World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [16]
Ethnic Chinese have played a disproportionate role in the commercial life of Southeast Asia since long before the colonial era. In the early 1400s, when the Grand Eunuch Admiral Cheng Ho led a fleet of three hundred vessels around Southeast Asia on behalf of the Ming dynasty, he discovered an enclave of fellow Chinese already prospering in Java, now in Indonesia. The admiral observed that the Chinese had fine food and clothing, in contrast to “the natives of the country, who were very dirty and were fond of eating snakes, insects, and worms, and who slept and ate together with the dogs.”
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Around the same time, in another part of what is now Indonesia, the much more advanced Tabanan was the seat of one of Bali’s most powerful and cultured royal courts. The Tabanan kingdom, recounts Clifford Geertz, was full of “rebellious conspiracies, strategic marriages, calculated affronts, and artful blandishments woven into a delicate pattern of Machiavellian statecraft.” Tabanan was also the center of the now world-famous Balinese music and theater arts. Nevertheless, even six hundred years ago, all foreign trade in the kingdom was conducted by a single wealthy Chinese, with the remainder of the tiny Chinese community acting as his agents. Indigenous commerce was practically nonexistent. Half a millennium later, little in this respect had changed. As late as 1950, virtually all the stores and factories in Tabanan were Chinese owned.
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In the Philippines, when the Spanish in 1571 founded the city of Manila on the island of Luzon, they encountered Chinese settlements that had preceded them by more than a century as well as belligerent Chinese traders, who sailed up in their junks, firing rockets and cannons. Animosity between the Chinese and the Spanish is a constant theme in the Philippines’ colonial history. The Spaniards subjected the Chinese to severe taxes and restrictions, and sequestered them in fenced-in quarters called the Parián. At the same time, the Spanish were utterly dependent on the Chinese, who, as traders, tailors, locksmiths, bakers, and so on, seemed to occupy every critical economic niche.
On May 23, 1603, three Chinese mandarins, wearing all their official insignia, and carrying a box of seals as if they were still in China, arrived in the Philippines. After receiving homage from Manila’s Chinese residents, the mandarins
presented a letter to the Spanish Governor explaining that they had come to investigate a hill of gold and silver, as yet unexploited they understood, of which the Chinese Emperor had heard tell. They bore themselves with the dignity befitting the emissaries of All Under Heaven, moving through Manila as though it were Chinese territory, and administering floggings as they saw fit. The Spaniards did not quite know what to make of it. Was it a curtain-raiser to a Chinese takeover of the Philippines? . . . Taking immediate precautions, the Governor issued orders for all Chinese on the island to be registered, and for the men to be divided and housed in groups of three hundred.
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The Chinese resisted, and hostilities broke out. After a Spanish envoy was killed in Parián, the Spanish took their vengeance, massacring twenty-three thousand Chinese and hungrily looting their property. Afterward, however, the Spanish regretted having killed so many Chinese, for, as one of them lamented, they had no food and “no shoes to wear, not even at excessive prices.”
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The Chinese eventually returned and were massacred by the Spanish many more times. In the end, the Chinese outlasted the Spanish.
Chinese economic dominance in Vietnam dates back even further. Vietnam’s recorded history begins in 208 B.C., when a renegade Chinese general conquered Au Lac, a domain in the northern mountains of Vietnam populated by the Viet people, and declared