1421: The Year China Discovered the World

by Gavin Menzies

  For the courtesan, the voyages offered an opportunity to attain the ultimate aim: to be freed to join a man who loved her. An envoy would request that a particular favoured concubine be disembarked with him at his home port, and she would remain with him as the fleet sailed on. Aboard she was respected and protected. If she failed to attain her dream and became too old to attract men, she was given the job of instructing the younger women in dancing and singing. By the time the foreign envoys left the treasure ships, some of the courtesans would undoubtedly have been pregnant. What happened to their children will become an interesting part of our story as more and more DNA analysis results come in. The concubines also assumed other duties – cooking, weaving and sewing silk, making hemp ropes and looking after the tubs of beans and coops of chickens. The eunuchs clearly had no use for the concubines and crewmen would have been executed for even approaching their quarters.

  As the armada continued south on the first stage of the great voyage, the power to drive its huge ships was provided by the massive energy of the monsoon winds. Monsoons had always determined sailing patterns from China through the Indian Ocean to India and Africa. Ports such as Malacca (modern Melaka in Malaysia) developed where goods could be stored between the monsoons, the south-west in July and the north-east starting in January. Chinese ships took advantage of the north-east monsoon to sail before the wind to India, returning home on the next monsoon. The south-west monsoon reaches India in July, several weeks before it breaks over the coast of China. Ships from India sailing before the north-east monsoon winds arrived in Malacca before the junks from China had even set sail, and had unloaded and sailed for home by the time the junks arrived in Malacca.

  According to Ma Huan, Zheng He’s fleet arrived in Malacca six weeks after leaving Beijing. First established by the Chinese as a port where spices from the Moluccas – the Spice Islands (the modern Maluku Islands of Indonesia) – could be collected, Malacca soon expanded into a distribution centre for Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles, and grew to become one of the principal hubs of Indian Ocean trade. Halfway between India and China and 120 miles up the west coast of Malaysia from modern Singapore, Malacca lies on a strait through which sailing vessels must pass and has a sheltered location protected from storms by a ring of islands. There were rich tin mines in the surrounding area, a freshwater river bisected the town and the abundant water and teak from the surrounding forests made Malacca an ideal port. The trade in spices remained of paramount importance, offering merchants and traders the chance to amass vast fortunes. The attempt to exploit and control this vastly lucrative spice trade was later to be one of the principal engines driving the European voyages of discovery.

  The Chinese set up a series of trading ports such as Malacca and Calicut on the south-west coast of India throughout south-east Asia and around the Indian Ocean. They were used as forward bases by Zheng He’s fleets, providing fresh provisions, water and wood all the way from China to East Africa. They were an essential prerequisite for Zhu Di’s plan to bring the entire world into China’s tribute system. In 1421, trade throughout the Indian Ocean was dominated by the Chinese and Arabs from Egypt and the Gulf States; relations between them were friendly. Like the rest of the known world, the Arabs craved Chinese porcelain and silk, and Chinese junks were almost always welcomed in Arab ports.

  Chart of the Straits of Malacca from the Mao Kun map in the Wu Pei Chi. Malacca is in the top left-hand corner and Sumatra runs along the bottom.

  A report came from Mecca, the honoured, that a number of junks had come from China to the sea ports of India and two of them had anchored in the port of Aden, but their goods, chinaware, silk, musk and the like, were not disposed of there because of the disorders of the State of Yemen … The Sultan wrote to them to let them come to Jeddah and to show them honour.13

  Chinese and Arabs met in equal numbers at the great Indian port of Calicut. Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and Malindi, Kilwa and Zanzibar in East Africa were Arab ports used extensively by the Chinese, but Malacca was virtually a Chinese colony and epitomized the Chinese forward base.

  Formerly this place [Malacca] was not designated a ‘country’ … There was no king of the country; it was controlled only by a chief. This territory was subordinate to the jurisdiction of Hsien Lo [Thailand]; it paid an annual tribute of forty Liang of gold [approx. 48 troy ounces]; if it were not [to pay] then Hsien Lo would send men to attack it.

  In the seventh year of the Yung Lo [1409] the Emperor ordered the principal envoy the grand eunuch Cheng Ho [Zheng He] and others to assume command and to take the imperial edicts and to bestow upon the chief two strong seals, a hat, a girdle and a robe … Thereafter Hsien Lo did not dare to invade it (Ma Huan, 1424).14

  In effect, this was the birth of Malaysia.

  The diaries of Ma Huan also give a vivid picture of south-east Asia – the crocodiles that inhabit the mangrove swamps, rubber being tapped, the tin mines and coconut plantations.

  The coconut has ten different uses. The young tree has a syrup, very sweet and good to drink; it can be made into wine by fermentation. The old coconut has flesh, from which they express oil, and make sugar, and make a food stuff for eating. From the fibre which envelops the outside they make ropes for shipbuilding. The shell of the coconut makes bowls and cups; it is also good for burning to ash for the delicate operation of inlaying gold or silver. The trees are good for building houses, and the leaves are good for roofing houses.15

  Ma Huan also described the procedures followed by the Chinese fleets when in port:

  When Malacca is visited by Chinese merchant vessels, [the inhabitants] erect a barrier [for the collection of duties]. There are four gates in the city wall, each furnished with watch and drum towers. At night men with hand bells patrol the precincts. Inside the walls, a second small enclosure of palisades has been built where godowns [warehouses] have been constructed for the storage of specie and provisions. When the government ships [Zheng He’s fleet] were returning homewards, they visited this place in order both to repair their vessels and to load local products. Here they waited for a favourable wind from the south and in the middle of the fifth month [June] they put to sea on their return voyage.16

  As well as trade, the Chinese were also greatly intrigued by the erotic Thai and Malaccan women. ‘The mental capacity of the wives far exceeds that of their husbands. Should it happen that one of their wives is on terms of great intimacy with one of our countrymen, and allows him to feast and carouse with her, her husband looks calmly on and is not angry, but simply remarks: “My wife is beautiful and the Chinaman is delighted with her.”’17 Malaccan men went to considerable lengths to give pleasure to their women. Chinese-made tin or hollow gold beads assisted them, a custom still practised in some parts of south-east Asia today.

  When a man has attained his twentieth year, they take the skin which surrounds the penis (membrum virile), and with a fine knife shaped like an onion they open it up and insert a dozen tin beads inside the skin … [The beads] look like a cluster of grapes. The King and the great chiefs or the rich people use hollow beads of gold in which is placed a grain of sand. After these have been inserted, when they walk there is a tinkling sound which is considered beautiful. Men who have no beads inserted [in the manner described] are people of the lower class.18

  All manner of peoples visited Malacca – Thais, Bengalis, Gujaratis, Parsees, Arabs and many others conversed in eighty-four languages – and all returned home with Chinese goods. Boats that brought spices from the Spice Islands of Ternate and Tidore in the Moluccas returned with Chinese porcelain. Arab dhows sailed north-west for India, the Gulf, Egypt and Venice laden with silk, supplemented with batiks and tin from Malacca and Java. After the Chinese junks had unloaded their silk and porcelain, they refilled their holds with spice, Indian gems and Venetian glass.

  [The Chinese] go about the country, scales in hand, buying up all the pepper they find, and after weighing a small amount so that they can judge approximately the q
uantity, they offer the payment for it in a lump sum, depending on the need for money of those who are selling it, and in this way they amass such a quantity they can fill the ships from China when they arrive, selling fifty thousand caixas’ [a Portuguese trading currency] worth, which has cost them no more than twelve thousand.19

  Throughout the archipelago and the whole of south-east Asia, trade was focused on Malacca and dominated by the Chinese. China consumed a hundred times more spice than distant Europe, and the Chinese merchants not only controlled commodity and currency markets but property prices too, even amusement and gambling. For ten months on end there was a Chinese fair where merchants gambled. ‘As their merchandise is sold, they occupy less room and rent fewer houses. As sales fall, the gaming increases’.20 Malacca was used as a forward base on each of Admiral Zheng He’s voyages, and the importance he attached to the port is demonstrated by the temple he established there. It still stands in the road that bears his name, a few yards east of the Malacca River. According to legend, his flagship was once holed on a reef but its triple hull and watertight compartments enabled him to reach Malacca without sinking.

  Zheng He’s expeditions had become progressively more adventurous. His first, between 1405 and 1407, had sailed in sixty-two treasure ships manned by 27,800 men. En route for Malacca, they visited Cambodia and Java, then sailed on the next south-west monsoon for Sri Lanka and Calicut on the west coast of India. An incident on this voyage cemented a belief among the sailors that Zheng He’s fleet was under divine protection. In the midst of a storm so ferocious that the sailors were praying to Ma Tsu to save them from death, a ‘divine light’ – presumably St Elmo’s Fire, a luminous electrical discharge sometimes seen during a storm at sea – appeared at the tips of the masts of Zheng He’s flagship. ‘As soon as this miraculous light appeared, the danger was appeased.’21

  By the time of the third expedition, 1409 to 1411, Zheng He had established a settled programme. The fleet used Malacca as its forward base and there divided into squadrons that sailed on independently to separate destinations. The next great fleet set sail from China in 1413. One squadron departed from Malacca for Bengal, the Maldives and Africa; another sailed for the Arabian Sea and up the Persian Gulf to Hormuz. The fleets of the following expedition, 1417 to 1419, visited every major trading port in Africa, Arabia, India and Asia, then brought back the rulers and ambassadors travelling to Beijing for the inauguration of the Forbidden City. They were to spend almost two years enjoying the lavish hospitality of the emperor before the inauguration of his capital. Now, another fleet led by Admiral Yang Qing had been sent on ahead of the main armada. After returning rulers and ambassadors to the Gulf states, his daunting task was to solve the problem of determining longitude.

  The rest of Zheng He’s armada was embarked on the greatest voyage of them all. After provisioning in Malacca, they sailed northwards for five days before anchoring off Semudera (modern Sumatra) at the entrance to the Indian Ocean. There, the admiral divided his armada into four fleets. Each carried an army equipped with gunpowder weapons. Three of these great fleets were placed under the command of Grand Eunuch Hong Bao, Eunuch Zhou Man and Admiral Zhou Wen.22 The fourth, by far the smallest fleet, remained under Zheng He’s direct command. He was the emperor’s right-hand man and could not be spared for the entire duration of the voyage. He would return envoys to south-east Asia and then sail for home, arriving in November 1421.

  We know from an account by the widely travelled Portuguese poet Camões (1524–1580) that by the time the Chinese fleets reached Calicut so many foreign merchant ships had joined the convoy that it comprised over eight hundred sail. Assuming that Zheng He would have taken only a handful of ships with him for a brief and relatively easy passage home, it is safe to estimate that each of the remaining Chinese fleets numbered nearly two hundred ships – the largest armada the world had ever known. Zheng He delegated powers of life and death to his admirals, and command was further delegated within each fleet: two brigadiers and ninety-three captains commanded regiments, and 104 lieutenants and 103 sub-lieutenants reported to them. The first task of the fleets was to return the rulers, ambassadors and envoys to their home ports in India, Arabia and East Africa. They were then to rendezvous off the southern coast of Africa and set sail into uncharted waters to fulfil Zhu Di’s vision. They knew exactly what was expected of them. They would proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas or they would die in the attempt.

  II

  The Guiding Stars

  4

  ROUNDING THE CAPE

  IN ORDER TO trace the story to this point, I had had to learn the history of medieval China almost from scratch; my previous knowledge of Chinese history and culture had been modest at best. However, as I began to trace the voyages of the great treasure fleets in the ‘missing years’ from 1421 to 1423, I was entering familiar territory, making use of knowledge and skills I had acquired over many years’ experience as a navigator and commanding officer on the high seas. During that sixth voyage, the fleets of Hong Bao, Zhou Man, Zhou Wen and Yang Qing sailed the oceans for as many as five years, but the mandarin official at the Ministry of War, Liu Daxia, had ordered the destruction of all written records and there was virtually no evidence to show where they had sailed or what discoveries they had made. But where before I had been plodding in the footsteps of academics and historians far more knowledgeable and gifted than myself, I could now use my skills to decipher the fragmentary evidence offered by ancient maps and charts, and those few documents and artefacts to have survived.

  Two of these artefacts were carved stones. Old, virtually ignored by the new regime in China and perhaps fearing that he might never return, Admiral Zheng He erected two carved stones in palaces of the Celestial Spouse, a Taoist goddess, before he set sail on his final voyage in late 1431. The first was in Chiang-su, Fujian province, and the second at Liu-Chia-Chang. Only rediscovered in 1930, the stones commemorate the crowning achievements of his life, the great voyages of the treasure fleets. Their inscriptions are the key to unlocking the riddle of the sixth voyage.

  Inscription at Chiang-su

  From the time when we, Cheng Ho [Zheng He] and his companions at the beginning of the Yung Lo Period [or Yong Le – Zhu Di, 1403], received the imperial commission as envoys to the barbarians, up until now seven voyages have taken place and each time we have commanded several tens of thousands of government soldiers and more than a hundred oceangoing vessels. Starting from T’ai Ts’ang and taking the sea, we have by way of the countries of Chan-Ch’eng (Champa), Hsien-Lo (Siam), Kua-Wa (Java), K’o Chih (Cochin) and Ku-Li (Calicut) reached Hu-Lu-Mo-Ssu [Hormuz, in the Gulf] and other countries of the western regions, more than three thousand countries in all.1

  Inscription at Liu-Chia-Chang

  We have traversed more than 100,000 li of immense water spaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising sky-high [tsunami], and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away, hidden in a blue transparency of light vapours, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds, day and night continued their course, rapid like that of a star, traversing those savage waves.2

  The original English translation of Zheng He’s Chiang-su inscription had been made by that great scholar of medieval China J.J.L. Duyvendak in the 1930s. In his article ‘The True Dates of the Chinese Maritime Expeditions in the Early Fifteenth Century’, the translation of a key phrase in the inscription was given as ‘three thousand countries’. He and later scholars3 thought that such a claim was so wildly implausible that the stone mason who carved the inscription must have made a mistake. On these grounds, the translation was amended to read ‘thirty countries’. This was then repeated by subsequent writers and historians, and it was only when I consulted Duyvendak’s text that I realized the original translation could have been correct; there was no logical reason why the mason who carved the inscription should have made such a gross error. But could such an e
xtraordinary claim really be true? Had Zheng He’s fleets reached three thousand countries? If so, the history of the exploration of the globe would have to be rewritten.

  In attempting to reconstruct the voyages the fleets had made, I first had to put myself into the shoes of the Chinese admirals. There was no better way of doing that than by sailing in their wake, as I had done as a young officer in the British Royal Navy aboard HMS Newfoundland. Our captain was a very brave and distinguished submariner, now Vice-Admiral Sir Arthur Hezlet KBE CB DSO and bar DSC. Newfoundland left Singapore in February 1959, passed through the Malacca Straits into the Indian Ocean and then turned westwards for Africa. We visited the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean before continuing west, making landfall on the East African coast at Mombasa. From there we went on to call at Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam before arriving at Lourenço Marques. We then sailed on down the east coast of Africa, visiting East London and Port Elizabeth before rounding the Cape, calling in at Cape Town, and sailing up the west coast round the ‘bulge’ of Africa to Sierra Leone, through the Cape Verde Islands and back home to England.

  That journey gave me an invaluable insight into the winds, currents and navigational problems the Chinese admirals had encountered. Without that experience I could never have followed the elusive trail of evidence across the globe that revealed the incredible journeys made by the great Chinese treasure fleets. If I was able to state with confidence the course a Chinese fleet had taken, it was because the surviving maps and charts and my own knowledge of the winds, currents and sea conditions they faced told me the route as surely as if there had been a written record of it.