As in the case of the Portuguese, early Dutch contacts with
China moved rapidly from mutual incomprehension, to frustration, to
armed conflict. After Dutch requests to trade were refused (1604,
1607), force was used. A Dutch flotilla first unsuccessfully attacked
Macau in 1622, then was driven from the Pescadores islands, and
finally established a fort on Taiwan. From there the Dutch opened
regular trading relations with Japan, though the China trade contin-
ued to elude them.
If China took little interest in these developments, wracked as it
was by internal rebellion, Southeast Asian rulers and their courts cer-
tainly did. It did not take regional political elites long to realise that
Europeans were greedy and ruthless in their pursuit of trade; that they
were prepared to intervene in local politics; and that their superior
military technology was a two-edged benefit—it could be used by
Southeast Asian rulers, and it could be used against them. With the
arrival of the Dutch, something else was evident: there were different
kinds of Europeans, and they did not like each other. One kind could
therefore be played off against another.
In both Burma and Cambodia in the first half of the seventeenth
century, Portuguese and Spanish freebooters attempted unsuccessfully
to seize political power. With its capital at Batavia, the VOC estab-
lished a maritime commercial empire capable of bringing political
pressure to bear throughout the Indonesian archipelago. European mer-
cenaries served in both the Burmese and Siamese armies, while
European arms merchants plied their trade to anyone who would buy.
When civil war broke out in 1627 between the Trinh in the north and
the Nguyen in the south of Vietnam, the Dutch supported and sold
arms to the north, while the Portuguese did the same for the south.
Arms and precious metals were about the only European goods of
value in regional trade. European manufactured goods, including
woollen cloth and linen, were not in demand. Arms were mostly pur-
chased by ruling elites, while silver and gold were in high demand from
Asian merchants. Silver, in particular, fuelled European trade with
A Short History of China and Southeast Asia