The Malacca Strait was a vital passage between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, a major hub of global maritime routes known as the Crossroads of the East. If foreign warships wanted to come through by the nearest route, with safe shipping lanes and abundant supplies, they had to pass through here.
Even though global trade was still only in its early stages, countless ships already traveled through these waters. Across the stretch of sea, only thirty-seven kilometers wide at its narrowest north-to-south point, people could clearly witness the magnificent sight of a thousand sails racing across the waves.
Although the people living on both sides of the strait had long grown accustomed to such scenes, one could still imagine the enormous turmoil in the hearts of the elderly as they watched huge merchant vessels and ironclad warships grow more numerous by the day, until things had become what they were today. Ordinary people could never truly understand it.
Yet many in China understood, and understood even more intensely than these so-called "natives." After all, twenty thousand men had once forced the Manchu Qing to sign treaties, while the Heavenly Kingdom and the Boxer Rebellion had left behind all manner of tragic and heroic tales. The helplessness of using flesh to stop bullets, of one's own people being harvested like leeks—nothing could be more visceral than that.
Though the "natives" had experienced such things as well, had been beaten into submission and slaughtered into fear, they lacked the deep accumulation of history and culture. When their bones were broken, they naturally knelt without hesitation.
Culture made people define humiliation differently, and their hatred of humiliation naturally differed even more.
At the same time, quite a bit of the grain the foreigners sold to the new dynasty was transported from