Admiral Zheng He - China's Treasure Fleet

Over a period of almost three decades in the early fifteenth century, Ming China sent out a fleet the likes of which the world had never seen. These enormous treasure junks were commanded by the great admiral, Zheng He.  Zheng He and his armada made seven epic voyages from the port at Nanjing to India, Arabia, and even East Africa.

Zheng He's most important role in his master's service, and the reason he is remembered today, was as the commander in chief of the new treasure fleet, and as the emperor's principal envoy to the peoples of the Indian Ocean basin. The Yongle Emperor appointed him to head the massive fleet of 317 junks, crewed by over 27,000 men, that set out from Nanjing in the fall of 1405. At the age of 35, Zheng He had achieved the highest rank ever for a eunuch in Chinese history.  

The so-called "Zheng He map", probably produced in 1763.

During his career as a naval commander, Zheng He negotiated trade pacts, fought pirates, installed puppet kings, and brought back tribute for the Yongle Emperor in the form of jewels, medicines and exotic animals, among other things. He and his crew travelled and traded with not only with the city-states of what is now Indonesia and Malaysia, with Siam and India, but even with the Arabian ports of modern-day Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and as far as Somalia and Kenya.

Replica of Zheng He Treasure Ship

The first expedition of this mighty armada (1405-07) was composed of 317 ships, including perhaps as many as sixty huge Treasure Ships, and nearly 28,000 men. In addition to thousands of sailors, builders and repairmen for the trip, there were soldiers, diplomatic specialists, medical personnel, astronomers, and scholars of foreign ways, especially Islam. The fleet stopped in Champa (central Vietnam) and Siam (today's Thailand) and then on to island Java, to points along the Straits of Malacca, and then proceeded to its main destination of Cochin and the kingdom of Calicut on the southwestern coast of India. On his return, Zheng He put down a pirate uprising in Sumatra, bringing the pirate chief, an overseas Chinese, back to Nanjing for punishment.

The route of the voyages of Zheng He's fleet.

The seventh and final voyage (1431-33) was sent out by the Yongle emperor's successor, his grandson the Xuande emperor. This expedition had more than one hundred large ships and over 27,000 men, and it visited all the important ports in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean as well as Aden and Hormuz. One auxiliary voyage traveled up the Red Sea to Jidda, only a few hundred miles from the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. It was on the return trip in 1433 that Zheng He died and was buried at sea, although his official grave still stands in Nanjing, China. Nearly forgotten in China until recently, he was immortalized among Chinese communities abroad, particularly in Southeast Asia where to this day he is celebrated and revered as a god.

Zheng He’s naval adventures were not universally popular. The Confucian bureaucrats opposed them for a number of reasons. At a basic political level, Confucian bureaucrats despised eunuchs in the government, and Zheng He and the other supporters of overseas expansion were eunuchs. At a practical level, the Confucian bureaucrats considered the great fleets tremendously expensive, producing little benefit to China, and they opposed such egregious wastes of the nation’s resources. As traditionalists, they also opposed the expansionism policy on principle; it was militaristic, and they were anti-militarists. The expeditions promoted commercial expansion, while they desired economic self-sufficiency for China, and they increased China’s foreign contacts, while the Confucians advocated isolationism.

The Confucian bureaucrats won the struggle by winning over succeeding emperors to their point of view. China withdrew from the rest of the world, and a little over 60 years later, Vasco da Gama reached India by sea from Europe. In one of history’s ironic twists of fate, it was da Gama’s tattered little fleet of a few vessels and his small, dirty crew that truly changed the course of history, not Zheng He’s magnificent armada with its crew in the tens of thousands. Ming China did not become a nation of world travelers; the Western world came to them.

One has to wonder how different the world would be today if China’s emperors had continued on the path of expansionism, world exploration and expanding trade. Recently, there has been serious exploration of the idea that on one of Zheng He’s expeditions he visited the Americas years before Columbus. Stranger still is that Zheng He may have been using maps created by Kublai Khan’s fleet (Kublai Khan’s maps were recently discovered at the U.S. Library of Congress and may date back to the late 13th century).

Sources: Net Central,  Wikipeida

Ancient Navigators: Zheng He the Christopher Columbus of China

Zheng He was an ethnically Muslim Chinese figure of the Ming Dynasty, which ruled China for 276 years between the 1368 and 1644. Zheng He might be called the “Christopher Columbus” of China because of his spectacular journeys to far-off lands, such as East Africa, the Middle East, and Sri Lanka. But he was also much more. He was a great military and naval commander, diplomat, adviser, emissary and political insider.
Rediscovering Zheng He

Zheng He was all but forgotten to Chinese history until his story was rediscovered and documented in a popular 1909 book by the Chinese scholar, Liang Qihao. Shortly after this incredible biography became widespread knowledge, a monument to the explorer placed in Sri Lanka was also rediscovered. It is known as the Trilingual Stele because written on the stone are homages to the Buddhist, Islamic, and Hindu religions in three different languages.
 

The Galle Trilingual Inscription is a stone tablet inscription in three languages, Chinese, Tamil and Persian, that was erected in 1409 in Galle, Sri Lanka to commemorate the second visit to the island by the Chinese admiral Zheng He. The text concerns offerings made by him and others to the Buddhist temple on Adams Peak, a Mountain in Sri Lanka, Allah (the Muslim term for God) and the god of the Tamil people, Tenavarai Nayanar. The admiral invoked the blessings of Hindu deities here for a peaceful world built on trade. The stele was discovered in Galle in 1911 and is now preserved in the Colombo National Museum.

Zheng He’s Background

Zheng He belonged to a Muslim subgroup of Chinese culture known as the Hui people. He was born in 1371, the second son in a large family. His birth name was Ma He, and his father was Ma Hajji. Even though he was born into a Muslim family, his own religious convictions are uncertain.

It is likely that Zheng was a broad-minded intellectual whose contact with many cultures and belief systems gave him and expanded worldly view and perspective. He was honored and admired by Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu alike.

Zheng He was born in a time of turmoil. When he was 10 years old, Ming forces had invaded Yunnan, the land of Zheng’s birth and family. Yunnan was controlled by the Mongols at the time. His father was killed fighting against the Ming army, although historical records differ on the actual circumstances and allegiance of Ma Hajji. He may have simply been killed in the complicated, chaotic violence of war between opposing forces.

Captured and Castrated

At this time, young Zheng He was captured by Muslim forces allied with the Ming. He was subsequently castrated so that he could be placed in servitude to the Prince of Yan, who would become the future emperor, the Yongle Emperor. He eventually became a soldier in the Ming wars against the Mongols.

He distinguished himself as a soldier and rose steadily through the ranks of the military hierarchy. This path led him to gain the personal confidence of the Prince of Yan. When the Prince rose to the supreme position of Emperor, Zheng also gained a position of considerable power.

In 1404, the Emperor appointed Zheng “Grand Director” of Palace Servants. It was a reward for his considerable achievements as a military leader in battles fought not only against enemies of the Ming Dynasty, but against the many internal feuding factions which characterized those complicated times.

Zheng He’s Sea Campaigns

Zheng He’s role in the Ming Dynasty evolved from that of soldier to a commander of ships. In 1424, he sailed to Palembang to confer an official seal upon and appoint an important official as a commissioner. Shortly after, the Yongle Emperor died and was succeeded by his son, the Hongxi Emperor. His new master wanted Zheng to serve as commander of the important city of Nanjing, and so his naval career was suspended for a time.

In 1430, the next ruler, the Xuande Emperor, ordered Zheng to lead an expedition to the “Western Ocean.” This was a time when China was moving aggressively to expand its trade and imperial power throughout the southeastern nations of Asia. The Ming Dynasty was also interested in expanding trade to distant locations in the West, which meant far-reaching efforts to establish links, trade, and power in Africa and the Middle East.

A relief wall telling the story of Chinese navy explorer Zheng He in front of the Sam Poo Kong Temple, in Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia

Legacy and Death of Zheng He

Similar to the way Europe began looking westward after the discovery of the New World by Columbus in 1492, the years of 1404 through the 1430s were a major age of seafaring expansion for China. The gigantic role Zheng He played in these expeditions cannot be overestimated.

His mind, skills, bravery, military instincts and superior diplomatic talents made Zheng He a natural to make significant gains for his country and to earn his place as one of the greatest explorers of all time. His accomplishments at sea included considerable military actions that expanded Chinese interests throughout Southeast Asia and among nations of the Indian Ocean.

Zheng He died at sea in 1433. His tomb remains today in the city of Nanjing. Numerous monuments to his memory can be found throughout the Asian world today.


Reposed from Totally History

Ancient Chinese Explorers

An Oriental armada

 

In the 15th century, Zheng He, seen here with one of his massive ships in a painting at a temple shrine in Malaysia, led seven enormous seafaring expeditions. Photo credit: © Chris Hellier/Corbis

Six centuries ago, a mighty armada of Chinese ships crossed the China Sea, then ventured west to Ceylon, Arabia, and East Africa. The fleet consisted of giant nine-masted junks, escorted by dozens of supply ships, water tankers, transports for cavalry horses, and patrol boats. The armada's crew totaled more than 27,000 sailors and soldiers. The largest of the junks were said to be over 400 feet long and 150 feet wide. (The Santa Maria, Columbus's largest ship, was a mere 90 by 30 feet and his crew numbered only 90.)

Loaded with Chinese silk, porcelain, and lacquerware, the junks visited ports around the Indian Ocean. Here, Arab and African merchants exchanged the spices, ivory, medicines, rare woods, and pearls so eagerly sought by the Chinese imperial court.

Seven times, from 1405 to 1433, the treasure fleets set off for the unknown. These seven great expeditions brought a vast web of trading links—from Taiwan to the Persian Gulf—under Chinese imperial control. This took place half a century before the first Europeans, rounding the tip of Africa in frail Portuguese caravels, "discovered" the Indian Ocean.

With unrivaled nautical technology and countless other inventions to their credit, the Chinese were now poised to expand their influence beyond India and Africa. Here was one of history's great turning points. Had the Chinese emperors continued their huge investments in the treasure fleets, there is little reason why they, rather than the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and British, should not have colonized the world. Yet less than a century later, all overseas trade was banned, and it became a capital offense to set sail from China in a multi-masted ship.

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The Bizarre Mirage of the Fata Morganan

The mysterious fata morgana: making people question their sanity since the beginning of time. Louise Murray/Visuals Unlimited/Getty Images

Jesuit priests aren’t especially known for their heavy drug use, but it would seem that Father Domenico Giardina was tripping pretty hard on August 14, 1643. Looking out over the sea from Messina, Sicily, Giardina saw “a city all floating in the air, and so measureless and so splendid, so adorned with magnificent buildings, all of which was found on a base of a luminous crystal.” The metropolis suddenly transformed into a garden, and next a forest. And then in a flash it all descended into chaos. Huge armies sprang forth, as did the towns they had laid waste to, before the whole mess disappeared.

Father Giardina, you see, was high on life. The “great and marvelous theater” he had witnessed was the mysterious fata morgana, an incredibly complex mirage that has historically both fascinated and scared the hell out of sailors and landlubbers alike. Whether it be the work of necromancers or fairies or a god, few phenomena have captivated humankind quite so thoroughly as fata morgana.

It was Jesuits like Father Giardina, argues Marina Warner in her brilliant book Phantasmagoria, who made the first “careful” observations of fata morgana, that is, not freaking out about them and instead beginning to apply a dash of science to the matter. The good Father claimed, writes Warner, that the minerals and salts in the region “rise up in hot weather in vapours from the sea to form clouds, which then condense in the cooler upper air to become a mobile specchio, a moving, polyhedrical mirror.” It was wrong, but it actually wasn’t that far off.

Light being refracted downward as it passes from air into a denser material, plexiglass. (Some light is also reflected upward)  Zátonyi Sándor/Wikimedia Commons

At work here is some basic physics. When the sun heats up the atmosphere above the ocean, it creates a gradient of temperatures: Near the surface, it’s still relatively cool because the water is chilling that air, but sitting above that is a layer of warmer air. Now, light doesn’t always travel in a straight line. When it hits a boundary between two layers of the atmosphere that are different temperatures (and therefore different densities), it bends and travels through the new layer at a different angle. This is known as refraction. The change in the light’s angle of travel depends on the difference in density between the two layers.

How does bending light create a mirage? The rest of the effect is caused by how your brain works. When light hits your eyes, your brain assumes it arrived there in a straight path between you and the object reflecting the light. So if light is bent on its way toward you, your brain will think the object is where it would be if the light’s path was straight. This is why when you are looking down on a surface of water, objects under the surface will appear to be in a different spot than they actually are—just ask a spear fisherman…if you happen to know a spear fisherman. The human brain doesn’t automatically account for the refraction. (Interestingly, the brains of some birds like ospreys do correct for the effect so that when they dive headlong into the water after a fish, they are right on target.)

In the case of a fata morgana mirage, light reflecting from a distant object such as a ship is bent downward as it passes through the colder, denser air near the surface of the ocean (or sometimes cold land, particularly ice). But your brain places the object where it would be if the light came to you in a straight path—higher than it actually is. This bending effect can even work with the curvature of the Earth if conditions are just right, which is why some fata morgana images can actually be refracted cities and ships from beyond the horizon.

 A superior mirage or fata morgana, left, and an inferior mirage, what you’d see on a hot day on asphalt, right. Ludovica Lorenzelli, DensityDesign Research Lab/Wikimedia

The opposite situation is what produces mirages like an oasis of water in the desert. In this case, a hot layer of air just above the surface bends light rays up toward your eyes, causing your brain to perceive things as much lower than they actually are. The desert oasis is actually the sky. This kind of mirage is known as inferior, while the fata morgana, which places objects higher than they actually are, is superior.

But before the Scientific Revolution and all its wonderful advances in physics, mirages were firmly in the realm of mysticism (thank a Frenchman named Pierre de Fermat, by the way, for his pioneering work in decoding inferior mirages right around the same time Father Giardina was making his own observations). Indeed, fata morgana takes its name from Morgan le Fay, the treacherous fairy, enchantress, and half-sister of King Arthur.

Morgan le Fay: fairy

According to Warner, the Normans brought stories of Morgan’s magic to Italy, particularly her penchant for luring sailors to an undersea palace with visions of castles in the air—fata morgana is particularly prevalent in southern Italy’s Strait of Messina, where Father Giardina experienced his own vision. Another Italian version of the legend has Morgan falling in love with a regular fella, granting him immortality, and keeping him in captivity, then putting on shows in the sky when he gets bored with the whole never dying thing.

And long before Arthurian legend, it could have been that sightings of these phenomena gave rise to any number of the “whoa something is appearing in the sky” scenes in antiquity, Warner argues. The Second Book of Maccabees, for example, tells of sky-people coming to the aid of the Jews in their skirmishes with the Romans: “When the battle became fierce, there appeared to the enemy from heaven five resplendent men on horses with golden bridles, and they were leading the Jews.” The ghostly warriors fired arrows and thunderbolts at the rascally Romans, “so that, confused and blinded, they were thrown into disorder and cut to pieces.”

Fata morgana’s most famous offspring, though, is the legend of the Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship said to sail aimlessly around the high seas. The tale was first popularized in a story called “Vanderdecken’s Message Home” from 1821, which told of a boat from Amsterdam that haunts the Cape of Good Hope, trying to hand off letters from its dead crew to the vessels of the living (uh, no thanks, the sailors would say, you can deliver your own damn mail). Warner connects this to fata morgana showing a ship from beyond the horizon: The mirage vessel could suddenly disappear with no explanation, and there you have your legend.

The tale of the Flying Dutchman ghost ship likely came from sailors seeing ships caught up in fata morgana

In the decades following “Vanderdecken’s Message Home,” few other than the most superstitious (or most intoxicated) of sailors actually feared the Flying Dutchman, but real fata morganas made their way into the blossoming mass media of America. In 1871, the Sentinel of Santa Cruz, California reported a fata morgana that made a steamer appear “four or five stories high,” while other schooners played about beautifully in the mirage. Some 20 years later in Buffalo, New York, 20,000 people gathered to witness a fata morgana on Lake Ontario. Though Toronto was over 50 miles away, “its church spires could be counted with the greatest ease” through the mirage, reported Scientific American.

Gone was the mythologizing of fata morganas, yet the wonderment remained. And that right there is the beauty of science: The ghost ships full of angry dead dudes waving letters may be passé, but we get to keep 100 percent of the awe and zero percent of the scurvy. And I’d say that’s pretty good progress.


Reference:
Warner, M. (2008) Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media Into the Twenty-First Century. Oxford University Press

 Reposted from Wired