China at sea
Jonathan Mirsky
Edward L. Dreyer
ZHENG HE
China and the oceans in the early Ming dynasty 14041433
238pp. Longman. Paperback, £12.99.
0 3210 8443 8
During the early years of the Ming dynasty (13681644), the Chinese eunuch Zheng He was the commander of the greatest state-directed voyages in the age of sail. Zhengs seven vast armadas, with crews and soldiers numbering about 27,000, included the largest wooden ships ever built. Beginning in 1405, these voyages were the first projection of Chinese Imperial power by sea over vast distances, reaching across the Indian Ocean to the eastern shores of Africa. They were also the last.
Edward L. Dreyer, a well-known Ming historian, comprehensively examines this stupendous story in his book Zheng He. As he says, his account rests squarely on Chinese primary sources, of whose complexities he has masterful control. This mastery extends to details of naval architecture, court hierarchies and maritime geography that for the most part interest only specialists. But some of the information is staggering. Of the well over 200 ships in each armada, more than sixty were 385440 feet long. The number of Ming ships, which Professor Dreyer considers to have been huge shallow-draught river barges, overshadows the Spanish Armada; in size, they dwarfed British ships-of-the-line such as Nelsons Victory. Most of the 27,000 men in the fleet were soldiers, intended to overawe any ruler or potentate wherever the Chinese fleet appeared.
Eunuchs were important to the early Ming rulers, who prized their exclusive loyalty to the Emperors and recruited hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them for court duties. Traditional Confucian officials despised them, partly because eunuchs created no offspring, partly because they were said to be deeply corrupt, and partly out of envy. Nothing is known of Zhengs character apart from what his career implies, and the facts of his personal life are meagre. Born into a famous Muslim family in Yunnan, Zheng He (13711433) was castrated as a boy and sent to serve the prince who became the Yongle Emperor (who reigned from 1402 to 1424). When the prince fought the Mongols along the northern frontiers, Zheng He was at his side, admired for his intelligence, bravery and bulk. He may have been chosen to command the armadas because his Muslim background (although he became a devout Buddhist) would please many of the rulers along the shores of the Malay-Indonesian waters and the Indian Ocean, men well known to generations of Chinese sailors. In some Ming sources, Dreyer points out, Zheng He is exempt from the usual condemnation of eunuchs, although, and I hope Dreyer meant this to be a comical aside, he later became just another eunuch as far as Confucian opinion was concerned .
There have been many theories about Zheng Hes voyages. He was, and remains, the symbol of Chinas sea power in a period of Chinas historical greatness . The most recent theory, masquerading as fact, is the fantasy, disputed by all authorities, of the retired Royal Navy submariner Gavin Menzies in his best-selling 1421: The year China discovered the world (2002). Menzies claimed that Zheng Hes sixth voyage reached the western shores of the Americas and sailed home across the Pacific. Dreyer briskly rejects this nonsense: There is no evidence for any of this in the Chinese sources, which do document the return of the sixth expedition in 1422 . Other explanations, some of them very early, suggest that the reigning Emperor Yongle was searching for vanished rival or that he was fascinated by exploration. In more modern years, especially after the humiliations of foreign dominance in the nineteenth century, Chinese nationalists contended that if China was once the mightiest naval power on the planet, it could be so again. In recent years, Beijing has claimed that Zheng He’s benign voyages, and contacts with rulers throughout South-East Asia and along the east coast of Africa, parallel the People’s Republic’s slogan of “China’s peaceful rise”. Dreyer dismisses such “sentimentalising” that prefers, he says, Chinese tranquil history to the violent expansion of the West. Although here, I think, he is unfair to the late Joseph Needham, who in Volume Four Part Three of Science and Civilisation in China, suggested that “while the entire Chinese operations [of Zheng He] were those of a navy paying friendly visits to foreign ports, the Portuguese east of Suez engaged themselves in total war”. But Needham correctly avers – as does Dreyer – that Zheng He engaged in three battles, one of them a sensational victory over a pirate force whose much-feared chief was carried back to the Ming capital and executed. Portuguese and other Western expansion into Eastern oceans, based in part on firepower, was far more violent than that of the Ming fleets, which established no colonies, enslaved no rulers or subjects, and made no attempt to corner the goods of the East for China alone.
Dreyer emphasizes that the Yongle Emperor intended, in the words of the “Mingshi”, the official history of the Ming, “to display his soldiers in strange lands in order to make manifest the wealth and power” of Ming China. In different formulations this was also Needham’s view.
While it is true that Zheng He brought back, for the exclusive use of the Ming household, lions, leopards, ostriches and giraffes, spices and minerals – his largest vessels were called Treasure Ships – the purpose of the voyages, as the main authorities now agree, was to enfold distant rulers, some of whom sent their envoys to China on Zheng He’s ships, in the ancient Chinese “tribute system”. According to this tradition the Emperor, ruling from the centre of the world, by his virtue and splendour attracted foreigners to his Court. There they presented him with their goods, deemed to be “tribute”, and performed the kowtow. In exchange, the Emperor bestowed on visiting rulers and their envoys goods exceeding in value what he received. As Dreyer and others have pointed out, this process permitted thinly disguised trade. After Zheng He’s voyages, there were no further tribute missions from rulers around the Indian Ocean.
When the Ming frontier armies fought losing battles with the Mongols and sent equally unsuccessful armies against the Vietnamese, this may have reflected, especially in the case of Yongle, an impulsive expansionism; the same impulse that inspired him to command Zheng He’s fleet to sail along centuries-old trade routes to display Chinese power, and make trade safer from the Malay-Indonesian waters to southern India and beyond. Historians have long debated why the Ming voyages were terminated – in 1436, the construction of deep-sea vessels was banned – and their logs either destroyed or concealed. Dreyer provides the most likely reasons. Apart from merchants, venturing far across “blue water” was an aberration in China’s long tradition of focusing on its land borders. Zheng He’s armadas were not a “navy”, for which there was no Ming department. The voyages were expensive, costing far more than the “tribute” they gained. The presence of eunuchs at Court and as champions of the voyages, on which some of them, as well as Zheng He, played leading roles, also made the Confucians despise the armadas. This hatred of eunuchs may explain why the plans for the ships disappeared, perhaps were destroyed, although this is not certain. And when the Ming capital moved permanently from Nanjing to Beijing, and China once again became inward-looking, Overseas meant out of mind, as far as official China was concerned .
This is indeed a stupendous story, and Dreyers learned and often vividly written book lays out its details and ramifications. It will be the last word for some time to come. His conclusions are vigorous and profound. Had the Chinese maintained their great armadas, Vasco da Gama and his successors would have found a powerful navy in control of the Indian Ocean. Instead China withdrew from the sea . . . . After Yongles grandson, the Emperor Xuande, died, none of the eleven succeeding Ming Emperors cared about the Western Ocean and its countries, and their eunuchs did other things . True enough, but as Edward Dreyer says of Zheng He, he is likely to sail on forever in our imaginations .