China rediscovers its place in the world
"As China’s international status grows, its civilisation excites an increasing interest in the outside world."
That seemingly contemporary sentiment was in fact written half a century ago. It introduced a book-length survey of China’s legacy edited by Oxford scholar Raymond Dawson (1923 – 2002) — the man who, perhaps more than any other, established Chinese studies in England.
In the book, Dawson lamented the slowness with which China’s achievements had been recognised in the West, but also acknowledged that the country’s social and economic conditions, so admired by Marco Polo and other medieval travellers, had been quickly overshadowed by improvements in European cities.
Nevertheless, said Dawson, belief in the opulence of the Middle Kingdom lingered, with political economist Thomas Malthus claiming as late as 1798 that China was the richest country in the world. By then it was an outdated perception, though one that only really began to change in the nineteenth century with the arrival of Protestant missionaries who had a vested interest in portraying China as ‘a second-class country peopled by those who, lacking the light of God, must inevitably be regarded as inferior beings.’
When Dawson’s The Legacy of China came out in 1964, Mao Zedong was two years away from unleashing his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – the massive upheaval that wrought havoc on China’s social, political and economic landscape. Yet even at that stage in its evolution, Dawson could think of the country’s remote past as something as distinct and well defined as Greece’s Golden Age.
Recently, China has begun devoting a great deal of time and energy to reclaiming its past standing in the world, as a way of adding lustre to its emergence (or re-emergence) as a global power.
One of its most spectacular successes was the raising of Nanhai 1, a Song dynasty (960-1279) merchant vessel discovered in shallow water off the country’s southern coast in 1987.
Photo: A model of Nanhai 1 in Song City
Several years ago the 30m-long ship was transported to Yangjiang City in Guangdong province where it now rests in the Marine Silk Museum’s ‘Crystal Palace’, a glass pool that approximates the conditions in which it was first discovered and which allows visitors to see the archaeologists at work. Items retrieved so far from an estimated hoard of 60,000 to 80,000 relics include porcelain, gold, silver and copper coins.
Importantly, the Nanhai 1 offers fresh evidence about the extent of the country’s connections with the rest of the world through maritime trade. China’s history books talk of trade routes linking Europe, Africa and elsewhere in the Song era which they term ‘the marine silk road’.
Professor Liu Wensuo, an archaeologist from Guangdong’s Sun Yat-sen University described the Nanhai 1 as ‘the biggest ship of its kind to be found’, saying both the vessel and its contents were in exceptionally good condition.
The BBC’s Quentin Sommerville has suggested that China was perhaps spurred to embark on what for it is the new field of underwater archaeology as a result of losing similar hoards found by foreign treasure hunters in the 1980s. Those artefacts were sold at auction in the West at a time when China was too poor to bid for them.
Photo: a scale model of Zheng He's ship (the larger one) compared to that of Columbus.
In October 2010 came news of a less glamorous but equally significant discovery. A team of Kenyan and Chinese archaeologists unearthed a small 15th century Chinese brass coin on Kenya’s northern coast.
According to Professor Qin Dashu of Peking University’s archaeology department, that type of coin was minted between 1403 and 1424 and carried only by envoys of Emperor Chung Zu. He surmised that the recent find was brought to the coast as a gift from the emperor – almost 100 years before the arrival in the region of the first European.
The coin, which came to light during a US$3 million three-year expedition funded by Peking University, follows the netting by Kenyan fishermen of 15th century Chinese vases and DNA confirmation of a long-held belief that some local villagers have Chinese ancestry.
Conjecture links such fragmentary evidence of a distant Chinese presence in East Africa with the exploits of the Chinese admiral Zheng He, who is said to have taken an enormous fleet of ships across the Indian Ocean in 1418. The voyages are thought to have been attempts to increase recognition and trade for the Ming Dynasty.
Indeed, the DNA testing, carried out in 2006, was part of an event celebrating the 600th anniversary of Zheng He’s first voyage and the larger aim of the joint archaeology project is to discover the remains of one of the admiral’s ships, said to have sunk off the Kenyan coast.
Photo: statue of Admiral Zheng He
No one knows how far Zheng He got, but the Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama, who arrived in 1499, is traditionally credited with being the first foreign trader to open up East Africa and laying the foundation of more than five centuries of European colonial power.
‘We’re discovering that the Chinese had a very different approach from the Europeans to East Africa,’ archaeologist Herman Kiriama from the National Museums of Kenya told the BBC.
‘Because they came with gifts from the emperor, it shows they saw us as equals.’
Such evidence of ancient links with the continent will no doubt encourage Beijing to portray its new economic push in the region as the renewal of an old trading relationship rather than anything more worrisome.
- by Vaughan Yarwood