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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
     Second, there are the archaeological findings. While this approach is not possible in China since archaeology there is only done on the periods before 1000 AD, elsewhere in Asia the results have been little short of startling. Archaeological excavations in southeast Asia have uncovered a great amount of Chinese ceramic from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In Japan also, such diggings have shown a dense distribution of fifteenth century Chinese goods, especially ceramics, all along the coastal areas of western Japan, from Kyushu up through the Inland Sea. The amount so far discovered is already far beyond what one might have expected from the official trade between the countries, particularly in these provincial sites during two centuries of a supposed ban on private trade. But one is still not prepared for the results of a recent excavation in southern Hokkaido, a place one might suppose was far off the beaten track of any merchant. At the Japanese colony town of Katsuyama-tate, which served as the center of Japanese-Ainu trade along the Japan Sea from 1473 to 1514, over 10,000 objects have been dug up. More than 60% of them were imported Chinese ceramics, blue and white, white, and celadon. Here and elsewhere the excavated Chinese ceramics were not luxury items but objects for daily use.

     Thirdly, the non-Chinese side was far less anxious to curtail the China trade than was the Ming court. The Ming ban on private trade in China's coastal ports only meant the development instead of several southeast Asian ports for transshipment-Ayutthaya, Melaka, Macau, Amoy, Taoyuan, Batavia, Manila, and Naha in the Ryukyus. All the evidence recently collected by Anthony Read (* earlier spelled as Reid) suggests these and other ports continued to engage in Chinese trade during the fifteenth century, the period when the ban was meant to be most effective. The state of Java was so keen to trade with China even within the framework of tribute trade that in 1443 and 1453, the Ming government demanded that the Javanese send tribute less often. Siam and Melaka proved even more eager, and by the 1470s they became more important than Java as China's trading partners. Melaka in particular placed emphasis on this link by (*)

      And finally, the ban on Chinese merchants doing private trade with foreigners in Chinese ports did not prevent Chinese merchants from working for foreigners. In an early form of the later compradore system of nineteenth and twentieth century China, Chinese merchants worked in the employ of foreign states anxious to maintain good ties with the Chinese court and other Chinese merchants in China. Some of these overseas Chinese traders had settled abroad long before Zheng He's voyages.

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