Sources from and on Fujian
Hugh R. Clark, Ursinus College
Fujian Province is among the most important foci of attention to and interaction with the maritime world in all of China. From long before the integration of the area into the Chinese cultural ecumene in the second half of the 1st millennium CE until the present, the inhabitants of the coastal region south of the Dongtou 東頭 Archipelago (off the coast of Wenzhou溫州 in Zhejiang 浙江) and north of Chaozhou 潮州 in Guangdong 廣東—the coastline that defines modern Fujian—have had an intimate relationship with the seas that face them.
Yue peoples and Sinitic immigrants
Even before the onset of significant initic immigration during the first millennium CE, Fujian was inhabited by Austronesian peoples known in sinitic sources as Yue 越 (Cantonese: jyut; Vietnamese: viet). Although written sources on the ancient Yue peoples are scant and entirely filtered through the perspective of the sinitic north, one constant is an emphasis on the relationship of the coastal peoples with the sea. As the “Classic of Mountains and Seas” (Shanhai jing 山海經) states, “Min 閩 [i.e., Fujian] lies within the sea.” Archaeolgy, such as the excavations at the Damao shan 大帽山 site on the southern Fujian coastline, have furthered this impression. As site one report notes, over thirty species of shellfish have been recovered.[1] Although no boats have as yet been recovered, current anthropology sees the Fujian coast as the point of origin of the Austronesian dispersal throughout the western Pacific, indicating a fairly advanced nautical technology.
Although early Sinitic immigrants were most likely attracted by the agricultural fertility of the coastal and riverine estuaries, by the late Tang if not earlier the excellent harbours that dot the coast were being used by maritime traders. By the ninth century both Fuzhou 福州 in the north and Quanzhou 泉州 toward the south had emerged as alternative ports of call for the foreign traders bringing goods from the “South Seas“ and perhaps beyond who sought to avoid the tariffs levied at Guangzhou 廣州, the single authorized port. During the tenth-Century Interregnum, both the Min government based in Fuzhou and the autonomous warlord government in Quanzhou depended heavily on revenues from maritime trade, over which they fought an intense competition.
Song to Ming
During the Song and Yuan dynasties (10th–14th centuries), Quanzhou, known to foreign traders as Zayton, emerged as one of two principle ports, along with Guangzhou/Canton, for trade coming to and going out of the empire. Although the Song court initially required all trade to pass through Guangzhou/Canton, where all tariffs were collected, evidence points to a thriving, and probably mostly illegal, trade in Quanzhou. The trade enriched the city and encouraged the diversification of the hinterland economy, which became a major source of porcelains and stonewares, of mass-produced ironwares, as well as a wide array of specialized agricultural products. Faced with this reality, in the late eleventh century the court established a trade superintendency in Quanzhou. By the twelfth century evidence suggests the collective ports of Quanzhou, which spread well beyond the central anchorage in the Jin River to include an array of subordinate ports, may have surpassed Guangzhou as the empire’s principle port of maritime trade.
The port continued to flourish through the Mongol Yuan dynasty and into the early Ming. When Kublai Khan needed fleets to invade Japan, shipbuilders from Quanzhou provided much of the expertise. When Zheng He 鄭和, the great admiral of the early fifteenth century, assembled the fleets he seven times led into the “South Seas,” as the South China Sea is known in traditional Chinese sources, and beyond into and across the Indian Ocean, he drew heavily on the technical resources of Quanzhou shipbuilders.
The overt role of Fujian in maritime trade was interrupted by the imperial ban on such trade that followed the court-mandated cessation of Zheng He’s expeditions. Nevertheless it continued unofficially and illegally as traders from Fujian maintained their relationships with Southeast Asia. When trade was again legalized in the sixteenth century, Fujianese merchants were well-positioned to resume their role as principle carriers. While the beginnings of the Fujian diaspora throughout Southeast Asia very likely pre-date the resumption of legal trade, by the late Ming communities of Fujianese could be found in almost every trade outpost throughout the Southeast Asia. Chinese colonization of Taiwan was led by Fujianese, and the interface between the Spanish silver trade through Manila and the mainland was maintained by Fujianese merchants. Consequently, as Roman Christian missionaries arrived in the course of the later sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Fujian was a major target of their efforts.
The Fujian diaspora
As European nations established a colonial footprint through Southeast Asia in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, they also came to depend on the Fujian diaspora, remnants of which even today remain powerful from Indonesia to the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and even into Burma. By then the principle port of Fujian had moved from Quanzhou, where the harbor had been constricted by coastal land reclamation and silting, to Xiamen 廈門 (known to Europeans by its local name: Amoy). When Great Britain demanded access to additional ports beyond Guangzhou/Canton as part of the settlement of the Opium War, Xiamen was one of the ports that was opened.
Although Fujian continued to develop its diaspora presence throughout Southeast Asia through the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was not at first a source of emigration to North America. In a final manifestation of the province’s long and close relationship with the maritime world, however, this has changed in recent decades as more and more Fujianese have migrated to North America. Today they represent the largest number of new arrivals, although many come to the United States illegally and are not counted in official statistics.
It is clear, therefore, for these and many more reasons that Fujian must be included in any survey of China’s historical interaction with the maritime world.
Notes
- ↑ Kaogu 考古 2003.12: 19–31
