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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
Admittedly, the continued Chinese ban on Japanese ships doing any trade with China allowed the Portuguese to secure great profits in transporting Japanese silver for Chinese gold, ceramics, and silk goods. But in fact, Chinese, Japanese, and other East Asian ships far outnumbered the Portuguese and Dutch boats during this century. After the trading ban was lifted, the Ming government first licensed only 50 junks a year to go abroad. By 1589, the official quota was 88, by 1597 it was 117, half for the Philippines and Borneo and half for southeast Asia. By 1620, the system had broken down, but in fact it was flouted right from the start. Chinese custom revenues in the coastal port of Zhangzhou almost tripled between 1576 and 1594, while the number of Chinese boats annually arriving in the Philippines for silver trade from Fukien was estimated by the Spanish to be more than 400. As for the Japanese, between 1604 and 1616, 173 ships set sail to southeast Asia; according to another estimate, at least 299 Japanese ships left Japan for overseas trade between 1604 and 1635, each holding cargoes mainly of silver.

Consider then the figures for the Portuguese and the Dutch fleets. From 1500 to 1634, just 470 Portuguese ships-just 3.5 ships a year-traveled from Lisbon to Asia. Within East Asia, the Portuguese galleons were even fewer. Usually no more than one a year plied between Macau and Hirado from 1557 to 1590. Just one large Spanish galleon usually made a trip in each direction between Acapulco and Manila. The Dutch, during the heyday of their Taiwan-based trade with China and Japan in the 1630s, kept at Taiwan only five ships sent from Batavia. Their only way of making up for the shortage of boats was to hire many Chinese junks, incorporate them into the so-called "Dutch merchant fleets," and rely on Chinese to account for almost half of the officers and crews of the Dutch East Asia Company.

What was true for the numbers of boats was, however, perhaps not as true also for their tonnage. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the average cargo of a Portuguese galleon rose from 400 to 1000 tons. By 1600, the largest Dutch boats could hold similar size cargoes, but normally their hold was built for about 700 and 800 tons. In contrast, the range of cargo on privately operated East Asian boats was far wider, from 200 to 800 tons for the Chinese and 80 to 800 tons for the Japanese. Southeast Asian ships could even be smaller; one Dutch traveler estimated that a thousand or more vessels of just 20 tons were lying in just the Surabaya area of present-day Indonesia. However, even here by the late sixteenth century large boats were built and operated, often belonging to rulers, like the kings of Banten, Arakan, Ayutthaya , who built war galleys and freight ships according to either European or Chinese design.

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