THE RUINS OF St Paul's church on a hill in the Malaysian city of Malacca provide a good view of the vicissitudes of Pacific trade. Peer through the late-monsoon haze from its cobbled courtyard, and you can just about see container ships and oil tankers chugging through the blue-green waters of the Strait of Malacca. At least 70,000 ships pass on their way to and from the Pacific and Indian oceans each year, carrying a third of the world's seaborne oil and many of its goods. 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." Hundreds of vessels bore 20,000 crewmen, passengers and horses through the western Pacific to take silk, porcelain and tea to countries as far away as east Africa. But after 1433 China abruptly stopped trading missions to the outside world, and a much uglier form of trade emerged. This was the European version, laden with mercantilist and imperialist ambitions partly disguised as a mission to spread Christianity. St Paul's, originally called Our Lady of the Hill, 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. 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 after their king, Philip II) 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. 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. 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. 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. Next in our special report on the Pacific Age: Economic integration: The flying factory (3/9)