CHAPTER 2
IMPERIAL CHINA AND THE SEA
John Curtis Perry
If you stand on Cape Agulhas, that needlelike promontory at the southernmost
tip of Africa, and look out at the ocean, you will see a sign announcing that on
the left you are facing the Indian Ocean and on the right the Atlantic. This is a
terracentric view of the world. Of course what you face is an uninterrupted body
of water, a reminder that the salt-water space of the globe is united in the world
ocean. Salt water may separate continents, but itself it forms an undivided whole.
The ocean covers more than 70 percent of the global surface; we are the blue
planet, a body of water spinning through space, more accurately called Ocean,
not Earth. The sea is outside us, the sea is within us; we ourselves are watery
creatures. As John F. Kennedy put it in a speech toasting the Australian winners
of the America’s Cup sailing race in 1962, ‘‘We have salt in our blood, salt in
our sweat, salt in our tears.’’ The composition of the human organism is about
70 percent salty water. Thus each of us is the globe in microcosm.
Humanity is drawn to the sea. Eight of the world’s ten largest cities lie at the
ocean’s edge. Nearly one-half of the world’s people live within one hundred miles
of salt water, and that proportion is growing as people seek out the sea. We are
lured to that from which life itself springs.
We can divide the world’s land areas into continental and coastal, those that
face oceanic space and those that do not—turf and surf, we might say. This is a
simple matter of geography. Continental empires have played a vastly significant
role in history. One of the greatest was that of the Mongols who swept from
Pacific shores almost to the Adriatic, opening a huge area to flows of commerce
and culture. But the Mongols’ rule was short; their nomadic patterns of life made
for political instability and great fluctuations of power and influence.
Other Eurasian societies such as China practiced sedentary agriculture and
engaged in a continuing contest with their nomadic neighbors, a struggle
between steppe and sown, the man on horseback vs. the man with a plow.