1421: The Year China Discovered the World

by Gavin Menzies

  Balls of fire appeared to travel down the Imperial Way itself, along the very axis of the Forbidden City, destroying what we now call the Hall of Great Harmony, the Hall of Central Harmony and the Hall of Preserving Harmony – the magnificent palaces where Zhu Di had received leaders of the world three months earlier. The emperor’s throne was burned to cinders. ‘In his anguish he repaired to the temple and prayed with great importunity, saying, “The God of Heaven is angry with me, and, therefore, has burnt my palace; although I have done no evil act. I have neither offended my father, nor mother, nor have I acted tyrannically.”’2

  The shock killed the emperor’s favourite concubine. Zhu Di was so distraught that he was unable to make proper arrangements for her burial in the imperial mausoleum.

  He fell ill owing to his anguish and on account of this it could not be ascertained as to in what manner the dead personage was buried … The private horses of the deceased lady were let loose to graze freely … on the mountain where the sepulchre was situated. They had also posted about that sepulchre a number of maidens and eunuchs … leaving for them provisions to last five years so that after that period when their food got exhausted, they might likewise die there.3

  Chinese emperors believed they ruled with the mandate of heaven. The manner in which the lightning struck and the severity of the fire that followed could hardly have been more ominous for Zhu Di. An event of this terrible nature could only signal the gods’ demand for a change of emperor. Zhu Di temporarily handed power to his son, Zhu Gaozhi. ‘The illness of the Emperor having increased, his son used to come and sit in the audience hall.’4 Struggling to comprehend the nature of the calamity that had befallen him, the emperor then issued an edict to his people:

  My heart is full of trepidation, I do not know how to handle it. It seems that there has been some laxness in the rituals of honouring heaven and serving the spirits. Perhaps there has been some transgression of the ancestral law or some perversion of government affairs. Perhaps mean men hold rank while good men flee and hide themselves, and the good and evil are not distinguished. Perhaps punishments and jailings have been excessive and unjustly applied to the innocent, and the straight and the crooked not discriminated … Is this what brought about [the fire]? Harshness to the people below and above, going against heaven. I cannot find the reason in my confusion … If our actions have in fact been improper, you should lay these out one by one, hiding nothing, so that we may try to reform ourselves and regain the favour of heaven.5

  The edict unleashed a predictable storm of criticism from the mandarins. Most of it was targeted on Zhu Di’s grandiose plans and projects, notably the Forbidden City that the gods had destroyed. Vast areas had been denuded of trees to build the enormous halls, tens of thousands of artisans had laboured for years on the fabulous rooms, huge sums had been invested in marble and jade, the Grand Canal had been rebuilt using a million teaspoons to ferry grain, and the treasury drained to such an extent that peasants had even been reduced to eating grass. And all this toil, suffering and sacrifice had led only to a carpet of ashes and cinders. The fires also coincided with a terrible epidemic of some unknown disease that had been raging in the south for two years. More than 174,000 people had died in the province of Fujian alone and their bodies lay rotting in the fields, for there was no-one to bury them. The epidemic seemed yet another sign of the gods’ anger.

  The mandarin Minister of Revenue, Xia Yuanji, who had managed to find the funds for the Forbidden City and for Zheng He’s great armada, bravely stepped forward to accept personal responsibility for the catastrophe, but to no avail. Frantic efforts were made to pacify the people. Twenty-six high-ranking mandarin court officials were sent on ‘calming and soothing’ missions6 and, in an attempt to save his throne, Zhu Di issued a series of ill-conceived decrees. A halt was placed on future voyages of the treasure fleets and foreign travel was prohibited.

  Zhu Di had been plagued by other indignities and misfortunes. He had suffered a series of strokes during the previous four years and was being treated with an elixir containing arsenic and mercury that was probably poisoning him. Shortly before the great fire, he had also been thrown from his charger, Tamerlane’s former steed and a present from one of the Mongol conqueror’s sons, King Shah Rukh of Persia. Zhu Di was so furious that he was determined to put Shah Rukh’s ambassador to death.

  Thereafter the Qazi, coming forward, said to the ambassadors: ‘Dismount and when the Emperor arrives prostrate yourselves on the ground!’ They did so.

  When the Emperor came near he asked them to mount again. The ambassadors mounted and proceeded along with him. The Emperor began to make complaint saying to Shadi Khwaja: ‘I mounted for chase one of the horses which you brought me, and it being extremely old and feeble fell down throwing me off. Ever since that day my hand is giving me pain and has become black and blue. It is only by applying gold a good deal that the pain has abated a little.’7

  A mandarin replied on behalf of the Persians:

  The ambassadors are in no way to blame, for if their sovereign had sent good horses or bad as presents, those persons had no choice in the matter … Moreover, even if your Majesty has the envoys cut in pieces it shall make no difference to their sovereign. On the other hand … the whole world would say that the Emperor of China had acted contrary to all convention by imprisoning the envoys.8

  Slurs on Zhu Di’s manhood were even more humiliating. He had fathered no children after 1404, and had probably been impotent since the Empress Xiu’s death in 1407. Two imperial concubines had been found trying to assuage their sexual frustration by attempting intercourse with one of the eunuchs who guarded them. In the subsequent witch hunt, 2,800 concubines and eunuchs were alleged to have been involved in treasonable activity; Zhu Di personally executed many of them, but before they died a number of Korean concubines flung insults at him, taunting him for his impotence: ‘You have lost your yang power and that is why your concubines resorted to a relationship with a young eunuch.’9

  Apparently abandoned by heaven, the humiliated, ill and distraught old emperor also faced mounting political problems. The construction of the Forbidden City, the Grand Canal, the fleet of treasure ships and the repair of hundreds of miles of the Great Wall had placed enormous strains on China’s economy, and the felling of the vast hardwood forests had provoked rebellions in Annam and Vietnam. The first rebellion, in 1407, was led by Le Qui Ly, a former minister of the Vietnamese court who usurped the throne and introduced reforms that won him wide support. Taxation was simplified, ports were opened to foreigners and trade boomed. Restrictions were placed on the acquisition of land by the wealthy at the expense of peasants, a system of health care was introduced, and the army and civil service were reorganized; ability was henceforth to be the key word. His ultimate aim was to end his country’s subjugation by China. Vietnam would no longer be a colony, but a proud and united sovereign nation. Zhu Di had sent an army southwards to crush the rebellion, depose Le Qui Ly and begin the systematic obliteration of Vietnamese national identity. Native literature was burnt and works of art destroyed. Chinese classics became required reading in schools and Chinese dress and hairstyle were imposed on Vietnamese women. Local religious rites were outlawed and private fortunes confiscated, while the pillage of the forests continued.

  Another uprising began in 1418, this time led by an aristocratic landowner, Le L’oi, the founder of the dynasty that was to rule Vietnam for 360 years. Although twice defeated by the Chinese armies, each time he managed to escape to the jungle and continue the war. Despite a massive commitment of combat troops, the Chinese could neither find Le L’oi nor suppress his guerrilla army.

  Insurrection spread throughout Annam and Vietnam; the entire coastal region south of the Red River delta (near modern Hanoi) was in revolt. Enormous numbers of Chinese troops were now tied down in the jungle at vast cost to the treasury and Chinese pride. The rebellion was a serious political and military problem, but it was one that a fit, powerful
emperor such as Zhu Di in his prime would have solved with ruthless efficiency. Weighed down by his domestic troubles, he failed to suppress the revolt; Le L’oi then inflicted on the Chinese armies the first serious defeat the Ming dynasty had ever experienced. It was another shattering blow to the morale of the Chinese and their emperor, and though Le L’oi did not secure his country’s formal independence until 1428, Zhu Di had effectively abandoned Vietnam by July 1421.

  The demoralized old emperor had also lost control of his cabinet, and of China itself. There had always been an inherent contradiction at the heart of Zhu Di’s government: it was effectively two separate administrations – a mandarin cabinet in charge of finance, economics, home affairs and law and order, and the eunuchs, who led the armed forces and executed Zhu Di’s foreign policy. At the peak of his powers, Zhu Di had tolerated his mandarin critics, allowing them to influence his favourite son and successor, Zhu Gaozhi. Deep down the mandarins loathed Zhu Di’s grandiose plans, his foreign policy, and the bleak northern location of the Forbidden City. They seized the opportunity offered by his illness and waning powers and looked to the crown prince, Zhu Gaozhi, to reverse his father’s policies.

  A diplomatic crisis accelerated the disintegration of Zhu Di’s government. Sensing the emperor’s weakness after the fire in the Forbidden City, the Mongol leader Arughtai refused to pay the tribute demanded by China. Zhu Di saw a heaven-sent opportunity to reassert his authority; the emperor himself would lead an army to bring Arughtai to heel. As a young man, Zhu Di had relied on the speed of his cavalry to outwit and outmanoeuvre the Mongol army. Now, he and his eunuch generals assembled an enormous, ponderous force of almost a million men and 340,000 horses and mules and plodded northwards into the steppe. Some 177,500 carts were needed just to transport the grain to feed this vast army. The mandarin Minister of Revenue, Xia Yuanji, the financial genius who had raised the funds for the Forbidden City, for widening the Grand Canal, for the fleet of grain barges and for Zheng He’s armada, baldly stated he could not find the money for this latest imperial adventure. The Minister of Justice, Wu Zhong, also objected. Zhu Di had both ministers arrested. Fang Bin, Minister of War, then committed suicide. By the end of that terrible year, Zhu Di had lost his most able, loyal and long-serving ministers and his cabinet had disintegrated.

  As his ministers had feared, Zhu Di’s expedition was a fiasco. Arughtai simply disappeared into the vastness of the steppe. On 12 August 1424, while still pursuing Arughtai, Zhu Di, a broken man, died at the age of sixty-four. Some of the army’s pots and pans were melted down to make a coffin to carry him back to the burnt remains of the Forbidden City in Beijing, where his body lay in state for one hundred days.

  Zhu Di’s funeral had the same epic quality as his life. The procession was led by the old emperor’s honour guard. Ten thousand soldiers and officials surrounded the cortège as it slowly zigzagged on its two-day march to the magnificent imperial mausoleum at Chang Ling in the foothills north-west of Beijing. There, in hazy autumn sunshine, they marched down an avenue lined with stone animals to lay the emperor’s body in his magnificent tomb. Animals were sacrificed to his ancestral gods and then his cloak of imperial yellow and military decorations were laid beside him. Sixteen concubines were buried alive with Zhu Di. The complex was sealed as the cries of the doomed women marked the end of the mortal life of one of the greatest visionaries and gamblers in history.

  On 7 September 1424, Zhu Di’s son, Zhu Gaozhi, ascended the throne. That very day he issued an edict:

  All voyages of the treasure ships are to be stopped. All ships moored at Taicang [a Yangtze port] are ordered back to Nanjing and all goods on the ships are to be turned over to the Department of Internal Affairs and stored. If there are any foreign envoys wishing to return home, they will be provided with a small escort. Those officials who are currently abroad on business are ordered back to the capital immediately … and all those who have been called to go on future voyages are ordered back to their homes.

  The building and repair of all treasure ships is to be stopped immediately. Harvesting tieli mu [hardwood for shipbuilding] is to be conducted in the same way as it was in the time of the Hongwu Emperor [Zhu Di’s father]. [Additional harvesting] is to be stopped. All official procurement for expeditions abroad (with the exception of items already delivered at official depots), the making of copper coins, buying of musk, raw copper and raw silk must also be stopped … All those employed in purchasing should return to the capital.10

  Zhu Gaozhi also ordered the immediate release of those senior officials who had been imprisoned by his father, including the former finance minister, the mandarin Xia Yuanji. Xia took immediate steps to control inflation, forbidding the mining of gold and silver and stabilizing the amount of non-paper currency in circulation (paper money had been invented by the Chinese in AD 806, centuries before it came into use in Europe). Such was the value of pepper that it had been used as a means of payment by the Chinese. Now, all the pepper in the imperial warehouses was given away, the purchase of all luxury goods banned, the budget deficit slashed and all expenditure on the treasure fleets curtailed. China’s territory produced all goods in abundance, so why buy useless trifles from abroad?11

  The young emperor, fat, studious and religious, had shown no interest in military affairs and had hardly ever accompanied his father on his military expeditions, preferring to remain surrounded by his mandarin advisers. His priorities were in strict accordance with their Confucian values; ‘Relieving people’s poverty ought to be handled as though one were rescuing them from fire or saving them from drowning. One cannot hesitate.’12 He saw no need to listen to the eunuchs who, in aiding and abetting his father’s expansionary schemes, had brought China to the brink of disaster.

  As two of the battered treasure fleets limped home in October 1423 after two and a half years at sea. Zheng He’s men had no idea of the dramatic events unfolding at home and must have been expecting a heroes’ welcome. Their voyages had been a remarkable success. They had reached countless unknown lands and immeasurably furthered their knowledge of navigation, but instead of plaudits, the returning admirals were spurned by those who now ruled China. Only Zheng He was spared from humiliation; perhaps his prestige was too great to strip him of his rank. The old admiral was pensioned off as an imperial harbour master in Nanjing, but was allowed to keep his sumptuous palace there and to continue building his mosque.

  Zhu Gaozhi died in 1425 after only a year as emperor, and was succeeded by his son, Zhu Zhanji, who intensified his father’s policies. Social harmony returned, but China had reverted to rule by traditional rural gentry. As long as the irrigation systems were maintained, the farmers were well fed and famine averted, there was little requirement for economic or political change, or the exercise of China’s inventive genius. The country’s institutions remained as if preserved in amber. Merchants wielded little political power, bankers and soldiers virtually none, and revenue from foreign trade dropped to less than 1 per cent of government income. Zhu Zhanji did allow Admiral Zheng He his swansong – one final voyage to Mecca – but with Zhu Zhanji’s death in 1435, complete xenophobia set in. All voyages of the treasure fleets were halted and the first of a stream of imperial edicts banned overseas trade and travel. Any merchant attempting to engage in foreign trade was to be tried as a pirate and executed. For a time, even learning a foreign language or teaching Chinese to foreigners was prohibited.

  The embargo on overseas trade was rigidly maintained throughout the next hundred years, and the Qing dynasty that succeeded the last of the Ming emperors in 1644 went even further. To prevent any foreign trade or contact, a strip of land along the southern coast 700 miles long and 30 miles wide was devastated and burnt, and the population moved inland. Not only were the shipyards put out of commission, the plans for building the great treasure ships and the accounts of Zheng He’s voyages were deliberately destroyed. The mandarin Liu Daxia, a senior official at the Ministry of War, seized the records from
the archives. He declared that ‘the expeditions of San Bao (Zheng He) to the Western ocean wasted myriads of money and grain, and moreover the people who met their deaths may be counted in the myriads’. The goods the fleets had brought home – ‘betel, bamboo staves, grape-wine, pomegranates and ostrich eggs and such like things’ – were useless, and all the records of these expeditions – ‘deceitful exaggerations of bizarre things far removed from the testimony of people’s eyes and ears’ – should therefore be burned. Liu then blandly reported to the Minister of War that the logs and records of Zheng He’s expeditions had been ‘lost’.13 Not only was the priceless legacy of the greatest maritime expeditions of all time gone for ever, foreign lands were to be banished from the minds of the Chinese people. Only piracy and smuggling would be left to connect the fallen colossus with the outside world. The colonies established in Africa, Australia, New Zealand and North and South America were abandoned and left to their fate.

  By late 1421, China’s history was set for centuries to come. The legacy of Zhu Di, Zheng He and their great treasure fleets would be all but obliterated. What oceans they had sailed, what lands they had seen, what discoveries they had made, what settlements they had created were no longer of interest to the Chinese hierarchy. The ships that had made those voyages were left to rot and were never replaced. The logs and records were destroyed and the memory of them expunged so completely over the succeeding decades that they might never have existed. As China turned its back on its glorious maritime and scientific heritage and retreated into a long, self-imposed isolation from the outside world, other nations took up the torch. But all their explorers, colonizers and discoverers voyaged in the long shadows cast by Zhu Di’s fleets.