(^42) Chapter Two
This partial coalescence between mercantile and official outlooks
reached its apogee under the Mongols (the Yüan dynasty, 1227—
1368), who did not share the Confucian disdain for shrewd traders.
Marco Polo’s reception at Kublai’s court illustrates this fact. He was,
indeed, only one of many foreign merchants whom Kublai appointed
as tax collectors and to other key administrative posts in his empire.^39
Under the Ming (1368–1644) reaction against the alliance between
mercantile and military enterprise set in, though not at once, for some
of its most spectacular results came early in the fifteenth century,
when Chinese fleets explored the Indian Ocean for political-commer
cial purposes.
The imperial venture into the Indian Ocean built upon a naval
tradition that took shape with the establishment of the southern Sung
dynasty. When K’ai-feng fell to the Jürchen in 1126, a scion of the
ruling house fled to the south and proved able to defend the remnant
of the empire at the river barriers that still protected him from the
barbarians of the north. He did so by creating a navy. Instead of
relying on infantry forces stationed in fortified strongholds along a
land frontier, as the northern Sung had done, after 1126 the southern
Sung government came to rely on specially designed warships to guard
against the Jürchen horsemen.
Initially the Sung navy was used primarily on inland waterways.
New types of vessels, including armored ships driven by treadmills
and paddle wheels, were invented for river and canal fighting. Cross
bowmen and pikemen provided the main offensive and defensive
element, but large projectile-throwing machines of the kind that had
long been used in land sieges and for the defense of fortified places
were also mounted on the bigger vessels. It was, in general, an adapta
tion of methods of land warfare to shipboard, each ship playing the
role of mobile strongpoint. Equipping such a navy, numbering hun
dreds of ships and manned by as many as 52,000 men,^40 required an
even more complex assemblage of raw materials and manufactured
parts than the land army of the northern Sung had required. All the
- Herbert Franz Schurmann, Economic Structure of the Yüan Dynasty (Cambridge,
Mass., 1967), pp. 3–4. Herbert Franke, “Ahmed: Ein Beitragzur Wirtschaftsgeschichte
Chinas unter Qubilai,” Oriens 1 (1948): 222–36, describes the rise and fall of the most
spectacularly successful of these outsiders. He was a Moslem born in Transcaucasia who
became chief administrator of the salt and other monopolies. Yet the greater scope
the Mongols accorded to merchants went along with such an energetic mobilization of
shipping for state purposes that Chinese seaborne trade suffered serious setback, ac
cording to Lo Jung-pang, “Maritime Commerce,” pp. 57–100. - Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge, 1971), 4,
pt. 3:476.