China as a Sea Power, 1127–1368: A Preliminary Survey of the Maritime Expansion and Naval Exploits of the Chinese People During the Southern Song and Yuan Periods

By Jung-pang Lo

Lo Jung-pang argues that during each of the three periods when imperial China embarked on maritime enterprises (the Qin and Han dynasties, the Sui and early Tang dynasties, and Song, Yuan, and early Ming dynasties), coastal states took the initiative at a time when China was divided, maritime trade and exploration subsequently peaked when China was strong and unified, and declined as Chinese power weakened. At such times, China's people became absorbed by internal affairs, and state policy focused on threats from the north and the west. These cycles of maritime activity, each lasting roughly five hundred years, corresponded with cycles of cohesion and division, strength and weakness, prosperity and impoverishment, expansion and contraction.


In the early 21st century, a strong and outward looking China is again building up its navy and seeking maritime dominance, with important implications for trade, diplomacy and naval affairs. Events will not necessarily follow the same course as in the past, but Lo Jung-pang's analysis suggests useful questions for the study of events as they unfold and decades to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: National University of Singapore Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9789971697136

Book preview

China as a Sea Power

1127–1368

Contents

List of Tables

List of Figures

Foreword by Bruce A. Elleman

Preface by Lo Jung-pang

Acknowledgements

Editorial Note

Introduction by Geoff Wade

PART I: FACTORS CONTRIBUTING TO CHINA’S MARITIME EXPANSION

Chapter 1. China’s Rise as a Naval Power

The Early Thallasic States

The Qin and Han Period

Invasion of Min-Yue

The Medieval Thallasic States

Overseas Campaigns of the Sui

The Korean Wars of the Early Tang Period

The Wutai and Northern Song Period

Chapter 2. The Shift to the Sea

The Shift of Economic Centers

The Eruption of the Nomads

The Relocation of the Capital

Demographic Changes

Psychological, Cultural, and Intellectual Changes

A New and Expansive Spirit

The Push to the Sea

Chapter 3. The Foundation of Chinese Maritime Power

Absolutism and Centralization of Political Power

The Rise of the Merchant Class

Spirit of Adventure

Geographical Knowledge

Aids to Navigation

The Development of Ship Technology

Arms and Armament

PART II: THE SOUTHERN SONG PERIOD, 1127–1279

Chapter 4. Creation of the Southern Song Navy

Building a New Song Navy

The Jurchen Threat

Naval Engagements in 1130

Growing Support for the Navy

The Office of Coastal Control

Expansion of the Navy

Charter of Merchant Ships, Recruiting, and Anti-Piracy Patrols

Chapter 5. The War of 1161 and the Expansion of the Navy

Building a Navy and the Sea Fight at Chenjiadao

The Battle of Caishi

The Song Program of Naval Expansion

Changes in Song Naval Organization

Naval Personnel and Weapons

Naval Use of Merchant Ships

The Song Navy at Maximum Strength

Chapter 6. Development of Maritime Trade

Economic Crisis and Foreign Trade

The Importance of Maritime Revenue

Promotion of Maritime Trade

The Impact of Foreign Merchants

Chinese Overseas Colonies

Development of Harbors

Trade and Development of the Navy

PART III: THE YUAN PERIOD, 1260–1367

Chapter 7. The Emergence of the Yuan Navy: The Battle of Yaishan, 1279

The Mongol Invasion of China

The Yangzi Campaign, 1275

The Fall of the Song Capital at Hangzhou

Chinese Counter-Offensives

Operations off the Guangdong Coast

Both Sides Prepare for the Showdown

The Battle of Yaishan, 19 March 1279

Chapter 8. Yuan Campaigns in the Eastern Sea

Preparing Korea for the Maritime Invasion of Japan

The First Expedition against Japan, 1274

Preparations for the Second Invasion of Japan

The Eastern Fleet in Action

Arrival of the Southern Division

Preparation for the Third Invasion

Further Preparations for Invading Japan

Chapter 9. Yuan Naval Campaigns to the South

The Mongol Invasion of Southeast Asia

The Expedition against Champa, 1283

The Second Campaign against Annam, 1285

The Third Invasion of Annam

The Expedition against Java, 1293

Mongol Support for Foreign Trade

The Yuan Dynasty’s Overseas Trade Empire

PART IV: CONCLUSIONS

Conclusions: The Collapse of the Yuan, Rise of the Ming, and China as a Sea Power

The Rise of Piracy

The Han Exodus out of Yuan China

The Rise of the Ming Dynasty

The Expeditions of Zheng He

The End of the Ming Expeditions

China as a Sea Power

Concluding Thoughts

Selected Bibliography

Index

List of Tables

1. Water Control Works: Proportion of the Number on the Coast to the Total Number

2. National Revenue: Proportion of Amount from the Coastal Provinces and from the Entire Empire

3. Proportion of Coastal Population to Total Population

4. Influx of Migrants into Mingzhou, Taizhou, and Fuzhou (Song Period)

5. Percentage of Floods and Droughts in Two Periods of History

6. Ratio of City-Building in the Northwest and the Southeast

7. Growth of the Population of Hangzhou in the Southern Song

8. Geographical Distribution of Scholars and Literary Men in History

9. Geographical Distribution of Notable Personalities in History

10. Geographical Distribution of Notable Personalities: Comparison between Henan and Zhejiang

11. Geographical Distribution of Notable Personalities Showing Concentration in the Coastal Provinces

12. Geographical Distribution of Notable Personalities in Four Coastal Provinces

13. Number of Severe Winters per century in China

14. Provincial Naval Units, 1068–85

15. Coastal Fleets, Northern Song

16. Naval Bases, 1127–32

17. Piratical Activities

18. Expansion of Existing Squadron, 1165–74

19. Squadrons Commissioned, 1167–89

20. Squadrons Commissioned, 1205–21

21. Annual Pay in the Provincial forces, 1186–89

22. Annual Pay in Cavalry and Infantry Units, 1186

23. Annual Pay in the Navy

24. The Dinghai Fleet

25. Mines and Smelting Centers

26. Annual Amount of Metals Supplied to the State

27. Revenue: Amount and Percentage Paid in Money

28. Revenue: Amount and Percentage Derived from Maritime Trade

List of Figures

1. A page from the Wu-bei-zhi charts of the early fifteenth century, showing the East coast of Africa at the bottom of the page

2. A Chinese merchant ship in Cambodia as depicted in the late twelfth-century bas-relief of Angkor Thom

3. A bas-relief decoration at Borobodur (c. 800 A.D.) in Java showing a Southeast Asian ship with clear employment of an outrigger

Foreword

In the field of China studies, one of the most important unanswered questions is whether Beijing does or does not have the strategic ambition to acquire a blue water navy, the first step to becoming an acknowledged maritime power. To date, China clearly has historical desires for a great navy, has a viable naval acquisition program to build one, has adopted major structural reforms to make the organization of a modern navy possible, has clearly defined regional maritime strategic goals, and has apparently adopted a timetable for how to obtain these goals.

However, the reason why China would desire a blue water navy is a much more elusive question. One major reason explaining why Beijing might want to acquire such an asset is to obtain the rank, fame, or power that goes along with this military capability. Most great powers have navies, so if China hopes to be included in this exclusive club then it must follow suit. But if Beijing builds such a naval fleet, then China may one day become a dangerous peer competitor of the United States, which could lead to conflict.

The value of publishing Dr. Lo Jung-pang’s book at this particular time, therefore, is to shed light on China’s previous attempts to become a sea power. Dr. Lo examines a particularly important period in Chinese history, during the Southern Song, Yuan, and early Ming dynasties, when — in his words — China was more of a sea power than a land power. If Chinese leaders today do indeed have the ambition of building an ocean-going navy, then understanding this earlier period of Chinese history is particularly important. If China succeeds, then it may soon become the most important twenty-first-century maritime rising power, certainly challenging and perhaps overpowering U.S. national interests in the Pacific and perhaps even globally.

* * *

Lo Jung-pang was born in Beijing, PRC, on 28 September 1912, the same year the Manchus abdicated and Sun Yat-sen founded the Republic of China. His father was a diplomat, so as a young child Jung-pang lived and was educated in a number of countries — England, Canada, and Singapore. He graduated from Yenching University in Beijing in 1934, and after emigrating to the U.S. during the mid-1930s, earned his M.A. in History from UC Berkeley in 1940, and — after serving during World War II in the Office of War Information in San Francisco — his Ph.D. in 1957. Along the way, he taught at Swarthmore, University of Michigan, and at the University of Washington, finishing his academic career as a tenured professor of Chinese history at the University of California, Davis.

Interestingly, Jung-pang’s father, Lo Chong, was married to Kang Tongbi (Kang Tung Pih), daughter of K’ang Yu-wei, one of China’s most famous nineteenth-century reformers. As a child, Jung-pang spent time with K’ang Yu-wei, and later told his own children stories about boating with his grandfather. Many years later, Jung-pang authored the well-known book K’ang Yu-wei: A biography and a symposium (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1967).

While he is perhaps best known for his K’ang Yu-wei book, it turns out that Jung-pang’s real interest was Chinese maritime history. While still a graduate student, he began to assist Joseph Needham by writing analytical pieces about China’s navy that were used in Needham’s ground-breaking book Science and Civilisation in China. In fact, the Needham papers at Cambridge, UK, includes well over three dozen letters and essays from Dr. Lo, on such varied topics as hydraulics, ship-building, navigation, and naval weaponry. Along the way, Dr. Lo published several seminal articles, including: The Emergence of China as a Sea-Power during the late Sung and early Yuan Periods (1955), The Decline of the Early Ming Navy (1958), China’s Paddle-Wheel Boats; the Mechanised Craft Used in the Opium War and their Historical Background (1960), and Maritime Commerce and Its Relations to the Sung Navy (1969). In 1957, he also completed a book-length manuscript combining much of his prior work on China’s navy entitled China as a Sea Power, 1127–1368.

Unfortunately, prior to his death by heart attack on 5 April 1981, Dr. Lo was never able to publish this manuscript, or a second book, entitled Empire Across the Western Ocean: Seapower and the Early Ming Navy, 1355–1449, which was specifically on the Ming treasure fleets sent to Southeast Asia. Although it is difficult to know now why they did not come out in print, perhaps it was due — in part at least — to the extraordinary attention being focused on the Soviet Union at this time; few, if any, could have predicted that thirty years later it would be China, not the USSR, that would most concern the West. Fortunately, a copy of this unpublished manuscript is part of Dr. Lo’s collected papers, held by the UC Davis library archives, and the archives and Dr. Lo’s surviving family members, including his spouse Fern Quon and his children Sandra, Anthony, and Victoria, have graciously given their permission for his work to finally be published.

* * *

Why publish a book written originally in the 1950s? What contemporary value could such a book possibly have? Well, the short answer is that at the end of the Cold War, the Soviet navy disappeared almost overnight as the world’s second most powerful naval force in the Pacific. China is now seeking to fill the vacuum left by the USSR’s collapse and build an ocean-going blue water navy. The question of the hour is can China succeed in becoming a sea power?

As Lo Jung-pang discussed in China as a Sea Power, China has tried and failed to become a sea power many times before, in particular during the Qin and Han dynasties, and then later still during the Sui and Tang dynasties. His manuscript examined the Song, Yuan, and Early Ming period, in other words the last of China’s three failed attempts to become a sea power. Dr. Lo focused on the 1127–1368 period as the crucial stage in a maritime cycle, concluding that:

... the beginning was made by coastal states when China was divided, the height was reached when China was strong and unified, and the decline took place when China weakened, the people became absorbed by internal affairs, and the policy of the state was directed to the north and the west. These cycles of maritime interest, lasting roughly five hundred years, corresponded with the cycles of cohesion and division, strength and weakness, prosperity and impoverishment, and expansion and contraction. Such is the dynamics of China’s growth as a nation. The periodic shifts of orientation, from land to sea and vice versa, have shaped the course of China’s historical, social and cultural development as well as that of her neighbors. China, with her huge population, her territorial vastness and her geographical location occupies a position of dominance in East Asia. Her neighbors to the south and the east had felt the influence of China even during the centuries when China had preferred to look inward or towards the steppes of the northwest, but the presence and influence of China is felt in far greater measure when the Chinese people push out to sea and China emerges as a sea power.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Dr. Lo’s thesis is particularly important as China appears to be entering a new — fourth — stage of maritime expansion, one that seems likely to continue until China becomes a major sea power.

Today, the entire world is watching closely as a strong and outward looking China is again building up its navy and seeking maritime dominance. If China succeeds, this could bring with it enormously important implications for global trade, diplomacy, and naval affairs. While history never repeats itself exactly, Dr. Lo’s book brings up many questions about China’s previous attempts, and previous failures, to become a sea power. It is imperative for maritime scholars to once again raise these questions for further study as events unfold in the years and decades to come.

Bruce A. Elleman

U.S. Naval War College

Preface

The three hundred years from the beginning of the twelfth century to the beginning of the fifteenth was a period of fundamental and profound metamorphosis for China. It was a period of transition as tremendous as the change from the chaos and disunity of the Warring States to the absolutism of Qin and Han, as far-reaching as the change from the disorders of the Six Dynasties to the autocracy of Sui and Tang, and as convulsive as the change from the old order to the new that is now taking place in China. The Song, Yuan, and early Ming period was a time of intellectual ferment and economic conversion and a time of political turmoil and social upheaval. As Europe emerged from the medieval to the modern world during the disorders of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, so did China emerge from the medieval to the modern world during the chaos of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries.¹ Like Europe, during its period of transition China embarked on maritime enterprises and overseas expansion.

Indeed, during the three centuries from the Southern Song to the early Ming period, the maritime and overseas activities of the Chinese people were so great in extent and consequence that China then was more of a sea power² than a land power. The China Seas were Chinese in fact as well as in name. They were a mare clausum over which the Chinese navy ranged unchallenged. Under the aegis of their naval power, the Chinese extended their political influence from Japan in the east to Ceylon in the west, from the Yellow Sea in the north to the Java Sea in the south. The merchants of China controlled the commerce of the opulent East and Chinese colonists spread their settlements to the tropical lands of the southern sea.

It was by sea more than by land that the Chinese went abroad to trade and to colonize, and it was by sea more than by land that foreign peoples and new ideas have entered China. The study of the history of China’s maritime activities is therefore of cogent value to the study of the historical and cultural development of the Chinese people. It provides the background of events in the past centuries and explanations of the reactions of the Chinese to the peoples of the West from the sixteenth century to the present. It enables the student to understand China’s past relations with the other nations in the Orient and to understand the origin of the millions of Chinese who are today residents of Southeast Asia.

It is strange, therefore, that so important a phase in the history of China has escaped the interest of most writers.³ Many Chinese historians of the traditional school of historiography in the past centuries have disdained to write about the maritime aspects of China’s history. Some Western writers, judging the China of the past by the China of the present, have refused to admit that China was ever a sea power.⁴ Others have taken the subjective view that China’s maritime contacts with the rest of the world began only when the Europeans came knocking on China’s doorway in the sixteenth century,⁵ or when they crashed open that door in the nineteenth century.⁶

Historians are today becoming more and more conscious of the great impact of the sea on the historical development of the Chinese people and of the influence exerted by China via the sea on her neighboring lands. The past century has seen the appearance of a considerable body of writings by Chinese, Japanese, and American scholars that throw light on and give interpretation to the maritime history of China. However, a study of the literature reveals that there are relatively few monographs on the maritime history of China per se. The aim of this book is to make a small beginning in filling the gap in our knowledge of the maritime phase of the history of China. As it is an ambitious project, this work can do no more than to serve as a brief introduction, and as the subject is one that is broad in temporal scope, it must unfortunately be confined to a relatively short period.

The maritime phase of China’s history during the past eight hundred years may be divided into two periods. The first from 1127 to 1450 was a period of aggressive overseas expansion, when China was a naval power. In the following chapters, only the beginning of the story is told, the part concerning the rise of China to a position of maritime predominance during the late Song and Yuan epoch from 1127 to 1368. Many historical accounts exist of the early Ming navy and its exploits that enabled China to reach the apogee of naval power.⁷ The second period was from 1517 to 1840, a time when China was largely on the defensive in her relations with the peoples of the maritime states of Eastern Asia and with the peoples of the West.⁸

The main theme of the story of China’s rise to prominence as a sea power from the twelfth to the fifteenth century is the Chinese navy of the Southern Song, Yuan, and early Ming dynasties and its performance on the waters of East Asia. Like the navies of other nations, the Chinese navy was an instrument of national policy and, as such, was subject to the exigencies of domestic politics and the conduct of foreign relations. As to the wars in which the navy took part, some were wholly naval but others were amphibious in nature, in which the actions at sea were closely related to land actions. Thus, there will have to be some discussion of political and international events and of military movements on land in order to provide background and continuity to the narration of the activities of the navy. The campaigns in inland rivers might normally appear to be beyond the scope of this monograph, but they have been described at some length because the navies of Southern Song, Yuan, and Ming all had their genesis in the wars on the Yangzi River. Riverine campaigns play an important part in building maritime forces. There are also several sections devoted to commerce and colonization, which are major factors in the development of sea power.

But as sea power is more than the possession of fleets of ships, so the history of sea power is more than a chronicle of events. Thrilling battles and adventurous voyages were numerous, but the greatest drama is that of a people’s advance to the sea. There are other facets that are less spectacular, perhaps, but which are also necessary ingredients of maritime history. Maritime history, wrote a famous British naval historian,

should not be content with a recital of disjointed events, its purpose would be to show how the influence of the sea permeated the life of the nation. It should illustrate the natural and economic forces which turned our forefathers’ attention to the sea, the ways in which the navy had been used as an instrument of policy ... the close interconnection of naval and military history, the reaction, especially financial, of domestic politics on the [navy], and the civil and administrative history of the [navy] in all its branches.⁹

This broader interpretation of the scope of maritime history is adopted here in the writing of China’s history as a sea power. Instead of recording what one critic has called the episodical aspects of conventional historiography,¹⁰ an attempt will be made to study the geographical, political, economic, and social forces that set the stage. This book will also trace the pattern of historical development and the nature and scope of China’s naval expansion and the causes for the rise and decline of China as a naval power. Finally, it will attempt to evaluate the significance and consequence of the maritime activities of the Chinese during the Song, Yuan, and early Ming period on the subsequent history of China and East Asia.

Lo Jung-pang

Acknowledgements

The editor would like to thank Fern Quon, Professor Lo Jung-pang’s late spouse, and his three children, Sandra, Anthony, and Victoria, for granting permission to publish this book. Dr. Geoff Wade, at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, first suggested approaching NUS Press to publish this book, and later agreed to write the book’s introduction. An enormous debt is due to John Skarstad, University Archivist, Special Collections, University Library at the University of California, Davis. At the Naval War College, this project benefited from the support of Maritime History Department Chairman John B. Hattendorf, Center for Naval Warfare Studies Dean Robert Barney Rubel, and Naval War College Provost Mary Ann Peters. It also owes much to Alice Juda, Wayne Rowe, and Bob Schnare for their library assistance. At NUS Press, I am grateful to the Managing Director, Dr. Paul H. Kratoska, to the Production Editor, Lena Qua, and to Foo Chuan Min, who was responsible for the insertion of Chinese characters. I would also like to extend my thanks to Robert Bickers, at Bristol University, who has kindly sent me links to high quality copies of the images that appear on the cover of the book. I am especially indebted to Andrew Marshall of the Office of Net Assessment for his ongoing support of my research on the Chinese navy.

Editorial Note

When Dr. Lo wrote this book, the use of the Wade-Giles transliteration system predominated, as did the use of complex Chinese characters. To adhere as much as possible to Dr. Lo’s original design, the first time a name, place, object, or event is mentioned, the text uses the Wade-Giles name and complex Chinese characters. Thereafter, the more common pinyin transliteration system is used. For those unfamiliar with these two systems, conversion tables are easily available at <http://madcat.library.wisc.edu/help/wadetopinyin.pdf> or .

Introduction

The name Lo Jung-pang is synonymous with studies of the maritime realm and particularly of China’s naval history. During his lifetime, which extended from the first year of the Chinese republic (1912) until his death from a heart attack in 1981, Professor Lo contributed to a wide variety of spheres of Chinese history, but it is his famous articles in maritime studies¹¹ which have been most used by generations of scholars and students.¹²

Born as a grandson of the famed Chinese reformer Kang Youwei (K’ang Yu-wei), Lo Jung-pang was a global person, studying in Ottawa, London and Singapore before attaining his B.A. at the mission-run Yenching University in China. With a move to the United States to further his studies, he obtained his masters and later, in the 1950s, his doctoral degree at the University of California Berkeley. During his years at the University of Washington in the 1950s and 1960s, he worked most intensively on the Qin and Han periods, particularly on transport, communications, and warfare. It was also during this time that his interests in maritime studies burgeoned. A paper entitled The Emergence of China as a Sea-Power during the Late Sung and Early Yuan Periods was published in the Far Eastern Quarterly in 1955, and it was this piece which provided the skeleton around which the present publication was developed. His later scholarly years were pursued at the University of California at Davis where he was appointed as Professor in 1969. At Davis he continued his work, inter alia, on maritime China, publishing Maritime Commerce and its Relation to the Sung Navy. While his later years were marked by health problems, he continued to be fascinated by China’s engagement with the maritime realm. In his obituary,¹³ it is noted that just before his death, Professor Lo completed a book-length study in draft form, entitled Empire across the Western Ocean: Seapower and the Early Ming Navy, 1355–1449, centered on the maritime expeditions to the Indian Ocean before the decline of the Ming navy. It is not known whether the 1980s project to edit and publish this work is still in train.

The Lo Jung-pang papers are now deposited in an archive at the Library of the University of California at Davis,¹⁴ while letters detailing his interactions with another doyen of Chinese studies, Joseph Needham, as well as other papers and some manuscripts, are held in the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge.¹⁵ Professor Lo always had, at any one time, a number of working papers in manuscript or almost ready to go to press.¹⁶ One of these, listed in the bibliography of Joseph Needham’s volume on Civil Engineering and Nautics, was entitled The Sung Navy 960–1279 and was noted as being in press.¹⁷ The work was, however, apparently never published and, given the overlapping periods and themes, parts of this may well have been incorporated by Professor Lo within the text published in the present volume.

* * *

The draft for China as a Seapower 1127—1368: A Preliminary Survey of the Maritime Expansion and Naval Exploits of the Chinese People During the Southern Song and Yuan Periods was completed by Lo Jung-pang in Seattle in 1957 during his time at the University of Washington. It is here presented with editorial additions and annotations by Professor Bruce A. Elleman of the U.S. Naval War College, to whom our thanks are due.

The study within the present volume presents us with far more than its title promises. The 241 years spanned in the title are presented in a manner which provides us with the most comprehensive study of Chinese naval development during the twelfth-fourteenth centuries available in the English language. But this period of maritime development in China is presented within a much longer context extending from circa 1000 B.C. to the first half of the fifteenth century.

The first section of the text provides an examination of the factors leading to Chinese maritime expansion prior to the Southern Song. Professor Lo examines the emergence of ports and polities associated with the sea, suggesting mariners crossed the seas between Shandong and Liaodong by the eighth century B.C. It is of course no surprise that people along the East Asian littoral were crossing oceans at this stage given that the Austronesians, whose origins are still debated but whose descendants continue to live in Taiwan, the islands of Southeast Asia and across the Pacific, were crossing wide oceans thousands of years B.C.¹⁸ The Chinese political and cultural incorporation of sea-going peoples along the Asian continental coast allowed access to maritime technologies previously deficient in the Chinese technological quiver. The importance of control over major estuary ports, such as those around the Yangzi Delta, for extended political control over broader areas is one of the points which Professor Lo examines and expounds upon. It is this, he suggests, that first gave rise to the need for sea-going ships as tools of Chinese political agency.

The nature or extent of the navies of King Wu of Zhou (of c. 1000 B.C.) or those over the following 1,000 years are virtually unknown to us given the minute snippets of information provided by early texts, but it is apparent that the ships of the coastal states did travel at least along the maritime littoral, as well as along rivers and through lakes, to attack other polities. We have some more concrete descriptions of the ships used by the state of Wu for warfare, being perhaps 30–35 meters long with each carrying 100 men, and being organized in squadrons. Ships were sail-propelled by c. 500 B.C. Figures suggest 11,000 men as the size of the Yue navy, but by the time of the Han dynasty, a figure of 200,000 men in a single fleet is recorded.

The real coming of age of Chinese coastal sea-power was seen under Emperor Wu of the Han, one of the most expansionist of Chinese rulers, who sent a succession of massive naval expeditions, comprising a force of over 100,000 men, against the state of Nan-Yue in 112 B.C., against Min-Yue in 111 B.C. and then against Choson, located in what is today Korea. The later naval expedition against the Viet in 42 A.D. with 2,000 ships was a further manifestation of the maturing of the Chinese navy.

But the Chinese ships of this period seem to have been restricted to coastal forays. When Chinese persons journeyed, in the early years of the Common Era, from Hepu in today’s Guangxi through Southeast Asia to Kanchipuram on the eastern coast of India, a journey of several months, they travelled on barbarian trading ships (蠻夷賈船).¹⁹ We can thus infer that in the first centuries A.D. that the Chinese sea-crossing capacities were inferior to those of the people of South and Southeast Asia. Details of early Southeast Asian ships are provided to us by a third-century Chinese text, now lost and left to us only in cited fragments — the Nan-zhou Yi-wu-zhi. It records:

The men from foreign lands call their boats po.²⁰ The large ones are over 200 feet (20 zhang) long, and they are twenty to thirty feet (2–3 zhang) high [above the water level] ... they can hold 600–700 men, and a cargo of over 10,000 ho (a Chinese corn measure of about ten pecks). The men from beyond our frontiers use four sails for their ships, varying with the size of the ships. These sails are connected with each other from bow to stern. There is a kind of lu-t’ou tree whose leaves are like lattice [-windows]. These leaves are more than ten feet long, and are woven into sails. The four sails do not face directly forwards, but are made to move together to one side or the other, with the direction of the breeze ... when they sail, they do not avoid strong winds and violent waves, and therefore can travel very swiftly.²¹

While the navies of the polity of Wu were engaged in attacks on Hainan and what is today northern Vietnam during the third century A.D., we also have accounts in Chinese texts of Southeast Asian ships being used to attack other polities in Nusantara. The Liang shu records that Fan Shiman, ruler of Funan in the third century, had great ships built, and crossing the immense sea, he attacked more than ten kingdoms.²² We can thus see that the Chinese navies were just part of the many maritime forces operating in the Eastern Asian oceans in the early centuries of the Common Era.

The establishment and growth of the Chinese state of (Liu) Song (420–79 A.D.) during the period of the competing Northern and Southern dynasties was in a way a result of its access to, and its people’s capacities on, the sea. From capitals first located in the area of modern Nanjing and then in the region of today’s Hangzhou, it commanded extensive naval forces which were used for attacks as far afield as Linyi (Champa), destroying and pillaging its capital in 446 A.D. As Professor Lo sums up this period, The Chinese Navy was clearly an instrument of offensive action. (See p. 44.)

An example of East Asian seafaring in the fifth century has come down to us through the accounts of the Chinese monk Faxian, who left China to travel to India overland in 399 A.D. Travelling through Central Asia he arrived in India via Gandhara. After ten years in the subcontinent, he returned to China by sea over the two years 413–14, via Ye-po-ti, which can be fairly safely reconstructed as Jawadwipa, and which was somewhere in the Sumatra/Java area. He travelled from there northwards toward Canton, but a storm blew them off course and the ship, after drifting for more than 80 days, achieved landfall on the Shandong peninsula in China.²³ We thus observe that in the early fifth century, the ships connecting China, Southeast Asia and South Asia, could survive sailing across open water for 80 days without landfall.

With the rise of the Sui polity in the late sixth century, naval power was also a key factor in its domination and suppression of rival polities to the south. We have textual evidence of Chinese ships at this time comprising five decks, with masts 15 meters high and a carrying capacity of 800 men. After securing China south of the Yangzi, the Sui emperor again launched a naval attack on Champa in 605, completely destroying its capital. Sui Yangdi then invaded Korea by land and sea. A later naval expedition in 610 targeted and razed the Liuqiu islands. Lo Jung-pang sees this period and the early Tang dynasty which followed as a key age in naval development as it marked a period when Chinese ships started sailing across open ocean rather than coasting, with ships sailing directly between the ports of East China and the Satsuma coast of Kyushu by the early ninth century.

The early Tang saw massive ship-building in order to provide thousands of large naval vessels for expansionist attacks, particularly against Korea, climaxing with the famous naval battle against the Japanese at the port of Chu-ryu in 663. That these ships had to be built as far inland as Sichuan suggests something of the deforestation which was resulting partly as the result of the ship-building demands.²⁴

During the Five Dynasties (907–60) period, with the autonomy and maritime engagement of the Wu-Yue and Nan Han states along the southern coast, new naval warfare techniques were developed, including the use of flaming oil being fired from canisters. The northern states also used the southerners to help develop their naval skills and these skills were employed after the establishment of the Song dynasty to dominate and incorporate the southern polities within the Song empire. In the second half of the 1000s, the Song also sent naval forces further south against Champa and Annam. Professor Lo makes the key point that up until this time, Chinese navies were simply adjunct military forces to be used in both attack and defence and that the lack of a large commercial fleet rendered it unnecessary for China to maintain a standing navy for the protection of commerce. This was soon to change.

The Song period was to see an expansion of both maritime commerce and naval power in the south of China. The enormous social and economic changes in the southern regions, particularly Fujian, during the tenth–thirteenth centuries have been described by a number of authors including Billy So,²⁵ Robert Hartwell²⁶ and Hugh Clark.²⁷ The figures provided by Professor Lo in the present study on the expansion of public water control works and their predominance in coastal regions from the Song onwards, as well as his figures on population densities and urban construction underline this trend.

From 1069 onwards, economic and fiscal reforms were also promulgated for the purpose of expanding and monetizing Chinese economic activities. One of the effects of this was that Song overseas trade in the eleventh century saw increasing monetization — that is, an increased use of copper cash.²⁸ This was both consequent on and contributing to a boom in domestic commerce²⁹ and maritime trade which has been described by Paul Wheatley.³⁰

With increasing control over the southern ports, the Song began to systematically utilize maritime trade for its fiscal advantage. Song maritime trade provided revenue to the Song through three avenues:³¹

To coordinate the overseas trade and its taxation, the Song established maritime trade supervisorates at various ports.³² These maritime trade supervisorates had a range of functions, including inspection of incoming ships and their cargoes, assessing the cargoes and charging duty, purchasing government monopoly products, registering Chinese ships going abroad, issuing certificates for merchants, enforcing prohibitions against export of controlled commodities such as copper, and providing accommodation for maritime merchants.³³ The booming maritime trade over these centuries was either a stimulus to or a result of similar booms right through Southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean to the Middle East.³⁴

The pushing of Song rulers south of the Yangzi by the incoming Jin and the establishment of the Southern Song capital at Lin’an (Hangzhou) in 1127 is seen by Professor Lo as a key moment both in Chinese history and in Chinese engagement with the oceans. However, it appears that much of the commercial development and maritime engagement had in fact begun prior to this date as evidenced by the establishment of the maritime trade offices mentioned above.

Certainly Chinese knowledge of the maritime world grew greatly during this period, with works such as Zhou Qufei’s Lingwai Daida (1178) and Zhufan Zhi (1225)³⁵ by Zhao Rugua (1225), Zhenla Fengtu Zhi (1304) by Zhou Daguan and Daoyi Zhilue (1349) by Wang Dayuan reflecting the new Chinese geographical knowledge, extending even to Europe. Professor Lo cites Zhou Qufei from the second half of the twelfth century:

The great [world-] encircling ocean-sea bounds the foreign countries. In every quarter there are kingdoms, each has its peculiar products, each its trading center from which it derives its prosperity.... Still beyond [this Sea of Ceylon] there is another sea called the Eastern Sea of the Arabs, and beyond it to the west are the countries of the Arabs. The land of the Arabs is very broad and their kingdoms very many, too numerous to count. In the west beyond them is the sea called the Western Sea of the Arabs, and still beyond that is Mulanpi [Spain], and a thousand other kingdoms; and in the extreme west is the place where the sun sets and of which we do not know.³⁶

Map-making also developed in this period as did navigation skills. As Professor Lo notes, many of the maps by Zhu Siben of the late thirteenth century were of maritime regions, and it is obvious that maritime charts were also developing at this time. The earliest extant of such charts are the Wu-bei-zhi maps, produced either for, or as a result of, the voyages led by Zheng He and other eunuchs in the first 30 years of the fifteenth century. Other navigation tools such as guidebooks known as rutters are also known from this date, although they likely had a much longer history. The oldest known was found in the Bodleian Library in Britain, and contained sailing directions throughout Southeast and East Asia and the Persian Gulf.³⁷

Fig. 1 A page from the Wu-bei-zhi charts of the early fifteenth century, showing the East coast of Africa at the bottom of the page.

But all these navigation aids were premised on the availability of ships which could travel the open seas. Professor Lo claims that during the Song dynasty the Chinese wrested the monopoly of the sea lanes from the Arabs, and they were able to maintain their lead throughout the Yuan and early Ming periods. They had almost exclusive control of all the shipping from Guangzhou to Quilon on the west coast of India, where their ships unloaded their cargoes for trans-shipment, preferring not to go farther because the draft of their large merchantmen was too deep for the shallow waters of the ports of the Persian Gulf. This claim may be asserting more than historical sources allow us to claim for the Song dynasty,³⁸ but there is no doubt that during this period there was a revolution in ship-building in China.

It was indeed the case, as he notes, that during the century and a half of the Southern Song dynasty that the Chinese suddenly spurted ahead in naval architecture. The building of these large ships continued into the Yuan, with the accounts of Marco Polo in the 1290s and Ibn Battuta³⁹ in the 1340s recording ships which carried upwards of 500 men. These ships are reported to have had a length-to-breadth ratio of about 4:1 which, if attested, made them very broad of beam. Professor Lo also reports the treasure ships of Zheng He being 440 feet long and 180 feet wide, a claim which recent scholarship has tended to dismiss.⁴⁰ But the merchant ships were indeed large with accommodation and space for cargo and even family members, as well as crops and animals for food.

Fig. 2 A Chinese merchant ship in Cambodia as depicted in the late twelfth-century bas-relief of Angkor Thom.

Fig. 3 A bas-relief decoration at Borobodur (c. 800 A.D.) in Java showing a Southeast Asian ship with clear employment of an outrigger.

The description of the Song navy elements and their activities contained within the Lo text is extremely informative, providing details of ship varieties — the whales, comprising converted merchantmen which were utilised during times of need, and the sea hawks which were faster and more maneuverable. One of the more fascinating references comes from the Song dynasty manual of war Wujing Zongyao (武經總要) (dated 1064), under which the description of the Sea Hawk includes: The prow is low and the stern high, the fore is large and the aft narrow. The shape is like a hawk. There are floating boards attached to the port and the starboard sides of the ship, shaped like wings of the hawk. They assist the ship so that despite the fury of the wind and the roughness of the waves [the ship] cannot capsize. This is possibly the sole reference to Song ships employing outriggers, a nautical technology long utilised on Southeast Asian ships, and undoubtedly adopted from there, and Professor Lo discussed this issue with Needham.⁴¹ There appears to be no Chinese illustration of such a technology in use.⁴²

While new types of anchors, new sail materials and new rigging styles marked the ships of the Song period, perhaps most important for the naval role of these vessels was the new armaments they carried. New types of steel, possibly Damascus steel, were introduced, new crossbows were developed, and new forms of armour created, but the key element was the development of pyrotechnics and subsequently firearms. We have already mentioned the flaming oil (火油), which Professor Lo associates with naptha or Greek fire.⁴³ By the tenth century the use of fire arrows and incendiary bombs was already in evidence, and these began to be rapidly disseminated. For naval warfare the huopao, a variety of incendiary projectile, proved useful for setting on fire the sails and rigging of other ships. Then came the transition to explosives in the twelfth century and by the thirteenth century the firing of projectiles by gunpowder. The importance of the Asian Gunpowder Age, not only in China but in the region more generally has not yet been fully appreciated by Western scholars, but the materials within this study, along with other works,⁴⁴ will help to bring this phenomenon to wider attention in global history.

The story of how the Mongols, with an essentially horse-based armed force, came to utilize maritime technologies and naval power and how important this was for them in taking power in the Sinitic world has never been told as fully as it is written about in this volume. Initially utilizing only river and lake-based naval forces, the Mongols increasingly employed Chinese sailors and maritime techniques and eventually gained power by taking the Southern Song capital in 1276. Professor Lo brings to the world the story of the importance of the navy in this conquest. The role of the Muslims of Fujian, and especially Pu Shougeng,⁴⁵ in the capturing of the maritime areas of Southern China is also given much attention. Yet in the end, after examining the technologies, ship-building and manning of the ships, Professor Lo concludes In retrospect, the Yuan navy was essentially the Song navy.

Control of China allowed the Yuan to set their sights even further afield and, given that the sea lay between them and other potential territories, the importance of naval forces became even greater in the last two decades of the thirteenth century. The relevance of the Yuan naval expeditions in this period to world history and their effects, particularly on Southeast Asia, have been greatly under-studied and the present volume will go some way to redressing this deficiency.⁴⁶

An expedition against Japan had been undertaken in 1274 concurrently with the Mongol push against the Southern Song. The