The Era of Chinese 'Predominance, 1000–1500 45chants and capitalists built and operated large ships. Standard patterns
for management of crew and cargo, for sharing risks and gains, and for
settling disputes arising from transactions at a distance came to be well
defined.^45 Lands close to China’s coast—Manchuria, Korea, Japan—
were common destinations; but Chinese shipping had begun to enter
the Indian Ocean several decades before Cheng Ho’s imperial squad
rons first went there. The scale of Chinese trade in south Asia and east
Africa seems to have spurted upwards from the middle of the twelfth
century. The best index of this is offered by sherds of Chinese porce
lain found along the African coast. They can be dated quite accurately,
and show that trade started as early as the eighth century (presumably
carried in Moslem ships); but quantities increased sharply after 1050,
when Chinese vessels regularly began to enter the Indian Ocean by
rounding the Malay peninsula instead of sending goods across the Kra
Isthmus by land portage, which had been the usual practice in earlier
centuries.^46
Just as the rapid growth of coke-fueled blast furnaces in the
eleventh century leads someone attuned to European history to sup
pose that an industrial revolution of general significance ought to have
followed, so the overseas empire China had created by the early
fifteenth century impels a westerner to think of what might have been
if the Chinese had chosen to push their explorations still further. A
Chinese Columbus might well have discovered the west coast of
America half a century before the real Columbus blundered into His
paniola in his vain search for Cathay. Assuredly, Chinese ships were
seaworthy enough to sail across the Pacific and back. Indeed, if the
like of Cheng Ho’s expeditions had been renewed, Chinese navigators
might well have rounded Africa and discovered Europe before Prince
Henry the Navigator died (1460).
But the officials of the imperial court chose otherwise. After 1433
they launched no more expeditions to the Indian Ocean, and in 1436
issued a decree forbidding the construction of new seagoing ships.
Naval personnel were ordered to man the boats that plied the inland
- For details of how Chinese overseas shipping and trade were financed, and how
ships were commanded, controlled, and crewed, see Shiba, Commerce and Society in Sung
China, pp. 15–40. For a survey of what Chinese merchants knew about the world
beyond the oceans, see Chau Ju-kua, On the Chinese and Arab Trade in the 12th and 13th
Centuries, trans. Friedrich Hirth and W. W. Rockhill (St. Petersburg and Tokyo, 1914). - August Toussaint, History of the Indian Ocean (Chicago, 1966), pp. 74–86; Paul
Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese: Studies in the Historical Geography of the Malay Pen
insula before 1500 A.D. (Kuala Lumpur, 1961), pp. 292–320; K. Mori, “The Beginning
of Overseas Advance of Japanese Merchant Ships,” Acta Asiatica 23 (1972): 1–24.