History of The Song Dynasty - China's First Standing Navy

China's First Standing Navy

As the once great Indian Ocean maritime power of the Chola Dynasty in medieval India had waned and declined, Chinese sailors and seafarers began to increase their own maritime activity in South East Asia and into the Indian Ocean. Even during the earlier Northern Song period, when it was written in Tamil inscriptions under the reign of Rajendra Chola I that Srivijaya had been completely taken in 1025 by Chola's naval strength, the succeeding king of Srivijaya managed to send tribute to the Chinese Northern Song court in 1028. Much later, in 1077, the Indian Chola ruler Kulothunga Chola I (who the Chinese called Ti-hua-kia-lo) sent a trade embassy to the court of Emperor Shenzong of Song, and made lucrative profits in selling goods to China. There were other tributary payers from other regions of the world as well. The Fatimid-era Egyptian sea captain Domiyat traveled to a Buddhist site of pilgrimage in Shandong in 1008, where he presented the Chinese Emperor Zhenzong of Song with gifts from his ruling Imam Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, establishing diplomatic relations between Egypt and China that had been lost during the collapse of the Tang Dynasty in 907 (while the Fatimid state was established three years later in 910). During the Northern Song Dynasty, Quanzhou was already a bustling port of call visited by a plethora of different foreigers, from Muslim Arabs, Persians, Egyptians, Hindu Indians, Middle-Eastern Jews, Nestorian Christians from the Near East, etc. Muslims from foreign nations dominated the import and export industry (see Islam during the Song Dynasty). To regulate this enormous commercial center, in 1087 the Northern Song government established an office in Quanzhou for the sole purpose of handling maritime affairs and commercial transactions. In this multicultural environment there were many opportunities for subjects in the empire of foreign descent, such as the (Arab or Persian) Muslim Pu Shougeng, the Commissioner of Merchant Shipping for Quanzhou between 1250 and 1275. Pu Shougeng had gained his reputable position by helping the Chinese destroy pirate forces that plagued the area, and so was lavished with gifts and appraisal from Chinese merchants and officials. Quanzhou soon rivaled Guangzhou (the greatest maritime port of the earlier Tang Dynasty) as a major trading center during the late Northern Song. However, Guangzhou had not fully lost its importance. The medieval Arab maritime captain Abu Himyarite from Yemen toured Guangzhou in 993, and was an avid visitor to China. There were other notable international seaports in China during the Song period as well, including Xiamen (or Amoy).

When the Song capital was removed far south to Hangzhou, massive numbers of people came from the north. Unlike the flat plains of the north, the mountainous terrain riddled with lakes and rivers in southern China is largely a hindrance and inhospitable to widespread agriculture. Therefore, the Southern Song took on a unique maritime presence that was largely unseen in earlier dynasties, grown out of the need to secure importation of foreign resources. Commercial cities (located along the coast and by internal rivers), backed by patronage of the state, dramatically increased shipbuilding activity (funding harbor improvements, warehouse construction, and navigation beacons). Navigation at sea was made easier by the invention of the compass and Shen Kuo's treatise of the 11th century on the concept of true north (with magnetic declination towards the North Pole). With military defense and economic policy in mind, the Southern Song Dynasty established China's first standing navy. China had a long naval history before that point (example, Battle of Chibi in 208), and even during the Northern Song era there were concerns with naval matters, as seen in examples such as the Chinese official Huang Huaixin of the Xining Reign (1068–1077) outlining a plan of employing a drydock for repair of 'imperial dragon boats' (see Science and technology of the Song Dynasty). Already during the Northern Song Dynasty, the Chinese had established fortified trade bases in the Philippines, a noted interest of the court to expand China's military power and economic influence abroad. Provincial armies in the Northern Song era also maintained naval river units. However, it was the Southern Song court that was the first to create a large, permanent standing naval institution for China in 1132. The new headquarters of the Southern Song Chinese admiralty was based at Dinghai, the office labeled as the Yanhai Zhizhi Shisi (Imperial Commissariat for the Control and Organization of Coastal Areas). Even as far back as 1129 officials proposed ambitious plans to conquer Korea with a new navy and use Korea as a base for launching invasions into Jin territory, but this scheme was never achieved and was of secondary importance to maintaining defense along the fluctuating border with Jin.

Capturing the essence of the day, the Song era writer Zhang Yi once wrote in 1131 that China must regard the Sea and the River as her Great Wall, and substitute warships for watchtowers. Indeed, the court administration at Hangzhou lived up to this ideal, and were successful for a time in employing their navy to defend their interests against an often hostile neighbor to the north. In his Science and Civilization in China series, Joseph Needham writes:

From a total of 11 squadrons and 3,000 men rose in one century to 20 squadrons totalling 52,000 men, with its main base near Shanghai. The regular striking force could be supported at need by substantial merchantmen; thus in the campaign of 1161 some 340 ships of this kind participated in the battles on the Yangtze. The age was one of continual innovation; in 1129 trebuchets throwing gunpowder bombs were decreed standard equipment on all warships, between 1132 and 1183 a great number of treadmill-operated paddle-wheel craft, large and small, were built, including stern-wheelers and ships with as many as 11 paddle-wheels a side (the invention of the remarkable engineer Kao Hsuan), and in 1203 some of these were armored with iron plates (to the design of another outstanding shipwright Chhin Shih-Fu)...In sum, the navy of the Southern Sung held off the and then the Mongols for nearly two centuries, gaining complete control of the East China Sea.

During the reign of Emperor Xiaozong of Song, the Chinese increased the number of trade missions that would dock at ports throughout the Indian Ocean, where Arab and Hindu influence was once predominant. The Chinese sailed regularly to Korea and Japan in the Far East, westwards towards India and Sri Lanka, and into the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea. The Chinese were keen to import goods such as rare woods, precious metals, gems, spices, and ivory, while exporting goods such as silk, ceramics, lacquer-ware, copper cash, dyes, and even books. In 1178, the Guangzhou customs officer Zhou Qufei wrote of an island far west in the Indian Ocean (possibly Madagascar), from where people with skin "as black as lacquer" and with frizzy hair were captured and purchased as slaves by Arab merchants. As an important maritime trader, China appeared also on geographical maps of the Islamic world. In 1154 the Moroccan geographer Al-Idrisi published his Geography, where he described the Chinese seagoing vessels as having aboard goods such as iron, swords, leather, silk, velvet, along with textiles from Aden (modern-day Yemen), the Indus River region, and Euphrates River region (modern-day Iraq). He also commended the silk manufactured at Quanzhou as being unparalleled in the world for its quality, while the Chinese capital at Hangzhou was best known throughout the Islamic world for being a major producer of glass wares. By at least the 13th century, the Chinese were even familiar with the story of the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria since it is described at length by Zhao Rugua, a Southern Song customs inspector of Quanzhou.