Chapter 730: The Ming Dynasty Can Also Do Gunboat Diplomacy

The report from the Golden Goblet Agricultural Colonization Office was actually already out of date.

Because six Ming gunboats flying the Sun-and-Moon-Together banner had by this time already formed a line and sealed off the mouth of the Chao Phraya River.

These six Ming gunboats were the six ten-thousand-dan great sea ships that had carried the Ming embassy to Europe. Although they were armed merchantmen, their hulls were very sturdily built and they carried a large number of cannon. Each of the ten-thousand-dan great bird ships had as many as twenty-four gunports, mounting twenty-four 6-pounder bronze cannon.

Firepower like that was no match for the navy of the Dutch East India Company, but there was no great problem in bottling up the most important estuary of the Kingdom of Siam.

In addition, a 200-ton Dutch East India Company galleon was also together with the six Ming ten-thousand-dan ships. It did not take part in "blocking the door," but merely cruised about in a friendly manner nearby.

This was Van Diemen's flagship. Commissioned by the Ming court to accompany the Ming embassy on its visit to Europe, this was a fine opportunity to expand Dutch influence on the European diplomatic stage! So Van Diemen had asked the East India Company for a 200-ton galleon.

And now this ship had been brought along by the Ming embassy to frighten the Siamese!

This was the Ming–Dutch combined fleet! Were you Siamese afraid or not?

Do not assume that because Siam's Ayutthaya dynasty profited handsomely from foreign trade, and was moreover the first country in Asia to open its doors to Westerners, signing a pile of treaties as early as the seventeenth century, that this country had ever thought of building a powerful navy.

By the way, the military strength of the Ayutthaya dynasty at this time was not weak. Their great ruler for a generation, King Naresuan the Great, had been dead only forty-five years. The sakdina system reorganized by Naresuan was still functioning well, able to provide the state with sufficient tribute and conscripts. And through trade with Westerners, Siam also possessed quite a few foreign guns and cannon.

But this state land-grant system, similar to China's equal-field system, had no way of providing the Ayutthaya dynasty with enough sailors and merchants and artisans. With hardly any sailors, how could they run a navy?

The reason for this was that Heaven had been truly generous to Siam's peasants, giving them a country that was flat, vast, warm, and rich in water resources. Moreover, because it had developed late and had often been beaten to the brink of death by its neighbor Burma, the country's population had never been large, so there was enough land to grant to nobles and commoners alike.

Under the Ayutthaya dynasty's sakdina system, even the lowliest slave received a grant of five rai, roughly twelve mu of land!

And a commoner's land grant was as much as twenty-five rai — sixty mu of land!

This was not a grant per household, but per commoner, regardless of sex!

Under such a generous land-grant system, how could the Siamese be willing to go to sea, or willing to go into trade? And even if they were willing, it was not permitted! Siam's population was too small and its land too plentiful, so land was not the most important means of production — people were!

Therefore Siam had no free commoners to speak of. Men and women alike had to register with the lord of the land where they lived, then receive their allotment to cultivate, and also bear the corresponding taxes and military service. Moreover, the allotted land could not be bought or sold, and if one grew too old and feeble to farm it, it had to be returned to the lord.

Thus the commoners of Siam were basically all farming peasants (serfs). Artisans were mostly household slaves, farming five rai of land to feed themselves while also doing handicraft work for their lord — one can well imagine how well that work was done.

As for the merchants within Siam, they were mostly foreign immigrants, chiefly Chinese, with a small number of Indians, Japanese, Annamese, and Westerners.

Because the population was too small, and because women outnumbered men (in the seventeenth century, Siam's sex ratio was quite skewed), Siam had always welcomed adult male immigrants from abroad. Immigrants were also treated as "commoners," but enjoyed super-national treatment: they only had to pay taxes and did not have to bear military service or corvée labor (usually six months of service a year). This allowed them to move about relatively freely, and therefore to engage in commerce.

So many years later, the wealthy in Siam, apart from the old aristocracy, were all descendants of foreign immigrants.

Moreover, because there were far more women than men in Siam, many bachelors who could not find wives in their own countries were able to marry in Siam, and along with a wife they could also pick up a piece of property — under Siam's sakdina system, land grants were made regardless of sex (what else could you do with so much land?), always twenty-five rai. And the women of Siam were all very capable workers, hardy and hardworking (as in all the Nanyang countries), no worse than men at farming.

For a foreign immigrant who had come ten thousand li with empty hands, in a country where it was so easy to catch tropical diseases, marrying a local woman who had a bit of property and was willing to work was simply a gift from Heaven — a Siamese wife meant sixty mu of already-cleared land (never mind how well it was farmed, it was certainly not forest), a certain amount of farm tools, a dwelling that sheltered one from wind and rain (so one could avoid falling ill), someone to look after one (who knew how to avoid tropical diseases), and enough food to fill the belly.

With such living conditions, an immigrant's chances of contracting a tropical disease or starving to death dropped sharply, and it was also easy to gain a firm foothold and then grow rich.

So for a Chinese immigrant arriving empty-handed, seventeenth-century Siam was absolutely the ideal destination — no contest!

Had the Ming Empire's assertiveness in Southeast Asia over the past two years not frightened King Prasat Thong of the Ayutthaya dynasty, who was then carrying out a "renaissance," the harmonious relationship between the Kingdom of Siam and Chinese immigrants would have continued for a long time to come.

But the destruction of Champa by the combined forces of Ming and Annam, and the seizure of the great plains of eastern Cambodia by the Ming's Golden Goblet Agricultural Colonization Office, filled the sovereign and ministers of Ayutthaya with fear.

And so decrees restricting and expelling Ming immigrants were issued from the court at Ayutthaya to all parts of the Kingdom of Siam!

Near the mouth of the Chao Phraya River, on the wharf of a fishing village called Dinei Island Village, a new immigrant from the Ming homeland stood side by side with a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Siamese woman, dark-skinned but with delicate, finely wrought features, the two of them simply staring blankly at the Ming gunboats at the river's mouth.

This immigrant was Ye Jiaxin. Late the previous year, he had drifted to Siam's Nakhon Si Thammarat Province together with the unlucky Yao Daqiao.

Yao Daqiao had become afraid of sea travel and unwilling to leave dry land again, so he had sold off the plow oxen he had brought from the Central Plains (some had been slaughtered, but most remained), raised a little capital, and settled in the port of Songkhla in Nakhon Si Thammarat Province to do business.

Because Ming had implemented the "grain embargo" system, many Western ships trading with China would stop at Songkhla to purchase some paddy or polished rice.

This gave the shrewd Yao Daqiao an opening — not in farming or rice trading, but in selling the rush sacks used to hold rice. He first spent money to have the local Chinese community leader in Songkhla smooth relations, and married the daughter of a local village clerk who had no sons. Then, using his father-in-law's connections, he traded the iron farm tools he had brought from the Central Plains for rush sacks, sold the rush sacks to the Chinese rice merchants at Songkhla port, and used the money to buy ironware shipped from Foshan or other goods, which he then traded for more rush sacks.

Ye Jiaxin, however, was unwilling to follow Yao Daqiao in small-time peddling, so Yao Daqiao gave him a share of the farm tools and let him take a ship north to the Golden Goblet. But when the unreliable Huizhou merchant's junk he was traveling on put in at the mouth of the Chao Phraya, he was seduced by a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Siamese girl, and so he settled on Dinei Island. He received a grant of twenty-five rai of farmland from the local lord, and his wife had another twenty-five rai of allotted land, so the two of them had a total of 120 mu of land, all of it paddy fields. Ye Jiaxin had also brought along a good number of quality farm tools from Shanghai's Shen Steel, traded some of the tools for plow oxen, and carefully worked all fifty rai of land they had been allotted.

Siam's land grants were very generous, but because men had to bear heavy military and corvée service, women lacked the strength, and quality farm tools were scarce, the land's output was not great — it was a pattern of extensive cultivation with thin harvests. Therefore the taxes attached to the land were also not heavy. For Ye Jiaxin, who could devote all his energy to farming, the business of farming in Siam was simply ideal.

But this business that suited him best might now be impossible to continue, because a "Chao Phraya" (a Siamese title of nobility, roughly equivalent to a prince) who had granted him his land had sent word through a minor clerk that he was to finish harvesting this season's rice and then get lost — and he was not allowed to take his wife, who was already pregnant, with him!

But this matter was not the worst of it — according to Ye Jiaxin's Siamese wife, the expulsion of the Chinese was very likely just talk and would not be seriously enforced, because no one had said what would happen if one simply refused to leave. So the worst thing was that the Siamese might not be serious, but the neighboring Ming Golden Goblet Agricultural Colonization Office had taken it seriously, and had joined with the Dutch to send troops to demand an accounting. Was this going to mean war? Would they not even let a man farm in peace?

(End of Chapter)