Table of Contents for 1368
1.Five Hundred Years across the Indian Ocean and South China Sea
How did China under the Great Ming become a global power? The story of Beijing's global turn after 1368 is connected both with developments in Europe and in China itself. On the eve of Europe's Age of Exploration, Beijing's Ming dynasty was in the process of consolidating its place at the center of Asia's overland and maritime trade routes–the legendary silk and spice routes. The Ming cultivated connections across its three frontiers: Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia. A closer look at the Ming's connections with these three frontiers helps explain how China was already a global power when European mariners arrived in the 1500s, and that European development of new trade routes, such as the Manila-Acapulco route, essentially extended the geographical reach of Chinese culture to its final frontier: the modern West.
2.Global Beijing under the Great Ming
How did China under the Great Ming become a global power? The story of Beijing's global turn after 1368 is connected both with developments in Europe and in China itself. On the eve of Europe's Age of Exploration, Beijing's Ming dynasty was in the process of consolidating its place at the center of Asia's overland and maritime trade routes–the legendary silk and spice routes. The Ming cultivated connections across its three frontiers: Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia. A closer look at the Ming's connections with these three frontiers helps explain how China was already a global power when European mariners arrived in the 1500s, and that European development of new trade routes, such as the Manila-Acapulco route, essentially extended the geographical reach of Chinese culture to its final frontier: the modern West.
3.Picturing China in Persian along the Silk Routes
This chapter examines how the Great Ming dynasty expanded China's political and cultural connections across Asia on the eve of the Age of Exploration. With an emphasis on the Istanbul-Samarqand-Beijing trade route, it follows two travel narratives: Ghayath al-Din Naqqash's account as an artist and envoy of the Timurids (Samarqand) to Beijing, and Ali Akbar Khitayi's account of his trip to Beijing, which he published upon his return to Ottoman Istanbul. Taken together, their accounts elucidate why later European diplomats like Matteo Ricci found China to be so culturally eclectic, and why many of the aesthetic trends in Europe, based on Chinese ceramics and textile design, were already underway in the Ottoman Middle East.
4.Trading with China in Malay along the Spice Routes
This chapter turns to the heart of the book's geographical setting: Southeast Asia. It introduces China's own fifteenth-century "Age of Exploration" led by the Yunnanese Muslim admiral Zheng He. It recounts how royal Malay epics written in the Sultanate of Pasai and Sultanate of Malacca (present-day Indonesia and Malaysia respectively) represented the Malay world's connections with Ming China in terms of political alliances, royal material culture, and local Chinese social networks. This chapter draws particularly on narrative passages from the Chronicle of the Kings of Pasai (Hikayat Raja Raja Pasai) and its references to Chinese villages and martial arts teachers, the Chronicle of Hang Tuah (Hikayat Hang Tuah) and its tale of the warrior-ambassador Hang Tuah's diplomatic missions to coastal India and Beijing, and the Malay Annals (Sejarah Melayu) with its stories of Chinese-Malay marriages and diplomatic go-betweens.
5.Europe's Search for the Spice Islands
This chapter turns to the Age of Exploration, when Iberian royals and mariners searched for a new route to Asia's Spice Islands. For centuries, the Italian maritime powers and the Middle East represented the wealthy go-betweens connecting Europe with the markets of Asia. By the late 1400s, a series of maritime expeditions changed the global commercial landscape forever. While Portugal sponsored expeditions eastward across the Indian Ocean that eventually reached Melaka (Malay peninsula), Spain sponsored expeditions westward across the Atlantic and Pacific. By the 1500s, Magellan crossed from southern Chile to Manila, ushering in the era of Spain's Acapulco-Manila trade galleons. Spain's trans-Pacific commerce competed with Portugal's merchant cargoes, which connected Macau (China) with Goa and Lisbon across the Indian Ocean. Along both trade routes, Southeast Asia became a key transit point for the transfer of Chinese material and intellectual culture to Europe.
6.A Sino-Jesuit Tradition of Science and Mapmaking
This chapter explores the lives of the Iberian powers' Jesuit clients. Francis Xavier, Matteo Ricci, and their followers in the Roman Catholic Society of Jesus settled in China and Japan by way of Macau. They immersed themselves in Chinese and Japanese language and culture, sending accounts of their work in China and the results of their Jesuit-Chinese scientific collaboration–from cartography and botany to philosophy and history–back to Europe. Their works, together with objects like tea and porcelain brought back by European merchants, accelerated the rise of Dutch printing, pseudo-porcelain production in Delft, and a variety of other industries indicative of a rising European fascination with all things Chinese in the 1600s and 1700s.
7.Porcelain across the Dutch Empire
This chapter turns to the European trading companies that followed the Iberians out to Asia: the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and British East India Company (EIC). Throughout the 1600s and 1700s, the Dutch edged the Portuguese out of the Japanese-Chinese trade circuit and built a portfolio around porcelain and tea. Dutch shipments of Chinese porcelain accelerated Europe's insatiable appetite for the rare commodity, and by the 1800s, this taste for "fine china" became the basis for local industries of pseudo-porcelain production in Delft and Staffordshire. It was in cities like Delft where the European industrial revolution took place, with local artisans using machines and factories to produce the same varieties of ceramics and textiles Europe once imported from China. By then, however, the VOC had been eclipsed by its British counterpart and its decision to manufacture a variety of Chinese tea within the British Empire itself.
8.Tea across the British Empire
This chapter traces the story of the British East India Company (EIC) and its dominance in Asia on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. What helped the British eclipse the Dutch was its risky yet profitable focus on the tea trade. In the hands of the EIC, Chinese tea became something that porcelain never was under the Dutch: a European colonial commodity manufactured within the British Empire itself. It was an unprecedented development that foreshadowed the global dominance of British manufacturing, and it was made possible by the transfer of tea manufacturing secrets from Fujian to the plantations of British India in the 1800s. By then, however, with growing Chinese restrictions on exports to the British, conflict erupted over British smuggling. The Opium Wars that followed were an unprecedented blow to China, one that inspired a new global imagination of European modernization and that kickstarted China's own industrial reforms.
9.China's Eclipse and Japan's Modernization
This chapter traces the origins of China's long twentieth-century modernization in Japan. Japan had a headstart in its industrialization because of their exchange with the Dutch since the 1600s. What accelerated Japan's turn away from Chinese political models was not only the British invasion of China, but also the arrival in Tokyo Bay of Commodore Perry. Like the British, the US sought to force Japan's borders open for Western commodities and state-building experts. Japanese administrators, like their Chinese counterparts, managed to buy some time by navigating competition between Western powers while transforming their own political system. By the end of the 1860s, the shogun had stepped down and a series of samurai embarked on a new set of careers in a rising Japanese Empire modeled on the British Empire. Among this transformation's observers was Sun Yat-Sen, the Republic of China's first president.