Zheng He

Zheng He was a Muslim-born court eunuch who became the most famous admiral of China's Ming dynasty. Between 1405 and 1433 he commanded seven great fleets across the Indian Ocean, reaching South-East Asia, India, Arabia and the coast of East Africa. The voyages displayed Ming power and drew dozens of states into the tribute system, but they were abandoned after his death and largely neglected by later official histories.

He was born Ma He in 1371 in Kunyang, Yunnan, into a Hui Muslim family; his father and grandfather both bore the title hajji, which implies that both had travelled to Mecca as pilgrims. Yunnan was then held by a Mongol prince loyal to the fallen Yuan dynasty. When Ming armies conquered the province in the early 1380s, his father died in the fighting and the boy was taken prisoner, castrated, and placed in the household of Zhu Di, Prince of Yan, a son of the Hongwu Emperor who governed Beiping, modern Beijing.

Ma He spent his youth soldiering along the northern border, fighting the Mongols alongside the prince, and received an education. When Zhu Di rebelled against his nephew, the Jianwen Emperor, in 1399, Ma He defended a key reservoir at Beiping, and he served as a commander in the campaign that took Nanjing in July 1402. Zhu Di became the Yongle Emperor, made Ma He a Grand Director of palace eunuchs, and on 11 February 1404 granted him the surname Zheng.

The first fleet left in July 1405 with, by the recorded figures, 317 ships and nearly 28,000 men. The aims were to project Ming authority, bring foreign rulers into the tribute system and control trade; the official Ming history also hints that the emperor hoped to find his vanished predecessor. Over seven treasure voyages the fleets called at Java, Siam, Malacca, Sri Lanka, Calicut and other Indian ports, Hormuz, Arabia and the Swahili coast. Zheng He traded silk, porcelain and precious metals for goods such as ivory, ostriches and zebras; a giraffe from Malindi was hailed at court as the auspicious qilin. The fleets were heavily armed. Zheng He captured the pirate leader Chen Zuyi and sent him to China for execution, campaigned on land against Kotte, a kingdom on Ceylon, and carried its king to China as a prisoner. Envoys from more than thirty states travelled to the Ming court.

Later tradition, especially a novel published in 1597, describes nine-masted "treasure ships" of 44 zhang, implying lengths well over 100 metres, which would have made them the largest wooden ships ever built. Many historians doubt this. The value of the zhang varied, and excavations at the Nanjing treasure shipyard in 2003–2004 found building docks far too narrow for vessels of that size.

The Yongle Emperor died in August 1424 and his successor halted further voyages, appointing Zheng He defender of Nanjing, where he also oversaw the rebuilding of the Bao'en Temple. The Xuande Emperor sent him on a seventh and final expedition in 1430–1433. Zheng He probably died in 1433 during or soon after that voyage, possibly at Calicut, though some accounts place his death in 1435. His tomb near Nanjing is thought to be empty. Court officials, many hostile to the eunuch faction and wary of the cost, played the voyages down, and Ming energy turned to the Mongol threat in the north.

Zheng He was revived as a national hero in the twentieth century, beginning with a biography by Liang Qichao in 1904. Among Chinese communities in South-East Asia he became an object of popular veneration, with temples bearing his name Sam Po.

Our 1400 map shows the Ming dynasty on the eve of his voyages and the states of South-East Asia and the Indian Ocean his fleets visited.