Jammer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The concept of a ruling dynasty that turned so
> inward it severed what promised to be lucrative
> trade ties in a solid belief it was the center of
> the world and all barbarians should come to them
> caring to EXPORT knowledge to the sasme barbarians
> is ludicrous.
>
> Some of their science trickled down the silk road.
> But it wasn't state sponsored, it was actually
> "stolen".
>
> Gunpowder was a pyrotechnical weapon to the
> Chinese, there "grenades" so slow burning the
> Japanese called them "Stink pots" and
> "Smoke-spitters" as the black powder ignited so
> unevenly and slowly it's expansion power was quite
> weak.
>
> The Muslim alchemists worked on it first,
> increasing the quality control and formula,
> creating the first "hand-gonnes". European
> alchemists improved on even that, and their
> gunsmiths constantly improved the quality of cast,
> then steel fabrication. By the time the Portuguese
> showed up with fairly modern cannon in 1517 the
> Chinese didn't even recognize their weapon when it
> was turned on them.
>
> But why would the "Middle Kingdom" spend one dram
> of effort intentionally sending science or the
> arts to barbarian Europe? It is so far outside
> their societal concepts as to be laughable.
>
> In 750CE the Chinese Tang Dynasty emperor sent an
> army to conquer "all of the west". The army
> numbered 30,000 and was commanded by Gao Xianzhi,
> a Korean who had risen to prominance in the Tang
> command. They reached as far as Talas, in modern
> Khazakhstan, after having succeeded in reaching
> and receiving submission from the western Aral and
> Caspian basins. At the battle of Talas the army
> was soundly defeated, with only 10% surviving to
> fight another day. The slave markets of Anatolia
> and the Abbasid Caliphate were oversupplied for
> several seasons. And the Tang dynasty Imperial
> Staff had both Gao and his fellow general Fend
> executed. Purportedly it was for cowardice and
> graft, but the realty was the Imperial Dynasty
> could conceive of no way the ignorant barbarians
> could win unless the generals were complicit.
>
> From the book synopsis;
> >" mass of information was offered by the
> Chinese delegation to the Pope and his entourage
> > - concerning world maps (which Menzies argues
> were later given to Columbus), astronomy,
> > mathematics, art, printing, architecture,
> steel manufacture, civil engineering, military
> > machines, surveying, cartography,
> genetics..."
>
> Of which there is no public record and
> furthermore, when the Portugese established
> contact in the 16th century, the Chinese were
> BEHIND the European state of the art in Steel,
> Civil Engineering, Military machines? The concept
> makes no sense.
>
> Jammer
>
>
>
>
>It makes no sense the way Menzies postulates. And it makes no sense if one believes that Greenwich is is the center of the world because zero longitude runs through it. It makes sense if one believes that China invented everything and that the real center of the world is the Dragon Throne. European primacy and exceptionalism is as myopic as Sinophiliac chauvinism. Your posts speak of the limits of Chinese penetration and the ridiculousness of the 'solid belief that China was the center of the world.' Lets pull out that Mercator map and show 'em where the real center of the world is...in fact, look at that...England is slightly larger than India.
Lets put Mercator and Menzies aside for the moment and glimpse what is somewhat verifiable.
In his book, "ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age", Andre Gunder Frank examines these macro-economic questions while acknowledging the lack of hard data for production, population, trade, consumption and growth. Despite these hinderances, Frank assembles a body of evidence that paints a wholistic global perspective. His World Systems Theory is a "horizontally integrative macrohistory" that effectively demolishes European exceptionalism, and the myth of Chinas developmental shortcomings.
Frank dismisses the idea that the 'capitalist world economy' and its financial institutions had its beginning in the Italian city-states. That the new departure into capitalism originated in Europe around 1500 is a myth embraced by such varied sources as Amin (1989) Arrighi(1994) and Karl Marx, while ignoring over two thousand years of Eurasian development. Venice and Genoa adopted the arbitrage of paper currency, bills of exchange, bullion based money and credit....engines of economic development that had been in use for thousands of years in the east. The prosperity of the Italian city-states was attributable to their middle man role between a prosperous Asia and impoverished Europe. We cannot view the rise of merchant capitalism in a vacuum or the Renaissance or Dark Ages for that matter.
Franks thesis is that the global economy was dominated by Asia in general, and China in particular, well into the 1800's, and he provides a quantitative analysis that Asia accounted for 80% of the global production and surplus of the worlds economy. It was only due to Europes new found access to New World silver (and gold) that allowed it (Europe) to participate in the world economy. It is well known what Europe sought from Asia, but it was silver that gained the Italian city-states entry into the ongoing millenias-old global economy. The shortages of bullion in the east made the voyages of discovery profitable, and searches for new extraction and refining techniques contributed to industrialization. Even Adam Smith knew better. He stated in 1776 that 'China was richer than any part of Europe'. Social historians have compartmentalized economic determinants of growing and ebbing trade and production and ignored economic cycles of growth and depression common to east and west as well as the effects of plague and Mongol domination upon the trade routes that were the lifelines of continents. It is more instructive to put the comparisons into a global perspective lest we suffer from what Hodgson and Blaut (1993) called "tunnel history".
We know that China and the city-states (those incubators of renaissance) had onging formal relations with Khublai through Toscanini, Polo and others. There was no real need to send ships when the first archbishop of Chinas capitol (John Montecorvino) presided over a diocese of sixty thousand parishioners in 1308. After the Ming overtrew the Mongols there was a reaction against all foreigners which caused problems, but that doesn't negate the ongoing high level relationship between the Vatican and Imperial China. The 'public record' could attest to a cozier relationship that is generally supposed, but I seem to have misplaced my Vatican library card.
In 1448, the Emperor of China was captured by a Mongol raiding party and the Ming realized that it was just a matter of time before another Khan moved across the Ordos. The technical, artistic and economic rapproachment ceases to be 'laughable' if it is viewed in the framework of Chinas geo-political strategy, a strategy that included the opening of the Grand Canal, the building of the Great Wall, and suspension of trade and maritime adventures. Bolstering the argument that the aforementioned elements were a comprehensive plan, is the fact that the man who expedited the completion of the Grand Canal, and was the administrator of the Wall, was also the man who had the pilots logs of Zheng He burned and the greatships destroyed.
"Cheng Ho and his associates must certainly have
presented the fullest records of their voyages to their imperial
master. But before the century ended these were burnt and destroyed by
administrative thugs in the service of the Confucian anti-maritime
party. In his "Kho Tso Chui Yu" (Memorabilia of Nanking), compiled in
1628, Ku Cci-Yuan tells us that in the Cheng-Hua period (1464-1487) an
order was given to search in the state archives for the documents
concerning Cheng Ho's expeditions to the western world. But Liu
Ta-Hsia, then vice-president of the War Office, took them and burnt
them, considering their contents 'decietful exaggerations of bizarre
things far removed from the testimony of peoples eyes and ears'.
Other sources (Shu Yu Chou Tzu Lu) giving further details, say that
Lius activities were covered up and protected by his successive chiefs
Hsiang Chung and Yu Tzu-chun, so the affair must have happened in the
nieghborhood of 1477."
'Science and Civilisation in China' Vol. 23 p525 Joseph Needham

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries like today, China was the largest trade surplus nation by far. It also experienced staggering inflation. Its currency was the silver tael which was used to pay the workers on the wall and canal. China became the worlds silver sink, using it to buy security along its northern flank. Global bullion prices soared and for the first time in history, Europe had or had access to, something that China needed badly. The price of silver made the voyages of discovery much more attractive to bands of poor Castilians. Conversely, when the wall was completed, Chinas demand for silver dropped as well as the Crowns tax reciepts from American silver in the early 1600's.
So when viewed from the perspective of a holistic macrohistory, China influencing the renaissance becomes less ludicrous....although Zheng He sailing into Venice is still uh, problematic.
Duncan