1421: The Year China Discovered the World

by Gavin Menzies

  A plan of the Longjiang shipyards from the Lung Chiang Chhang Chih, a history of the yards at the time of Zheng He, published in 1553. The administrative offices are on the left, the slipways and docks on the right.

  Within twelve months, despite never having been to sea, Zheng He had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of one of the largest fleets ever built. One of Zhu Di’s first orders had been to double the size of the Longjiang shipyards, near Nanjing. Already the principal shipyards in China, they were now vastly expanded, covering several square miles on the banks of the Yangtze beyond the eastern gate of Nanjing. Seven vast dry-docks were built, connected by a series of locks to the river, and each one could be subdivided to permit three ships to be built simultaneously. They remain there to this day.9 Zhu Di’s aim was to create what even Kublai Khan had failed to achieve: a maritime empire spanning the oceans.

  Prior to the ninth century, ships voyaging beyond coastal waters were almost always foreign-owned, but from the ninth century onwards China developed its own ocean-going fleet. The Song and Yuan (Mongol) dynasties had maintained large fleets, sent emissaries overseas and built a substantial foreign trade, gradually wresting control of the spice trade from the Arabs who had once dominated it. Zhu Di now embarked on an incredible expansion of the Chinese fleet. In addition to the warships and the merchant fleet he had inherited, Zhu Di commissioned 1,681 new ships, among them many gigantic nine-masted ‘treasure ships’, named after the huge value and quantity of goods they could carry in their vast holds. Tens of thousands of carpenters, sailmakers and shipwrights from the southern provinces around the shipyards were put to work to build them. In addition to 250 treasure ships, the fleet contained more than 3,500 other vessels. There were 1,350 patrol ships and the same number of combat vessels based at guard stations or island bases, 400 larger warships and another 400 freighters for transporting grain, water and horses for the fleet. The emperor’s ships were to sail the oceans of the world and chart them, impressing and intimidating foreign rulers, bringing the entire world into China’s ‘tribute system’. Rulers paid tribute to China in return for trading privileges and protection against their enemies, but China always gave its trading partners a greater value of goods – silks and porcelain at discounted prices, often funded by soft loans – than was received from them. They were thus in perpetual debt to China. These ships were also tasked with hunting down the fugitive Zhu Yunwen: ‘There are some who say he is abroad. The emperor ordered Zheng He to seek out traces of him.’10 All should know who was the rightful occupant of the Dragon Throne: the Emperor on Horseback, Son of Heaven – Zhu Di.

  As soon as he had claimed the imperial throne, Zhu Di decided to relocate the capital to his former stronghold of Beijing. The ageing Tamerlane, the last of the great nomadic leaders, had decided to seize his last and greatest prize of all, China, and Zhu Di resolved to meet the threat head on. Tamerlane (the anglicized form of the Persian Timur-i-Lang, or ‘Timur the Lame’, a nickname he received as a result of arrow wounds sustained in battle) had proved a worthy successor to his forebears Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan. ‘He loved bold and valiant soldiers, by whose aid he opened the locks of terror, tore men to pieces like lions and overturned mountains.’11 From his capital Samarkand, straddling the Silk Road, the great trading route through central Asia, Tamerlane had waged relentless campaigns across Asia, conquering northern India, Persia and Syria, and defeating the Ottomans at Ankara in 1402. Now his gaze had turned eastwards, his aim to destroy the Chinese armies, overthrow Zhu Di and restore China to Mongol rule.

  To counter this potent threat, the new emperor took with him to Beijing his court, guarded by a million-strong army, but his vision for the new imperial capital encompassed far more than its being a defensive stronghold to thwart Tamerlane. Kublai Khan had built Ta-tu to a traditional Chinese design and diverted rivers to encircle the city. Zhu Di incorporated the basic elements of Kublai Khan’s capital, but he demolished the royal enclosure and replaced it with a classic imperial complex, the Forbidden City, with far more perfect proportions than its former design. The walled capital surrounding it was to be built on an awesome scale: fifteen hundred times the area of walled London at that time and housing fifty times the population.

  Yet building the world’s greatest city to dazzle his people and intimidate his enemies and all the rulers of the world was only one part of Zhu Di’s master plan. He would also repair the Great Wall, built by the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, during the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC). Qin Shi Huangdi had united the warring provinces of China and was the first man to rule the entire country. The wall was erected at ruinous expense to protect China’s northern frontiers from attack, but over the following 1,600 years it had been allowed to crumble into disrepair. Zhu Di began a programme of rebuilding and strengthening, adding watchtowers and turrets along the wall’s existing 5,000 kilometres and extending it by a further 1,400. It ran from the Pacific as far west as the Heavenly Mountains in central Asia.

  Still Zhu Di’s aims were higher. He despatched expeditions to China’s eastern neighbours and along the Silk Road across central Asia to recreate the trading empire China had possessed in the golden age of the Tang dynasty over five centuries earlier. All this in addition to his fleet-expansion programme.

  Zhu Di intended to achieve all these stupendous goals within two decades. Running through all his policies was his determination that the Chinese should once again believe in themselves and their illustrious history. The Mongols had been expelled, China was Chinese again. Zhu Di was always concerned by the fact that he was not his father’s designated heir, and he constantly sought to demonstrate that the gods had bestowed legitimacy on his ascent to the Dragon Throne. Hence the first buildings he commissioned were those of the great ceremonial complex, the Temple of Heaven, at the centre of the new city. It was to be not only the stage for the annual ceremonies the emperor, the Son of Heaven, was required to perform, but the very heart of the new Chinese empire. A new observatory, in turn, would be at the epicentre of Beijing. Zhu Di took a personal interest in astronomy, and in the means by which he could build on the wonderful legacy he had inherited in this field. Chinese astronomers had well over two thousand years’ experience of recording events in the night sky. They had noted the appearance of a new star in 1300 BC, had charted every arrival of Halley’s comet since 240 BC, and by 1054 were describing the remnants of the supernova explosion known as the Crab Nebula, with its rapidly spinning neutron star, or pulsar, at its centre.

  During eighty-nine years of rule over China, the Mongol emperors had neglected this priceless inheritance; in the first year of his reign, Zhu Di restored the nightly practice of recording the stars. His astronomers charted no fewer than 1,400 of them as they traversed the sky, and they were able to predict both solar and lunar eclipses with considerable accuracy. Zhu Di also set up a committee of distinguished astronomers to ‘compare and correct the drawings of the guiding stars’12 and eventually persuaded the Shogun of Japan, the King of Korea, and Prince Ulugh Begh, grandson of Tamerlane, to do the same. The emperor’s interest in astronomy was practical, not theoretical. He was determined that his astronomers should perfect new methods of using these guiding stars, enabling his admirals to navigate accurately at sea and correctly locate the new territories they would find on their journeys of discovery. His aim was to ensure that Beijing’s great observatory was the reference point from which the entire world would be explored and charted, and all new discoveries located – in short, the centre of the known universe.

  The relocation of the capital from Nanjing to Beijing was by far the most complex and far-reaching project undertaken during the Ming dynasty. The move started in 1404, when ten thousand households were forcibly moved north to increase Beijing’s population. A vast army of workers was also required to accomplish Zhu Di’s vision and hundreds of thousands of Chinese labourers were force-marched to the north; some 335 army divisions were re-deployed to guard them, even though the thr
eat from Tamerlane’s Mongol hordes had quickly evaporated. The great warlord had left Samarkand at the head of a vast army in January 1405, his aim to march eastwards through the mountains, set up encampments near the Chinese border, and await the first sign of the approach of spring before striking deep into China, catching the emperor’s forces unprepared. Sick and old, Tamerlane was too weak to march and was carried in a litter – a couch carried by bearers – but even so, the privations of the journey over such bleak terrain in the depths of winter were too much for him. He died on 18 February without even sighting the Chinese frontier. His army broke up into rival factions and dispersed.

  Zhu Di’s plans for Beijing remained unaltered by the news of Tamerlane’s death, but feeding the first construction workers soon began to prove difficult. The growing season in the north was short; millet could be grown, but not rice, and wheat and barley produced poor yields. There was nowhere near enough grain to feed the tidal waves of workers continuing to arrive. Zhu Di delegated his third son, Zhu Gaozhi, to assume military command of Beijing, and tax rebates were granted to anyone who could grow grain around the city. When this measure failed to produce enough to feed the growing armies of workmen, the emperor decided that the Grand Canal must be repaired and enlarged to carry shipments of grain northwards.

  Begun in 486 BC under the Wu dynasty, the canal was one of the wonders of the ancient world. From AD 584 onwards it was extended and the individual sections linked together to form a system stretching for 1,800 kilometres – to this day the longest man-made waterway in the world. However, it was built at a horrific human cost: it is estimated that half of the six million labour force perished at their work. The financial stresses and domestic upheavals caused by the building of the canal were also one of the principal causes of the rapid collapse of the short-lived Sui dynasty (AD 589–618).

  The Grand Canal was the main artery of commerce between north and south China, but its capacity was no longer equal to the demands being placed upon it. The work to enlarge it was carried out in two stages. In 1411, dredging and reconstruction of the northern section began to clear 130 miles of channel, and thirty-six new locks were built, for Beijing was over a hundred feet higher than the Yellow River. Three hundred thousand labourers were employed on the task. The southern section from the Yellow River to the Yangtze was opened in 1415. The completed canal stretched from Beijing in the north to Hangzhou on the coast, south of Shanghai. Grain was transported in close to ten thousand flat-bottomed barges, and shipments rose from 2.8 million piculs (approximately 170 million kilograms) in 1416 to five million (300 million kilograms) by the following year.

  An early Ming grain freighter from the Thien Kung Kai Wu (Tian Gong Kai Wu), ‘The Exploitation of the Works of Nature’, 1637.

  The insatiable demand for grain to feed the workforce in Beijing led to shortages and famine elsewhere in China, and the timber required for Zhu Di’s great schemes stripped the forests of hardwood. Quite apart from the timber needed to build the Forbidden City, each treasure ship in the emperor’s huge fleet consumed the wood of three hundred acres of prime teak forest. The imperial navy was supported by a new fleet of auxiliary store ships, and hundreds of smaller merchant ships were also built to trade between Chinese, Indian and African ports. Yet more hardwood was used in the construction of the thousands of grain barges plying the Grand Canal. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of acres of forest were felled. Annam (the northern part of modern Vietnam) and Vietnam were also denuded of trees, sparking off the first of a series of uprisings against Chinese rule.

  Zhu Di also faced domestic problems. The scale and cost of his grandiose schemes provoked increasingly ferocious opposition from the mandarins, and even an emperor could not undertake a massive project like the building of the Forbidden City without their co-operation. The mandarins were responsible for raising the tax revenues to fund Zhu Di’s projects, and, as with officials of any court in any country, there were a thousand ways for them to delay or hinder schemes they did not favour. Zhu Di continued to pursue his dreams with a customary mixture of guile and ruthlessness, even going so far as to exploit the arrival of a ‘qilin’ – in reality a common giraffe obtained by Admiral Zheng He on one of the epic expeditions that began in 1405, when his fleet visited East Africa – to bamboozle and outmanoeuvre his opponents.

  The qilin was an important animal in Chinese mythology, said to have the body of a musk deer, the tail of an ox, the forehead of a wolf, the hoofs of a horse, and a fleshy horn like a unicorn. In legend, a qilin had appeared before a young woman, Yen Tschen-tsaii, in the sixth century BC. It dropped a piece of jade into her hand on which was engraved a message: she would bear a son, ‘a king without a throne’.13 The son she bore was Confucius, whose philosophy of system and order was to dominate Chinese thought for over two millennia.

  The ‘qilin’ was presented to Zhu Di by Zheng He on 16 November 1416. Proclaiming its arrival as a sign of heavenly approval for his rule, Zhu Di immediately convened a council to confirm once and for all the merits of transferring the capital from Nanjing to Beijing. The court poet wrote a eulogy to the emperor and, astounded by the appearance of the celestial animal, the mandarins duly obliged him.

  The whole of China was now mobilized to achieve the completion of the imperial design. Gangs were sent to fell yet more teak in the forests of the Chinese provinces of Jiangxi, Shanxi and Sichuan, and in Annam and Vietnam. Kilns were built to manufacture enormous quantities of bricks. A workforce of artisans, soldiers and labourers was recruited from all over the Chinese empire. In all, one million men were employed directly on constructing the Forbidden City, three and a half million indirectly. A further one million soldiers stood guard over them.

  Once barges could carry food along the Grand Canal to this multitude of workmen, the rate of progress on the Forbidden City accelerated. Improvements were made to the moats, walls and bridges of the former Ta-tu and a start was made on the emperor’s residence, the western palace in the Forbidden City. In March 1417, the emperor left Nanjing for the last time, and by the end of that year most of the palace buildings had been completed. In 1420, sections of the southern city wall that had fallen into disrepair under the Mongols were restored, and later that year the Temple of Heaven was completed. Sufficient buildings had also been erected to enable the court permanently to move north, and on Chinese New Year’s Day, 2 February 1421, the magnificent new capital was inaugurated. To emphasize the importance of the occasion, the envoys of all visiting heads of state were required to bow and kow-tow – prostrate themselves and press their foreheads to the ground – at Zhu Di’s feet. China’s absolute dominance was further highlighted by the humiliation imposed on two of the most powerful men in the world: the son and grandson of the mighty Tamerlane. Their first attempt at kow-towing before Zhu Di was deemed unsatisfactory and one of Zhu Di’s eunuchs, Haji Maulana, made them repeat it. Their second attempt was also inadequate. Only after their third prostration at his feet did the emperor pronounce himself satisfied.

  This array of foreign heads of state kow-towing before the emperor was the culmination of fifteen years’ assiduous diplomacy. Chinese foreign policy was quite different from that of the Europeans who followed them to the Indian Ocean many years later. The Chinese preferred to pursue their aims by trade, influence and bribery rather than by open conflict and direct colonization. Zhu Di’s policy was to despatch huge armadas every few years throughout the known world, bearing gifts and trade goods; the massive treasure ships carrying a huge array of guns and a travelling army of soldiers were also a potent reminder of his imperial might: China alone had the necessary firepower to protect friendly countries from invasion and quash insurrections against their rulers. The treasure ships returned to China with all manner of exotic items: ‘dragon saliva [ambergris], incense and golden amber’ and ‘lions, gold spotted leopards and camel-birds [ostriches] which are six or seven feet tall’ from Africa; gold cloth from Calicut in south-west India, studded with pe
arls and precious stones; elephants, parrots, sandalwood, peacocks, hardwood, incense, tin and cardamom from Siam (modern Thailand).

  Those rulers who accepted the emperor’s overlordship were rewarded with titles, protection and trade missions. In south-east Asia, Malacca was rewarded for its loyalty by being promoted as a trading port at the expense of Java and Sumatra; the emperor even personally composed a poem for the Malaccan sultan, and can be said to have been the founder of Malaysia. The subservient Siamese were also extended trading privileges to the detriment of the truculent Cambodians. Korea was especially important to China: Zhu Di lost no time in despatching an envoy to the King of Korea, Yi Pang-Won, granting him an honorary Chinese title. The Koreans needed Chinese medicine, books and astronomical instruments, and in return they agreed to set up an observatory to co-operate with Zhu Di in charting the world. They traded leopards, seals, gold, silver and horses – one thousand of them in 1403, ten thousand the next year. Despite some reluctance, they also found it expedient to comply with Chinese requests to fill Zhu Di’s harem with virgins. Many Korean ships were to join the Chinese fleets when they left to sail the world.

  As soon as he had expelled the last Mongols from China in 1382, Zhu Di had despatched his eunuch Isiha to the perennially troublesome region of Manchuria in the far north-east, and in 1413 the Jurchen people of Manchuria responded by sending a prestigious mission to Beijing, where its members were showered with titles, gifts and trading rights. Japan was also assiduously courted. The third Ashikaga Shogun Yoshimitsu was a Sinophile; he lost no time in kow-towing as ‘your subject, the King of Japan’.14 His reward was a string of special ports opened to promote trade with Japan, at Ningbo, Quanzhou and Guangdong (Canton). Like Korea, Japan also set up an observatory to aid Zhu Di’s astronomical research, and Japanese ships also joined the globetrotting Chinese convoys.