TREASURE AND TREATY Ma Huan, 1413-1431 CE - Cary Academy

130 TREASURE AND TREATYMa Huan, 1413-1431 CS 131This large-scale negotiated price-fixing was not the typicalpattern in Malabar ports of the time. Traders simply bought whatthey could and the market set the price. Later in the memoir, MaHuan described this regular trade at Kalikut:Foreign ships from every place come there [to Kalikut] and theking of the country also sends a cruef and a writer and others towatch the sales; thereupon they collect the duty and pay it to theauthorities. 38The Chinese court had grand plans for long-term domination.At several ports, Zeng He set up carved stone proclamations announcingtheir intentions that stated:Though the journey from this country to the Central Country[China] is more than a hundred thousand Ii, yet the people arevery similar, happy, and prosperous, with identical customs. Wehave here engraved a stone, a perpetual declaration for ten thousandages. 39~ -rILe- ,l>Dfex.b' a.L '25 ,fo"«'.£-What C01!ld a !'l;gional king like Zamorin of Kalikut gain fromthe Chinese connection? With an army of several thousand Chinesesoldiers in his port. perhaps he had little ~hoice. Still, ther~w.ere some political benefits. The Chinese committed to supporthim against family rivals and external enemies. Practicall;y, thispromise meant relatively little, as a fleet arrived unpredictably only.once every few years. Ma Huan records only one case in which theChinese actually captured a local usurper in Southeast Asia andrestored the king to his throne.From Kalikut, possibly during the extended negotiations, Mal;Iuan got an opportunity to go to Mecca alone, possibly on a localship. The holy city moved him. He wrote about many of the expectedsubjects: architecture, local fruits and vegetables, and tradeproducts. "The customs of the people are pacific and admirable.They observe all the precepts of their religion; and law-breakersare few. It is in truth a happy country."40Mter the lengthy stop in Kalikut, the fleet sailed west to theMaldive Islands. If Malabar was pepper country, the two importantcommodities in the Maldives were cowry shells, used as minorcoinage, and coconuts.The fibre whicb covers the outside of the coconut is made intoropes both thick and fine; men come from every place on foreignships to purchase these too .... In the construction of their foreignships they never use nails, they merely bore holes, and alwaysuse these ropes to bind [the planks] together. 41Sewn boats were common all across the Indian Ocean, the Bayof Bengal, and Southeast Asia, and had been for a thousand yearsbefore the time ofMa Huan. Recall that this was exactly the constructionof the Intan shipwreck explored in Chapter 4.42A century before Ma Huan's voyage, Ibn Battuta visited theMaldives, islands off the west coast ofIndia that were then newlyconverted to Islam. He railed against the women who were nakedfrom the waist up. They laughed at him. By the time ofMa Huan,Islamic modesty prevailed. "The women wear a short garment on~he upper [part of the body]; and on the lower [part] they, too,___ . wear a broad kerchief round them. They also carry a broad, large,cotton kerchief which passes across the head and covers it, disclosingonly the face."43From the Maldives, the imperial fleet sailed northwest to Adenand Hormuz. In the twelfth century, Aden had been the home ofAbraham bin Yiju's senior partner. It was still a rich sophisticatedport when Ma Huan arrived there three centuries later. "Theyhave seven or eight thousand well-drilled horsemen and- foot soldiers;therefore the country is very powerful and neighbouring