"1493"

[fiefoe]

In Asia:

• Built in enormous dry docks, encrusted with precious metals, replete with technical innovations—double hulls, watertight compartments, rust-proofed nails, mechanical bilge pumps—that Europe would not discover for a century, the Chinese ships were marvels for their time.
• But the empire stopped long-range exploration “for the same reason the United States stopped sending men to the moon—there was nothing there to justify the costs of such voyages.
• With bureaucratic logic, court bureaucrats reasoned that because maritime trade was outlawed the nation therefore didn’t need a coastal force to police that trade.
• The main docks were several miles up the Jiulong, in water so shallow that ships had to be towed in on the incoming tide. The location was an anti-piracy measure: criminals would not dare raid the docks, because the incoming tide that permitted entrance was too strong to allow escape.
• Observing this success, other smugglers in other parts of Fujian followed the Generals’ lead, forming the Twenty-four Constellations and the Thirty-six Bravos. The region became a bewildering, violent amalgam of overlapping loyalties and betrayals, as business gangs and pirate gangs from different neighborhoods, regions, and nations vied among themselves for control of the smuggling trade.
• The copper-starved Song dynasty was forced to create a “short-string” standard, in which strings of 770 coins were officially treated as if they contained a thousand.
• The Mongols, who became the Yuan dynasty, issued their own paper money—lots of it. To them belongs the honor of inventing hyperinflation.
• In 1394 the government banned the use of its own coins—a policy that “flouted economic realities,”
• Businesspeople sold silk and porcelain to brutal men with silver, then turned around and used the silver to pay their taxes, which in turn was spent on military campaigns against those brutal men. The Ming government was at war with its own money supply.Despite Potosí’s huge population, no child was born there to a European for more than half a century.
• Two-thirds of Potosí’s mines and the municipal council were controlled by Basques by 1602.
• was to point out that the turbulence in Europe, though devastating, was “a kind of sideshow—most of the silver actually went to Asia.” And not just to some generalized part of Asia. A disproportionate share of the silver ended up in a single port in a single Chinese province: Yuegang, in Fujian.
• Porcelain was packed tightly in cases, Li said, with rice separating the plates and bowls. “They injected water on all sides, then set down the case in a humid place. It glued the ceramics into a solid, unbreakable mass.”
• One shopkeeper sold a wooden nose to a Spaniard who had lost his in a duel. He tried to capitalize on his success by importing “a fine boatload of wooden noses.” Sales were poor.
• In 1654 the San Francisco Javier sank near Manila Bay. Its official manifest claimed that it carried 418,323 pesos. Centuries later, divers found 1,180,865 aboard.
• They designed special presses to mash huge quantities of silk into the chests, packing them so tightly, according to Li, the Fujianese scholar, “that a single sea-chest had to be carried by six men.
• Rebellions flowered in the Parián, followed by expulsions and massacres. The cycle repeated itself in 1639, 1662, 1686, 1709, 1755, 1763, and 1820, each time with an awful death toll.
• But the state does this because trade has two roles: one highlighted in economics textbooks, where private markets allow both sides to gain economically, and one that rarely appears in those textbooks, in which trade is a tool of statecraft, the goal is political power, and both sides usually do not win.
• Given the circumstances, acquiring the silver was entirely rational—it provided monetary stability. But it was also extremely costly.
• Women carried special silk tobacco purses with elaborate jeweled fastenings; to protect their delicate feminine essences from the harsh spirit of tobacco, they smoked extra-long pipes, some so big that they had to be lugged around by servants. A new poetic sub-genre emerged among China’s wealthy aesthetes: the hymn to tobacco.
• “While men who stormed Tenochtitlan with Cortés still lived,” Crosby said, “peanuts were swelling in the sandy loams near Shanghai; maize was turning fields green in south China; and the sweet potato was on its way to becoming the poor man’s staple in Fujian.”
• To deny supplies to the Ming/wokou, the Qing army forced the coastal population from Guangdong to Shandong—the entire eastern “bulge” of China, a 2,500-mile stretch of coastline—to move en masse into the interior.
• the Qing coastal clearance effectively turned over the silver trade to wokou. As it happened, the trade was turned over to one pirate in particular: Zheng Chenggong,
• the Ming had prohibited people from leaving their home regions. Reversing course, the Qing actively promoted a westward movement.
• For almost two thousand years, China’s numbers had grown very slowly. That changed in the decades after the violent Qing takeover... the Qing campaigned against the nation’s traditional population-control method: female infanticide.
• Part of the reason China is the world’s most populous nation is the Columbian Exchange.
• Instead smallholders discovered they could make more money by switching from rice and wheat to sugarcane, peanuts, mulberry trees, and, most of all, tobacco. Initially the Qing court cracked down on this shift, insisting that peasant farmers practice “correct agriculture”—that is, grow rice and wheat.
• And some didn’t understand that planting the maize in rows straight up and down the hills, rather than across the slope, would channel that rain down the slope, increasing erosion.
• By cutting down the forests, the shack people were not only laying waste to the land around them, they were helping to devastate the agricultural infrastructure miles downstream.
• Between 1841 and 1911, the Qing faced more than thirteen major floods a year—a Katrina every month, as one historian put it to me.
• Zhejiang’s censors repeatedly asked Beijing to send troops to rip out maize. There was no response. In the kind of phenomenon that makes one despair of the human race’s ability to govern itself, the pace of land clearing actually accelerated in the first part of the nineteenth century.
• The ensuing deforestation might ravage their own fields in the valleys, but the risks would be spread across an entire region, whereas the landowners’ profits were theirs alone. Absorbing all of the gain and only a fraction of the pain, local business interests beat back every effort to rein in shack people.
• In an attempt to subdue the floods, the Qing established a corps of engineers who maintained a five-hundred-mile line of dikes, a network of spillways, locks, and dams, and an array of as many as sixteen secondary channels into which the river could be divided—a hydraulic infrastructure easily as impressive as the Great Wall,
• During my visit the lines of dead trees dotted the slopes like contour marks, stretching for miles. The harvest was over, and farmers were about to be marched back in for another try. Tree by tree, the government was trying to undo the accidental legacy of the global silver trade.