(The Suma Oriental Which Goes from the Red Sea to China, compiled by Tom_Pires, [six book], Of Malacca, translated from the Portuguese MS. in the Biblioth ue de la Chambre des D_ut_, Paris, and edited by Arnoldo Cortes_)
The pronunciations of some of these peoples are so different from their modern equivalents that it is impossible to identify them, but it is clear from this list that an amazing variety of people came to Southeast Asia from the whole maritime Asian region spanning the Indian Ocean and the China Sea. The Lequeous mentioned here are Ryukyuans from the Ryukyu Kingdom, which is now Okinawa. In the fourteenth century, the main island of Okinawa was divided into three kingdoms situated in the northern, central and southern regions. This Three Mountains Era came to an end in 1429 when the second king of the Sho dynasty, Sho Hashi, unified the island. The prosperity of the Ryukyu Kingdom, which traded not only with China, Korea and Japan but also with Siam and Nalacca, is reflected in names such as Horaito (_Isle of Eternal Youth_) and Bankoku no Shinryo (_Bridge to the World_).
The Lequeous had made their way to Malacca, which had become established 500 years earlier as the hub of international trade. In the first half of the sixteenth century Southeast Asia was already a center of world trade and a base for cultural exchange. Southeast Asia formed the boundary between the two regions of Maritime Asia: the Indian Ocean and the China Sea regions. On the Indian Ocean the Islamires went back and forth in their dhows, while the Chinese crossed the China Sea in their junks. Viewed from the perspective of the these leading figures, the Indian Ocean region could be called _maritime Islam_ and the China Sea region _maritime China._ Ever since the arrival of Vasco Da Gama in Calicut on the west coast of India in 1498, Europeans had been buying Eastern goods from maritime Islam, mainly via Venice. Maritime Islam provided the goods that formed the basis of modern European life, such as pepper and spices, coffee, sugar, Indian cotton and indigo, and by the sixteenth century Europeans were traveling to the maritime Islamic world to directly purchase these commodities. Portugal, followed by countries such as Spain, Holland and Britain, proceeded to enter maritime Asia backed by comprehensive support from their governments. The Chinese, on the other hand, have long been known as tireless travelers over both land and sea. There is a tendency to think that the Chinese first appeared in Southeast Asia as a result of their employment by western nations at copper mines, rubber plantations and the like. In fact, however, the maritime Chinese from coastal cities such as Fujian (Fukien) and Guangdong (Canton) had been active in trade in the China Sea region for over 1,000 years. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, Nanjing (Nanking)was made the official capital of Ming China, and through the overseas campaigns of Zheng He (Cheng Ho) (seven campaigns from 1405 to 1433), China even developed a sea empire.
The Japanese have only looked upon China as a continental nation represented by cities such as Chang_an (Ch_ang-an) and Beijing (Peking) during the Tang dynasty (618 to 906), when Japan regularly dispatched embassies to China, and in the present day. In all other ages, it has deepened trade relations with a China that it viewed primarily as a maritime nation. From the medieval period onwards, the Japanese based themselves at Ningpo on the South China coast and referred to the maritime Chinese as tojin. As we have seen, the fact that Japanese spared the lives of only these tojin after the second Mongol invasion is proof of the closeness of this relationship.
(Mongol China distinguished between Mongols, tribes of the Western China, North Chinese, and South Chinese. The Japanese killed the _continental Chinese_ Mongols and North Chinese as enemies.) In Ayutthaya and other Japanese towns in Southeast Asia, the maritime Chinese lived together with the Japanese as neighbors. During Japan s period of national seclusion in the Edo era, the trade conducted with the Chinese and Dutch at Nagasaki (_Nagasaki trade_) was also called the tojin trade and the Chinese were provided with an estate that was bigger than Dejima, where the Dutch resided.
From medieval to modern times, Europe and Japan were continuously influenced by maritime Islam and maritime China respectively. These two main forces in the modern age, situated at the easternmost and westernmost tips of the Eurasian continent, developed through trade and cultural exchange with maritime Asia.
