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vulnerable. The corruption became worse and worse until, in October 758, there was a riot. Persian and Arab traders sacked the city and took their trade elsewhere. The rulers of the Red River Delta in what is now Vietnam (nominally under Tang rule but largely autonomous) jumped at the opportunity. Their port, at Long Bien, became the trade terminus for a few decades. However, Guangzhou must have regained its position by the time the Belitung ship departed there around 826. But 40 years after that, in 878, anti-Tang rebels occupied Guangzhou. One Arab account says they singled out and slaughtered thousands of Arabs, Persians, Jews and Christians who were resident there. Nonetheless, the surviving foreign traders seem to have clung on to their toeholds on the coast.
    The revolt was a taste of things to come. In 906 the Tang Dynasty collapsed, their former realm fractured and the coast became independent again. The ramifications changed the whole region. On the southwest coast, the area around Guangzhou broke away to form the Nan Han kingdom and then the rulers of the Red River Delta broke away from that to form Dai Viet. Dai Viet would grow to rival and ultimately conquer the lands of Champa (and over the next thousand years evolve into Viet Nam).
    On the southeast coast, in the modern province of Fujian, the kingdom of Minnan emerged. Cut off from the north, Minnan embraced the sea. Over the course of the tenth century, it became a fully maritime trading state. The port of Quanzhou emerged from obscurity to become a hive of entrepreneurial energy and the destination of choice for merchants from the Middle East. After more than a thousand years of trading with foreigners, the people whom we would now call ‘Chinese’ set sail across the oceans on their own vessels for the first time. 11 It was the start of a seafaring tradition that would carry Fujianese – and members of the Min or Hokkien ethnic group in particular – across the South China Sea and beyond.
    By 970, after 60 years of independence, the south came under the control of the Song Dynasty, with its capital in the northern city of Kaifeng. Initially the Song regarded the sea in the way inland rulers traditionally had: as a source of threat. It was a place where ‘bad elements’ could hide – whether smugglers or political rivals – and where foreign ideas could propagate. In 985 all Chinese merchants were banned from travelling abroad. The Song followed their predecessors and imposed a state monopoly on trade. Private dealings were banned, forcing foreign merchants to import their cargoes through official channels, so that the court could then impose taxes on ships, customs duties on imports and also confiscate a proportion of the cargo and profit from its resale to domestic consumers.
    But within a few years the Song initiated a remarkable policy U-turn. In 987 the court sent four missions abroad to encourage foreign states to trade. But that wasn't enough. Pressure on the court to relax its controls grew further: from coastal merchants, who wanted the profits; from consumers, who wanted the foreign goods; and from the treasury, which needed revenue to support the bureaucracy. In 989 private Chinese shipping was allowed to sail abroad for trade. Finally, after centuries of being on the receiving end of trade, in the late tenth century Chinese mariners were officially permitted to make their own trading voyages. There were tax incentives too. The proportion of inbound cargo that was automatically commandeered by the state was cut to just half and later reduced further. Boat-builders learnt to construct ocean-going vessels. They adopted inventions from the Chinese inland water trade, such as watertight compartments and sternpost rudders, but they also copied elements of the Malay ships that had been visiting their shoresfor centuries. Even the name they gave these vessels – po – was of Malay origin.
    In the years after 1069, a Song court official, Wang