Отправлено: 05.01.07 15:41. Заголовок: THE HELAN COURT, 794-1070

The fall of Po-hai in 926 was followed just nine years later by the final collapse of Silla, and in 936 by the reunification of the Korean peninsula under the new state of Koryo (918-1392). The Koryo king immediately sought to establish official relations with Japan, but his overtures were twice rejected by the wary Japanese court, and intercourse was left as before in the hands of Korean refugees, pirates, and merchants, who were joined occasionally by Japanese traders in defiance of the court’s ban on unauthorized overseas travel by its subjects.

After decades of disunity, China was finally reunified under the Sung dynasty during the years between 960 and 979 and entered a period of rapid agricultural and handicraft-industrial development that stimulated vigorous trade with all the nations of East Asia. This trade was actively fostered by the Sung court, where the imperial coffers depended heavily on customs duties collected from overseas traders and on the monopoly the court reserved for itself in the sale of aromatics and other luxury items. eased chiefly around the port of Ming-chou, the Sung merchants early made their way to Japan, crossing the East China Sea to Hakata in Kyushu. There the Kyashu authorities at the Dazaifu determined the status of the merchant, the object of his visit, and what cargo he carried, reporting the information to the court in Kyoto, which determined the allowed length of the merchant’s stay in Japan and whether or not he would be permined to trade. If trade was permitted, the Kyoto government exercised its right of first purchase either directly through a specially dispatched official, the Foreign Goods Commissioner (karamono no tsukai), or indirectly and increasingly through the Dazaifu office. It was the growing authority of the Dazaifu in the trade that encouraged the Sung merchants to seek out private ports in Kyushu.

After the cessation of its official relations with the continent, which can be dated to the year 920, when a Po-hai embassy is last known to have reached Kyoto, the Japanese court’s chief foreign problem apart from trade was piratical brigandage. Large-scale attacks by Koryo and Amami Island pirates on Tsushima, Iki, Kyushu, and other nearby islands between 997 and 999 resulted in heavy losses of life and property.

 Отправлено: 05.01.07 15:46. Заголовок: Re:

FOREIGN RELATIONS

Twenty years later, the ferocious attacks of a people previously unknown to the Japanese spread even greater havoc. The Japanese called the mysterious new marauders “Toi,” a Korean term, it is said, meaning “barbarian” borrowed from Koryo prisoners who had been impressed into Toi service. It was only subsequently that the Japanese authorities learned from the Koryo government that their attackers were actually a Tungusic Jurchen people from the maritime region northeast of the Korean peninsula. The attacks came in the spring of 1019, when fifty large ships loaded with several thousand Toi pirates ravaged Tsushima, Iki, and the northern coastal areas of Kyushu for seventeen days, killing more then 350 people, including the governor of Iki, taking nearly 1,300 prisoners, and looting and burning countless buildings. Dazaifu forces at the Bay of Hakata and local warriors in Hizen put up a stiff resistance and finally succeeded in expelling the invaders. Koryo, which had also earlier suffered from Toi depredations, deployed armed ships at several places along the Korean coast and inflicted heavy damage on the piratical fleet as it sailed homeward. The Koryo forces captured eight of the Toi ships and sent back home 270 or so Japanese prisoners on board (mostly women), a friendly gesture that the Japanese authorities at the Dazaifu acknowledged with a gift of gold.

Trade between Koryo and Japan grew during the tenth andeleventh centuries despite the refusal of the Japanese court to enter into formal relations with the Korean government, the trade forming part of a significant, if unquantifiable, volume of trilateral commerce among China, Koryo, and Japan. It was presumably at least in part the importance of the trade and the more favorable Japanese attitudes toward the Koryo government following the Toi attacks that finally forced the court at Kyoto to emerge somewhat from its isolationist shell in the last half of the eleventh century. At that time the Sung court in China, its treasury strained by the southward pressure of the Khitan state of Liao (916-1125), repeatedly sent envoys to Japan seeking the opening of state relations and trade (the latter, as usual, under the fiction of tribute rendered to the Sung emperors, with “gifts” sent in exchange). Although the Japanese were still unwilling to enter into a formal relationship, they now at least responded to the Chinese imperial messages and sent gifts in return.

Insofar as the content of the China-Korea-Japan trade is known (and that is not very far at all), the Japanese exported such natural products as gold and gold dust, mercury, pearls, sulfur, pine, cryptomeria, and hinoki cypress, and also various handicraft items, in-

 Отправлено: 05.01.07 15:51. Заголовок: Re:

cluding different types of fancy lacquerware, hinoki cypress folding fans, folding screens, and swords. They imported from China bracades, damasks and other rich silks, ceramics, writing implements, books, paintings, and copper coins; from Koryo came chiefly ginseng and saffron; from Southeast Asia, dyes, medicines, aloeswood, and other aromatics. The items of trade, in other words, seem to have been chiefly low in bulk and high in cost, as would be expected.

The general nature of Japanese foreign commerce remained much the same in the twelfth century, except that domestic and external problems in Koryo lessened the level of trade with that state, creating an almost entirely bilateral trading relationship between Japan and Sung China, which by that time had lost its northern territories to the Chin and was centered on the valley of theYangtze River. The importance of the trade to Japanese leaders at Kyoto grew markedly when the imperial court came increasingly under the domination of Taira no Kiyomori (1118-1181) and his family in the last half of the century. Much of the Taira military strength was in the Inland Sea and Kyushu areas, where local warriqr leaders were often heavily involved either directly or indirectly in overseas trade, and it clearly served Taira interests to protect and develop that trade. Kiyomori himself was notably active in that regard, undertaking a large-scale redevelopment of Owada-no-tomari, the port for his estate at Fukuhara on the Inland Sea coast near modern Kobe, where he succeeded in developing a brisk commerce with Sung merchants and, according to literary sources, reaping rich rewards for his efforts. In 1171, Kiyomori and the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa received one of the Sung merchants in an audience at Fukuhara, much to the dismay of some conservative courtiers at Kyoto, and in the following year he and the retired emperor were also recipients of messages and gifts from the Sung emperor.