The World полностью

Of Song’s refined statesmen, Shen Gua, the polymathic courtier who served Renzong’s son Emperor Yingzong, was one of the most extraordinary. He rose to be chief of the emperor’s Bureau of Astronomy, a reforming Assistant Minister of Imperial Hospitality and ambassador to the Khitans, and as a general he led Song forces against the Tanguts.^* All the while he experimented with the magnetic compass needle and the concept of true north, researched the orbit of planets, designed a water clock, analysed geological history using marine fossils and climate change, improved the designs of drydocks for ships and pound locks for canals, analysed pharmacology, refined iron forging, dissected corpses of executed bandits to study the throat and conceived a pinhole camera. But his luck ran out at court and he was framed for a defeat by the Tanguts. He finally retired to his country estate Dream Pool, where he wrote his collection Dream Pool Essays – enjoying his ‘nine guests’.^*

He was one of many luminaries. At the southern end of the Great Canal, the port of Linan (Hangzhou), briefly administered by a famous poet, Su Shi, was the world’s supreme entrepôt, its canals, restaurants and streets crowded with Persians, Jews and Indians, its ships bearing silk, velvet, porcelain, iron and swords to western Asia and Europe, via Egypt and the Gulf, eastwards to Japan and southwards to Sumatra and India.

In 1033, a delegation arrived in Hangzhou from a Song trading partner, Rajendra Chola, the chakravartin (world emperor) of a Tamil empire who had conquered the eastern coast of India up to Bengal as well as the Maldives and Sri Lanka. Champion of Hinduism, builder of the majestic Brihadishvara temple and his capital Gangaikonda Cholapuram, Rajendra created a powerful Indian navy, based at Nagapattinam, supposedly with 500 enormous ships, some bearing 1,000 sailors and boasting the latest Chinese technology – compartmentalized hulls, compasses and flamethrowers. He also backed the Ainnurruvar – ‘the five hundred [lords] from the four countries and the thousand directions’ – and other piratical Tamil trading guilds whose fleets were precursors of European armed trading corporations. Rajendra’s two embassies to China reflected his frustration that Indian trade had to be mediated through a seafaring kingdom, Srivijaya in Sumatra, that was closer to Huanzong.

Srivijaya was an Indic thalassocracy ruled by a raja who sent traders across a wide mandala – sacred circle – of power, selling spices, camphor (from Borneo), cloves, sandalwood and brazilwood to the Chinese court in return for porcelain and silk and recognition of its rajas as kings. Its people paid tribute to the Chinese but thought in Sanskrit. This mercantile confederacy enjoyed close relations with another Indic power, the Sailendra family, who ruled the Mataram raj, building magnificent temples in Java and presiding over a mandala extending as far as the Philippines and Thailand. Later its Buddhist and Shaivite branches split and fought, a schism in the Indosphere with political consequences: Mataram and Srivijaya separated. Yet both thrived as trading empires: a shipwreck, found in Srivijayan waters, carrying an estimated 70,000 pieces of ceramic shows the scale of this trade to China and Iraq. Riches attract enemies, and the Srivijayan confederacy sanctioned pirates who preyed on Arab, Indian and Chinese convoys, pushing up the prices for Arab horses for the Chola armies.

Rajendra got his pretext in 1025 when the most powerful king in south-east Asia,^* Suryavarman, ruler of the Khmer empire and a fellow Shaivite Hindu, requested Rajendra’s help against the Buddhist Srivijayans. Rajendra sailed with his fleet, sacked their capital, captured their raja. There, much of the Chinese trade was taken over by his Tamil trading companies, which gloried in names such as the Merchants of the Three Worlds (Arab, Indian and Chinese). But Song influence also extended eastwards to Japan, where a female writer was inventing the novel.

‘No matter how amorous or passionate you may be, as long as you are straightforward and refrain from causing others embarrassment, no one will mind,’ wrote Lady Murasaki, a widow aged around thirty, in her diary in 1010 as the all-powerful regent Fujiwara Michinaga, fifty-five years old, flirted with her at the court of the emperor of Japan.

TWO FEMALE WRITERS – MURASAKI AND THE POETESS