Zheng He (1371–1433), was a Chinese mariner, explorer, diplomat and fleet admiral, who made the voyages collectively referred to as the travels of "Eunuch Sanbao to the Western Ocean" or "Zheng He to the Western Ocean," from 1405 to 1433.
As a young boy, Zheng He was taken captive by the Ming and made a eunuch in the imperial service. He became a close confidant of the Yongle Emperor. Between 1405 and 1433, Zheng He commanded a series of seven naval expeditions sponsored by the Ming government to establish a Chinese presence and extend the tributary system to the maritime nations in Southeast Asia. Zheng He set sail on his first voyage on July 11, 1405, commanding 62 treasure ships, 190 smaller ships and 27,800 men. At each port, Zheng He demanded that the inhabitants submit to the “Son of Heaven” (tianzi, the Chinese Emperor), and rewarded those who cooperated with gifts. Zheng He brought back emissaries from 36 countries who agreed to a tributary relationship, along with rich and unusual gifts, including African zebras and giraffes that ended their days in the Ming imperial zoo. Zheng He died during the seventh voyage and was buried at sea off the Malabar coast near Calicut in Western India.
Life
Zheng He was born in 1371 of the Hui ethnic group in Kunyang , Jinning modern-day Yunnan Province , one of the last possessions of the Mongols of the Yuan Dynasty before being conquered by the Ming Dynasty. According to his biography in the History of Ming, he was originally named Ma Sanbao (Ma Ho; 馬三保). Zheng belonged to the Semu or Semur caste which practiced Islam. He was a sixth-generation descendant of Sayyid Ajjal Shams al-Din Omar, a famous Khwarezmian Yuan governor of Yunnan Province from Bukhara in modern day Uzbekistan. His family name "Ma" came from Shams al-Din's fifth son Masuh (Mansour). Both his father Mir Tekin and grandfather Charameddin had traveled on the hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, and their travels contributed much to the young boy's education.
In 1381, following the fall of the Yuan Dynasty, a Ming army was dispatched to Yunnan to put down the Mongol rebel Basalawarmi, commonly known as the Prince of Liang, a descendant of Kublai Khan and a Yuan Dynasty loyalist. Zheng He, then only a young boy of eleven years, was taken captive by that army and castrated, becoming a eunuch. He was made an orderly in the army, and by 1390, when the army was placed under the command of the Prince of Yen, Zheng He (Ma Ho) had distinguished himself as a junior officer, skilled in war and diplomacy. He became a close confidant of Prince of Yen. In 1400, the Prince of Yen revolted against his nephew, the Jianwen (Chien-wen) Emperor the second Emperor of the Ming dynasty, personal name Zhu Yunwen), and took the throne in 1402 as the Yongle Emperor of China (reigned 1403–1424, the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty). The Yongle emperor conferred the name Zheng He as a reward for his support in the Yongle rebellion against the Jianwen Emperor . Zheng He studied at Nanjing Taixue (The Imperial Central College). The Ming court then sought to display its naval power to the maritime states of South and Southeast Asia. The Chinese had been expanding their influence across the seas for three hundred years, establishing an extensive sea trade to bring spices and raw materials to China. Chinese travelers visited foreign nations, and Indian and Muslim visitors had widened China’s geographical horizons. By the beginning of the Ming dynasty, shipbuilding and the art of navigation had reached new heights in China.
Between 1405 and 1433, the Ming government sponsored a series of seven naval expeditions. Emperor Yongle intended them to establish a Chinese presence, impose imperial control over trade, and impress foreign peoples in the Indian Ocean basin. He also might have wanted to extend the tributary system, by which Chinese dynasties traditionally recognized foreign peoples.
Zheng He was selected by the Yongle Emperor to be commander in chief of the missions to the “Western Oceans.” He set sail on his first voyage on July 11, 1405, commanding 62 treasure ships and 27,800 men. Many of these ships were mammoth nine-masted "treasure ships," by far the largest marine craft the world had ever seen. The fleet visited Annan, Champa (now South Vietnam), Siam, Malacca, and Java; then sailed through the Indian Ocean to Calicut, Cochin, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), returning to China in 1407.
On his second voyage, in 1409, Zheng He (Cheng Ho) encountered hostility from King Alagonakkara of Ceylon. He defeated his forces and took the King back to Nanking as a captive to apologize to the Emperor. In 1411, Zheng He (Cheng Ho) set out on his third voyage, sailing to Hormuz on the Persian Gulf. On his return he touched at Samudra, on the northern tip of Sumatra. Zheng He set out on his fourth voyage in 1413. After stopping at the principal ports of Asia, he proceeded westward from India to Hormuz. A part of the fleet then cruised southward down the Arabian coast, the Persian Gulf and Arabia, visiting Djofar and Aden. A Chinese mission visited Mecca and continued to Egypt. The fleet visited Brava and Malindi in what is now Kenya, and almost reached the Mozambique Channel. On his return to China in 1415, Cheng Ho brought envoys from more than 30 states of South and Southeast Asia to pay homage to the Chinese emperor. During Zheng He (Cheng Ho)'s fifth voyage (1417–1419), the Ming fleet revisited the Persian Gulf and the east coast of Africa. In 1421, a sixth voyage was launched to return the foreign emissaries to their homes, again visiting Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, andAfrica.
Final Voyage
In 1424, the Yongle Emperor died. His successor, the Hongxi Emperor (reigned 1424–1425), decided to curb Zheng He’s influence at court and appointed him garrison commander in Nanking. Zheng He made one final voyage under the Xuande Emperor (reigned 1426–1435), visiting the states of Southeast Asia, the coast of India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the east coast of Africa, but after that the Chinese treasure ship fleets were disbanded. Zheng He died during the treasure fleet's last voyage. Although he has a tomb in China, it is empty: he was, like many great admirals, buried at sea.
The records of Zheng He's last two voyages, which were believed to have been his farthest, were unfortunately destroyed by the Mingemperor. Therefore it can never be ascertained exactly where Zheng sailed on these two expeditions. The traditional view is that he went as far as Persia. It is now the widely accepted view that his expeditions went as far as the Mozambique Channel in East Africa, from the ancient Chinese artifacts discovered there.
International Relations
At each port, Zheng He demanded that the inhabitants submit to the “Son of Heaven” (tianzi, the Chinese Emperor), and rewarded those who cooperated with gifts. Throughout his travels, Zheng He liberally dispensed Chinese gifts of silk, porcelain, and other goods. In return, he received rich and unusual presents from his hosts, including African zebras and giraffes that ended their days in the Ming imperial zoo. Zheng He and his company paid respects to local deities and customs, and in Ceylon they erected a monument honoring Buddha, Allah, and Vishnu.
Ultimately, 36 countries in what the Chinese called the “Western Ocean” agreed to a tributary relationship with China. Zheng He generally sought to attain his goals through diplomacy, and his large army awed most would-be enemies into submission. But a contemporary reported that Zheng He "walked like a tiger," and did not shrink from violence when he considered it necessary to impress foreign peoples with China's military might. He ruthlessly suppressed pirates who had long plagued Chinese and southeast Asian waters. He also intervened in a civil disturbance in order to establish his authority in Ceylon, and he made displays of military force when local officials threatened his fleet in Arabia and east Africa. From his fourth voyage, he brought envoys from 30 states who traveled to China and paid their respects at the Ming court.
Legacy
Zheng He’s missions were impressive demonstrations of organizational capability and technological advancement, but did not lead to significant trade, since Zheng He was an admiral and an official, not a merchant. Chinese merchants continued to trade in Japan and southeast Asia, but Imperial officials gave up any plans to maintain a Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean, and even destroyed most of the nautical charts that Zheng He had carefully prepared. Their motivations were political; during much of the Ming dynasty (1368 – 1644), the eunuchs exercised great power in the imperial court, at the expense of the Confucian civil bureaucracy. The expeditions of Zheng He, who was himself a eunuch, were strongly supported by eunuchs in the court and bitterly opposed by the Confucian scholar bureaucrats.
During the 1950s, historians including John Fairbank and Joseph Needham popularized the idea that after Zheng's voyages, China turned away from the seas and underwent a period of technological stagnation. Most current historians of China question the accuracy of this view, pointing out that Chinese maritime commerce did not stop after Zheng He, and that active Chinese trading with India and East Africa continued long after the time of Zheng and Chinese ships continued to dominate Southeast Asian commerce until the nineteenth century. The travels of the Chinese Junk Keying to theUnited States and England between 1846 and 1848 testify to the power of Chinese shipping. Historians such as Jack Goldstone argue that the Zheng He voyages ended for practical reasons that did not reflect the technological level of China Starting in the early fifteenth century, China experienced increasing pressure from resurgent Mongolian tribes from the north. In 1421 the emperor Yongle (the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty) moved his capital north from Nanjing to present-day Beijing, from where, at considerable expense, China launched annual military expeditions to weaken the Mongolians. These land campaigns and a massive expansion of the Great Wall of China took precedence over state-sponsored naval explorations.
Zheng He's tomb and museum
. Zheng He's tomb in Nanjing has been repaired and a small museum has been built next to it. The tomb is empty as he was buried at sea off the Malabar coast near Calicut in Western India. However, his sword and other personal possessions were interred in a typical Muslim tomb inscribed with Arabic characters.
Zheng He as a Chinese Muslim
Zheng He travelled to Mecca, though he did not perform the pilgrimage itself. The government of the People's Republic of China uses him as a model to integrate the Muslim minority into the Chinese nation.
Zheng He was a living example of religious tolerance, perhaps even syncretism, or at least a master of diplomacy. The Galle Trilingual Inscription set up by Zheng He around 1410 in Sri Lanka records the offerings he made at a Buddhist mountain. "Inscriptions written in Chinese, Tamil and Persian praise Buddha, Shiva and Allah in equal measure."
Around 1431, he set up a commemorative pillar at the temple of the Daoist goddess Tian Fei, the Celestial Spouse, in Fujian province, to whom he and his sailors prayed for safety at sea.This pillar records his veneration for the goddess and his belief in her divine protection, as well as a few details about his voyages.
We have traversed more than 100,000 li (50,000 kilometers) of immense water spaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising in the sky, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds day and night, continued their course [as rapidly] as a star, traversing those savage waves as if we were treading a public thoroughfare…
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