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New Perspectives on Southeast Asia-China Interactions
Organizer: Yangwen Zheng, National University of Singapore
Chair: Sherman Cochran, Cornell University
Discussant: R. Bin Wong, Asia Institute
Southeast Asia and China have, for millennia, been linked by commercial interaction, human movement, and political aspirations, and woven together by ideological, technological and cultural interflows. These links have been disrupted or re-patterned, initially by the expansion of European imperialist powers, and subsequently by the revolutions which emerged in the 20th century. Today, the situation is undergoing change again. This process is, in various ways, reviving some of the older ties which long linked these areas. If we are to understand the changes now taking place in the region, and the growing interdependencies and alliances which are emerging, we need to examine them through both contemporary and historical lenses. This panel will address some of the historical elements which have tied the two regions. It will also examine some of the problems which emerge through the continuing division between academic "area studies” of Southeast Asia and of China, which means that many aspects of human existence that have extended across these boundaries have not been systematically studied. Southeast Asia-China Interactions is an emerging research focus at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. Our panel, which comprises three speakers who are either current or former members of the ARI team, seeks through its deliberations to illuminate historical Southeast Asia-China interactions and also bring attention to ARI’s research focus and new publication series: “Southeast Asia and China: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives”. We will, for this panel, focus on the flows of commodities, ideas and peoples between these regions, and will also examine trade networks, goods and cultures of consumption between Southeast Asia and China from before the 15th to the 21st century. Linkages and their dynamics between Southeast Asia and East Asia are the essential and common elements of our panel.
Spices and Sea-Products in Trans-Asian Circuits: Oral Histories and the Sino-Southeast Asian Connection
Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University
One of the most important lines of commerce in Asian waters during the past several centuries has been the trade in spices and sea-products, often termed as “exotica” by Europeans who came to trade in this part of the world. The history of many of these items – cloves, nutmegs, and mace; sharks’ fins, pearls, and sea cucumbers as just a few examples – has been sketched out in some detail in historical writing. Though the trade in many of these commodities was waning in importance by the mid-19th century, when opium, silk, and tea became crucial as items of the intra-regional trade orbit, spices and sea products still circulate in Sino/Southeast Asia in important and interesting ways. This paper will explore some of the history of these items in our own time, based on a year’s fieldwork of oral interviewing with specialist merchants throughout the ports of East and Southeast Asia. A picture will be generated of what the modern trade in these historically-based items looks like, and how much continuity exists with earlier patterns. Fieldwork done in China, Taiwan, and a number of Southeast Asian countries will show how family-firms and lineages describe their own place in this trade, and how they envision their link to the past. The material from these oral interviews will also be supplemented by numerical data that shows the larger scope of this commerce, and how it continues to connect East and Southeast Asia in interesting and unusual ways.
Most Exotic Treasures Come from the West
Yangwen Zheng, University of Manchester
This paper studies the making and bourgeoning of a most important consumer trend and culture called yanghuo. Very few Chinese historians, in their efforts to understand Ming-Qing-Republican economies, cultures and societies, have written about this vital economic, social and cultural aspect from the mid Ming to late Qing. Yang was used as a prefix to denote foreign people and things because they came via the ocean. For example, Westerners were called yang ren, their companies yang hang, and their goods yang huo. This term had its origin in the Ming when tribute and maritime trade brought a whole array of non-Chinese goods and exotics to China from or via Southeast Asia. The Chinese elite’s appreciation for them intensified in the eighteenth century when taiping shengshi or “the heyday of peace and stability” bred a generation of sophisticated middle class consumers. The consumption of yanghuo would become a major consumer trend in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It would thrive into the Republican era and it is still thriving today. A comprehensive study of yanghuo, their origin, scope, impact and consequences, is overdue. It will help East, Southeast, South Asian and European historians to better comprehend the economic dynamics that linked these regions from the “Age of Commerce” to the “Age of Empire”.
Southern China and the Islamization of Southeast Asia
Geoff Wade, National University of Singapore
The existing synthetic histories of Islam in Southeast Asia (such as those by De Graaf and by Johns) tend to see Islamic religious influences on that region as having derived either from the Indian subcontinent or directly from the Middle East. However there is increasing evidence, obtained in part from Chinese texts, of an important role being played by Muslim communities in southern China in the Islamization of the archipelago. The earliest Muslim communities in the Chinese port cities of Guangzhou and later Quanzhou (comprising a cosmopolitan range of Chams, Arabs, Tamils, Persians, Chinese and culturally hybrid people) had extensive maritime links with communities in what is today Southeast Asia and it was to those communities that Muslims fled when faced with oppression or warfare in the Chinese ports. This paper posits that the earliest Muslim communities in Southeast Asia grew in the trade ports of Srivijaya and Champa, both closely connected with trade between the Indian Ocean and southern China, in the 9th to 11th centuries. While, the first Islamic polities to have been established in the region were in northern Sumatra and were obviously influenced by Persian and Indian Muslims, this paper suggests that it was major purges of Muslims in 14th-century Fujian which resulted in flight from this region and were responsible for the emergence of early Islamic influence in Java and the development of Islamic polities on the northern Javanese coast. The latter appear to have seen consolidation through the Chinese voyages led by the Muslim commander Zheng He in the early 15th century.