Zheng He: the Admiral Who Carried China to the World

Introduction

In the year 1405, an armada unlike anything the world had ever seen assembled in the harbors along the lower Yangtze River and the coast of Fujian Province in southeastern China. It comprised more than two hundred and fifty vessels, including dozens of enormous ships so large that the entire European fleet of the era could have been swallowed within their holds. Commanded by a tall, imposing Muslim eunuch admiral named Zheng He, the fleet carried approximately 27,000 sailors, soldiers, translators, physicians, astronomers, and diplomats. Its mission was not conquest in the European sense, not the seizure of territory, the subjugation of peoples, or the establishment of extractive colonies. Instead it was something at once simpler in appearance and grander in implication: to project the majesty of the newly established Ming dynasty across the waters of Southeast Asia, across the Indian Ocean, to the shores of Arabia and, eventually, to the cities and ports of East Africa. Over the next twenty-eight years, Zheng He would command seven such voyages, visiting ports from Java to Kenya, receiving the submission of foreign kings, negotiating trade relationships, and demonstrating through the sheer scale of his fleet the power and confidence of the Chinese imperial system.

He would die at sea on the last of these voyages, somewhere in the Indian Ocean during the return from the Persian Gulf and the East African coast. He left behind no colony, no territorial empire, no permanent network of military installations in foreign lands. What he left behind was something more ephemeral and yet more enduring: the consciousness, preserved in the memories and records of dozens of nations, that China had once reached out to the world with an open hand, and that the world had known the name of the Dragon Throne.

For centuries after his death, Zheng He was largely forgotten within China itself. His records were deliberately destroyed by Confucian officials who regarded maritime adventure as wasteful extravagance, a distraction from the agrarian foundations of proper imperial order. His rediscovery by modern historians, and his elevation by the government of the People's Republic of China to the status of a primary symbol of Chinese maritime heritage and of what Beijing calls the peaceful rise of China in the contemporary era, has made him one of the most discussed and most significant historical figures of the pre-modern world. To understand who Zheng He was, why he sailed, what he accomplished, and why China ultimately chose to turn its back on the sea, is to understand one of the great pivot points in global history, a moment when the trajectories of civilizations diverged in ways that shaped everything that followed.

A Life Born at the Crossroads: Yunnan, Islam, and the Mongol Legacy

Zheng He was born, under the name Ma He, around 1371 in the province of Yunnan in what is now southwestern China. Yunnan is a land of extraordinary geographical and cultural complexity, a highland plateau of exceptional biodiversity, cut through with deep river gorges and mist-covered mountain ranges, sharing borders with present-day Myanmar to the west, Laos to the south, and Vietnam to the southeast. In the fourteenth century, it was not yet fully or deeply integrated into the Chinese cultural and administrative mainstream. It had been ruled by the Mongol Yuan dynasty as a frontier province, and before that had been the independent Dali Kingdom, with its own dynastic traditions, its own blend of Buddhist and indigenous religious practices, and a substantial Muslim population drawn from Central Asia by the waves of Mongol conquest that had swept across Eurasia in the thirteenth century.

Ma He's family were Hui Chinese, a Muslim ethnic group whose roots in China stretch back many centuries, to the Arab and Persian merchants, soldiers, and administrators who had settled along the overland Silk Road and the southern maritime trade routes during the Tang and Song dynasties, and whose numbers had been substantially augmented during the Mongol period, when Central Asian Muslims were actively recruited to serve in administrative roles throughout the Yuan empire. The family name Ma was itself a compressed Chinese rendering of Muhammad, the common practice among Hui Muslims of transliterating the Prophet's name into a single monosyllabic Chinese character. The family's lineage was distinguished by the standards of their community: they claimed descent from Sayyid Ajjal Shams al-Din Omar, a Bukharan Muslim administrator and scholar who had served as governor of Yunnan under the Mongol Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century, himself a descendant of the Islamic scholarly and administrative aristocracy of Central Asia, from the Khwarazmian region of what is now Uzbekistan.