by John Keay
There were seven such voyages, six of them ordered by the Yongle emperor himself between 1405 and 1421, plus one of 1431 that was an afterthought by an admiring successor. All were commanded by Zheng He; each included between 100 and 300 ships carrying in total up to 27,000 men; and of these ships, around fifty were usually ‘treasure ships’, colossal constructions about five times the size of any wooden vessel built elsewhere in the world at the time and ten times the capacity. In the most considered of several recent interpretations of the textual and archaeological evidence, the Ming scholar Edward Dreyer concludes that the largest vessels stretched to over 130 metres (425 feet), and with a beam of around 50 metres (164 feet) could have displaced 20,000–30,000 tonnes. They were the size of small cruise liners. (By way of comparison, later in the century the pioneering voyages commanded by Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama involved only three or four ships, none longer than 20 metres (65 feet) and whose capacity barely amounted to one twentieth that of a Ming treasure ship.) Rectangular in cross-section and of comparatively shallow draught for estuarial sailing, the treasure ships were constructed with watertight bulkheads, fitted with retractable sternpost rudders and centreboards, and had six to nine masts, each up to 60 metres (195 feet) tall, with collapsible rattan sails. ‘In the language of a later era of navalism,’ says Dreyer, ‘China had the ships, had the men, and had the money, too.’2
Each of the Zheng He voyages lasted just over two years and followed much the same monsoon-dictated course – from the Yangzi to Qui Nhon in Champa (southern Vietnam), Java, Malacca (Melaka, near Singapore), various ports in Sumatra, the south or west coasts of Sri Lanka, and then Calicut (Koshikodse) on the Kerala coast of south India, which was ‘the great country of the Western Ocean’. From Calicut, all or part of the fleet sometimes sailed on. Hormuz in the Persian/Arabian Gulf was first visited by the fourth voyage, Djofar and Aden on the south coast of Arabia by the fifth voyage, and various ports on the Somali coast of Africa by both that and the sixth voyage. Chinese envoys also reached Mecca, though not in Chinese ships, and Malindi in what is now Kenya, possibly in Chinese ships. Various island stopovers – in Borneo, the Philippines, Andamans, Maldives and Laccadives – have also been identified, and numerous other parts of coastal mainland Asia seem to have been occasionally frequented, including Bengal and Thailand. Just seventy years before Vasco da Gama’s cockleshell craft ventured round the Cape of Good Hope, Zheng He’s stately armadas had demonstrated maritime mastery of the entire Indian Ocean.
For an empire that had previously taken little official cognisance of overseas trade and had never played a political role west of Java, it was a sensational achievement. The superiority of China’s shipbuilding techniques, navigational expertise and organisational skills was incontrovertible. Like a space-launch programme, or the great airship boom of the 1920s and 1930s, the voyages of the majestic treasure ships seemed to herald a new age of commodious travel, bulk transport and unchallenged maritime security under the wave-ruling Ming. Overland travellers like Polo and the great fourteenth-century Moroccan adventurer Ibn Battuta could scarcely believe their eyes when they first encountered such ships. Though wary of Indo-Arab craft, they embarked on the great junks without hesitation. Aboard a Chinese merchantman even traders had their own cabins; you could sail for weeks in comfort and privacy without ever being aware of your fellow passengers; and all the while, in the words of Zheng He’s diarist, ‘by day and night the lofty sails, unfurled like clouds, continued their star-like course, traversing the savage waves as if they were a public thoroughfare’.3
Wherever it had a coastline, ‘All-under-Heaven’ was comfortably within reach of the Ming armadas. China looked poised to command the seas and engross that trade on which, within a century, European states would construct empires and claim world dominion. But in China’s case nothing of the sort happened. Rather did the Yongle initiative discredit the whole idea of overseas enterprise. The great ships were allowed to rot; the construction of replacements was specifically forbidden; and so, for over a century, were all but coastal sailings. Subsequent mention of the voyages is so rare that some scholars would come to doubt whether they ever took place; others, going to the opposite extreme, have exploited the paucity of records to postulate preposterous theories of polar endeavour and world circumnavigation; nearly all have wondered why so ambitious a scheme was suddenly adopted and then, just as suddenly, abandoned.
An explanation may lie in reconsidering the motivation for the voyages, which was quite different from that which informed European expansion. For domestic consumption, it was also wilfully obscured. Thus the main reason for scouring the Indian Ocean as given in Zheng He’s biography in the Ming dynastic history was to track down the Jianwen emperor, the nephew whom the Yongle emperor had overthrown. This was partly a red herring, partly a convenient fabrication, the intent being to rally support for the voyages from a Confucian bureaucracy that disliked their expense, resented eunuchs commanding them and yet could ill afford to appear other than zealous in eliminating any threat to the Yongle emperor’s legitimacy.
For in 1402–04 residual loyalties to the previous (Jianwen) emperor had unleashed another purge that was ‘among the most brutal and barbarous political acts in Chinese history’ – no mean distinction given the recent excesses of the Hongwu emperor. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands perished in agony for being connected with someone who had served the previous regime or who might be sympathetic to it. Famously one suspect official, already beaten to near-death and bleeding profusely from the extraction of his tongue, still managed a defiant retort. Using a finger as brush, his blood as ink and the floor as paper, he drew the characters for ‘And where is King Cheng?’ The reference was to the Yongle emperor’s claim that he, like the Duke of Zhou, had come to the aid of his nephew and to rescue the dynasty at a time of crisis. So where, then, was King Cheng, the legitimate emperor in whose name the grand old duke had acted? demanded the blood-red characters.4
The Yongle emperor’s response, if any, may be inferred from the instructions given to eunuch Zheng He: the missing emperor had taken flight; even if it meant going to the ends of the earth, he would be found; and thus would the Yongle emperor’s conduct be vindicated. Needless to say, this exchange did nothing for the tongueless official, who was then dismembered limb by limb. But his challenge lived on, and not just in the minds of the faithful; for his bloody calligraphy defied the palace scrubbing brushes and was said ever after to have glowed in the dark. This luminosity was too much for the Yongle emperor. Tradition has it that his decision to move the capital north to Beijing sprang from revulsion over the floor that would not come clean.
Another greatly respected Confucian scholar had his already tongue-less mouth surgically extended so that it stretched from ear to ear. A week later, grinning hideously, he too died from limb-by-limb subtraction, to be followed by 873 relatives and an untold number of those whom he happened to have taught or examined. Yet in reality, as everyone knew, the Jianwen emperor was already dead. His corpse had almost certainly been among the charred cadavers hauled from the burnt-out ruins of the Nanjing palace when the Yongle emperor’s forces first took the city. Even if he had miraculously escaped, such public exhibitions of vengeance were more likely to inflame loyalties than extinguish them. Sure enough, two and half centuries later someone claiming descent from the Jianwen emperor would indeed topple the Ming. As for the ex-emperor having somehow reached India, say, or Africa, and having there elected to await recovery by Zheng He’s armadas, it was a Peking canard.
Likewise one may doubt the ‘world history’ thesis that supposes the Yongle emperor to have been casting about for Afro-Asian allies against Timur Leng (Tamerlane, r. 1369–1405), the all-conquering khan of Samarkand. As of 1398 Timur, a Muslim as well as a Mongol remotely descended from Chinggis Khan, had indeed been planning to round off his Asian acquisitions, already extending from Anatolia to India, by invading Ming China. The Hongwu emperor had offended him
by sending envoys who treated him as a vassal – he detained them – and by nursing designs on the Hami oasis which conflicted with Timur’s claims over Xinjiang. In 1404/05 Timur actually set off for China leading an army of 200,000. But he died within a matter of weeks, whereupon the campaign was aborted amid the usual Mongol succession struggle. Timur’s troops never reached the limits of Ming rule in Gansu; the Yongle emperor seems not to have taken the danger very seriously; anyway, it was over by the time Zheng He first set sail; and there is absolutely no mention of Timur in connection with the voyages.
Much better relations were established between the Yongle emperor and Shahrukh, Timur’s eventual successor (r. 1407–47). In fact, they provide an altogether more convincing context for the voyages. Once Shahrukh had disowned Timur’s Chinese ambitions, missions of a size, opulence and frequency never before witnessed began to ply back and forth between Ming China and Timurid central Asia. The issue of protocol was shelved; an equality of status was implied in address and accepted in Shahrukh’s capital, though tributary obeisance remained compulsory at Beijing. During the Yongle reign, the Ming court ‘received 20 missions from Samarkand and Herat [Shahrukh’s new capital], 32 from the various oasis states of central Asia, 13 from Turfan and 44 from Hami’.5 Nearly all were reciprocated, usually on a still-grander scale. As had commonly been reported at the height of the Han and Tang empires, such was the traffic through the Gansu corridor that missions were rarely out of sight of one another, and traders posing as tributaries were commonplace.
A Ming mission of 1414 that visited seventeen states, including Herat and Samarkand, compiled the century’s most exhaustive report on every aspect of the central Asian economy. Never was China better informed about its overland neighbours, nor more particular about the products required from them. Incoming tribute featured ‘precious metals, jade, horses, camels, sheep, lions and leopards’.6 In return the Yongle emperor gave silks, silver and paper money, all of which could be exchanged for Chinese products of a more utilitarian nature before the foreigners departed. Manufacturers and merchants thereby profited. Though the private importation of foreign produce was officially outlawed, the tribute system encouraged trade in general, albeit at imperial discretion.
With a lesser volume of tribute-bearing missions arriving at the Ming court from potentates elsewhere – in Burma, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea and Japan – scarcely a week passed without one or more grand receptions. These were the responsibility of the Ministry of Rites and were so choreographed as to emphasise the emperor’s cosmic ascendancy and the envoys’ utter abasement; for instance, the prostrations (‘kowtow’) that Europeans would find so objectionable were performed to barked orders and acclaimed with musical fanfares. All foreign relations, however politically or commercially important, came within the compass of the emperor’s ritual responsibilities; and every official reception was therefore an affirmation that all those under Heaven acknowledged their subordination to Heaven’s Son. Yet in other respects emissaries fared well. They were transported, fed and housed at government expense and they invariably left both richer and wiser. In 1407 the emperor set up the first College of Translators to handle correspondence in connection with all these foreign contacts, plus another of interpreters to handle and impress the visiting tributaries.
The contribution of Zheng He’s voyages to this diplomatic traffic is especially notable. During the twenty-two years of the Yongle period some ninety-five missions from the states of south-east Asia and the Indian Ocean reached the Ming court, many of them aboard Zheng He’s ships. The emperor ‘wanted to display his soldiers in strange lands in order to make manifest the wealth and power of the Middle Kingdom’, explains the Ming dynastic history. Zheng He was commissioned, says a stele erected by him at the port of Changle (near Fuzhou), ‘to go to the [foreigners’] countries and confer presents on them so as to transform them by displaying our power while treating distant peoples with kindness’. As a result, adds the same inscription:
From the edge of the sky to the ends of the earth there are none who have not become subjects and slaves. To the most western of the Western Region and the most northern of the northern extremities, the length of a voyage may be calculated, and thus the barbarians from beyond the seas, even those who are truly distant [and whose speech requires] double translation [through an intermediary language], all have come to court bearing precious objects and presents.7
The great voyages of the Yongle period, like its shuttle missions overland, were designed to demonstrate and affirm the peculiarly Chinese concept of universal subordination under Heaven’s Son. The envoys that were received, the tribute they delivered, the gifts of greater value with which they were presented, and the trade that undoubtedly accompanied these exchanges – all were primarily indicators of imperial centrality and supremacy rather than objectives in their own right. This was in marked contrast to how Europeans construed their own maritime endeavours. For them, exploration led to trade and trade led on to empire. It was the other way round in the case of China. Putative empire preceded actual contact; informal trade had been established long before the great voyages; and scientific exploration in the sense of distance measurements and navigational star charts came last, being just a further confirmation of terrestrial mastery.
Naturally the emperor took delight in the more exotic items that came his way as a result of the voyages. Unfamiliar spices and incenses conferred an aroma of otherworldly distinction. Precious gems and metals provided a dazzling visual confirmation. Lions, camels, ostriches and elephants advertised the all-terrain nature of his dominion. And giraffes and rhinos, especially, bore a welcome resemblance to the mythical creature known as the qirin whose rare sightings had always proved extraordinarily propitious. In short, tribute brought trophies that made manifest Heaven’s favour and the emperor’s incontestable supremacy.
Naturally, too, the fleets were well supplied with troops. No conquests were contemplated and no colonies planned; Khubilai Khan’s mistakes in Java and Japan were not be repeated. But parades and demonstrations of weaponry were an essential part of educating unenlightened peoples in Chinese superiority and so ‘transforming’ them into loyal tributaries. Dreyer likens such exercises to ‘showing the flag’ and emphasises the further need for the fleet’s self-defence and the suppression of piracy. In the course of the seven voyages, the fleet’s offensive capacity was tested on just three occasions, twice in Sumatra and once in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan affair resulted from native hostility, much complicated by a civil war. But the Sumatran actions were undertaken on behalf of two local rulers; one faced a pretender, the other pirates; and the pirates, at least, were Chinese.
Along the coasts of what are now western Indonesia and Malaysia, a basic tributary system already existed. In fact it probably predated Khubilai Khan’s disastrous invasion of Java over a century earlier. Additionally, small Chinese communities, mostly from Guangdong, had established themselves in the main ports of the region. Maritime equivalents of the cross-border outposts in, say, Tibet or Mongolia, they were influential in trade and amenable to closer supervision at a time when the Ming were actively engaged in nearby Vietnam. Large-scale Chinese settlement in south-east Asia came later in the Ming period but may owe something to these contacts.
Here, then, Zheng He’s voyages served some practical purpose in upholding the established order, ensuring the safety of the vital straits of Malacca, and deterring any interference with Champa, a Ming ally. At Malacca itself Zheng He established a landward depot, erected a commemorative stele (only in Calicut and Sri Lanka was this repeated), and supported as ruler an émigré prince from Sumatra. This man’s descendants, after adopting Islam, would become the sultans of Malacca; and Malacca itself would develop into the trade hub of the region. Perceived as a heavily fortified portal to the China and Java seas, by the turn of the century it would be a prime target of Portugal’s maritime drive to engross the spice trade.
But in the early fifteenth
century it was the dire situation in Vietnam which compelled Zheng He’s fleets to play a more active part hereabouts than anywhere else in the Western Ocean. Champa, the main Ming ally on the mainland, was ‘shown the flag’ by every voyage. So were most of the Sumatran maritime states; and Malacca was the nearest thing to a colony that Zheng He ever established. Moreover, if the friendly relations with Timurid central Asia suggest a context for the launching of Zheng He’s great voyages, the decidedly unfriendly relations with Vietnam suggest a context for abandoning them.
MISADVENTURES AND MISFORTUNES
Like the Zheng He voyages, the early Ming misadventure in Vietnam is something of a mystery. While in the far north of China there were pressing reasons for intervening in Mongolia, in the far south the mainland kingdoms of south-east Asia neither posed a threat nor offered much advantage. Historically the Red River region had served China as a place of exile and a source of fragrances, iridescent feathers and incessant revolt. Its climate was reckoned lethal and its people ungovernable. With a dangling configuration like that of a seine net, Vietnam already seemed to exist for the sole purpose of ensnaring great powers.
Sensibly the Hongwu emperor (Zhu Yuanzhang) had declared it off-limits to the Ming. In a set of ‘ancestral injunctions’ designed to govern the conduct of his successors – and often discomfit them – the Ming founder had included a list of countries that were not to be invaded. Annam, as most of Vietnam was then known, was the first on the list, followed by Champa and eventually Cambodia, which together shared the Mekong delta and its adjacent coastline. But the Yongle emperor chose to ignore this injunction. As proclaimed in Zheng He’s Changle inscription, he aspired to ‘surpass the Han and the Tang’. To an emperor who, by ousting his Jianwen nephew, had effectively usurped the imperial throne, there could be no clearer proof of Heaven’s approval and his own legitimacy than successfully recreating the greatest empires of the past; and since those of Han and Tang had embraced the Red River flood plain and extended down Annam’s coastal panhandle, so must his.