Thus, the European boats tended to hold larger cargoes than their East Asian counterparts. But overall they were far too few to account for much of the new or total trade in these waters. If we need to label this boom in trade, we would do better to call the East Asian Century than the Portuguese Century.

     A major reason for this East Asian predominance was of course the importance given to the China-Japan trade, in particular to the flourishing exchange of silver and military goods. As seen last week, silver was the most valuable export from Japan to the rest of East Asia from its discovery in the 1530s to the eventual decline of Japanese exports from the 1660s. During these 13 decades, the average annual figures of this Japanese export, by the best available estimates, show a consistent rise: 20,000 kilograms in the 1540s, 34,000 to 49,000 kilograms between 1560 and 1600, 110,000 to 130,000 kilograms in each of the first three decades of the seventeenth century, then 300,000 kilograms in both the 1640s and 1650s. From Acapulco in the New World came an estimated annual average of 12,000 kilograms from 1600 to 1610, 19,000 kilograms in the 1610s, 23,000 kilograms in the 1620s, and 18,000 kilograms in the 1630s. A third route was New World silver sent on from Europe to Goa, Melaka, and Macau through Portuguese ships or Levantine routes at the annual scale of about 7,000 kilograms at the end of the sixteenth century. Just as Chinese traders acquired the Acapulco silver shipments overseas at Luzon, so they went abroad to Hoi An, Manila Patani, Ayutthaya, and Cambodia in southeast Asia. A fourth silver source came from Vietnam and Burma; the figure for the 1630s is not known, but at the peak of this trade in the mid-eighteenth century, it was very roughly estimated at 100,000 kilograms. Thus by the 1630s, well over (* blank space) kilograms was entering China every year.

     Since much of this silver was entering China along the Fukien coast, particularly at Amoy, it is not surprising that piracy still flourished and that the next most important Japanese export to China and to much of the rest of East Asia was military goods. Witness the cargo for the twelfth Japanese mission of tribute which left Japan in 1465 and returned in 1468. The Japanese government sent as tribute one suit of armor, two royal swords, 100 other swords, 100 spears, 10 horses, and 5,000 kilograms of sulphur, used for making explosives. In addition, its ships brought for sale 500 swords, 40 long swords, 15,000 kilograms of sulphur (along with 4,725 kilograms of copper). The most desirable of these products were the Japanese swords. Exported to China from at least the tenth century, they had ever since retained a high reputation throughout East Asia for their strength and flexibility. The 1483 bakufu voyage, for instance, brought 37,000 Japanese swords to China, and probably over 100,000 such swords entered China during the Ming dynasty.