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In some ways, confronting the Confucian establishment, the emperors of the Ming dynasty had long been the foremost outsiders. As they strove to balance the contending religious factions, the ruling dynasty chose to be called “Ming” in defiance of Confucianism, for the name was a Buddhist epithet. It denoted the “Brightness” anticipated in the fabled deity Lord Maitreya, who, according to one strand in Buddhism, would preside over the end of the world. Although successive emperors could hardly escape Confucian values during their education at court, the tension present at the foundation of the Ming dynasty remained. Emperors frequently tried to break the hold of the official class on power, but always failed. At different times, they tried empowering Buddhist or Taoist clergy to offset the influence of the mandarins. By 1486 there were 1,120 monks in official positions at court.
Emperors employed thousands of eunuchs, to the disgust of the official class; there were as many eunuchs as mandarins in the service of the empire by the 1480s. Ch’oe Pu expressed surprise at eunuchs in power; in his country, he protested, they would be allowed only to sweep the palace and carry messages.12 In China, they ran many departments of government, including the dreaded internal security agency, the so-called Western Depot, established in 1477 to seize and punish suspected traitors. But reliance on the mandarins to staff the provincial administration and the courts of law proved inescapable. Generally in the fifteenth century, moreover, emperors tended to be short-lived, and inherited “greybeard” mandarin counselors from their fathers and grandfathers.
In the late fifteenth century, the Chinese imperial court was in the grip of a reaction in favor of the political power of the mandarin class—something like a Confucian revolution. In large part, this was because of a change of power at the top: the accession of an emperor thoroughly educated in Confucian pieties and deep in cahoots with the Confucian elite. Partly, however, it was a reaction against the spectacular growth, in preceding reigns, of the numbers, wealth, and power of the Confucians’ enemies. Confucians traded hatred with Buddhists and Taoists. A judge who denounced the previous emperor’s favorite monk as “a good-for-nothing vagabond from the marketplace” was beaten, demoted, and exiled. Other Confucian critics of the monks got the same treatment. A hundred thousand Buddhist and Taoist clergy were ordained in 1476. The following year, the emperor decreed that in the future, ordination ceremonies would take place only once every twenty years. The government also tried to tighten the qualifications for ordination in the Buddhist and Taoist hierarchies. Scandal broke out over the sale of ordination certificates—ten thousand of them, for instance, to raise money for famine relief in Shaanxi in 1484—inflating the numbers. The certificates were blank; purchasers simply wrote in their names. “Unless we take timely measures,” reported a concerned official in 1479, “in the worst situations they might gather together in the mountains and forests to plan criminal acts; and in less serious situations they might manufacture rumours to alarm people’s minds. In any event, the harm they do is never small.” 13
The inflation of the Buddhist priesthood continued with another two hundred thousand ordinations in 1486. That very year, however, a new emperor came to the throne. Zhu Yutang, the Hongxi emperor, aspired to be a Confucian perfect prince. He ordered the death or expulsion of the sorcerers who thronged the previous emperor, and expelled over a thousand Buddhist and Taoist monks from court. He restored neglected rites, the reading of Confucian texts, the study of law, and the reform of judicial institutions. He embellished the Temple of Confucius in Qufu with a literary pavilion. When fire destroyed some Taoist institutions in Beijing in 1497, one of the emperor’s chief ministers gloated unfeignedly: “If they had possessed numinous power, would they not have been protected by it? Heaven despises such filth.” 14 Qixao, the Buddhist monk who occupied the informal position of favorite in the previous reign, was accused of peculation from state funds and dealing in aphrodisiacs. His head was chopped off in 1488.
In practice, however, the spiritual life of the court was woven of many strands, and it was hard to unwind Taoism and Buddhism from it entirely. The emperor still relied on Taoist magic for medicine. He favored painters who produced celebrations of scholarship, but Confucian heroes never monopolized the artists’ subject matter. The emperor’s personal favorite was—on the face of it—a surprising choice: an eccentric drunkard from Nanjing, called Wu Wei. Wu became a painter, like so many impoverished mandarins, because his family could not afford to complete his scholarly education and get him a job in the imperial bureaucracy. His father had squandered the family fortune on experiments in alchemy—the sort of practice a Taoist might be prey to but which a good Confucian would eschew. Perhaps in recoil from the shame, Wu cultivated a bohemian reputation, snubbing patrons, whoring, and exhibiting crazy virtuosity—painting masterpieces when apparently so drunk that he could hardly stand, sometimes using his hands to paint instead of brushes, or smearing the ink onto the paper or silk with bits of tableware. When he did use a brush, he gripped it tightly and wielded it boldly, stabbing and slashing at the surface with angular strokes. The results were stunningly brilliant. Yet despite these offences against propriety—and despite producing many works of Taoist piety for monastic paymasters—Wu knew how to please a Confucian patron.
In Wu Wei’s painting, a legendary Taoist saint contemplates the sea with, underfoot, the miraculous crutch that will serve as a raft.
Detail from Wu Wei, Two Daoist Immortals. Hanging Scroll, Shanghai Museum.
To understand his appeal, it is worth comparing his work with that of his senior contemporary, Shen Zhou. Shen’s mountains soar, his trees tower; the very air in his works seems to vibrate visibly with cosmic power. Human works and lives are reduced to specks in all this immensity. His most famous work, painted in 1487, now in the National Palace Museum in Taipei and known as Rainy Thoughts, recalls the tastes and circumstances revealed in the rain-induced mystical experience with which this chapter began. He realized that experience is incomplete until transformed, by some unseen power, into part of oneself. Until then, the bell and drum may as well be mute and the beauties of the landscape invisible. Sounds and vision die on the air. But when they register in the human mind, memory and art perpetuate them. The painter called this transmuting power “will.”
“Sounds are cut off, colours obliterated; but my will, absorbing these, endures. What is the so-called will? Is it inside me, after all, or outside? Does it exist in external things or does it come into being because of those things?” 15
In the calm of his vigil, in mystical interpenetration with the rest of nature, when his being engaged and fused with the stimuli around him, he sensed the answer.
“How great is the power of sitting up at night! One should purify one’s heart and sit alone, by the light of a newly trimmed, bright candle. Through this practice one can pursue the principles that underlie events and things, and the subtlest workings of one’s own mind…. Through this, we shall surely attain understanding.” 16
On another occasion, he recorded “in a chance moment of exhilaration” a night spent in conversation with a friend on a wet night.
Doing a painting in the rain, I borrow its wet richness.
Writing poems by candlelight, we pass the long night.
Next morning, in sun, we open the gate; the spring freshness has spread.
At the lakeshore you leave me among the singing willows.17
The real subject is the rain-soaked world. The room where the artists sit draws the eye, because it glows with light, but its scale is insignificant and our view of it indistinct. The rain dominates the composition, seeping into the very paper on Shen Zhou’s sopping brush, speckling the air with spongy dabs, dripping from the tall thickets and dense copses that overshadow the painter’s flimsy house, blurring the dark mountains that glower in the background.
Wu Wei, by contrast, painted people not as fragments of a landscape or specks in an enveloping cosmos. In his work, humankind is nearly always dominant. Even
when he located people in large-scale landscapes, he always made them bigger and more active than Shen Zhou’s characteristic figures. When he painted scholars, he made them dominate the composition, as if mastering nature by the power of thought and the resources of knowledge. Typically, his sages are strongly delineated, while the sketchy trees and hills around them seem feeble by comparison.
Although Confucianism never monopolized Chinese values, it did dominate the culture of the late-fifteenth-century court and of the administrative elite throughout the empire. Part of the consensus was that the empire was already big enough for its own purposes. It comprised all that mattered under heaven. It could supply its own wants from its own resources. If the “barbarians” outside its frontiers realized the wisdom of acknowledging Chinese superiority, revering the emperor, paying tribute, and adopting Chinese ways, that was welcome, in the foreigners’ own interests. But the best way to attract them was by example, not by war. The state should defend its frontiers but not waste blood and wealth to enlarge them.
Earlier in the century, when factional squabbles displaced the Confucians from power, China had looked briefly as though it might launch a major effort to found a seaborne empire, reaching out across the Indian Ocean. The Yongle emperor (r. 1402–24) aggressively sought contact with the world beyond the empire. He meddled in the politics of China’s southern neighbors in Vietnam and enticed the Japanese to trade. The most spectacular manifestation of the new outward-looking policy was the career of the Muslim eunuch-admiral Zheng He. In 1405, he led the first of a series of naval expeditions, the purpose of which has been the subject of long and unresolved scholarly debate but which was intended in part, at least, to exert political power around the Indian Ocean’s shores. He replaced unacceptable rulers in Java, Sumatra, and Sri Lanka, founded a puppet state on the commercially important Strait of Malacca, and gathered tribute from Bengal. He displayed Chinese power as far away as Jiddah, on the Red Sea coast of Arabia, and in major ports in East Africa as far south as the island of Zanzibar. “The countries beyond the horizon,” he announced with some exaggeration, “and from the ends of the Earth, have become subjects.” 18 He restocked the imperial zoo with giraffes, ostriches, zebras, and rhinoceroses—all hailed as beasts bringing good luck—and brought Chinese geographical knowledge up to date.
Can Zheng He’s voyages be called an imperial venture? Their official purpose was to pursue a fugitive pretender to the Chinese throne—but that would not have required expeditions on so vast a scale to such distant places. The Chinese called the vessels “treasure ships” and emphasized what they called “tribute gathering.” (In the more distant spots Zheng He’s ships visited, what happened was more like an exchange.) Commercial objectives may have been involved. Almost all the places Zheng He visited had long been important in Chinese trade. In part, the voyages were scientific missions: Ma Huan, Zheng He’s interpreter, called his own book on the subject The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores, and improved maps and data on the plants, animals, and peoples of the regions visited were among the expeditions’ fruits. But flag showing is always, to some extent, about power or, at least, prestige. And the aggressive intervention Zheng He made in some places, together with the tone of his commemorative inscriptions, demonstrates that the extension or reinforcement of China’s image and influence was part of the project.
One of the star charts Ma Huan composed en route with Zheng He between the Persian Gulf and Calicut.
Ma Huan, Ying-yai Sheng-lan: “The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores,” ed. J. V. G. Mills (Cambridge: The Hakluyt Society, 1970). Courtesy of The Hakluyt Society.
It is hard to see how else the huge investment the state made in his enterprise could have been justified. Zheng He’s expeditions were on a crushing scale. His ships were much bigger than anything European navies could float at the time. The first expedition was said to comprise 62 junks of the largest dimensions ever built, 225 support vessels, and 27,780 men. The vessels—to judge from a recently discovered rudder post—justified the awed terms of contemporary assessments, displacing, perhaps, over three thousand tons; this was ten times the size of the largest ships afloat in Europe at the time. The seventh voyage—probably the longest in reach—sailed 12,618 miles. The voyages lasted on average over two years each. Some silly claims have been made for Zheng He’s voyages. Ships of his fleet did not sail beyond the limits of the Indian Ocean—much less discover America or Antarctica.
His achievements, however, clearly demonstrated China’s potential to become the center of a maritime empire of enormous reach. Strictly speaking, these were not route-finding voyages. As we have seen, the trade routes of the Indian Ocean, across maritime Asia, and into East Africa had been familiar to Chinese merchants for centuries. In the early thirteenth century, Zhao Rugwa provided a practical handbook for commercial travelers in Southeast Asia and India. There were certainly opportunities to increase commercial openings by backing initiatives with force. The trades of the region were highly lucrative, including spices, fragrant hardwoods, valuable medicinal drugs, and exotic animal products. The motives for dispatching the “treasure ships,” however, transcended commerce. Zheng He was engaged on what would now be called flag-waving missions, impressing the ports he visited with Chinese power and stimulating the awe of the emperor’s home constituency with exotica that the Chinese classified as the tribute of remote peoples.19 The official pretext for his commission—which few believed, then or now—was to search for a fugitive ex-emperor who was supposed to be in hiding abroad. Strategic considerations were clearly involved. Zheng He intervened actively in the politics of some ports in Southeast Asia that were important for China’s trade and security. A potentially hostile empire had recently arisen in central Asia under the Turkic chief Timur, usually known in the West as Tamerlane or Tamberlaine; apprehension may have sent the Chinese sniffing for allies and intelligence around the edges of the new menace. Whatever the motives of the expeditions, part of the effect was to consolidate Chinese knowledge of the routes Zheng He took, and to compile practical maps and sailing directions for them.
The admiral was a Muslim eunuch of Mongol ancestry. Every feature of his background marked him as an outsider to the Confucian scholar-elites that dominated Chinese political life. When the emperor appointed him to lead the first oceangoing task force in 1403, it was a triumph for four linked factions at court, whose interests clashed with Confucian values. First, there was the commercial lobby, which wanted to mobilize naval support for Chinese traders in the Indian Ocean. Alongside the merchants, an imperialist lobby wanted to renew the program of imperial aggression espoused by the previous dynasty but opposed by Confucians, who theorized that the empire should expand, if at all, by peacefully attracting “barbarians” into its orbit. Then there was the always-powerful Buddhist lobby, which wanted to keep state funds out of skeptical or anticlerical Confucian hands by diverting them to other projects, and which perhaps sensed opportunities for spreading the faith under the official aegis of imperial expansion.
The voyages did display China’s potential as the launching bay of a seaborne empire: the capacity and productivity of her shipyards; her ability to mount expeditions of crushing strength and dispatch them over vast distances. Zheng He’s encounters with opponents unequivocally demonstrated Chinese superiority. On the first expedition, he encountered a Chinese pirate chief who had set up a bandit state of his own in the sometime capital of Srivijaya in Sumatra. The pirates were slaughtered and their king sent to China for execution. On the third voyage, the Sinhalese king of Sri Lanka tried to lure Zheng He into a trap and seize the fleet. The Chinese dispersed his forces, captured his capital, deported him to China, and installed a pretender in his place. On the fourth expedition, a Sumatran chief who refused to cooperate in the exchange of gifts for tribute was overwhelmed, abducted, and, eventually, put to death.
Of all Zheng He’s acts of political intervention, perhaps the most significant—in terms of long-term conseq
uences—was his attempt to set up a Chinese puppet kingdom to control the trade of the Strait of Malacca, the vital bottleneck in the normal route between China and India. He chose to elevate Paramesvara, a bandit chief who had been driven from his own kingdom and had established a stronghold in the swamps of what is now known as Melaka, on the Malayan coast. In 1409, Zheng He conferred the seal and robes of kingship upon him. Paramesvara traveled to China to pay tribute in person and established a client relationship with the emperor; Chinese patronage turned his modest stronghold into a great and rich emporium.
Zheng He’s own perception of his role seems to have combined an imperial impulse with the peaceful inspiration of commerce and scholarship. A stela he erected in 1432 began in a jingoistic vein: “In the unifying of the seas and continents the Ming Dynasty even goes beyond the Han and the Tang…. The countries beyond the horizon and from the ends of the earth have become subjects.” That was an exaggeration, but he added, more plausibly, in deference to traders and geographers, “However far they may be, their distances and the routes may be calculated.” 20 An “overall survey of the ocean’s shores” was one of the fruits of the voyages. Copies of the charts survive thanks to the fact that they were reproduced in a printed work of 1621. Like European charts of the same period, they are diagrams of sailing directions rather than attempts at scale mapping. Tracks annotated with compass bearings show the routes between major ports and represent in visual form the sailing directions Zheng He recorded, all of which have the form “Follow such-and-such a bearing for such-and-such a number of watches.” Each port is marked with its latitude according to the elevation of the Pole Star above the horizon, which Zheng He verified by means of “guiding star-boards”—ebony strips of various breadths held at a fixed distance from the observer’s face to fill the space exactly between the star and the horizon.