East Asian Interactions with Europe
Overview
East Asian Interactions with Europe
Maritime voyages eclipsed the prodigious efforts of Europeans to cross Asia by the mid-sixteenth century. Consequently, East Asian Interactions with Europe were dictated by the Pacific Ocean. These interactions took the forms of trade, religious missions, and cultural and technological exchanges, usually from Europeans to east Asians.
Learning Objectives
Identify and assess the forms, effects, and repercussions of East Asian interactions with Europe.
Keywords / Key Concepts
Matteo Ricci - Italian Jesuit who worked as a Christian missionary and cultural intermediary in China from 1582 until his death in 1610
Tokugawa shogunate: the last feudal Japanese military government, which existed between 1603 and 1867
Sakoku: period of Japanese isolation dictated by the Tokugawa Shogunate from the early seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries
During the early modern period, trade between Europeans and east Asians was asymmetrical, with European ships visiting east Asian ports. European traders easily found east Asian goods and commodities that would sell in European and at European-American markets, but they had more difficulty finding goods that interested east Asians. A number of east Asian governments, including those of the Ming and Qing Dynasties of China and the Tokugawa Shogunate of Japan, resorted to restrictions to control that trade. The Dutch, the Portuguese, and the Spanish established trading posts along the coasts of south and southeast Asia as part of their coastal trading empires in early modern eastern and southern Asia.
Trade Restrictions
In the early Ming, after the devastation of the war that expelled the Mongols, the Hongwu Emperor imposed severe restrictions on trade, which came to be known the “haijin” or “sea ban.” Believing that agriculture was the basis of the economy, Hongwu favored that industry over all else, including the merchant industry. Partly imposed to deal with Japanese piracy amid the mopping up of Yuan partisans, the sea ban was completely counterproductive; by the 16th century, piracy and smuggling were endemic and mostly consisted of Chinese who had been dispossessed by the policies. China’s foreign trade was limited to irregular and expensive tribute missions, and resistance to them among the Chinese bureaucracy led to the scrapping of Zheng He’s fleets. Piracy dropped to negligible levels only upon the ending of the policy in 1567.
After Hongwu Emperor’s death, most of his policies were reversed by his successors. By the late Ming, the state was losing power to the very merchants Hongwu had wanted to restrict.
Trade Expands
After the Chinese banned direct trade with Japan, the Portuguese filled this commercial vacuum as intermediaries between China and Japan. The Portuguese bought Chinese silk and sold it to the Japanese in return for Japanese-mined silver; since silver was more highly valued in China, the Portuguese could then use Japanese silver to buy even larger stocks of Chinese silk. However, by 1573—after the Spanish established a trading base in Manila—the Portuguese intermediary trade was trumped by the prime source of incoming silver to China from the Spanish Americas. Although it is unknown just how much silver flowed from the Philippines to China, it is known that the main port for the Mexican silver trade—Acapulco—shipped between 150,000 and 345,000 kg (4 to 9 million taels) of silver annually from 1597 to 1602.
Although the bulk of imports to China were silver, the Chinese also purchased New World crops from the Spanish Empire. This included sweet potatoes, maize, and peanuts. These were foods that could be cultivated in lands where traditional Chinese staple crops—wheat, millet, and rice—couldn’t grow; hence, they facilitated a rise in the population of China. In the Song dynasty (960 – 1279), rice had become the major staple crop of the poor, but after sweet potatoes were introduced to China around 1560, they gradually became the traditional food of the lower classes. The Ming also imported many European firearms in order to ensure the modernness of their weapons.
The beginning of relations between the Spanish and Chinese were much warmer than when the Portuguese were first given a reception in China. In the Philippines, the Spanish defeated the fleet of the infamous Chinese pirate Limahong in 1575, an act greatly appreciated by the Ming admiral who had been sent to capture Limahong. In fact, the Chinese admiral invited the Spanish to board his vessel and travel back to China, beginning a trip that included two Spanish soldiers and two Christian friars eager to spread the faith. However, the friars returned to the Philippines after it became apparent that their preaching was unwelcome; Matteo Ricci would fare better in his trip of 1582.
The thriving of trade and commerce was aided by the construction of canals, roads, and bridges by the Ming government. The Ming saw the rise of several merchant clans, such as the Huai and Jin, who disposed of large amounts of wealth. The gentry and merchant classes started to fuse, and the merchants gained power at the expense of the state. Some merchants were reputed to have a treasure of 30 million taels.
During the last years of the Wanli Emperor’s reign and the reigns of his two successors, an economic crisis developed that was centered around a sudden widespread lack of the empire’s chief medium of exchange: silver. The Protestant powers of the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of England were staging frequent raids and acts of piracy against the Catholic-based empires of Spain and Portugal in order to weaken their global economic power. Meanwhile, in favor of shipping American-mined silver directly from Spain to Manila, Philip IV of Spain (r. 1621 – 1665) began cracking down on illegal smuggling of silver from Mexico and Peru across the Pacific towards China. In 1639, the new Tokugawa regime of Japan shut down most of its foreign trade with European powers, causing a halt of yet another source of silver coming into China. Collectively, these reductions in the flow of silver into China caused a dramatic spike in the value of silver, which made paying taxes nearly impossible for most provinces in China. People began hoarding precious silver, forcing the ratio of the value of copper to silver into a steep decline. In the 1630s, a string of one thousand copper coins was worth an ounce of silver; by 1640 it was reduced to the value of half an ounce; by 1643 it was worth roughly one-third of an ounce. For peasants this was an economic disaster, since they paid taxes in silver while conducting local trade and selling their crops with copper coins.
Isolationism in the Edo Period
The isolationist policy of the Tokugawa shogunate, known as Sakoku, tightly controlled Japanese trade and foreign influences for over 200 years, ending with the Perry Expedition that forced Japan to open its market to European imperial powers.
Sakoku
Sakoku was the foreign relations policy of Japan under which severe restrictions were placed on the entry of foreigners to Japan and Japanese people were forbidden to leave the country without special permission, on penalty of death if they returned. The policy was enacted, through a number of edicts and policies from 1633 to 1639, by the Tokugawa shogunate under Tokugawa Iemitsu—the third shogun of the Tokugawa dynasty. It largely remained officially in effect until 1866, although the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry in the 1850s began the opening of Japan to Western trade, eroding its enforcement.
Historians have argued that the Sakoku policy was established to remove the colonial and religious influence of Spain and Portugal, which was perceived as posing a threat to the stability of the shogunate and to peace in the archipelago. Some scholars, however, have challenged this view as only a partial explanation. Another important factor behind Sakoku was the Tokugawa government’s desire to acquire sufficient control over Japan’s foreign policy, to guarantee peace, and to maintain Tokugawa supremacy over other powerful lords in the country.
Japan was not completely isolated under the Sakoku policy, but strict regulations were applied to commerce and foreign relations by the shogunate and certain feudal domains (han). The policy stated that the only European influence permitted was the Dutch factory at Dejima in Nagasaki. Trade with China was also handled at Nagasaki. Trade with Korea was limited to the Tsushima Domain. Trade with the Ainu people was limited to the Matsumae Domain in Hokkaidō, and trade with the Ryūkyū Kingdom took place in Satsuma Domain. Apart from these direct commercial contacts in peripheral provinces, trading countries sent regular missions to the shogun in Edo and Osaka Castle. Due to the necessity for Japanese subjects to travel to and from these trading posts, this trade resembled outgoing trade, with Japanese subjects making regular contact with foreign traders in essentially extraterritorial land. Trade with Chinese and Dutch traders in Nagasaki took place on an island called Dejima, separated from the city by a small strait. Foreigners could not enter Japan from Dejima, nor could Japanese enter Dejima, without special permissions or authority.
Jesuits--European Catholic missionaries--came to east Asia to spread Christianity. These missionaries were part of the missionary impulse that the Roman Catholic Church pursued across east Asia from the sixteenth into the twentieth centuries. In these efforts Catholic missionaries were competing with Muslims, Hindus, and, later, Protestants.
Cultural and technological exchanges also were one-sided, with Europeans bringing new technology to east Asia, and exposing east Asians to various facets of European cultures. East Asians did not send ships to Europe and pursue this same strategy in reverse. East Asian leaders were most interested in European technology and did not wish to embrace other parts of European culture as part of any technological exchanges. For example, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European visitors found it much easier to interest the Chinese in European clocks than in Christianity.
These early modern interactions between Europeans and east Asia, along with European advances in military and transportation technology, would lay the foundation for the relationships between these two sets of peoples. East Asian efforts to catch up technologically with the West would become one of the key themes in east Asian history.
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