Cumin, Camels, and Caravans

by Nabhan, Gary Paul

  Tamerlane died a year later, but the fear of economic isolation still loomed large among the Han Chinese. So the Ming emperors decided to establish stronger and more pervasive trade and tribute relations with many of the countries along the Maritime Silk Roads. They developed the notion of formal regional trade policies that functioned, for their era, like the North American Free Trade Agreement served United States economic hegemony at the end of the twentieth century. Their policy explicitly allowed access for each trading partner to only one port of entry on the South China Sea, and funneled trade through only one ruling family in each of those countries, which then had to offer regular tribute contributions to the Ming emperor. In this way, the Ming could ensure a monopoly over all goods moving in and out of Chinese-controlled harbors.

  By the time I tried to fathom these historic developments along the Maritime Silk Roads, I had become a halfhearted museum visitor, preferring to see what dynamically persists of a culture on the backstreets and in the souks rather than believing what has been frozen in time by some curator. I had hoped to be edified by the Quanzhou Maritime Museum, but I was saddened by how it mythologizes and markets its internationally acclaimed hero, Zheng He, as a “Chinese” globetrotter. It barely notes in passing his Central Asian (and possibly Arab) ancestry. Worse yet, it makes the Han Chinese fleet he commanded into the premier explorers and “discoverers” of the outer world. Following Gavin Menzies into pop history,1 the exhibit claims that China discovered America and Antarctica and hints at circumnavigation of the globe, all to further honor Han Chinese ingenuity. I am momentarily dazzled by the exhibit on the evolution of boat construction through the ages, until I realize that most of it features river traffic and has little to do with true seafaring.

  It is easy to be amused at how the museum signage makes frequent jabs at foreign imperialists, from the Japanese to the Dutch, ones that sidestep any consideration of the historic Han Chinese as an equally good example of economic, ecological, and even military imperialists. Unlike other imperialists, however, their goal was not so much to seize territory. Instead, they aimed to secure and extend their trade networks and then bring the various participants in those networks into a broader tribute system that provided the Chinese with both wealth and stature as the dominant power in trade relations. But if the notion of “Han imperialism” were ever broached in the museum, would it be possible to admit on state-subsidized signage that the success of the 1405 to 1433 expeditions of Zheng He owes as much to the influence of the Hui, Persians, and other ethnicities in China and its outposts as it does to the Han? The Han Chinese seem to have difficulty admitting all the Arab, Persian, Tamil, and Gujarati influences on their own destiny.

  I take one last look at the highly rated permanent exhibits of the Quanzhou Maritime Museum and then walk outside to look at the museum’s recently constructed facsimiles of ancient spice trading ships. I should have already conceded that most museums have little room or patience for “messy” stories, and that’s too bad, for the stories of longdistance seafarers and caravans are never black-and-white. Good crosscultural history, perhaps like passionate lovemaking, is always messy, and sometimes a bit sticky as well.

  By far the best-known character in Sino-Arabic relations, and one who frequently stayed among the Ding Hui of Zayton and Chendai, was Zheng He, the legendary admiral of the so-called Treasure Fleet of the Ming dynasty.2 He was born into a Hui family in 1371, just six years after the collapse of the Muslim state of Ishafran, and lived ambiguously as a practitioner of both Buddhism and Islam as an adult. Zheng would bring these two sensibilities together in order to achieve some of the greatest maritime, mercantile, and diplomatic accomplishments their societies had ever engaged in.

  Although he was first called Ma He by his family in the small town of Kunyang on the shores of Lake Dian in Yunnan Province, his ancestral roots were elsewhere. According to some sources, his great-great-great grandfather may have been a prominent Persian administrator in the Mongol empire and the appointed governor of Yunnan during the Yuan dynasty.3 Ma He was also believed to be a descendant of a Bukharan king of lands in present-day Uzbekistan and of a soldier in the troops of Genghis Khan.4 In short, many of his ancestors were likely Hanafi Muslims who had been scattered along the Silk Roads. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather had been on religious pilgrimages to Mecca from China, so the tradition of completing a hajj must have been strong in his family—a tradition that he would continue.

  Despite his later accomplishments, Ma He’s life got off to a rocky start during the last years of the Yuan dynasty. When Ma was eleven, his father, a minor official in Mongol-controlled Yunnan, was killed by the Ming army, which had come into the province to overthrow the last stronghold of Mongol power in China. Although the Ming army had alliances with Muslim warlords, they captured the fatherless boy and made him into a eunuch. Ma was first trained to be the personal servant of the young Prince of Yan, Zhu Di, but he ultimately became his most trusted adviser. When the prince launched a coup d’état against his nephew, the legitimate third emperor of the Ming dynasty, Ma played a key military role in installing Zhu Di on the throne. In July 1402, Zhu Di became known as the Yongle emperor. Two years later, the emperor bestowed the name Zheng He on Ma He, in recognition of his military exploits, and appointed him both the imperial director of the palace eunuchs and the chief envoy of the emperor for overseas missions.5

  By all accounts, Zheng He grew to be an impressive man who departed in many ways from the eunuch stereotype of his era. Reputed to have walked “like a tiger,” he was reported by contemporaries to be “seven feet tall [with] a waist about five feet in circumference. His cheeks and forehead were high and his nose was small. He had glaring eyes, teeth as white and well-shaped as shells, and a voice as loud as a bell.”6

  Afte establishing a foreign language training institute in Nanjing, Zheng He surrounded himself with literate colleagues conversant in other languages (such as his Arabic-speaking envoy and biographer Ma Huan and other Muslim translators and navigators). Zheng apparently used these translators to enhance his ability to deal diplomatically with others who thought differently from himself, a critically important skill in his capacity to forge trade agreements and gain tributes for his Yongle emperor. He himself was also well read, having studied both Confucius and Mencius. These attributes offered him the means to solve problems that the emperor himself, ensconced in his palace and isolated from other societies, was unlikely to have mastered. Zheng could readily draw on advice from allies from a handful of different cultures, as well as intellectuals and strategists within his own circle. His knack for being able to imagine just what to do in unprecedented circumstances allowed him to rise to the challenge of leading the largest naval campaign in history.

  From 1405 to 1433, Zheng He would initiate and direct seven maritime expeditions with the explicit purpose of actively forging extensive new trade relationships and of renewing damaged trade and tribute relations with various partners. He brought the finest musk, various “peppers” (no doubt including Sichuan), porcelain, and cloth from China to renew or attract additional trade partners, whom in turn gifted him with spices, salt, ambergris, frankincense, precious stones, and a menagerie of animals, from giraffes, ostriches, and lions to Arabian horses and zebras.7

  Historians have attempted to document the size and nature of the fleet, and it is easy to be awestruck by its magnitude. The consensus now is that when the Ming armada set sail on the Maritime Silk Road in July 1405, it was comprised of sixty-two treasure ships large enough to hold several hundred passengers each, as well as 193 smaller vessels that helped with scouting, surveillance, protection, and logistical support. A landlubber most of his life, Zheng He now commanded a fleet that included scores of the largest ships that the world had ever seen.8

  FIGURE 18. China’s ancient harbors were filled with mercantile ships similar to this three-masted junk. These small junks would have been dwarfed by Zheng He’s enormous nine-masted treasure s
hips. (iStockphoto.)

  Zheng made up for his lack of seafaring experience by drawing on the navigational charts, journals, and oral histories of Chinese, Persian, and Arab admirals and mercantile seafarers who had explored some of the same straits, bays, and open waters over the previous centuries. In fact, most of the routes taken by his armada had historically been traveled by other seafaring merchants. Hindis, Guajaratis, and people from other South Asian cultures had long been island hopping to accomplish transit trade of spices and many other goods. Zheng not only studied their charts but also corrected them, and he initiated a forty-page strip map, completed and published many years later by others, that covered the waterways from China to Africa. Nearly two hundred years after his death, Zheng He’s charts were included in the Chinese military encyclopedia known as Wubei Zhi and continue to be studied as classic navigational works today.

  On most of the expeditions, the Treasure Fleet sailed from Nanjing in China to Champa (the port of Qui-Nor, in what is today central Vietnam) and on to the island of Java. It might stop at Gresik on Java or Palembang in southern Sumatra to load up on spices, incenses, and woods, but would then hurry on to Malacca, the pivotal port for the nutmeg, mace, sago, and cloves of the Moluccas, or Spice Islands.9 From there, if the timing was not right, the fleet sometimes ran into the doldrums of the Indian Ocean before it reached a port near Colombo on present-day Sri Lanka, or else it ran into them immediately after leaving Colombo. The season of the voyage might allow the ships to venture down to the Maldives, or to sail directly on to several Indian ports, including Quilon, Cochin, Calicut, Pahang, and Lambri. The fleet then made its way up the Arabian Sea to the port of Hulumosi in the Gulf of Hormuz. There, as in other bazaars, Zheng He’s chronicler, Ma Huan, made copious notes on the herb, spice, and incense inventories in the local markets. But Ma Huan also made more general social and economic assessments of each ethnic souk in the harbor of Hormuz: “Foreign ships from every place and foreign merchants traveling by land all come to this country to attend the market and trade; hence the people of this country are all rich.”10

  From the Gulf of Hormuz, the fleet’s various expeditions followed different routes. At least once, it continued down the coast of presentday Oman, stopping at Dhofar or Muscat for incense, then entered present-day Yemen. On the fleet’s first visit to Yemen, which occurred during its fifth expedition, it was stopped at the port of Aden by an army of over seven thousand foot soldiers and cavalrymen. The confrontation was short-lived, however, and the visitors were later presented with exquisite and exotic gifts as tribute by the sultan of the ruling Rasulid dynasty. In Aden, Ma Huan documented how globalized the cuisines of the Middle East had already become. He inventoried “husked and unhusked rice, [fava] beans, barley, wheat and other grains, sesame and all kinds of vegetables. For fruit they have . . . Persian dates, pine nuts, almonds, raisins, walnuts, apples, pomegranates, peaches and apricots.”11

  After stopping at Aden, the final three expeditions crossed over to the Horn of Africa. There, the fleet stopped at a number of African harbors, including Mogadishu, Barawa, Pate (in the Lamu Archipelago), and Malindi, all of which had been frequented and even colonized by Arab traders in the tenth century. On one voyage, the fleet likely reached Zanzibar and possibly Madagascar, but there is little to support the claims that Zheng himself or his understudies ventured farther.12 It is probable that he died en route home from Calicut in 1433, and his body was ceremoniously buried at sea. A lock of his hair and other belongings were later placed in a tomb just outside Nanjing.13

  Not long before his death, Zheng He was given the Muslim name Hajji Mahmud Shamsuddin, because he had initiated a hajj on his final voyage. As was customary and permissible during his era, the last leg of such a journey was fulfilled by proxy. While Zheng He waited in Calicut, his envoys Ma Huan and Hong Bao sailed to the Arabian coast on a ship navigated by Arabs or Indians, and then traveled overland, carrying Chinese musk to the Muslim leadership at Mecca as a gift from both Zheng He and the Yongle emperor.

  Perhaps inaccurately characterized as an explorer, discoverer, and conqueror of new lands, Zheng He was more fully engaged in revitalizing the tribute relations and spice trade once enjoyed by China’s dynasties.14 To do so, he forged military as well as religious alliances to secure control of intercontinental commerce that would ultimately benefit Zhu Di and his Muslim trade partners. As proof of his mercantile intent, one need only compare the list of ports in which Zheng chose to harbor with those where Muslim spice merchants were known to be active: Malacca, Gresik, Colombo, Cochin and Calicut, Hormuz, Muscat and Dhofar, Aden, Mogadishu and Jumbo, possibly Madagascar, and Malindi, Mombasa, and Pate off the Kenyan coast. It is telling that where Zheng ran into initial resistance was in ports like Palembang and Aden, where the transnational Muslim mercantile class had recently lost control of its portions of the spice routes. Zheng He was sent to “reconnect the dots.”

  In this latter capacity, some historians have claimed that Zheng He played a reinforcing role in “the development of Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia.”15 First, in the Strait of Malacca, Zheng sought out and destroyed the pirate ships of Chinese marauder Chen Zuyi, whose raiders had gained control of the commerce in Palembang, the Sumatran hub for spices from all parts of Indonesia. From his base in Palembang, Chen and his pirates had been intercepting incense, spices, and copper coins that were being sent to Zhu Di by the numerous Chinese Muslim merchants who had set up residence in the Javanese harbor of Gresik around 1410.

  Zheng He’s fleet found a way to stop this piracy by going upwind from Chen Zuyi’s fleet of seventeen pirate ships. The fleet then showered the pirates’ vessels with flaming arrows, poison-soaked hand grenades, and gunpowder-propelled missiles until ten of the ships burned and sank as Chen fled. Zheng’s men later caught the pirate chief, who was executed in 1407, thereby allowing Chinese-Muslim trade to reopen for one more fleeting moment in history.

  Once the pirates were out of the way, Zheng brought Chinese Muslim merchants from Gresik to Palembang, and then offered support to help their community build a historic mosque. According to historian Tan Yeok Seong, “These early Chinese settlements were populated by Chinese Muslims who had created a sphere of influence for themselves with the co-operation of Cheng Ho [Zheng He]. Religion and trade then went hand in hand. . . . Through Islam the Muslims, in spite of their racial differences became masters of trade; while, on the other hand, successful maritime trade helped to spread Islamisation.”16

  Of course, well before the spread of Islam, Arab sailors from Oman and Yemen learned to use the northeast monsoons to sail one way across the Indian Ocean between December and March, and back the other way with the southwest monsoons between late April and August. But if the summer monsoons arrived late or the Treasure Fleet arrived too early, the commander had the tough choice between staying in port or suffering through the doldrums out at sea before the sails caught the wind that would propel the ships across the Indian Ocean.

  Not far from Java and Sumatra, I am sitting as still as I can be in a forty-foot sloop stuck in the Indian Ocean. In other words, because there is no wind, the sailboat is not moving at all. I look out across the Badung Strait toward the small island of Nusa Lembongan and not a swell or whitecap is in sight. The calm waters all around me are the color of a deserted sky, a pale, cloudless blue. A stark desert to the eye, a low pressure area to the ear, this is what the ancient mariner in Samuel Coleridge’s poem recognized as “the doldrums”:

  Day after day, day after day,

  We stuck, nor breath nor motion,

  As idle as a painted ship;

  Upon a painted ocean.17

  As I sit on the edge of the sloop with my feet dangling over the lee side, I wait for the captain to decide whether he will turn on the backup engine and get us out of here. But for now, I have time to think of the Muslim admiral of the Chinese Treasure Fleet that came through this region six hundred years ago. He sailed his ships into a swath of the wor
ld known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone, where the prevailing heat surrounding the equator creates a belt of low pressure. Sometimes the winds disappeared for days, and with them went the gulls and the frigate birds, the flying fish and the sea turtles. The area took on the appearance of a dead zone, where boats without motors moved more slowly than desert tortoises crossing a dry, sandy plain.

  Despite the sophisticated navigational abilities of his crew and the enormous sails strung on masts made from the largest fir trunks ever taken out of China, on some days Zheng He could do little more than scan the horizon, for he was not convinced that his ships had actually moved. A landlubber like me for much of his life, Zheng was not at all accustomed to the doldrums; he was likely a man of action, not a man who could sit still for very long.

  It is a lovely irony: the enormous fleet of the Yongle emperor—the vanguard of globalization for its era—would venture farther than any flotilla had gone up until that time, and yet there were some days when all of its ships sat still, as if treading water. They suffered from the doldrums day and night, sometimes for weeks. The seafarers’ most difficult moments may not have been when they suddenly arrived, unannounced, in distant lands completely unlike their own, but when they did not move at all. As Saint Jerome once said, such a desert, whether it is on land or at sea, loves to strip you down. It may strip you down psychologically until there is nothing at all left of you.

  There was a moment in 1409, on his return from the doldrums of the Indian Ocean, when Zheng He chose to make a gesture of tangible engagement in the acquisition of aromatics, rather than simply serving as an orchestrator of their globalized commerce. He ordered some sailors on his second expedition to go ashore to a small island so that they could personally harvest one of the very products that was widely sought everywhere from the East China Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. He wanted his men to get their hands dirty and to participate directly in finding and extracting a mother lode of incense that was reputed to occur nearby.