442 Part VI: European Empires in Asia
reaped the benefits of a continuous sea-based trade, the southern trade route of
Eurasia. The first to do so was the Srivijayan Empire, a contemporary of the
very different, land- and agriculture-based state of Angkor. Srivijaya thrived on
a trade that linked the treasures of China—porcelain, silk, lacquers—with
India, the Middle East, and ultimately Europe. This trade link was based on a
model of international trade very different from the one Europeans were to
bring in a later period—the theoretical notion, at least, of “free trade” among
“equal” nations, this idea that dominates even today. For Srivijaya to be able to
play the middleman role between China, on the one hand, and a host of Indian
and Arab traders, on the other, the empire had to submit to the Chinese model
of international trade. For China, there could only be exchanges between the
Middle Kingdom and its tributary states. There was no question of equal trade
between equal nations. No nation was the equal of China, and the emperor
was the Son of Heaven; nominally, at least, he claimed to be the emperor of the
entire world. The Chinese knew of the existence of nations beyond their con-
trol and made no particular assertions about them, but any nation wanting to
engage in trade with China had to formally acknowledge China’s suzerainty by
arriving with “tribute” and performing the three kneelings and nine prostra-
tions before a symbol of the emperor. In return, they were lavished with gifts of
greater value than they had brought, plus an imperial letter of patent, a seal of
rank, and the Chinese calendar. They then had the legal right to trade and
could get on with business. This vassal status may have seemed like a small
humiliation for Srivijaya, since it did not involve them in any effort by China to
dominate them politically, and it gave them access to the wealth of Chinese
goods so desired in the rest of the world.
A third center of trade was a network linking Indian and Arab merchants
in the Indian Ocean. Imagine the Indian Ocean as an enormous version of the
Mediterranean Sea; small, coast-hugging trading ships could make stops along
a vast semicircle from Zanzibar to Arabia to the two coasts of India to Burma
to Indonesia. Calicut on the Malabar coast was a rich trade city where mer-
chants who worked these waters exchanged gold, jewels, ivory, silk, and spices.
In the early 1500s when the first Portuguese ships began going directly to
the Spice Islands, they described encountering enormous ships plying Southeast
Asian waters, larger than their own largest ships. All were over 200 tons, and
some were as large as 1,000 tons and carried 1,000 men. They were called jong
in Malay and Javanese, which the Portuguese called junco. (The English learned
this term, “junk,” and applied it to Chinese ships.) The main builders of these
ships, heirs to 2,000 years of shipbuilding, were all along the north coast of Java
and in southern Borneo and Pegu, close to the teak forests. The Srivijayan
empire was long gone, and these were local sultans and merchants engaged in
the lucrative long-distance, high-seas shipping, traveling to southern China,
Malacca, the Coromandel coast of India, Aden, the Red Sea, and Madagascar.
A fourth trade network was the land-based northern Eurasian route, the
stretch of central Asia crossed by the ancient Silk Road. Throughout its history,