Ryukyu Kingdom

For a century and a half, Shuri and Naha operated as the great warehouse of the Eastern seas. This prosperity was engineered by China’s haijin (sea ban) policies, which strictly prohibited private maritime trade and restricted commerce to official tributary states. Under the patronizing eye of the Ming, who provided the Ryukyuans with ocean-going ships and educated their elite at the Imperial Academy in Beijing, the tiny island kingdom became a colossus of transit trade. Ryukyuan vessels sailed in a vast arc from the Japanese archipelago to the ports of Southeast Asia, completing at least 150 documented voyages between 1424 and the 1630s. The official diplomatic chronicle, the Rekidai Hōan, records dozens of missions to Siam, Malacca, Java, and Sumatra. In the markets of Naha, Japanese silver, masterfully forged swords, painted folding screens, and lacquerware were exchanged for Chinese medicinal herbs, copper coins, and brocades. These, in turn, were bartered for Southeast Asian sappanwood, tin, sugar, and tortoiseshell, alongside luxury imports like Indian ivory, Arabian frankincense, and sumac.

By the late sixteenth century, however, this lucrative monopoly began to fracture. The rise of wokou piracy eroded the security of the shipping lanes, and the Ming court gradually dismantled the preferential trade benefits that had sustained Ryukyu. Concurrently, the arrival of heavily armed Portuguese merchants introduced intense competition into the South China Sea. The domestic tranquility of the kingdom was further tested by a series of regional uprisings, including the Oyake Akahachi Rebellion on Ishigaki Island in 1500, which Shō Shin suppressed with a fleet of forty-six warships, and later insurrections in the Amami islands. But the most existential threat emerged from the north, where a newly unified Japan was looking outward.

In 1590, the Japanese hegemon Toyotomi Hideyoshi demanded that the Ryukyu Kingdom provide military support and provisions for his planned invasion of Korea—a campaign ultimately aimed at conquering Ming China. Caught in an impossible diplomatic vice, the Ryukyuan court refused to betray its Chinese suzerain. Following Hideyoshi's death and the rise of the Tokugawa shogunate, the Shimazu clan, rulers of the southern Japanese domain of Satsuma, received shogunal authorization to punish the recalcitrant kingdom. In 1609, the Satsuma army launched a swift and devastating invasion. The Ryukyuan defenses, hollowed out by generations of domestic demilitarization and concentrated primarily in the south at Naha, crumbled. King Shō Nei was captured and paraded as a prisoner through the streets of Kagoshima and Edo.

The conquest did not end the Ryukyu Kingdom; instead, it ushered in a bizarre, highly choreographed era of "dual subordination." Satsuma stripped the kingdom of the northern Amami-Ōshima island group, absorbing it directly into its own domain. Yet, rather than annexing the rest of Ryukyu, the Shimazu clan restored King Shō Nei to his throne after two years of captivity. The Japanese shogunate recognized that Ryukyu was far more valuable as an independent tributary of China than as a formal Japanese province. Because the Ming, and later the Qing dynasty, forbade direct trade with Japan, the Ryukyu Kingdom became a vital backchannel.

To maintain this lucrative arrangement, the Japanese went to extraordinary lengths to hide their dominance from the Chinese court. In 1628, Satsuma established a discreet administrative headquarters in Shuri, the Zaibankaiya, to oversee the kingdom's finances and foreign policy. When Chinese investiture envoys arrived in Naha to formally confirm a new Ryukyuan king, all Japanese residents were ordered to hide in the countryside, Japanese books and coins were concealed, and the Ryukyuans were instructed to perform traditional Chinese court rituals. This elaborate masquerade benefited everyone: the Shuri court retained its cultural identity and domestic autonomy, China preserved the fiction of its universal tributary order, and Satsuma amassed the enormous wealth and political leverage that would, centuries later, allow it to lead the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate.

This delicate equilibrium of survival through performance endured for over two hundred and fifty years. The kingdom continued to exist in a twilight zone of sovereignty—neither fully Japanese nor entirely sovereign, yet culturally distinct, producing its own rich traditions of literature, music, and lacquerware that blended Chinese prestige with local sensibilities. The end of this long compromise arrived with the Meiji Restoration. The new, modernizing imperial government of Japan had no use for the ambiguities of feudal vassalage. In 1872, Tokyo unilaterally declared the kingdom to be the "Ryukyu Domain," and in 1879, the Meiji government formally abolished the domain entirely, replacing it with Okinawa Prefecture. The last king, Shō Tai, was forced to abdicate and was exiled to Tokyo, where he was integrated into the new European-style Japanese peerage. With his departure, the red-tiled roofs of Shuri Castle ceased to shelter a sovereign, and the maritime kingdom that had once bound the fractured ports of Asia together was quietly absorbed into the borders of a modern nation-state.