Sailing True North

by Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret. )

  So when Secretary Danzig began to ask hard questions about why the Chinese claimed the entire South China Sea (a vast body of water of nearly a million square miles, roughly the size of the Caribbean Sea), I realized it was time I learned about the explorer upon whom these extraordinary territorial claims rested: it was Zheng He, and his life story transfixed me. I spent several weeks reading all I could find about this extraordinary man and his implausible and inspiring rise from a genitally neutered captive to probably the leading international maritime figure of his age. It is a story of remarkable resilience, creativity, and drive, and one that resonates throughout the psychology of the Navy’s greatest potential opponent in our own turbulent century: the oddly named People’s Liberation Army Navy (the naval forces of the People’s Republic of China, commonly referred to as the PLAN).

  Arriving in China with a great deal of new knowledge about the greatest admiral in that culture’s history, I used my trip with Secretary Danzig to plumb the way Zheng He is viewed and how his character continues to influence the second-largest navy in the world. With my Chinese naval officer counterparts on that trip, I would always talk about Zheng He, discuss his role in the Chinese navy’s psyche, and at social events often end up proposing a toast to him. This was well received, and often elicited a toast to US fleet admiral Chester Nimitz, who is also well known in a very positive way among Chinese naval officers—for having defeated Japan, a nation they view with suspicion and bitterness stemming from centuries of bad blood and the attempted Japanese conquest of China in the Second World War.

  What I learned in my studies was that despite his singular background, Zheng He’s approach to life, inspired leadership, and depth of character transcended his own painful history and made him famous throughout the vast Pacific region. Though little known on US shores, Zheng He’s life is an important part of the larger story of Pacific peoples and the oceans that surround this part of the earth. My own personal lesson with Zheng He is a very practical one: to understand the character of other nations, regions, and cultures, we must learn their stories and legends, study in a methodical and comprehensive way, and draw lessons from the great sailors of the world—a group that most assuredly includes Admiral Zheng He.

  The multiethnic composition and lingering boundary disputes of modern China are trace reminders of the great historical flux in the peoples and lands that have made up Chinese civilization across the centuries. Dynastic transitions created some of the biggest fluctuations of all, and one of these—following the proclamation of the Ming dynasty in 1368—was responsible for creating the conditions that would lead to the rise of Zheng He.

  In the mid-fourteenth century—as Europe was staggering through the medieval period and trying to rebuild after the plague years—one of the most important dynasties in Chinese history emerged: the Ming. Just a few years after the Ming formally assumed the “Mandate of Heaven,” a child named Ma He was born to a Muslim family in Yunnan province, which is nestled just to the north of modern-day Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam. The Ming were still consolidating their power over the whole region of China, and Yunnan was one of the provinces still controlled by governors appointed by the deposed Yuan dynasty. Like all new dynasties, it took the Ming some time to assert their control throughout the lands they claimed, but Yunnan’s turn had come by 1381. According to legend, the Ming general who was sent to end the Yuan governor’s holdout was closing in on the governor (by then on the run) when he stopped to question a ten-year-old Muslim boy. When the boy not only refused to reveal the governor’s whereabouts but openly defied the general, he was taken as a prisoner of war and, in a relatively common but unpleasant practice, was soon castrated and placed into imperial service as a eunuch.

  The boy Ma He’s new master was Prince Zhu Di, the fourth son of the Ming emperor and aide-de-camp to the general of the Yunnan campaign. Despite the castration, Ma He became a powerful fighter and grew to an impressive height. He studied war and politics, peppering members of the court for their opinions on everything from the best weapons in a close-in battle to the navigational power of the stars. He was a standout in every dimension, and gradually became a favorite of the prince. Over the subsequent decades, the two would fight together against frontier Mongol warlords, rebellious provinces, and a claimant to the Ming throne. Ma He became a trusted confidant of the prince and, when the prince defeated the challenger to the throne and became the Yongle Emperor, he conferred on Ma He the high honor of choosing his own surname. Thereafter he became known as Zheng He, a reference to an important region in central China.

  The specific path of the unlikely rise of the young boy and eunuch to court favorite and confidant to the prince is not known. The conquering Chinese dynasties were quite willing, up to a point, to provide upward mobility for conquered “barbarians,” especially when they had been neutered and presumably were immune to feminine wiles and their natural ambitions curbed. This practice, also known in the Ottoman Empire, was largely successful in providing a talented pool of workers to the courts—strictly in advisory positions. But occasionally there are historical examples of such men rising to positions of significant power, albeit alongside rulers who would take advantage of their lack of outside sponsorship or affiliation. Such was the case with Zheng He, who fought alongside his master in many campaigns, earning his trust over more than a decade.

  Following a period of frontier wars, the new emperor set about rebuilding and modernizing the country. He charged Zheng He with one of the most ambitious parts of this plan: building China’s first deep-ocean fleet and leading it on exploratory voyages beyond the traditional range of Chinese coastal shipping. Although the emperor’s original reasons for ordering the fleet’s construction are lost to history—speculations range from conquest to commerce to sheer curiosity—the ruler’s wishes were of course carried out, and his longtime factotum and functional chief of staff, Zheng He, was given the task of his life. The emperor picked wisely—he knew the qualities of Zheng He: skilled management, a measured temperament, an independence of mind tempered by utter loyalty to his prince, and above all, a high degree of resilience to face whatever would come in the vast maritime unknown.

  A big part of Zheng He’s charter, of course, was not simply sailing off into the ocean blue. He had to first build a fleet, and in ancient China, the tendency was to build big, striking structures—a tradition that is followed today in the People’s Republic of China. In this case, that meant expanding existing designs and building what remain among the largest wooden structures of the time, massive warships over five hundred feet in length. Doing so successfully did not depend on military force, but on the less glamorous attributes of administration, supervision, and logistics.

  It is not hard to imagine Zheng He walking through the Longjian shipyard, caught up in the shattering noise all around him. Even after several months of supervising construction, he would not have fully adjusted to the sheer din of the work: it surpassed anything he had ever experienced before. This is also the case in modern shipyards, by the way—the noisiest and dirtiest times of my own naval career were the painful months spent in ship construction or repair in various shipyards on the coasts of the United States. Even when working in wood instead of metal for hull construction, the noise would have been substantial—but each day’s hammering, sawing, and shouting would bring the massive project closer to completion. In the end, the laborers of Longjian produced some of the largest wooden structures ever built by human hands. In the early 1400s, when Zheng He took command of his fleet, Europeans were struggling to build sailing vessels a fraction the size of the Chinese ships as their own age of exploration was just getting underway. When completed, the Chinese flagship would sail at the head of a fleet of dozens of “treasure ships”—all impressively large if not quite as enormous as the flagship itself—on a series of voyages that vastly expanded the Ming Empire’s map of and influence in the world.

  The work in the shipyards occup
ied Zheng He for the better part of four years. The tasks he faced included finding and transporting wood, pitch, nails, iron, and all the rest of the materials, but the most complex part of his job was leading his temperamental workers. Zheng He knew that people problems would get out of hand quickest, and with the greatest consequences. As a result, he often took personnel matters under his personal direction. Even as he sorted out the problems of construction, he was spending his nights preparing for the voyage itself—studying navigation, consulting with China’s few deepwater sailors, learning the art and science of combat afloat. The enormous ships coming together under his watchful eye would require massive crews and when at sea would prove to be far more cramped and contentious than the shipyard—once at sea, no one would be able to go home at night to cool off.

  The first voyage set sail in 1405. With more than three hundred vessels in the fleet and a crew of over twenty-seven thousand, the expedition was the largest naval excursion in history up to that time. As a point of comparison, nine decades later, Columbus set sail with only three vessels, which together approached the displacement of only one of Zheng He’s minor treasure ships, and a full crew of only ninety sailors, less than 1 percent of Zheng He’s crew. When the Yongle Emperor wanted something done, it got done in the most spectacular fashion possible. This was no simple fact-finding mission; it was the armada that truly introduced China to the world.

  The treasure fleet’s first mission was to reach the trading city of Calicut on the southwestern coast of India. A natural port of call for merchantmen crisscrossing the Indian Ocean, Calicut had been a commercial hub for a thousand years. Even the Romans conducted trade in this part of India, bringing glass and wool in exchange for spices. The government of Calicut mirrored China’s own: wealthy, efficiently managed by a bureaucracy, and a haven for the arts. There the Ming would establish their first prolonged contact with the outside world. The voyage also helped establish China’s historical claims to the South China Sea. The echoes of Zheng He’s missions form part of the case China has presented to the international legal system as evidence of China’s sovereignty over this vast area—echoes from centuries ago roiling the waters of the modern world.

  It was an ambitious undertaking from the start. The fleet would need to sail from its home port in southern China down the South China Sea, through the Straits of Malacca, across the Bay of Bengal, and into the Arabian Sea to reach Calicut. High waves and storm winds would batter them throughout the course of their voyage. This wooden “city at sea” could not make it straight through in even the best of times. The fleet would need to resupply often, securing new food for the crew, medicines to ward off disease, and materials to make field repairs for the damage wrought by man and nature. Luckily, although the fleet was the first official representation of the Chinese government ever to reach most of its ports of call, its crew were not the first Chinese people ever to set foot there: often, the fleet was aided by members of local Chinese diaspora communities. I spent years sailing these waters in massive steel US warship hulls, pulling into ports from Hong Kong to Taiwan to the Philippines to Singapore. And everywhere I went, there were Chinese hulls: warships, trawlers, coastal steamers, waste disposal ships, and always the fishing fleets.

  Piracy is one of the great consistent threads in world maritime history (recall Themistocles’s original appeal to his fellow Athenians to build a navy to sail against nearby pirates). In Zheng He’s day as well as our own, the desperately narrow, always-busy Straits of Malacca—at the head of which sits the gleaming modern city-state of Singapore—were subject to consistent predation by local pirates. The worst of these in Zheng He’s time was Chen Zuyi, a Chinese pirate who was as much a king as he was a brigand. It took months of cat-and-mouse pursuit to bring down Chen’s pirate network, but the treasure fleet eventually neutralized the most notorious raiding force of the era. Even though it was not designed specifically or even primarily for war, the fleet was proving to be an effective means of extending Ming foreign policy beyond the Chinese mainland.

  The keys to Zheng He’s success are not hard to see over the centuries. He was carefully organized, calm of spirit, devoted to his prince, and willing to take risks. Combined with his resilient character, this combination of attributes stood him in good stead through the long voyages, especially the first, which was a resounding success. The enthusiastic emperor ordered another expedition to Calicut to personally invest the leadership with China’s recognition. The fleet would also be used to prop up pro-Chinese leaders in kingdoms and city-states across Southeast Asia as the Dragon Throne cultivated a regional order to support its interests. In using the fleet in this fashion, the Chinese were anticipating by nearly half a millennium Alfred Thayer Mahan’s theories of sea power as a crucial element in national power.

  Subsequent voyages would range farther afield than Calicut, reaching the great trading cities of the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa. Zheng He would be at the helm for these voyages, generating wealth and prestige for the Ming court. The benefits were not confined to traditional objects of wealth. During the fourth expedition, for example, the fleet returned to China with a giraffe as a personal gift to the emperor from the king of Malindi in modern Kenya. The first animal of its kind ever to reach China, it bore resemblance to the mythical qilin of Chinese folklore, and supporters of the voyages pointed to it as proof that the heavens themselves favored China’s sojourns abroad.

  But the expeditions did not enjoy universal support. The cost increased markedly, as materials had to be brought from across the empire to sustain this massive enterprise. New domestic infrastructure had to be built to support the flow of goods. The eunuchs who served in the emperor’s household supported these missions and the wealth they brought the court, but the professional bureaucrats who staffed the imperial ministries opposed them. These administrators subscribed to traditional Confucian views on the role of government and society—they believed that virtuous emperors focused on managing domestic politics and improving the lives of their subjects. Trade and commerce were predatory activities—societally necessary evils that fell beneath the dignity of an emperor, in their view. As with any political disagreement, these fault lines were just as much about personal power as they were about high-minded ideals. The bureaucrats did not like being sidelined by the emperor, while the eunuchs fought to maintain their privileged role.

  The intense palace intrigue between eunuchs and bureaucrats brought on by the controversy over the fleet went back and forth for decades. Eventually, the death of the Yongle Emperor brought his more Confucian-minded son to the throne. The new emperor called a moratorium on the voyages in favor of focusing on domestic affairs, but he sat on the throne for only a few months before succumbing to illness. The next emperor launched a seventh and final round of expeditions. Zheng He was called back into service one last time to lead this final voyage. The great admiral, who had come so far from his provincial boyhood, died during the return voyage. His sailors committed his body to the deep.

  Without their powerful patron, the court eunuchs never regained the prominence they once held. The bureaucrats won the internal struggle, and the treasure fleet was abandoned to rot in port. Perhaps saddest of all for people interested in learning about this unique period of Chinese history, Zheng He’s personal logbooks were casualties of the political infighting, destroyed by those who wanted to remove the memory of the treasure fleets and prevent future adventurism. Thus we are forced to rely on secondary sources to catch glimpses of the admiral’s life and adventures.

  Nonetheless, his legacy lives on: Zheng He remains a folk hero among Chinese communities throughout Southeast Asia, and as I discovered on my own first trip to China, his name and memory are frequently invoked there as the country rediscovers its connection with the sea. And it is worth noting again that his voyages are part of the historical claims that China has repeatedly made in international courts to sovereignty over essentially the entire South Chi
na Sea. The treasures of oil and natural gas beneath that disputed body of water are crucial from a Chinese perspective to their nation’s strategic path in the twenty-first century. Zheng He’s voyages, which brought vast treasure to his emperor centuries ago, are very much a part of China’s pursuit of modern-day power as well. In a very clear sense, you can drop a plumb line from the qualities of character possessed by this ancient admiral to the ambitions and accomplishments of modern China.

  What can we learn from Zheng He? What were the qualities of character that shaped his life? The first of those qualities was in many ways the simplest: an organized frame of mind, tempered by a calm personality. Like Chester Nimitz, the US admiral whom my Chinese hosts toasted after I toasted Zheng He, Zheng’s undeniable accomplishments as a wartime commander flowed from—and in some ways were outshone by—his organizational abilities. Overseeing the fleet’s construction would have been a daunting task under any circumstance and was made all the more remarkable for being China’s first large-scale attempt to put to sea. For comparison, imagine if the United States had determined to send people to the moon on the first rocket it ever built—and succeeded. This required enormous organizational ability, and the challenges did not end once the fleet was underway. Hardly would Zheng He and his crews have learned to build and sail their enormous vessels before they would have had to learn how to repair and resupply them at sea and ashore beyond the edges of any maps they possessed. If going to the moon in one shot sounds difficult, imagine continuing to Mars next—and having to ask a Martian when you arrived for spare parts to fix your rocket.