China thus stood in sharp contrast to Atlantic Europe. The southward shift
of the Chinese state’s economic center of gravity would add a new oceanic
dimension to the Chinese experience. Thus a ‘‘blue,’’ salt-water China of the
south could emerge alongside the ‘‘yellow,’’ earthbound China of the north.
‘‘In the north go by horse, in the south go by boat,’’ runs the old Chinese
proverb. South China has no great coastal plain analogous to that of the north.
But many lakes and streams, the aquatic environment of much of southeast
China, made it relatively easy to dig canals and to fuse the natural with the man-
made into what became, in all likelihood, the premodern world’s most extensive
water-based system for moving goods. Since land transport of bulk items at any
distance was prohibitively expensive, this waterway system conferred enormous
economic advantages. Cheap transport thus became the engine for premodern
China’s great leap into global economic primacy.
The jagged southeastern coast, with its many inlets and harbors shut off
from large mainland spaces, encouraged the evolution of many dialects and
distinctive cuisines. Local people looked to the sea. Fishing, trade, and piracy
all flourished in their outward surge. Fishermen and merchants and their
families would sometimes live out their lives in coastal waters. As the poet
Po Chu-I wrote of a salt merchant’s wife, ‘‘wind and waves are her village, her
ship her mansion.’’
Thousands of ships carried grain up the coast to feed the hungry north,
venturing out into open sea, but whenever possible hugging the coastline to take
advantage of comfortably predictable currents, as well as seasonal winds that blew
southward in the winter before reversing in the summer. The ease of sailing with
the wind on these north–south voyages may have ultimately been corrupting,
encouraging Chinese mariners to confine themselves to monsoonal seas rather
than braving adverse weather.
The typical ship was the junk, a sturdy craft that was the product of centuries
of continuous improvement. Shipwrights would use nails to hammer the planks
together, varnishing the timbers with water-resistant tung oil and partitioning the
interior spaces with watertight bulkheads, improving a damaged vessel’s chances
of survival. Fishermen first devised these compartments in order to flood part
of their ship’s hold and thus get their catch live to the market. These ships, their
sails raised and lowered by pulley and slatted like Venetian blinds with bamboo
battens, boasted sternpost rudders, sounding leads, and star charts as standard
equipment. Chinese mariners began to use the magnetic compass a century
before Europeans did.
Joseph Needham has pointed out the curious fact that whereas Europeans built
their ships in the shape of a fish, bulging out from the bow and tapering to the
stern, the Chinese built theirs in the shape of a water bird, swelling aft with the
mass of the structure at the stern. Like today’s giant oil tankers, the superstructure
rose far aft, well abaft any masts, leaving ample space for cargo.24 Asia Looks Seaward