ADMIRAL ZHENG HE
By 1368 the Great Mongolian state that had offered such welcome to European missionaries and traders like the Polo family finally fell, disintegrating into competing khanate factions. The Han Chinese Ming Dynasty took control, and set about reinforcing the homeland, with an army over a million strong and the largest naval docks in the world. When the third Ming emperor Yongle rose to power in 1402, the Chinese gaze extended farther, beyond its borders, with the dispatching of an enormous expeditionary force into the South Pacific and Indian oceans as an unprecedented show of strength. To lead this venture, the Yongle emperor appointed a favourite palace eunuch and commander named Zheng He (pronounced jung-huh).
Never has there been a spectacle of such might as the colossal Chinese fleet of Admiral Zheng He (1371-1435), considered China’s greatest explorer. In seven voyages over twenty years, Zheng He opened up much of south and western Asia, and even east Africa, to his traditionally insular nation. He did this with ships of massive size: giant junks known as ‘treasure ships’, accompanied by an armada of support vessels. Reputedly the largest of these ships had four decks and measured 450ft (137m) long and 180ft (55m) at the beam, the widest part of a ship. The British sinologist Joseph Needham considered this to be a conservative figure, estimating the length could have been as much as 600ft (183m).*
To put these measurements in context, this is twice the width and just over half the length of the Titanic (at 92½ft/28m wide and 882¾ft/269m long). The vessels would also have completely dwarfed Columbus’s largest ship, Santa María – in fact, if you took every ship involved in the explorations of Columbus and Vasco da Gama, you’d be able to fit them all on the top deck of just one of Zheng He’s treasure ships. Individually the Chinese vessels were impressive; together, as they moved in formation, one would have had the impression of an entire wooden city sliding across the water.
When construction was finally completed in 1405 the Treasure Fleet was dispatched on a mission of exploration. Sixty-two of the behemoths, together with 225 smaller vessels (a total of 27,780 men) all under Zheng He’s command, headed for the Indian ocean to Calicut (Kozhikode) with orders to examine territories on their way along India’s east coast, establish trade networks and collect tributes to the emperor. After stops at Champa (southern Vietnam), Siam (Thailand), Malacca and Java, they reached Calicut, where they purchased huge quantities of spices. On their return to China the fleet was intercepted by the Indonesian pirate Chen Zuyi, who rather ill-advisedly attempted to seize the fleet. The Chinese killed more than 5000 of the pirates, sank ten of their ships and continued on their way unfazed.
For the next seven years the fleet ranged the Indian ocean. By the fourth voyage (1413-15) the crew totalled 28,560 men, and the massive force had progressed along Arabian coasts, reaching as far as Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. Their holds were filled with exotic goods and live cargo with which to honour and delight their emperor, such as the nineteen foreign envoys collected, with the task of paying homage. From the next voyage to India came an even more precious haul of ostriches, zebra and camels. But the jewel of the floating menagerie was a giant giraffe from Kenya via Bengal, which caused a sensation on its arrival in China. Having never seen such a creature the giraffe was deemed to be a qilin, a mythical creature said to herald good fortune, and readily accepted by the imperial court from the Bengali envoy.
Shen Du’s painting on silk of the giraffe given by Bengali envoys as tribute to the Yongle emperor on 20 September 1414.
As impressive as Zheng He’s travels are, there are unsubstantiated theories that his Treasure Fleet may have reached even farther than previously thought. The one piece of documentary evidence to support this idea is Fra Mauro’s world map of 1459 (see The Travels of Marco Polo entry here for full image), which features a junk rounding the southern tip of Africa, accompanied by the intriguing inscription:
About the year of Our Lord 1420 a ship, what is called a Zoncho de India [junk from India], on a crossing of the Sea of India towards the Isle of Men and Women, was driven by a storm beyond the Cape of Diab, through the Green Isles, out into the Sea of Darkness on their way west and southwest. Nothing but air and water was seen for forty days and by their reckoning they ran 2000 miles and fortune deserted them.
Though Mauro records this as the journey of a single ship, and includes no mention of Zheng He, it has been taken by some to indicate the possibility that the Chinese admiral made it at least as far as the Atlantic. (There is, however, little other evidence to support this.) The source of this quote is thought to be the Portuguese merchant explorer Niccolò de’ Conti, who roamed the Indian Ocean in the same era as Zheng He. After leaving his home in Damascus to cross the desert to Baghdad, De’ Conti spent more than twenty years exploring the trade routes that brought goods to the emporia of the Levant and on to India, Sumatra, Java and modern Vietnam in his quest to trace the source of the exotic spices. (The information gathered by de’ Conti was added to that of Marco Polo by Fra Mauro to embellish his mapping of the East.)
The anonymous Selden map of early seventeenth-century China is extraordinary in that it charts not just China but also the whole of east and southeast Asia, and with its illustration of shipping routes with compass bearings is the earliest known example of Chinese merchant cartography.
After a sixth and seventh voyage, during which he explored the east African coastline possibly as far south as the Mozambique Channel opposite Madagascar, Zheng He returned home to a changed China. Now ruled by the Xuande emperor, the principal state concern was the swelling threat of Mongol resurgence. An end was put to seaborne exploration, with funds instead devoted to internal development.* ‘We have traversed more than 100,000 li [about 500 miles/800km] of immense water spaces’, wrote Zheng in summation of his voyages, ‘and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising in the sky, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapours, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds day and night, continued their course as swift as a star, traversing those savage waves as if we were treading a public thoroughfare.’
* These sizes have been contested on the grounds of sheer impracticability. Although there is to be expected a degree of hyperbole to such legend, it is interesting to note that two of the dry docks at Longjiang, where the ships were probably built, were 210ft (64m) wide, sufficient for the construction of vessels of such monstrous dimensions.
* Europe would exist beyond China’s knowledge for decades to come. When the Portuguese entered Canton harbour in 1517, Ku Yin-hsiang, minister of maritime affairs, would be forced to break the news to his countrymen that ‘Fulang chi [Portugal] is the name of a country, not that of a cannon as generally assumed’.
