If I was to piece together the remarkable story of the Chinese voyages of discovery, I would have to look elsewhere for proof, but I feared almost to begin. It seemed arrogance bordering on hubris to believe that a retired submarine captain could reveal a story many great minds had failed to unearth, but though I was a mere amateur compared to the distinguished academics in the field, I started with one crucial advantage. In 1953, when I joined the Royal Navy at the age of fifteen, Britain was still a world power with great fleets and bases to support them strung right across the globe. During my seventeen years in the Navy I sailed the world in the wake of the great European explorers. Between 1968 and 1970, for example, I was in command of HMS Rorqual and took her from China to Australasia, the Pacific and the Americas.
The coasts, cliffs and mountains early explorers had viewed from their quarterdecks were those I saw through a submarine periscope, with roughly the same perspective. I quickly learned that what is seen from sea level is not necessarily what is actually there. In those days satellite navigation was unknown; we had to find our way by the stars. I saw the same stars those great European explorers had seen and calculated my position by measuring the height and direction of the sun, just as they had attempted to do. The mariner’s guiding stars in the southern hemisphere are Canopus and the Southern Cross. These stars played a vital role in the extraordinary story I was to uncover, and without the experience of astro-navigation I had gained in the Navy, this book would never have been written and the discoveries I made might have remained unrecognized for many more years.
A layman, no matter how distinguished in other fields, looks at a map or a chart and sees only a series of outlines that may or may not be the misshapen representations of familiar lands. An experienced navigator looking at the same map can deduce far more: where the cartographer who had first charted it had sailed, in what direction, how fast or slow, how near to or far from the land he had been, the state of his knowledge of latitude and longitude, even whether it was night or day. Given sufficient knowledge of the lands and oceans depicted on the chart, a navigator can also explain why what the chart shows as islands could be mountain peaks, why what was then an extensive body of land might now be shoals, reefs and islands, and hence why some lands might have been depicted with curiously distended forms.
I had seen the maps, dating from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, that show parts of the world then unknown to European explorers. There are inaccuracies – some of the lands depicted are unrecognizable, or misshapen, or in locations where no land exists – and because the picture they offer of the world contradicts the accepted history of exploration they have long been dismissed as fables, forgeries or, at best, puzzling anomalies. But I found myself returning to those early maps and charts again and again, and as I studied them and evaluated them, a new picture of the medieval world began to emerge.
My research confirmed that several Chinese fleets had indeed made voyages of exploration in the early years of the fifteenth century. The last and greatest of them all – four fleets combining in one vast armada – set sail in early 1421. The last surviving ships returned to China in the summer and autumn of 1423. There was no extant record of where they had voyaged in the intervening years, but the maps showed that they had not merely rounded the Cape of Good Hope and traversed the Atlantic to chart the islands I had seen on the Pizzigano map of 1424, they had then gone on to explore Antarctica and the Arctic, North and South America, and had crossed the Pacific to Australia. They had solved the problems of calculating latitude and longitude and had mapped the earth and the heavens with equal accuracy.
I was educated by a Chinese amah for the first five years of my life – I remember to this day my sorrow at our parting – and I had made a number of visits to China over the years, but despite my interest in that great country, my knowledge of its history was by no means deep. Before I could follow the incredible course of these Chinese voyages of discovery, I would first have to immerse myself in the unfamiliar world of medieval China. That was a voyage of discovery in itself, and my ignorance of those remarkable people was shared, I suspect, by many in the West. The more I learned, the more I was awe-struck by the glory of that ancient, learned and incredibly sophisticated civilization. Their science and technology and their knowledge of the world around them were so far in advance of our own in that era that it was to be three, four and in some cases five centuries before European know-how matched that of the medieval Chinese.
Having learned something of that great civilization, I spent years travelling the globe on the track of the Chinese voyages of exploration. I researched in archives, museums and libraries, visited ancient monuments, castles, palaces and the major seaports of the late Middle Ages, explored rocky headlands, coral reefs, lonely beaches and remote islands. Everywhere I went I discovered more and more evidence to support the thesis. It turned out that a tiny handful of Chinese documents and sailing directions had escaped the wholesale destruction of records, and there were several first-person accounts: two by Chinese historians, another by a European merchant, and others by the first European explorers to follow in the Chinese wake, who discovered evidence and artefacts left by their predecessors.
There was also a wealth of physical evidence: Chinese porcelain, silk, votive offerings, artefacts, carved stones left by the Chinese admirals as monuments to their achievements, the wrecks of Chinese junks on the coasts of Africa, America, Australia and New Zealand, and the flora and fauna transplanted far from their places of origin and thriving when the first Europeans appeared. Everything I found was confirmation of the accuracy of the maps that had first captured my imagination. The remarkable information that those maps contain is, and always has been, there for all to see, but it has eluded many eminent historians of China, not for want of any diligence on their part but simply because of their lack of knowledge of astro-navigation and the world’s oceans. If I have found information that escaped them, it is only because I knew how to interpret the extraordinary maps and charts that reveal the course and the extent of the voyages of the great Chinese fleets between 1421 and 1423.
Columbus, da Gama, Magellan and Cook were later to make the same ‘discoveries’ but they all knew they were following in the footsteps of others, for they were carrying copies of the Chinese maps with them when they set off on their own journeys into the ‘unknown’. To misuse a famous quotation: if they could see further than others, it was because they were standing on the shoulders of giants.
I
Imperial China
1
THE EMPEROR’S GRAND PLAN
ON 2 FEBRUARY 1421, China dwarfed every nation on earth. On that Chinese New Year’s Day, kings and envoys from the length and breadth of Asia, Arabia, Africa and the Indian Ocean assembled amid the splendours of Beijing to pay homage to the Emperor Zhu Di, the Son of Heaven. A fleet of leviathan ships, navigating the oceans with pinpoint accuracy, had brought the rulers and their envoys to pay tribute to the emperor and bear witness to the inauguration of his majestic and mysterious walled capital, the Forbidden City. No fewer than twenty-eight heads of state were present, but the Holy Roman Emperor, the Emperor of Byzantium, the Doge of Venice and the kings of England, France, Castille and Portugal were not among them. They had not been invited, for such backward states, lacking trade goods or any worthwhile scientific knowledge, ranked low on the Chinese emperor’s scale of priorities.
Zhu Di was the fourth son of Zhu Yuanzhang, who had risen to become the first Ming emperor despite his lowly birth as the son of a hired labourer from one of the poorest parts of China.1 In 1352, eight years before Zhu Di’s birth, a terrible flood had struck parts of China. The Yellow River had burst its banks, submerging vast areas of farmland, washing away villages and leaving famine and disease in its wake. The country was still in the throes of a terrible epidemic. The Mongols had ruled China since its conquest in 1279 by the great Kublai Khan, grandson of the greatest warlord of them all, Genghis Khan. But in 1352,
plagued by famine and disease and desperately poor as a result of the depredations of their Mongol overlords, the peasants around Guangzhou on the Pearl River delta rose in revolt. Zhu Yuanzhang joined the rebels and rapidly emerged as their leader, rallying soldiers and farmers to his cause. During the next three years the revolt spread throughout China. Over decades of peace, the once ferocious Mongol warriors, the scourge of all Asia, had grown idle and complacent. Riven by internal dissension, they proved no match for the army raised by Zhu Di’s father. In 1356, his forces captured Nanjing and cut off corn supplies to the Mongols’ northern capital, Ta-tu (Beijing).
Zhu Di was eight years old when his father’s army entered Ta-tu itself, in 1368. The last Mongol Emperor of China, Toghon Temur, fled the country, retreating north to the steppe, the Mongol heartland. Zhu Yuanzhang pronounced a new dynasty, the Ming, and proclaimed himself the first emperor, taking the dynastic title Hong Wu.2 Zhu Di joined the Chinese cavalry and proved himself a brave and skilful officer. At the age of twenty-one he was sent to join the campaign against the Mongol forces still occupying the mountainous south-western province of Yunnan, bordering modern Tibet and Laos, and in 1382 he was ordered to destroy Kunming, to the south of the Cloud Mountains, the remaining Mongol stronghold in the province. After the city was taken, the Chinese butchered the adult defenders and castrated those prisoners who had not reached puberty. Thousands of young Mongol boys had their penises and testicles severed. Many perished of shock and disease; the surviving eunuchs were conscripted into the imperial armies or kept as servants or retainers.
Eunuchs served as ‘palace menials, harem watch dogs and spies’3 for rulers throughout the ancient world, in Rome, Greece, North Africa and much of Asia, and they had played an important role throughout Chinese history.4 Surprisingly, they were intensely loyal to the emperors who had authorized their mutilation. There had been eunuchs at the imperial court since at least the eighth century BC and as many as seventy thousand were employed in and around the capital. Only sexless males were permitted to act as personal servants to the emperor and to guard the women of his family and the quarters occupied by his concubines in the ‘Great Within’, inside the palace doors. Emperors retained thousands of concubines both as a symbol of their power and to ensure a number of male heirs at a time of high infant mortality; guaranteeing the continuity of the dynasty and the worship of ancestors was a vital part of Chinese cultural rites. Non-eunuchs, even relatives of the emperor and his consorts, were barred from the vicinity of the women’s quarters on pain of death. The absence of potent males ensured that any children born to the concubines had been sired by the emperor alone.
Eunuchs also helped to preserve the aura of sanctity and secrecy that surrounded the imperial throne. While the gods granted a ‘Mandate of Heaven’ to legitimize the emperor’s rule, they could rescind it if he proved guilty of human failings, misgovernment or misconduct. It was forbidden to look upon the emperor: even senior officials kept their eyes downcast in the imperial presence, and when he passed through the streets, screens were erected to shield him from public gaze. Only the ‘effeminate, cringing eunuchs’, slavishly dependent upon the emperor for their very lives, were considered cowed enough to be silent witnesses to his private foibles and weaknesses.5
Ma He, one of the boys castrated at Kunming, was billeted in the household of Zhu Di, where his name was changed to Zheng He. Many of the Mongols whom Zhu Di and his father expelled had adopted the Muslim faith. Zheng He was a devout Muslim besides being a formidable soldier, and he became Zhu Di’s closest adviser. He was a powerful figure, towering above Zhu Di; some accounts say he was over two metres tall and weighed over a hundred kilograms, with ‘a stride like a tiger’s’.6 When Zhu Di was elevated to Prince of Yen – a region centred on Beijing – and given the new and more important responsibility of guarding China’s northern provinces, Zheng He went with him. Zhu Di based himself in the former Mongol capital, Ta-tu, and renamed it Beijing. By 1387, after over thirty years of fighting, the last vestiges of Mongol rule had been purged from China. Zhu Di’s father, the ageing and increasingly paranoid Emperor Hong Wu, systematically purged his military command, eliminating anyone who might offer even the most remote challenge to his authority. Many senior commanders committed suicide rather than bring dishonour and disgrace to their families and their ancestors by being dismissed or executed, but nonetheless, tens of thousands of civil and military officers were put to the sword.
After the death of his first-born son, Hong Wu had chosen his grandson, Zhu Yunwen – Zhu Di’s nephew – to succeed him. He distrusted Zhu Di, wrongly believing he was a Mongol. Hong Wu had married a princess but had not been told she was already pregnant (with Zhu Di). When the old emperor died six years later in 1398, Zhu Yunwen duly continued his policy of eliminating potential rivals. In the summer of the following year, assassins were sent north to kill Zhu Di. To escape execution, he abandoned his fine house and for several months became a vagrant on the streets of Beijing, sleeping in gutters at night and wandering the streets by day. He feigned madness, growing filthy and unkempt, unrecognizable as a prince of the imperial line, and the execution squad passed by this apparently harmless vagrant. Then Zhu Di turned on his pursuers. Aided by his loyal eunuch bodyguard, headed by Zheng He, Zhu Di gathered his forces in secret to strike against his would-be killers. He assembled eight hundred men in a park in Beijing, having previously filled it with honking geese to muffle the clanking of their armour and weapons. Taken by surprise, the assassins were themselves butchered. The victorious Zhu Di at once began to raise and train an army.
When he received the news of his men’s failure, Zhu Yunwen immediately despatched an army of half a million men to crush Zhu Di, but the seasons were turning, and his troops were sent north from Nanjing wearing only their summer uniforms and straw sandals. Many men froze as the pitiless winter advanced. Zhu Di’s army was on manoeuvres outside Beijing when the demoralized troops of Zhu Yunwen began their advance on the city. They were routed in a battle in which even the women of Beijing took part, hurling pots down on their attackers from the city walls.
In 1402, Zhu Di marched south to Nanjing at the head of a great army. The imperial capital was a divided city. The mandarins, the educated elite in Nanjing, loathed the court eunuchs. Their antipathy was deep-seated and almost as old as imperial China itself. As his personal attendants, the eunuchs had the emperor’s ear; like the courtiers of European rulers, they grew wealthy through their imperial connections. But while the eunuchs held sway in the ‘Great Within’, mandarins alone were entitled to hold office in the ‘Great Without’ beyond the palace walls.
Men became mandarins and holders of exalted official positions only after years of intensive study and examinations based exclusively upon the teaching of Confucius (551–479 BC), the ‘Great Sage’ who had expressed his own disapproval of eunuchs holding positions of power. Eunuchs received no Confucian education and relied solely upon the emperor for advancement. Mandarins were steeped in Confucian ethics and a code of moral values intended to maintain order and hierarchy in society by eliminating the opportunity for people to disturb the tao (interaction of natural forces). It determined everyone’s life, their rank, their rites and the position allocated to them in the social hierarchy. The Confucian definition of good government required that ‘a prince be a prince … the subject a subject, the father a father, the son a son’.7 Orderly, well-mannered continuity was at the heart of Confucianism and of mandarin government, and the mandarins saw rural farmers, not foreigners or merchants, as the backbone of society. The farmers represented stability, whereas merchants and foreigners continually upset the tao.
A plan of imperial Nanjing from the Wu Pei Chi (Wu Bei Zhi). This seventeenth-century treatise on armaments drew on illustrations from earlier manuals; the shipyards are on the right across the bridge.
The mandarins surrounding Zhu Yunwen had succeeded in marginalizing the court eunuchs, stripping them of much of the power and i
nfluence they had previously possessed, and when Zhu Di’s army appeared before the walls of Nanjing, the eunuchs threw open the city gates to them. Zhu Di seized the Dragon Throne8 and pronounced himself emperor, taking the dynastic title Yong Le. Zhu Yunwen was never found. It was believed he had escaped, dressed as a monk. Zheng He remained at the new emperor’s side, one of a group of eunuchs who formed an inner circle within Zhu Di’s staff. They had personal knowledge of and gained influence in affairs of state, saw the emperor frequently and became familiar with his moods and wishes. As they were permitted to enter the concubines’ quarters, they also became conversant with the intrigues among the two thousand women sequestered there.
The eunuchs were once more a political force. In recognition of his service to the emperor, the most powerful figure of all was the Grand Eunuch, Zheng He. He had earned the nickname San Bao, ‘Three Treasures’, which referred to the three raisons d’être of a Buddhist: Buddha, doctrine and meditation. Zheng He had placed his severed penis in a temple. The casket containing his pao – ‘manhood treasures’ – would accompany him to the next world, where once again he could become a whole man. But in this earthly life, he was sworn to serve and do the bidding of his patron and ruler, the third Ming emperor, Zhu Di.
1421: The Year China Discovered the World Page 3
