When Ma comes finally to conduct his readers through Arabia and Mecca, all such hints of raciness are absent. It was not merely that as a Muslim he was filled with a sense of reverence for the holy places of his religion, but also that two decades had passed since he first went to sea with one of the great Indian Ocean fleets; he was now in his fifties, accompanying the last of Zheng’s expeditions. Ma must have been surprised that the Three–Jewel Eunuch had won consent, after a gap of ten years, to mount another huge and costly venture to distant lands, because the death of the Yongle emperor in 1424 had seemed to mark the end of an era.
The coterie of predominantly Muslim eunuchs round the emperor had now been challenged by a rival élite, the Confucian civil servants. For six of the intervening years Zheng had been posted as garrison commander at Nanjing, watching his great treasure ships swing idly at their moorings in the Yangtze river. There were signs that the court of the Xuande emperor had turned its back on the idea of asserting a permanent mastery over a vast and dangerous ocean which nowhere touched China’s own borders.
Somehow, however, Zheng managed to override this indifference, and in January 1431 his final voyage began. Many of the veterans of former expeditions were among the 27,550 men under his command; others were performing compulsory service, in obedience to the laws of the Ming era, to expiate crimes committed by their fathers or grandfathers. Calicut was once again the base for the main fleet, and detachments were sent off to various countries. Ma Huan probably went to Arabia as the interpreter for a group of Chinese who took musk and porcelain as their trade goods and returned with sundry ‘unusual commodities’, as well as ostriches, lions and yet another giraffe; such animals were easily transported across the Red Sea from Ethiopia.
As might be expected, Ma offers no criticism of life in Arabia: ‘The customs of the people are pacific and admirable. There are no poverty-stricken families. They all observe the precepts of their religion and law-breakers are few. It is in truth a most happy country.’ When he describes the Ka’ba (House of God), there are many similarities to an account Ibn Battuta had given a century earlier. Ma even goes to the trouble of listing the number of openings (466) in the wall around the Ka’ba, and the exact number of jade pillars on each section of the wall. Although generally accurate, he makes some curious mistakes, saying that Medina, the site of Muhammad’s tomb, was a day’s journey west of Mecca, whereas it was ten days’ distance to the north. He goes on to describe the holy Well of Zamzam as being beside Muhammad’s grave, whereas it is in the centre of Mecca. This must arouse the suspicion that although he certainly went to Arabia he never reached Mecca itself, perhaps because of fighting near the southern end of the Red Sea.
It was a time when Aden was challenging the Mamluke monarchs of Egypt for control of western Arabia, including Mecca and Medina. The instability this caused is shown by the predicament of two large junks, loaded with trade goods, when they reached Aden in June 1432. Their captains wrote letters to the sharifin Mecca and the port controller in Jeddah, seeking permission to sail up the Red Sea. These officials in turn sought the approval of the ruler in Cairo, al-Malik al-Ashraf Barsbay, who said that the junks should be ‘welcomed with honour’. It is not recorded that the ships ever did reach Jeddah; it may have been this disorder which forced Ma in the end to rely upon hearsay about Mecca and Medina.
In March 1433, as the great fleet was reassembling to return to China, the Three-Jewel Eunuch died in Calicut. His body was carried home in one of the treasure ships, to be buried in Nanjing; as was the custom with Chinese eunuchs, his genitals – kept in a sealed jar since his castration – were buried with him, so that he could go complete into the afterlife.
Never again would the great fleets make their majestic progress across the Indian Ocean. Only memories lingered: according to an Arab ambassador who visited India in 1441, the ‘adventurous sailors of Calicut’ liked to call themselves Tchinibetchegan (Sons of the Chinese); by the end of the fifteenth century there were only confused legends of men with strange beards who had arrived in huge ships and came ashore carrying their weapons.
Despite all the imperial honours bestowed upon Zheng He, his lifelong efforts to forge permanent bonds with the lands of the Indian Ocean had come to nothing. China retreated into itself, once more indifferent to the world beyond the straits of Malacca.4 After his death the silken screens of Confucian authority closed around his reputation, and the ‘Star Raft’ records were destroyed. When another influential eunuch, hoping to organize a seaborne attack on Annam, asked to see them, he was told they could not be found. Only at the end of the sixteenth century, 160 years after Zheng’s death, did the author Luo Maodeng try to restore his fame with a 1,000-page novel called The Western Sea Cruises of the Eunuch San Bao (San Bao means Three Jewels). It contained a portrait of the grand admiral, seated aboard his flagship, his features awesome. But the book made little impact, for the civil servants had done their work well, and China’s greatest naval commander was consigned to oblivion. As for Ma Huan, he finally managed to have his book printed in 1451, when he was in his eighties; although he had spent his later life lecturing about his travels, his name was soon forgotten.
Viewed in historical perspective, Zheng’s seven expeditions seem a perplexing, almost irrational, phenomenon. The Indian Ocean in the fifteenth century was a trading arena of great wealth (no other region of the world had a comparable output of manufactured goods and raw materials); into this arena the Chinese intrusion had been sudden, massive and forceful. Yet just as suddenly it ended, leaving scarcely a trace behind. Indeed, there is only one known piece of tangible evidence throughout the whole of the Indian Ocean to prove that Zheng was ever there with his vast armadas and tens of thousands of men: that is the trilingual tablet set up in Ceylon in 1410.5
The rest of the tantalizing evidence survives in China, and apart from narratives such as Ma Huan’s book and the temple pillars there is a nautical chart more than five metres long. This was compiled during the expeditions and names more than 250 places in the Indian Ocean, from Malacca to Mozambique. Although known as the Mao Kun map, it is not a map in the normal sense, but lists ports, landmarks, bays, havens and dangerous rocks along a course drawn from right to left. There is no scale, and the space devoted to various regions varies according to the data available; thus China has three times as much as Arabia and East Africa combined. The correct routes are carefully defined, giving currents, prevailing winds and depth soundings. By means of compass bearings and the positions at precise times of sun and guiding stars (jian xing fa) the compilers were able to show with astonishing accuracy the sea lanes of the fifteenth century.
The map was probably assembled from the records of Zheng’s commanders.6 However, there is no way of knowing from it exactly where all the flotillas sailed, or how many of them never returned. There are hints that some may have swept in a great arc through the southern seas, looking in vain for land, and that others could have followed the African coastline past Sofala. The Mao Kun map says that storms stopped fleets going beyond ‘Habuer’, which appears to be a small island south of Africa.
Momentarily, the cloak of Chinese power was spread across the world, almost touching the borders of Europe. The merchants who went as far as Cairo stimulated the demand in Europe for oriental silks and porcelains. In China itself a cosmopolitan atmosphere was created as crowds of envoys from remote countries were brought back in the treasure ships. Processions of men speaking unknown languages and wearing strange costumes were seen in the streets of Nanjing and Beijing. They brought jewels, pearls, gold and ivory, and scores of animals. The keepers of the imperial zoological gardens were much occupied with the unfamiliar tribute being offered to the Sacred Emperor.
The place to ponder on the forgotten achievements of Zheng He is Dondra in Ceylon; it is the southernmost point of the Indian subcontinent. Close by the headland is a rocky beach, where the crumbling graves of shipwrecked mariners are shaded by coconut palms. Once Dondra had a great temple for a recumbent Buddha made entirely of gold, with two great rubies as eyes, and every night 500 maidens sang and danced before it. A short distance to the west is where Zheng’s tablet in three languages was set up. When the Chinese fleets, sailing west, sighted the