Economist, Nov 15, 2014 (I)

choi

Times with APEC held in Beijing, Economist, Nov 15, 2014 has
(a) a cover showing Obama and Xi about to shake hand, in between being "Bridge over troubled water[;] A 14-PAGE SPECIAL REPORT ON THE PACIFIC RIM;" and
(b) "The Pacific Age" (the special report).

In the latter, I see three essays somewhat noteworthy.

(1) Galleons and Gunships; Pacific history has been defined by bullies enforcing their rules.
www.economist.com/news/special-r ... lleons-and-gunships

Note:
(a) "THE RUINS OF St Paul’s church on a hill in the Malaysian city of Malacca"

St Paul's Church, Malacca
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Paul's_Church,_Malacca
("built in 1521. It is located at the summit of St Paul's Hill;" section 1.2 Reconsecration and abandonment: [now a ruin])

(b) "From its beginning, Malacca has been an entrepot between the Pacific and the rest of the world. Shortly after the city was founded in 1400, a Chinese Muslim from the Ming court, the eunuch Zheng He, used it as a base for his 'treasure ships.' * * * But after 1433 China abruptly stopped trading missions to the outside world [starting in 1405] * * * St Paul’s [church], originally called Our Lady of the Hill [actually in Portuguese: Nossa Senhora da Annunciada], was built by the Portuguese after they blitzed Malacca in 1511, driving out the sultan. It was a staging post for undermining Venice’s monopoly over the trading of Asian spices through the Mediterranean. Portugal wanted its own monopoly, and got it."
(i)
(A) Strait of Malacca
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Malacca
(named after the Malacca sultanate that ruled over the archipelago between 1400 and 1511)
(B) Malacca City
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malacca_City
(ii) Republic of Venice
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Venice
(697-1797 [carved up 瓜分 by Austria and France (Napoleon))
(iii)
(A) spice trade
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spice_trade

two consecutive paragraphs:

"Until the mid 15th century, [spice] trade with the east was achieved through the Silk Road, with the Byzantine Empire and the Italian city-states of Venice and Genoa acting as a middle man. In 1453, however, the Ottomans took Constantinople and so the Byzantine Empire was no more. Now in control of the sole spice trade route that existed at the time, the Ottoman Empire was in a favorable position to charge hefty taxes on merchandise bound for the west. The Western Europeans, not wanting to be dependent on an expansionist, non-Christian power for the lucrative commerce with the east, set about to find an alternate sea route around Africa.

"The first country to attempt to circumnavigate Africa was Portugal, which had, since the early 15th century, begun to explore northern Africa under Henry the Navigator. Emboldened by these early successes and eyeing a lucrative monopoly on a possible sea route to the Indies the Portuguese first crossed the Cape of Good Hope [so named 'because of the great optimism engendered by the opening of a sea route to India and the East'  Wikipedia] in 1488 on an expedition led by Bartolomeu Dias. Just nine years later in 1497 on the orders of Manuel I of Portugal, four vessels under the command of navigator Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope, continuing to the eastern coast of Africa to Malindi to sail across the Indian Ocean to Calicut in south India [arriving in 1498]-the capital of the local Zamorin rulers .The wealth of the Indies was now open for the Europeans to explore; the Portuguese Empire was the earliest European seaborne empire to grow from the spice trade.

(B) Europe no longer needed silk from China. See silk
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk
(the secret of silk-making only reached Europe around AD 550, via the Byzantine Empire. Legend has it that monks working for the emperor Justinian I smuggled silkworm eggs to Constantinople in hollow canes from China)
(iv) Battle of Diu (1509)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Diu_(1509)
(Feb 3, 1509; Location  Diu, India; introduction)

choi

(c) "One of the Portuguese victors at Malacca was Ferdinand Magellan. With an eye on establishing a rival trading route to the Spice Islands, he later defected to Spain, found a passage around Cape Horn and baptised the Pacific Ocean. His Spanish successors, sailing from Acapulco with galleons full of silver, used the Philippines (named [in 1543] after their [future] king, Philip II [but at the time was prince/heir apparent]) as a hub for trade with China between 1565 and 1815. The Pacific became a Spanish lake, defended by cannon from all manner of pirates."
(i) Ferdinand Magellan
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Magellan
(c. 1480 – 1521; Aug 10, 1519 left Seville--Nov 28, 1520 entered the south Pacific--Mar 17, 1521 reached the [present-day] Philippines)
(ii) Cape Horn
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Horn
(is located on the small Hornos Island; section 1 Geography and ecology: name)

Take notice Strait of Magellan is FURTHER to the north of Cape Horn.

(d) "In 1641 it was the turn of the Dutch to blast the Portuguese out of Malacca. They turned the church into a Protestant one and changed its name to St Paul’s. A nearby fort is engraved with the letters VOC, after the Dutch East India Company. The vast firm built its own monopoly in the Spice Islands. All clove and nutmeg trees apart from those belonging to the VOC were uprooted, and anyone unconnected to the company caught growing or selling cloves was executed.
(e) "In 1819 the British claimed Malacca from the Dutch, ran up a big Union Jack at St Paul’s, used the church as an ammunition dump and put a lighthouse in front. In the second world war Malacca was briefly overrun by the Japanese, but recently it has returned to the tranquillity of its birth.
(f) "When your correspondent visited, a muezzin’s call to Friday prayers floated up from a nearby mosque. Islam, too, first came to South-East Asia on Arab trading dhows. Its influence has been much more enduring than that of Christianity."
(i) dhow
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dhow
(ii) Islam in Southeast Asia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Southeast_Asia