Seagoing ships were faster than those coursing inland waterways, but they
required much larger crews for the amount of cargo carried than did river craft,
and, for all their seaworthiness, they probably suffered many a disaster from the
vagaries of wind and wave. Here lay the incentive to find a sheltered route.
Furthermore, the sea lay beyond the reach of the official’s grasping hand and
was open to private entrepreneurship. The government bureaucracy preferred
to see inland waterways used. These they could control, and from them they
could illegally squeeze personal profit. Chinese officials were modestly paid but
expected to become rich in office. The bribes or ‘‘fees’’ they customarily exacted
from the long-suffering populace were traditionally described as being ‘‘as
numerous as the hairs on the hide of an ox.’’ The complex canal system with its
many fees could sustain a large bureaucracy; ocean transport did not.
The Grand Canal ran for more than a thousand miles from south to north,
connecting the two great river valleys, Yellow and Yangzi, and linking Beijing
with the south. It thus fed the capital district from the centers of greatest food
production while avoiding the disadvantages, both perceived and real, of ship-
ment on the open sea. Sometimes human feet moved treadmills turning paddle
wheels, but the Chinese never used large numbers of oarsmen; nothing like the
Mediterranean galley operated in Chinese waters. Poling, or propelling long
heavy oars with a fishtailing motion, boatmen scraped the sandy shallows of the
Grand Canal, moving at a maximum speed of two miles per hour but making
steady progress. Traffic had to be seasonal, avoiding both the low water and ice
of winter and the monsoon floods of summer.
Year round the Yangzi pulsated with east–west boat traffic, even through
the gorges. There gangs of sweating trackers pulled bamboo hawsers attached
to boats laboring upstream against some of the world’s stiffest currents. With
painful slowness the men moved along a narrow path carved out of the cliff face,
with live rock to one side and death on the other.
Sino-Japanese Clashes
At the turn of the first millennium, the northern capital fell to the nomads
following one of their frequently successful invasions of China. In 1135, accord-
ingly, the Chinese established a new capital at Hangzhou, on the coast to the
south of the Yangzi mouth. This was the first (and only) seaport to serve as the
imperial capital. But it could play the imperial role for only 150 years before
the Mongol conquest of all of China. The temporary political shift prompted
by the move to Hangzhou did not form new values; it created no new set of
attitudes about the ocean.
Foreign hands and foreign ships—Muslims, Arabs, Persians, and Gujerati
from northwest India—conducted much of China’s overseas trade at the time.
The government tried to limit trade to certain ports so it could be more easily
Imperial China and the Sea 25