Ranking apples against oranges is always a slippery process. How does one maritime battle rise above others in importance? One benchmark is whether an encounter saw one fleet crush another. We could put Lord Nelson’s face on such a list. The Battle of Trafalgar (1805) delivered astounding tactical results. Yet the Napoleonic Wars raged on for another decade after Trafalgar, until Europeans finally banded together to put a stop to the little emperor’s marauding. It was indecisive. So why not rank battles by the magnitude of the issues they decided? Which sea fights yielded the most fateful results, reshaping the Asian order?
Herewith, my list of the Top 5 Naval Battles of the Asia-Pacific:
5. Battle of Yamen (1279). Sometimes dubbed “China’s Trafalgar,” this clash between the Mongol Yuan Dynasty and the beleaguered Southern Song determined who would rule China. It was far more decisive than Nelson’s masterwork. Over 1,000 men-of-war crewed by tens of thousands of men took part in the engagement. Yuan commanders deployed deception and audacious tactics to overcome at least a 10:1 mismatch in numbers. Most important, Yamen claimed the life of the Song emperor, clearing the way for Kublai Khan’s dynasty to rule for nearly a century.
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Robert
Midway and Lake Poyang.
Lauren Garza
Hello! Midway?
HH Datu Dr. Fernando Cruz
The difficulty in determining the top is because you have a difficulty as well in determining the bottom. Remember? In war, there are no winners, only degree of losses…
Mark Bloomfield
If this list was top 10, I think that the Battle(or battles, depending on perspective) of the Leyte Gulf would be either #6 or #7 becuase this battle(s) rendered the Imperial Japanese Navy completely useless and pretty much won the Pacific War.
EAM
Naval and navigational history is fascinating – with much still to be studied.
It is easy to forget that the patterns of "deep history" go back to Antiquity and that the Romans apart from their other achievements were great sailors. Even though they never succeeded in projecting their naval power beyond the Mediterranean, their trading ships were active in Asia carrying out a vibrant trade with India until the time of the plagues of the second and third centuries and even reached China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romano-Chinese_relations#First_Roman_embassy as recorded in Han annals . Vasco Da Gama therefore was not the first Westerner to take ship to Asia but sits within much older patterns.
While the journey of the Buginese to Madagascar about 2,000 years is well known, the recent scholarship concerning the populating of Northern Australia appears to suggest an even earlier journey across the Indian Ocean by the Harappans about 4,000 years from the Indus Valley to Australia – which may now require a rewrite of parts of the history of early Australia
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21569688-genetic-evidence-suggests-four-millennia-ago-group-adventurous-indians
The Harappans may have been unique in this respect in that they alone among the Bronze Ages civilisations to build ocean going vessels (unlike the smaller vessels used in the less challenging waters of the Mediterranean) and therefore appear to be the first to undertake long distance sea travel.
Deep history has much to reveal!
Chuck Hill
The comments here have been very enlightening, I now have a very long reading list to fill in gaps in my naval history education. Thanks.
EAM
Majapahit about the same time as the Yuan was able to establish their rule over much of modern Indonesia, Malaysia and parts of the Philippines and appears to have maintained powerful naval forces, importantly to subdue Sri Vijaya in 1377 (poor old Sri Vijaya did not seem to have much luck).
Unlike any Chinese or Indian dynasty, Majapahit was predominantly a naval power and the naval attack on Palembang in 1377 may also be a candidate for the list – and if Yamen helped consolidate the rule of the Yuan, Majapahit outlasted the Yuan.
If one thinks about, Indonesia historically depended most on sea power sea power in Asia since sea power and not land forces were important in maintaining their most powerful states. I think there is a good example of an Indonesian ship carved on the Borobodur and it looks like a solid Ocean going ship comparable to Chinese sea junks. They probably took to the seas before any other major society in Asia (eg the journey of the Buginese to Madagascar in Antiquity). And Indonesian Prahus were sailing to Northern Australia carrying out a thriving trade at least a century before the arrival of the British in 1788.
The major naval expansion of Indonesia we now see has ample historical precedents and appears to be little understood or commented on.
http://www.eurasiareview.com/30012012-indonesia%E2%80%99s-new-submarines-impact-on-regional-naval-balance-analysis/
wakali
How come the Pearl Harbor became a naval battle?
Leonard R.
I'd rate Yamen higher. After all, the Mongols' conquest of the Sung Dynasty invented what we know as globalism. The Mongols held the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever seen. And for the frst time, there was one global market, stretching from Canton to Vienna and from Moscow to Damascus. It also made possible the explorations of Zheng He and the global pandemic of the Black Death.
Ronaldo
Spotted a small mistake with the description of the Battle of Tsushima:
"Vanquishing its chief maritime competitor, furthermore, allowed Imperial Japan to annex Taiwan and Korea."
–> Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, after the Sino-Japanese War, not after the Russo-Japanese War.