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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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
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