Maritime Restriction And Tributary System: A Study On Official Foreign Trade In Ming Dynasty (1368-1567)

Tribute in Ming Dynasty with economic attribute as its essence was extremely particularcompared with other dynasty. At the very beginning of Ming dynasty, the Ming governmentimplemented maritime restriction in order to restrict personal oversea exchanges. In thecircumstance of losing normal trading pass, trade in form of tribute was built to put Chineseoverseas trading under the Ming government’s control. For monopolizing the profits oftributary trading, the Ming government is the only one who can buy the products from overseacountries according to tributary regulations. Based on tributary institute and Maritimerestriction, tributary exchanging became the only legal trading form in Ming dynasty. First, thispaper considers that the purpose of implementing maritime restriction and tributary trading forMing government is to benefit from official trading control. Then the paper aims to illustratethe above conclusion from three aspects, which is the form of tributary trading, tradingmanagement institution as well as maritime restriction.On basis of the above analysis, this paper aims to use spices trade between Ming andtributary countries as a clue to demonstrate the conclusion with three examples in three periodsrespectively. First from the establishment of tribute trading institution in Hong-wu(1368-1398),the first emperor of Ming. For protecting official trading, he thought the main task of this periodwas restrict informal oversea trading though Maritime restriction, but it was far beyond enough.Thus, Zhu di organized several voyages to attract oversea countries to build tributary relationswith Ming government. Such great amount of oversea products, especially spices flushing inChina after each activity, that Ming government used spices to pay official payments. AfterXuan-de(1426-1435), oversea countries rarely came to Ming because of the decline of Ming’spower. During this period, Ryukyu built the relation between Ming government and other countries. After Long-qing(1566-1572), tributary trading system collapsed which last close to200years.