Almost 100 years before the voyages of Columbus, In 1405 the Chinese began a series of voyages into Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean directed by Zheng He, a powerful court eunuch of the Ming Dynasty.
The motives for exploration were not unlike those of the Europeans a century later: a desire to establish or recover trade (profit) in the form of tribute from kingdoms in Southeast Asia; the reinforcement of the claim to universal authority (similar to the spread of Christianity as the universal religion), and a thirst for knowledge.
The
Ming dynasty ruled China from 1368 to 1644 and created one of the greatest eras of orderly
government and social stability in human history.
After the Mongols were overthrown in 1368, the emperor Hung-wu of the new Ming Dynasty wanted to assert Chinese power.
Because China was no longer part of a land empire that stretched from Asia to Europe, the emperor turned to the sea. He decided to build a navy. The Chinese made elaborate plans that would not be fulfilled for many years. A shipyard was built in Najing (Nanking). Thousand of varnish and tung trees were planted on nearby Purple Mountain to provide wood for shipbuilding. The emperor established a school of foreign languages to train interpreters.
After the dynasty's founder, the Hung-wu emperor, the Ming dynasty's most famous ruler was the emperor Cheng Zu (Yung-lo) known as "The Consolidator," who ruled from 1403 to 1424.
|
|
Emperor Cheng Zu "The Consolidator," r. 1403 to 1424 undertook to incorporate South and Southeast Asia into China's tribute system.
This tribute system was based on the overlord-vassal relationship between the ruler of China and the rulers of other countries expressed by the traditional cultural view that saw China as the largest and oldest state in the world:
China was the "parent state" of all other kingdoms and the source of civilization in general. The Son of Heaven (the emperor) effected a paternal interest in the orderly government of the tributary states by confirming the succession of new rulers, sometimes offering military protection against attack, and usually conferring the boon of trade with China.
This was not the system of aggressive imperialism that was common in Europe, but rather an expression of the Chinese cultural view: foreign rulers who wished contact with the Middle Kingdom (China) had to accept its terms and acknowledge the universal supremacy of the Son of Heaven. Trade with China was incredibly valuable and the tribute formalities of the performance of the kowtow (the "three kneelings and nine prostrations"), the exchange of envoys, tribute, and conduct of diplomatic relations; were the price to be paid.
|
|
The admiral of the expeditions, Zheng He (sometimes spelled Cheng Ho), was born in 1371 in Kunyang, a town in southwest Yunnan Province. His family, named Ma, were part of a minority group known as the Semur. They originally came from Central Asia and were Muslims. Both his grandfather and father had made the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Zheng He grew up hearing their accounts of travel through foreign lands.
Yunnan was one of the last strongholds of Mongol support, holding out long after the Ming Dynasty began. After Ming armies conquered Yunnan in 1382, Zheng He was taken captive and brought to Nanjing. The eleven year old boy was made a servant of the prince who would become the Cheng Zu Emperor. It was Cheng Zu who renamed the boy Zheng He.
Zheng He is described in Chinese historical records as tall and heavy, with "clear-cut features and long ear lobes; a stride like a tiger's and voice clear and vibrant."
He was well liked and admired for his quick wit in argument. He was famous as a brave soldier. When his prince seized the Chinese throne, Zheng He fought well on his behalf. As a result, Zheng He became a close confidant of the new emperor and was given an important position at court.
Emperor Cheng Zu had ambitious plans. He rebuilt the Great Wall to the condition in which it exists today. He also built his new capital at Beijing, next to the remains of the former Yuan capital. He built the "Forbidden City".
Cheng Zu's planned expansion of China's tribute system was marked by seven great maritime expeditions that begun in 1405 and continued until 1433. These expeditions were led by Admiral Zheng He, whose status as a Moslem made him suited to deal with the Islamic rulers of South Asia. Cheng Zu gave him the title "Admiral of the Western Seas."
|
|
These expeditions involved tens of thousands of sailors, navigators, doctors, scribes, shipwrights, and cooks and more than a hundred large junks (a style of ship) each.
The development of Chinese shipbuilding and techniques of navigation on the Asian sea routes made Zheng He's voyages possible. His seagoing junks were very large: over 400 ft long and 160 ft wide. (some accounts say 600 ft long) They were the largest wooden ships ever constructed. They had nine masts with both triangular and square sails that could be turned to allow the ships to sail into the wind - an innovation the Europeans would not develop for another 50 years. They had four decks and up to thirteen watertight compartments. Europeans did not develop watertight compartments until the 19th century. Zheng He's armada was bigger than all of the navies of Europe combined.
Zheng He's Armada The Starfleet Vessels
They navigated by using the compass and detailed sailing directions that brought them to the coasts of China's customary tributaries, such as Siam and Vietnam.
In addition to these some fifty new places were visited and their rulers enrolled as tributaries.
Missions from Hormuz and the African coast came to China four times, from Bengal eleven times. Rulers in Sumatra and Ceylon were brought into the system by force.
Commercially these expeditions provided a line of communication with the existing overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asian ports.
Politically, the tribute system was expanded from land-based trading partners to sea-trading partners. This incorporated much of the known world into the Chinese concept of the universal rule of the Son of Heaven.
|
|
The first fleet sailed in 1405-1407 with sixty-two vessels carrying 28,000 men, and over 100 support vessels.
They reached Sumatra, India and Ceylon, as did the second and third expeditions.
The forth voyage in 1413-1415 reached Hormuz on the Persian Gulf and Aden on the Red Sea.
A fifth voyage also went as far as Aden.
The seventh voyage started out with 27,500 men and reached Hormuz again in 1431-1433. Chinese vessels visited far down the east coast of Africa and seven emissaries reached Mecca.
|
|
On some voyages Muslim religious leaders and Buddhist monks were brought along to serve as diplomats in lands where people were Muslim or Buddhist.
Each ship brought enough food to last the whole voyage, in case "barbarian" food was not acceptable. In addition to rice and other food that could be preserved, the ships carried huge tubs of earth on deck so that vegetables and fruit could be grown.
On each voyage the fleet anchored at the Malacca base, where provisions, tribute, and gifts were stored in warehouses. Zheng He found that foreign kings and princes particularly admired the famous blue-and-white Ming porcelain dishes, vases, and cups. Foreigners still yearned for Chinese silk, for cotton printed with Chinese designs, and for the coarse but long lasting, brownish yellow cloth known as Nankeen because it was made in Nanking (now Nanjing). The holds of Zheng He's ships were also crammed with gold and silver, iron tools, copper kitchenware, and perfumes.
In exchange for such wares, and as tribute, Zheng He brought back medicinal herbs, dyes, spices, precious, gems, pearls, rhinoceros horns, ivory, and exotic animals.
The expeditions were an important source of information about foreign countries. A crew member described the Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal off the east coast of India:
Its inhabitants live in the hollows of trees and caves. Both men and women there go about stark naked, like wild beasts, without a stitch of clothing on them. No rice grows there. The people subsist solely on wild yams, jack fruit and plantains, or upon the fish which they catch. There is a legend current among them that, if they wear the smallest scrap of clothing, their bodies would break into sores and ulcers, owing to their ancestors having been cursed by Buddha for having stolen and hidden his clothes while he was bathing.
In Sri Lanka, the Chinese visited Buddhist Temple Hill, where Buddha was said to have left his footprint on a rock. They marveled at all the temples, particularly one that held a relic of the Buddha’s tooth. According to a crew member, the people of the island
do not venture to eat cow’s flesh, they merely drink the milk. When a cow dies they bury it. It is capital punishment for anyone to secretly kill a cow; he who does so can however escape punishment by paying a ransom of a cow’s head made of solid gold.
Sri Lanka seemed like a treasure island, where rubies and other precious stones were abundant. The people harvested pearls from the sea and had discovered the trick of making cultured pearls by planting a speck of sand inside an oyster’s shell.
The king of Sri Lanka was an ardent Buddhist who treated both cows and elephants with religious respect. However, because he did not show proper respect for the ambassadors from the Son of Heaven, he was taken back to China for "instruction." He was returned to his island on a later voyage.
When the Chinese reached the east coast of Africa, they found people who built houses of brick. "Men and women wear their hair in rolls; when they go out they wear a linen hood. There are deep wells worked by means of cog wheels. Fish are caught in the sea with nets." The Africans offered such goods a "dragon saliva, incense, and golden amber." The Chinese found the African animals even more amazing. There included "lion, gold-spotted leopards, and camel-birds (ostriches), which are six or seven feet tall."
The giraffe Zheng He brought back became a symbol of Cheng Zu's .
The animal came from today's Somalia. In the Somali Language, the name for giraffe sounds similar to the Chinese word for unicorn. It was easy to imagine that this was the legendary animal that had played an important part in the birth of Confucius. Surely, it must be a sign of Heaven's favor on the emperor's reign.
When the giraffe arrived in 1415, the emperor himself went to the palace gate to receive it, as well as a "celestial horse" (zebra) and a "celestial stag" (oryx). The palace officials offered congratulations and performed the kowtow before the heavenly animals.
When Zheng He came back from his seventh voyage in 1433, he was sixty-two years old. He had accomplished much for China, spreading the glory of the Middle Kingdom to many countries that now sent tribute and ambassadors to the court. Though he died soon afterward, his exploits had won him fame. Plays and novels were written about his voyages. In such places as Malacca and Java, towns, caves, and temples were named after him.
Half a century later, Portuguese ships approached the same region from the south. By then the Ming program of expansion had faded and the Europeans would wait to meet the first Chinese ships in Malacca and Canton.
After the beginning of 1433 China's beginnings as a naval power were suddenly stopped, never to resume again.
Why?
Ideological reasons
The court eunuchs that promoted the expeditions came under considerable opposition from their rivals, the Confucian scholar-officials -- so much so that Cheng Ho's accomplishments were practically suppressed from the historical record.
There was an internal Chinese court policy struggle between competing theories of the commercial and technology benefits of foreign trade, against the benefits in social purity of isolationism. Isolationism won.
China was politically unified - a decision by a single ruler to ban ocean travel was sufficient to stop an entire civilization from developing sea power. It became illegal to put to sea in a multi-masted ship
Economic Reasons
The completion of the Grand Canal as a more efficient and safer means of grain transport caused China to neglect and abandon its ocean-going navy.
maritime threats were always considered secondary in China to continental or land-based threats, and thus in difficult economic times such as the middle Ming dynasty, the maritime solutions to national security (i.e. the navy) lost resources to the continental solutions (i.e. the army).
Cheng Ho was an organizer, a commander, a diplomat, and an able courtier, but he was not a trader. No chartered companies, like the Dutch VOC Company or the British East India Company, emerged to found colonies or establish overseas trade. Unlike its European counterparts, the Chinese state remained uninterested in the commercial and colonial possibilities overseas. This was partially due to the Ming government's major source of revenue coming from land tax and not from trade tax.
|