Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [85]
In the Indian subcontinent Zheng-He’s attention was mostly concentrated on Śri Lanka, where on his second voyage in 1411 he is known to have left a trilingual inscription on a stone tablet (prepared in advance in China) in Chinese, Tamil and Persian.
It conveys greetings from the Chinese Ming emperor, and in its three languages expresses respect to the Buddha, the god Tenavarai-Nenavar and Allah respectively, listing massive offerings in gold, silver, silk, etc. These expeditions were evidently not mere courtesy visits, and have a certain dramatic similarity to the notorious behaviour of Europeans abroad: faced with resistance, the Chinese abducted the Śri Lankan king and took him forcibly to the emperor in Nanjing, but then returned him, along with the most holy relic in the island, the Sacred Tooth of Buddha. This resulted in a Chinese claim of sovereignty over Śri Lanka, which was actually respected through payment of tribute by the Śri Lankans until 1459.
Despite their apparent success, such imperialist initiatives ceased abruptly after Zheng-He’s final voyage, and were never renewed. No one really knows why. China’s foreign policy returned to its characteristic inward-looking and defensive stance.
Nevertheless, as seen above (’Beyond the southern sea’, p. 146), Chinese expatriates have given China, and the Chinese, a bridgehead into South-East Asia which its government never looked for—and indeed discouraged over many centuries. Now, in all the major countries of South-East Asia, Chinese-language communities are the principal source of investment capital.
In the Philippines, the overseas Chinese make up 1% of the country’s population, but control over half of the stock market. In Indonesia the proportions are 4% and 75% respectively, in Malaysia 32% and 60%. In Thailand the overseas Chinese account for at least half of the wealth … According to one estimate, the 51 million overseas Chinese control an economy worth $700 billion—roughly the same size as the 1.2 billion mainlanders.34
Growing Chinese-dominated businesses will have the opportunity of communicating with one another in Chinese, whether Mandarin or Southern Min; and so for the first time the Chinese language has potential for expansion outside the mainland. China itself is no longer keeping its distance from its fellow-Chinese who have chosen to make their living abroad, and it is possible that this new, more diplomatic face of China will become openly influential, perhaps even hegemonic.
China’s disciples
Although China was always reserved in accepting any influence from foreigners, its smaller neighbours who achieved some level of settled civilisation and independent statehood were nothing like so circumspect in their acceptance of influence from China. The states and peoples of Korea, Japan and Vietnam adopted this position. Each of them spoke a language unrelated to Chinese. Each of them had to resist sporadic Chinese attempts at conquest (though Japan suffered this only in the first flush of Mongol imperialism). But each first learnt to read and write not in their own languages but in classical Chinese. And each developed writing systems for their own languages by transforming or supplementing the use of Chinese characters.
Unlike Chinese with Sanskrit and Pali, they each adopted vocabulary from Chinese as it was, regardless of the fact that it did not fit well within the sound systems of their own languages. For them, after all, China represented the fountainhead of advanced civilisation.* As a result their languages became full of Chinese loan vocabulary, modified for their own pronunciation, and have remained so ever since. They soon had as clear an appreciation of the meanings of the syllables they borrowed, and the characters associated with them, as the Chinese had themselves—indeed, perhaps clearer, since they also used the same characters to represent words in their own languages, related only by meaning.
This faithful adoption