why couldn't they into sailing?>CHINESE TREASURE FLEET ALMOST DISCOVERED EUR-okay but actually thoughpeople were always starving but euros found abos in Taiwan using stone tools in the 1600s, obviously they couldn't sail for shit.vikings crossed the Atlantic in oversized cannoes. so why did they suck at it?
look at its sizethey had everything they needed plus tributaries europe was a shithole where malnourished ppl were looking for new places to livewe crossed the atlantic because our shithole couldnt feed the growing population, even when growth was so small
>>18457080builled by pirates so much they abandoned the coast.
>>18457080All the interesting stuff happened in the middle of china
>>18457080>why couldn't they into sailing?They could do that, though. They did it very often, actually. Sailing was not the problem.>abos in Taiwan using stone toolsNot even true. They were iron workers. >obviously they couldn't sail for shit.Anon has it ever ocurred to you that some people could sail to a place and not brutally colonize it?>vikings crossed the Atlantic in oversized cannoes.Because they were lunatics and also Island-hoping.
>>18457094Well, technically. The true lunatics were the low middle ages Europeans. They were literally hurling themselve sinto the atlantic. The Chinese are a much more sensible people and only sailed where they knew it was profitable.
>>18457080The Vikings lived in a society where groups of skilled sailors had the economic incentive to go sailing until they found some place neat to rob or settle.China has a long history of central government that I don't think created the incentive for Tang noblemen to get on boats and go looking for monasteries to loot.
But they could though? They were the leaders in anything maritime among the 3 East Asian groups. Chinese merchants, smugglers, and pirates could also be found all over in Southeast Asia since the 1200s and moreso by the 1400s.>>18457090The vast majority of pirates in Asia Pacific from 1500s-1800s were Chinese themselves lol.
>>18457080Chinese and European incentives for sailing are completely different. Small time Chinese junk captains regularly transited between the China Coast and Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia. But given the choke point at the Strait of Malacca, there's no major Chinese incentive to go beyond Indonesia. The Indonesians were more competent at trading with India so it makes little sense to compete with them when you can just buy their goods and go home. The same was also true of Japanese shipping, they almost never went beyond Malacca. The Moluccas, the Spice Islands were fully accessible to the Chinese without crossing the Strait of Malacca.By contrast the Portuguese didn't run into another oceanic maritime civilization until they reached the Swahili Coast. By that point they had already circled the uncharted African coast. They could have simply set up bases in Africa, bought whatever the goods were available in Zanzibar and gone home. Instead they chose to go to India, then Malacca, then the Moluccas to get to the source of the spices.
>GeneticsChina is high IQ, although they have different behaviour to Europeans described as autistic, sociopathic or uncreative and there may be merit to this, this is a flaky explanation here, I don't see it.>GeographyThe gulf stream warms the northern Atlantic which helped the Vikings to make their journey to Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. Whereas reaching the Bering strait involved enduring freezing conditions and potentially icebergs with few opportunities to found trading posts and supply depots to encourage and furnish further expeditions. However this does not explain why t hey did not reach Australia, which is a simple case of hopping from one island to the next.>Malay archipelago politiesThe Srivijaya and other thalassocracies dominated this area, so Chinese merchants couldn't pass through or simply deferred to them to obtain trade goods like coral or whatever is in Australia. It was similar for the silk road, China constantly tried to push west but their supply lines were throttled and they could not project all of their colossal military might that far, being defeated by local steppe peoples or Muslims.A better question is why the archipelago polities did not explore Australia and discover its temperate regions to the south which they could settle. It is possible also they did, but being a tropical civilization they did not realize they could grow the wheat of northern China there. This is speculation at this point of course. This is a more complicated question for another thread.
