The Yongle period was the heyday of the eunuchs, who had played a decisive role in the intrigues which helped the emperor to seize the throne in 1403. They came to have far more say in palace circles than the traditional wielders of power, the Confucian bureaucrats, and none was more influential than Zheng He. While still in his mid-thirties he became a senior officer in the army garrison at Nanjing, on the Yangtze river, after putting down a rebellion in his home province.
When the new emperor decided to implement the long-discussed plans for a naval venture into the Indian Ocean, he turned to Zheng whose religion made him a natural choice since so many of the ‘barbarian’ lands round the ocean were reputed to follow the rites of the ‘Heavenly Square’ (the Ka’ba in Mecca). There had been a pretence at first that Zheng He was merely being sent to look for Huidi, the deposed emperor, but this was soon abandoned. The Chinese were primarily looking for markets for the surpluses of their great factories.1
There is no knowing whether Zheng was ever a naval commander before being appointed to lead the first expedition. Perhaps he had seen action in sea fights with Japanese pirates (wokou), who wreaked havoc among Chinese merchant shipping; the junks of the coastal defence fleet carried warriors trained to board the pirate ships and slaughter their crews. Even if Zheng was no seafarer he must have been well acquainted with naval activity, since Nanjing was near the ocean. Stupendous efforts had been made there for several decades to build up China’s fleets.
A previous emperor, Taizu, had ordered the planting on mountainsides inland from Nanjing of millions of trees, to provide wood suitable for ships. By the time of Yongle, the imperial navy consisted of 400 vessels stationed at Nanjing, 2,800 coastal-defence ships, a 3,000-strong transport fleet, and 250 ‘treasure ships’, showpieces of Chinese technology. Although the Mongol rulers had been able to assemble 4,400 ships for a failed attack on Japan a century earlier, and 1,000 for a punitive expedition to Java, most of these would have looked puny alongside the vessels now put at the disposal of the ‘Three-Jewel Eunuch’.
Armed with the emperor’s edict, Zheng prepared the first of his seven expeditions with a bravura that was to be characteristic of his entire career. The fleet assembled at Dragon River Pass (Liujiajiang) near the mouth of the Yangtze in 1405; this was to be the pattern for the next quarter of a century. The stately ‘treasure ships’, each weighing more than 500 tons, borne along by the wind in their twelve sails, and carrying hundreds of men, had names such as Pure Harmony, Lasting Tranquillity and Peaceful Crossing.2 Under full sail they were likened to ‘swimming dragons’. These were the floating fortresses of the fleet, their crews armed with ‘fire arrows’ charged with gunpowder, as well as rockets and blunderbusses firing stones. By 1350 the Chinese had also invented bombards, known as ‘wonder-working long-range awe-inspiring cannon’, although these were not highly valued for naval use.
The number of big junks sailing in each of the expeditions varied from about forty to more than a hundred, and each had several support vessels. These armadas of the Xia Xiyang (‘Going Down to the Western Ocean’) were the wonders of the age. The ships carried doctors, accountants, interpreters, scholars, holy men, astrologers, traders and artisans of every sort: on most of his seven expeditions Zheng had as many as 30,000 men under his command, in up to 300 ships of varying types. Flags, drums and lanterns were used to send messages within the fleet. To work out positions and routes the heavens were studied with the use of calibrated ‘star plates’, carved in ebony.
As with all convoys, the slowest vessels dictated the speed, and this was often no more than fifty miles a day, despite the use of huge oars when winds were slack.3 Enough rice and other foodstuffs to last for a year were in the holds, lest provisions were lacking in the barbarian lands. Fresh water was stored in large tanks deep in the hulls. As a matter of pride, the Chinese never cared to feel at a disadvantage in foreign parts.
At first the Three-Jewel Eunuch ventured no further than Ceylon and the Malabar and Coromandel coasts of southern India, sending his huge fleets into such ports as Calicut and Quilon, with which Chinese merchants had been familiar for a century. By this time the South Indian pepper port of Calicut (called Kuli by the Chinese) was recognized as the most important emporium in the ‘Western Ocean’; when Calicut’s emissaries went to Nanjing in 1405 its ruler, the Zamorin, was rewarded with an elevated Chinese title. The attention Zheng’s fleets paid to this thriving city proves the commercial purpose behind his expeditions.
There were also less mundane reasons for visiting local rulers. In 1409 the Chinese invaded Ceylon, penetrated the country as far as the mountain capital of Kandy, and captured the Sinhalese king, Vira Alakesvara, together with his queen and members of the court. This was a direct punishment for the king’s refusal, several years before, to hand over to the Chinese emperor a precious relic, the tooth of the Buddha. In his time the Mongol ruler Kubilai Khan had also tried to acquire the tooth, but in vain. The king and the other captives were taken back to China as hostages and kept there for five years (although Zheng never did manage to lay hands on the holy tooth). As a reminder of this violent interlude the expedition left behind at the port of Galle a tablet inscribed in three languages, Chinese, Tamil and Persian, respectively praising Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam.
News of this hostage-taking must soon have spread along the trade routes of the Indian Ocean, ensuring that other rulers would be suitably submissive and hand over tribute, thus in effect conceding that they recognized the Chinese emperor as supreme ruler of the universe. When dealing with foreigners, the envoys from Beijing sometimes failed to hide the superiority they felt. One who went ashore in Aden could not bring himself to kiss the ground, as was customary, at the start of his audience with the sultan. This was taken by the Arabs as an insult; for their part, the Chinese thought the people of Aden ‘overbearing’.
However, the rewards were great for foreign monarchs willing to pay tribute to the emperor and acknowledge him as their ultimate overlord and mentor. They would be invited to send emissaries to China aboard one of the great treasure ships; in due course the emissaries would return with gifts more valuable than any they had taken with them, to press home the fact of Chinese superiority. An imperial edict explained: ‘They come here out of respect for our civilizing ways.’ The gifts they brought with them were seen as tribute, a proof of submission.
Yet if this was imperialism, it was of a curiously impermanent nature. Although Zheng sometimes sent punitive parties ashore – one was landed at Mogadishu in Somalia to teach its truculent sultan a lesson – he never installed a permanent garrison anywhere.4 When each expedition was finished, the entire fleet would turn away eastwards, sail back through the straits of Malacca, head north through the more familiar waters of East Asia, and finally drop anchor in the home port of Nanjing.
The treasure ships carrying the envoys from the Indian Ocean lands were known as ‘Star Rafts’, a term used by a certain Fei Xin in the title of his account of one expedition: Triumphant Sights from the Star Raft. This in turn came from an ancient belief, dating back at least twelve centuries, that if a ship sailed far enough it would eventually leave the earth, reach the Milky Way and come to a galactic city wherein sat a maiden spinning (the traditional representation of Vega in the Lyra constellation). Such heavenly images are mirrored in the wording on a column at Dragon River Pass commemorating Zheng’s expeditions: ‘Our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds, day and night continued their course, rapid like that of a star, traversing the savage waves.’
Although Zheng was a devout Muslim, he saw no inconsistency in erecting a column in a temple dedicated to the Taoist goddess Tianfei (the Celestial Spouse). The inscription boasts that countries ‘beyond the horizon and at the ends of the earth have all become subjects’, and goes on to thank the Celestial Spouse for her protection. The miraculous and majestic powers of the goddess ‘whose virtuous achievements have been recorded in a most honourable manner in the Bureau of Sacrificial Worship’ quelled hurricanes and saved the fleets from disaster. Her presence was revealed in times of extreme peril by a light shining at the masthead.
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