The Tongking Gulf Through History

7. The Trading Environment and the Failure of Tongking’s Mid-Seventeenth-Century Commercial Resurgence

Chapter 7 The Trading Environment and the Failure of Tongking’s Mid-Seventeenth-Century Commercial Resurgence Iioka Naoko Tongkingese raw silk was one of the most coveted mercantile commodities in the South China Sea region in the mid-seventeenth century. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) and Chinese private traders were engaged in exporting Tongkingese raw silk to its primary market in Japan. While several studies have focused on the Dutch role in this branch of trade,1 little attention has been given to the Chinese merchants who preceded and competed with them,2 except for Zheng Chenggong (1624–62) on Taiwan. It is generally believed that Zheng naval forces controlled the sea lanes linking East and Southeast Asian waters and manipulated the Japan trade until the regime’s 1683 fall to the Manchu. In regard to the Tongking silk trade, as I have discussed elsewhere, most of the Chinese junks plying the Tongking-Nagasaki silk route belonged to a particular Chinese merchant called Wei Zhiyan. From the late 1640s to the mid-1680s, he and other traders from Fuqing had no trouble competing there with either Dutch ships or Zheng junks. Their activities formed a critical link in the chain that linked northern Vietnamese silk producers to distant Japanese markets and, by so doing, helped stimulate a commercial resurgence in mid-seventeenth century Tongking.3 While the main body of this chapter discusses the internal trading environment of mid-seventeenth century northern Vietnam (Đại Việt, or Tongking), with particular focus on the export silk industry and its problems, it must be stressed right at the start that this industry principally owed its mid-century prosperity as well as its later decline to factors outside Tongking and well beyond the control of its rulers. When the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722) decided to open the seas subsequent to the Zheng surrender, those external factors changed to the detriment of Vietnamese production. The export silk industry was unable to adjust and its principal overseas market was soon largely lost to renewed and expanded Chinese silk production and export. The chapter begins by charting the changes in the wider political and commercial environment that fostered but later destroyed this short-lived Tongking commercial resurgence. Then it moves to examine the internal trading environment of midseventeenth -century northern Đại Việt, focusing on the problems in the silk industry and on the organization of foreign trade that would later make it so difficult to adjust to the challenges arising from the renewal of China’s maritime commerce from the later 1680s. The Seventeenth Century, a Time of Turmoil and Opportunity The seventeenth century was a period of turmoil in Đại Việt. In 1592 the Trịnh ruling family came to power, paying lip service to a captive Lê emperor whom they had restored after a fifty-year civil war against the usurping Mạc. But the Trịnh lords (chúa) were frustrated by their inability to “complete” this restoration, as they saw it. To their south the Nguyễn lords were securing their power over central and southern parts of present-day Vietnam; by the late seventeenth century, Trịnh Tongking and Nguyên Cochinchina would coexist as two independent polities . After repeated battles between 1627 and 1672 had failed to dislodge the southern rulers, a peace was declared in 1673.4 To the north, the Trịnh faced another potentially disastrous threat. In 1592, the usurping Mạc clan had been driven from Thăng Long (modern Hanoi) to the mountainous region bordering China. As Niu and Li further discuss in this volume, the Mạc long remained influential there, awaiting a chance to retake Hanoi. It was only in 1667 that the Trịnh conquered their Cao Bằng stronghold, forcing the Mạc remnants to flee to China. Ten years later, the last Mạc attempt to invade northern Vietnam was defeated by chúa Trịnh Tạc (r. 1657–82). Meanwhile in Japan the Tokugawa bakufu’s (the central government of Japan from 1603 to 1868) drastic shifts in foreign policy during the 1630s created a new trading environment. Previously, under the “Red Seal” trading system (from 1604 to 1635), Japanese merchants played a pivotal role in commercial exchanges between Tongking and Japan, with at least thirty-seven “Red Seal” vessels heading to Tongking for trade.5 Such distinguished Japanese merchant families as the 118 Ioka Naoko [52.14.130.13] Project MUSE...