Thank you, Sampan Viking. This sets up a few thought lines with me.
Only the Eastern end of the silk road was controlled by the Chinese. Most of the work was done by the nomads living in the Eurasian steppes.
That reminds me of a very good book by a Soviet writer about nomads, which I read some thirty years ago in a German translation. The point that is relevant here is that the nomads of the Eurasian steppes were often military superior to the settled peoples to the South and West of the steppes. They traded with these peoples but plundered or even conquered them when the opportunity offered. The Great Wall was at most times effective in protecting China. I have read somewhere that from the third century AD the Iranians introduced alfalfa to feed their war horses and that they organised something similar to European feodalism to have armored horsemen to keep out the Huns which would then inspire those Huns to attack and plunder the Roman Empire rather than Iran. When the pest came in the 14th century, just after the silk trade had also transmitted the design of cannon, Europe might have lost a third of the population but the the steppe peoples might have lost 90%. Demographic disaster and firearms in the hands of the Russians destroyed the military superiority of the nomads.
The changed demography also would have made the caravan trade much more expensive and would be an added reason, perhaps even the main reason, for Europeans to develop the sea trade to Asia.
The interview stresses that the Chinese ships were less able to sail on the wind than European ones. But later Chinese vessels were better. See for instance Tales of the Fish Patrol by Jack London in which he writes about his experience in working for the fishery patrol in the Bay of San Francisco about a century ago when people of different extraction used fishing vessels of the design from their homelands, as Greece and China and others. He said that the Chinese vessels sailed much better. There is also the anecdote of the Australian who in the middle of the 19th century bought a junk in Hong Kong and sailed it with a Chinese master to Sidney. The junk sailed beautifully until the master went home. The Australian was not able to sail her effectively. When the master was persuaded to come back a few years later she again sailed perfectly.
The European have been a belligerent lot at least since the time of the Vikings and they developed the quality of the guns more than the Chinese did, but recovered guns from the Armada were still pretty miserable by the standards of a hundred years later. So I would think the Dutch guns in this war are likely to have been far from perfect. Just a point that will have to be investigated.
A very different point. The ancestors of Polynesians departed from China about five thousand years ago and reached Hawaii, New Zealand and Madagascar about a thousand years ago. So seafaring over long distances is not unknown in the area. But China was naturally militarily most engaged in protecting itself against the nomads.
I think we are really at the beginning of a long rewriting of the history of the world.
Thank you Delft and you must forgive me if I seem to try to move aspects of this thread from the historical to the present and future, but I believe the underlying forces of the story are as strong today as they were in the 17th C.
I return to the core question of this and perhaps of a large part of Geopolitics past and present by asking:
Is the most important single activity on this planet the control of the method by which goods are transported from one side of the Eurasian/African Landmass to the other?
I certainly have come to the conclusion that it does and that the discovery and rise of the new world has done little to reduce that importance.
For most of history, the land routes dominated the trade and the trade routes were controlled by the Chinese Empire. It is true that Chinese soldiers did not patrol its entire length, but this was unnecessary for China was the central hub around which the whole mechanism revolved.
In the Far East, goods came to China from the SE Asian peninsular and the Spice Islands and from there were transported westwards. China was also a major sale destination for goods heading Eastwards from the West. Chinese soldiers may not have patrolled the entire Silk Route, but they did not need to as the value of the wealth successfully flowing provided a powerful incentive to all those through who's territory it passed, to ensure that the flow was assisted and not impeded.
I would go further and suggest that there is a direct correlation between disruption to the Silk Rd and both Dynastic turmoil in China and Chaos/Dark Ages in Europe.
It is also my proposal that it was partly in response to a time of collapse and decline in the late Mediaeval that prompted European mariners to seek the Orient directly by sea (which was after all what Columbus and other explorers all set out to do).
Up to that point, land was the only realistic option and while some goods headed West from East Asia across the Indian Ocean, the volumes were relatively small and only intended for local consumption, with only crumbs from the trade crossing the Mediterranean basin.
Sea Voyages were more risky than land and limited in their scope. Most ships were incapable of physically surviving the journey around Africa to reach Western Europe, further you can cut a deal with a bandit, but the weather is deaf to all entreaties.
Europe however set itself on that course and while it took several centuries to perfect, did refine it navel technology to the point where it ships could undertake the physical rigours of the journey and possess sufficient superior fire power to overcome the navies of the Moors, Turks and other None European powers who had to passed en-route.
Did Chinese ships have the legs of their European rivals, even if fire power and all other things were equal? I suspect that they did not, because such features were the product of very specific design and China clearly had little interest in sustaining such capability. This means that such design features were not incorporated into active ship building even if the technology was known.
The ATOL article clearly reports a significant superiority between Western and Oriental vessels and I think this should be accepted. Whether this was purely design or also a product of seamanship, tactics and even strategy is open to question, but whichever way you look at it, it reveals a failure of critical thinking and or effective response from the Chinese leadership.
What Europeans did when they arrived was two fold.
1) They sailed directly too and seized control of the primary spice Islands, thus taking possession of the raw commodities of trade themselves. This may not have been overall serious for China, had the Europeans still needed to transport their produce to China for land based transit to Europe. This was not the case though as
2) The Europeans were able to take this products directly to market in these same ships by sea.
In short the lasting achievement of Europe was to head East and for the first time ever, take physical control of the entire trade route from plantation to market stall and do so in a way that cut China out of the deal completely. They were able to do it because the ships were reliable, able to out gun any blocking power and able to make the journey in a manner ever closer and closer to becoming scheduled.
With so much value removed from the silk route, local chieftains in Central Asia will have had more to gain from looting what little was left (while it was still there) rather than protect it and created a vicious circle on land that quickly killed what little trade was left and turning other Eastern traders to seek the ships and protection of Europe.
China for whatever reason seemed unable or unwilling to respond.
Europe boomed and China fell into economic collapse.
This is situation that exists today with power passing from the Dutch to the British and currently with the Americans.
I now invite you to examine current Chinese policy from the strategic viewpoint of its desire to re-establishing the land routes and to securing access to the primary trade goods of the modern age for transmission along it.
You may especially wish to consider the implications of the South China Seas dispute in this light.
You may wish also wish to consider the implications of growing security in Central Asia, why others may wish to destabilise it and the effect of the growing piracy problems in the Indian Ocean.
