent africa) was more like: OMFG MONEY! SOOOO MUCH MONEY!!! MONEYMONEYMONEYMONEY!!!! MONEYUPMONEYDOWNMONEYSIDEWAYS!!
We HAVE to get some of THIS!! And keep those others f@*&%ers out of OUR MONEYPIT! Everybody up for a MOOOOONEYPARTY!1111111!elventy!!
God help me, I laughed my ass off.
While it may be more ressources than money itself (The symbolical value of spices in the medieval world was just huge)- and that Africa wasn't that let off - assorted, for the iberic powers, from a strong sense of continuing the Reconquista and struggle against Muslims.
As in replacing MONEY by SPICE/GOLD/SILVER/SUGAR/BLOODY UNICORNS, and fuckers by EXTERMINATE MUSLIMS ON SEA, EXTERMINATE, EXTEEERMINAAAAAAAATE.
But your point is still valid.
China had allegedly mapped the World (China developed advanced mapping techniques at the same time as the Romans but unlike the Europeans never lost them during the middle ages) and had according to some admittedly spurious sources (namely Rowan Menzies*) colonies in Africa and the Americas before Columbus was born!
*A lot of his work has been attacked - mainly due to his lack of academic credentials and methods etc - but I feel a lot of it may be in defence of the accepted established history.
We can accept that Vikings made it to North America in 11C in open Long baots but not the Chinese in the 15C with Large almost unsinkable Junks
What ever the truth what is known is that series of large and for the time very impressive expeditions almost bankrupted the Chinese Government between 1405 and 1433!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_voyages
This resulted in the new Emperor under severe pressure from his Mandarins to seriously curtail such adventurism and eventually end those trading fleets (apparently to the point of burning the ship yards!).
Another issue was the destabilising impact that European Ideas and inventions was having on Chinese Society and there was an attitude of enforced isolation (as the Portuguese were to discover).
So at the point where the Renaissance was driving European Exploration and expansion, China was entering a period of Self imposed Isolation and Decline.
Oh, yeah, the famous "Official History" nonsense. God I didn't missed that.
It's not like methodology, credibility or facts count, no. What's the use of that anyway?
If you oppose someone theory based on nothing but misunderstandings or outright fraud, it's only because you don't like it, and because of the "big official history" being mean.
It wasn't just symbolic. They needed spices to preserve food. Especially pepper, which pretty much came out of... one island, I believe, in those days.
Of course, they also had a rather... broad definition of what constituted a spice--the word could pretty much mean "rare stuff we can't make here on our own" at times.
He also said the Chinese sailed right up to Venice and started the Renaissance didn't he?
Spices weren't used for that, as they were really really expansive : an ounce of pepper could worth more than an ounce of gold.
Salt, brine, drying, acid sauces or even ice were mostly favoured, and if noble cuisine had reltivly less of these it was less because of a better preparation than all of a specific alimentation trading.
Medieval cuisine still, took a great interest on spice as it fit medicinal conceptions, based on humorism.
For exemple, a fish (cold and wet) and to be prepared in order to harmonise it : more dry and hot. Spices could contribue to that due to their effect (as pepper) or to their colours (associated to humours, such as yellow safran (hot and dry).
The best equivalent I could find, would be how today eating "organics" is taking on as both recommanded medically, fitting the mainstream conceptions and allowing to look good.
Oh, bugger. I think several of my neurons made a collective suicide.
I thought that the main reason for this was the Chinese turn inwards, but I have no idea what year that happened and could have been later. Also why bother doing a treacherous trade route to India when you have everything you need in vassals much closer plus if there was anything I think the traders would come to china rather then china coming to them
As in the one that also goes by Gavin Menzies? If I remember right, he also said that the Chinese sailed 83 miles up the Congo in the 1400s, they built the Newport Tower, and that there are wrecks of Junks off the coast of Oregon and California. There are a lot of reasons his stuff is called into question.
Oh gods that is a terrible title for a book and this the legit title
"1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance"
Yep, this is really frustrating. Many of the officials' attitude towards trade and also military are always a big problem.
Sure, uncontrolled merchants and military are big problems but without merchants and soldiers, how the hell will the state get the big chunk of the income and how will the state defend itself ?
These officials really need to get their head hammered and see what the real daily life looks like instead of fantasizing some idealized utopia / court life.
Confucian values need to be adapted to real life situation and combined with other values (legalism. etc) where it's necessary.
This is not much different from someone learning The Art of War but unable to adapt to the ever-changing situations in real battles...
Redhand
Banned
Honestly, if you have ever seen a Chinese Gvt Internet troll, they tend to espouse this view more or less. There have been some on this site before and they are hilarious.
In a sense, China always had more issues to deal with on land than at sea. Ming China (the core bits anyway) was approximately the size of half of Europe and several times its population: internal and external enemies were therefore proportionally much larger than what Portugal, France, or any other European power had to deal with.
This is not to mention the resurgence of the Mongols in the late 1400s under Esen Khan, the emergence of a unified Japanese state following the Sengoku period in the 1500s and the Imjin War, and finally the renewed threat of the Manchus in the 1600s. The Ming state spent disproportionate effort manning the northern frontier; there wasn't much left for an official push into the south - and one could argue that without state shouldering of risk, mercantile interests had no incentive to mount expeditions into the unknown.
The Ming dynasty itself was also a 'national-security state' of sorts, very suspicious about internal threats to its rule and frequently employing an array of agencies to control dissent. This also meant that it sought to control population movement, a tendency that only increased when the arrival of Japanese wokou created large refugee populations on the coast that were as likely to become bandits and pirates as they were to submit to Ming rule. A series of 'Coastal Ban Edicts' would be issued throughout the course of the mid-Ming, which banned all oceangoing activities and created a 'zone of exclusion' stretching c.10 miles from the coast. This method was again used during Qing times, and unsurprisingly it really tanked Chinese naval aspirations.
Generally speaking, the bulk of Chinese navigation was riverine, rather than sea-based. While in Europe international mercantile transport largely required mastery of the sea due to geographic reasons, in China you had the Yangtze and the Yellow River serving as two major conduits linking the country together. With the construction of the Grand Canal during the Sui, the merchants in the prosperous Yangtze Delta also gained the ability to transport goods to northern cities without going through the risks of shipping their goods using a sea-route. Not to say that oceanic activity never happened, but it simply wasn't such a big deal for China as it was for other nations.