The reign of the Yongle Emperor was by any account a remarkable one.
By the time he died in 1424, the dynasty was at the height of its power, the empire was prosperous and at peace (though the Mongol threat remained), and China enjoyed diplomatic relations with sixty-seven overseas kingdoms and principalities. Indeed, Chinese sea power reached further beyond her frontiers than ever before or since, to dom-inate not only the Nanyang, but also much of the Indian Ocean as far west as the African coast. Under Chinese naval protection, seaborne trade flourished, bringing wealth not only to the tribute ports of south-ern China, but throughout the empire wherever goods for export were produced or imports traded.
Yet as we have seen, even during the Yongle Emperor’s reign, Chinese attention had again shifted north. This was due to both exter-nal and interexter-nal factors. Exterexter-nally, Turks and Mongols continued to pose a threat to the security of the empire. Internally, scholar officials succeeded in contesting the power of the court eunuchs. The great voyages were criticised for their cost and extravagance, and those asso-ciated with them lost influence. Finances were required for the army and for building the new capital with its imposing Forbidden City.
Zheng He’s voyages were not the only cost involved in Yongle’s southern strategy. Vietnamese resistance had continued since 1406, and substantial Chinese reinforcements had had to be dispatched. The most effective resistance centred on the mountains west of Thanh-hoa, where a member of the local landed gentry named Le Loi led a motley band, with the support of the Muong, a non-sinicised people
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close to the ancestral Vietnamese. Other loyalists joined him, and in 1418 Le Loi launched his campaign to drive out the Chinese. At first he had little success. An attempt to gain Lao support was subverted by the Chinese and Le Loi was almost captured. His opportunity came in 1424 with the death of Yongle.
Over the next year Le Loi seized all the region from the frontier of Champa to north of Nghe-an, but for isolated Chinese garrisons in district centres. By the end of 1426, much of the Red River delta was in his hands. Massive Chinese reinforcements were not enough to stem the Vietnamese advance, and in early in 1428, after yet another significant Vietnamese victory, a face-saving peace was concluded.
Remaining Chinese forces were permitted to withdraw without further attack. Le Loi was left to found the Le dynasty, grudgingly recognised by the Ming court in 1431 after appropriate tributary submission. The Xuande emperor loftily proclaimed: ‘I am specially sending envoys with a seal and am ordering that [Le Loi] temporarily take charge of the affairs of the country (guo) of Annam and govern the people of the country.’13No longer was Vietnam a Chinese province.
The Ming invasion of Vietnam had given the Vietnamese another national hero. Once again the lesson was learned: Chinese occupation could be defeated by refusing to surrender, mounting a guerrilla resistance, and fighting a protracted war relying on popular support. It was a recipe that served the Vietnamese well into the twentieth century. But a further step was necessary. After defeating Chinese armies on Vietnamese soil, peace had to concluded in the only face-saving way that was acceptable to the Chinese—that is, by restoring the hierarchical tributary relationship. At this the Viet-namese were adept. VietViet-namese officials, good Confucian mandarins that they were, knew exactly the right form of address to use in humbly requesting imperial favour. And the Chinese, pragmatic about a lost cause, graciously responded by permitting Le Loi to rule his country as a nominal Chinese vassal. Thus was the security of Vietnam ensured.
China’s relations with other kingdoms in Southeast Asia were much more friendly. Numerous embassies were exchanged following the Zheng He voyages as even minor principalities sought to benefit from trading relations with China. One was Melaka whose independ-ence was expressly underwritten by Yongle. Melaka was founded around 1400 by a truant prince from south Sumatra, named Para-meshvara. The port was strategically situated to control the Melaka Strait, but sat on the fringes of the empires of both Majapahit and Ayutthaya, and was claimed by both. When Melaka was visited in 1403 by a Chinese envoy, Parameshvara appealed for Chinese recog-nition and protection. A tributary mission was dispatched; Zheng He visited Melaka in 1409; and Parameshvara went in person to make his submission to Yongle in 1411.
China took a particular interest in Melaka, both because of its importance as a trading emporium, and because of its strategic loca-tion. In 1405 Melaka was accorded the significant honour of being the recipient of the first of four inscriptions Yongle personally addressed to foreign rulers. In it the emperor graciously acknowledged Paramesh-vara’s desire to be part of the Chinese world order, and to benefit from its cosmically ordained harmony.14
The king of Brunei was another minor potentate who personally led a tribute mission to China. His reward was Chinese endorsement for Brunei’s independence. Yongle magnanimously freed Brunei of any obligation to pay tribute to the declining power of Majapahit. A royal inscription presented to the Brunei sultan demonstrated, however, the essentially condescending Chinese view of its vassal status. In all, seven kings made the long trip to the Chinese capital, all from minor principalities (including three from Melaka and two from Brunei).
For the Melakan ruler, the benefits of Chinese protection were immediate and tangible. Ayutthaya had attempted to impose its own suzerainty over Melaka by confiscating the imperial seal Yongle had bestowed on Parameshvara. Zheng He’s voyage of 1407, and again that of 1419, visited Ayutthaya to warn the Siamese king not to infringe
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China’s suzerainty over Melaka. The example of Ho Quy Ly was explicitly cited, and the warning was enough to thwart Siamese attempts to control the straits. An even stronger warning to the Javanese to settle their civil war, and to pay compensation in gold for executing Chinese envoys, also made reference to the fate of Annam.
For Southeast Asia, China had previously been as a great but distant power, one that might take upon itself to offer admonition or arbitration, but which seldom aggressively interfered in regional affairs. The voyages of Zheng He brought Chinese power much closer.
Small kingdoms like Melaka and Brunei, that feared being absorbed by powerful neighbouring mandalas, eagerly sought protection. Medium polities such as Champa and Cambodia, worried about pressures from neighbours, looked to China to maintain the status quo. Larger king-doms such as Vietnam or Ayutthaya, expansionist themselves, resisted intervention, while promoting trade with China.
The effectiveness of China as arbitrator and protector depended on its capacity to respond to an appeal from a tributary. After the Viet-namese invaded Lan Xang in 1479, Lao envoys requested Chinese assistance. The matter was investigated, and blame placed squarely on the Vietnamese. China admonished Vietnam, and demanded with-drawal of its forces on pain of punishment, though by then the Vietnamese had already retreated. Two years later, reports that Vietnam was again planning to invade Lan Xang elicited a strongly worded warning. Meanwhile a Lao request for Chinese forces from Yunnan to assist them in avenging the Vietnamese invasion was turned down. The Lao were told that the Chinese emperor regarded both Lao and Vietnamese as his ‘children’, and that he desired only to end their enmity, for ‘this is China’s way’. Instead of troops, Chinese envoys were dispatched to both sides in order to ‘instruct’ them how to maintain good relations and to care for their people.15
Eighty years later, when Burmese armies marched east into the Tai world, Ming power was on the wane and Chinese admonitions carried less weight. Even so, the possibility of calling upon China as
arbitrator remained and was resorted to on occasions, just as small powers might call upon the United Nations, with similarly nugatory effect.
Conclusion
We cannot be certain how the countries of Southeast Asia responded to this early fifteenth-century projection of Chinese power into the region, for as usual we have no Southeast Asian source materials. All we have to go on are the Ming records, written as they were from a markedly sinocentric point of view. One thing is obvious, however, just from the frequency of missions sent to China, and that is that trade was the primary motive. If trade was important for China, despite offi-cial restrictions, it was the lifeblood of small Southeast Asian kingdoms. Where it was a royal semi-monopoly, as in Ayutthaya, profit from trade contributed a substantial proportion of court revenue. After Yongle abolished restrictions on the frequency of missions, Champa sent envoys almost every year, while Ayutthaya on several occasions dispatched two missions in a year, in an effort to maintain the level of trade in the absence of private commerce. For the smaller port princi-palities, trade was their major source of revenue. After 1435, when embassies from Siam and Champa were again limited to one every three years (a rule subsequently also applied to Java), only illegal chan-nels were available, which had the effect of concentrating trade in the hands of Chinese smuggling networks.
A second point to note is that only the rulers of small and vul-nerable principalities led missions to the Ming court in person. No king of Champa or Cambodia, let alone Ayutthaya or Majapahit, ever paid homage to the Son of Heaven. That Chinese emperors preferred to accept the homage of kings in person is evident from the lavish way the minor rulers of Melaka and Brunei were received in Beijing, for the submission of a king enhanced the status of the emperor. Rulers of
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more powerful Southeast Asian kingdoms must have been aware of this, but rejected all inducements to pay homage in person. Moreover, apart from Vietnam, the kingdoms even of mainland Southeast Asia did not place China alone at the apex of the international hierarchy.
In the seventeenth century, for example, Siam accorded similar recog-nition to ambassadors from Mughal India and Persia as they did to envoys from China.16India was always an alternative pole of attraction (and status) for Buddhist kingdoms, for the same reason that Mecca was for Muslim polities. Thus for all their acceptance of the Chinese world order, Southeast Asian kingdoms never saw themselves as com-mitted to that order alone. Their foreign relations cultures, while hierarchical, recognised several potentially competing centres of power, and made allowance for shifting power relationships.
The Ming voyages confirmed that China was indeed the regional hegemon, with a capacity to project its naval power well beyond its maritime frontiers. But the voyages themselves were more about affirming the status of an ambitious emperor and reinforcing the Chinese world order than about imposing political or military domi-nation. When Ming armies did invade Vietnam, they were driven back, and the tributary relationship was re-established. Security rested, as always, on determined defence plus acceptance of the moral obliga-tions implicit in the Chinese world order, for both vassal and hegemon.