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21 Nov, 2014
A seaborne traffic jam forms outside the bustling (nhộn nhịp, náo nhiệt) ports of Singapore. These ships mostly come from around the Pacific. In the last few decades the Pacific has become the engine room of global trade, far eclipsing (làm lu mờ) the Atlantic (Đại tây dương). East Asia has turned into a giant factory, sending cheap goods to the United States. Asia will soon become the biggest trading partner of Latin America, and is about to get its first shipments of natural gas from North America.
It is not the first time in history that the global economy has revolved around the Pacific.
Travel 150 miles up the road from Singapore to Malacca in next-door Malaysia and you can see how pivotal the ocean used to be.
For centuries Malacca’s strategic (chiến lược) location at the narrowest point of the Malacca Straits made it a barometer (phong vũ biểu) of Pacific power.
Shortly after the city was founded in 1400, Zheng He (Trịnh Hòa), a Chinese admiral (đô đốc), built a warehose for China’s giant fleet of treasure ships on their way to trade silk and spices as far away as East Africa.
But in 1433 China abruptly stopped trading missions to the outside world and a far uglier form of trade emerged: The European version.
In 1511 the Portuguese seized Malacca and turned it into a base to create a spice monopoly in the western Pacific, forcing the Spaniards to find new trading routes via Cape Horn (Mũi Hảo Vọng) on the other side of the Pacific. This prompted the birth of the spectacular Spanish galleon (thuyền buồm lớn) trade between Asia and the Americas.
The Dutch and the British also created trading empires in the Pacific, using Malacca as a staging post. You can see the legacy (di sản) in the ruins of St Paul’s Church on a hill overlooking the Strait of Malacca. After the Dutch drove out the Portuguese in 1641, they turned it from Catholic to Protestant. The British claimed Malacca from the Dutch in 1819, turning the church into an ammunition (đạn dược) dump (kho đạn tạm thời).
Little is left of Malacca’s turbulent (náo động) past save some well-preserved ruins. Today it is much more peaceful. But peer through the Northeast-monsoon haze (sương mù) and you can still see cargo ships looming (lờ mờ đằng xa) on the straits of Malacca.
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