The Treasures Ships. Ming China on the seas: history of the Fleet that could conquer the world and vanished into thin air E-Book

Stefano Cariolato

• Herausgeber: Youcanprint
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In 1400 an immense Chinese fleet of hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men sailed through the seas, reaching Indonesia, India, Persia, Arabia and Africa: sent by a proud emperor to bring to the world the glory and the power of the Ming, was commanded by the most famous of the Chinese admirals, an eunuch named Zheng He. The ships carried valuable books, precious fabrics, delicate and beautiful ceramics, in addition to gold and silver destined for the princes of the visited countries, and were taking back in China exotic merchandise to show at court with the ambassadors of the Asian world who prostrated themselves in submission: for this reason they were called Treasures Ships. The history and descriptions of the peoples met are presented based on the news collected by previous and following travellers, as well as by the chroniclers who followed the fleet leaving a testimony of the voyages that had been accomplished. Despite the fact that the surviving information is very limited, this book narrates the missions of the Fleet of the Treasures between 1405 and 1433, attempting to reconstruct the routes likely to have been followed on the basis of the sea and wind conditions, phased by the monsoon cycle and detected today with precision by the satellites. After a thirty-year long endeavour the Chinese retired from the sea, cancelled the travels reports, destroyed the ships renouncing to sail and remained helpless in face of the penetration of European Navies before and of the Japanese aggression afterward. Today, China is currently rebuilding a large fleet that is already carrying its weight in home and neighbouring waters and its flag in the oceans, retracing the endeavour accomplished 600 years ago.

Leseprobe

Document Outline

The Ships of Treasures

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

CHINA AT THAT EPOCH

The beginning of the Ming

The achievements of Hong Wu

The Confucian concept

The structure of power

The Chinese economy and the tribute system

Science, technology, culture

Chinese foreign policy

ZHENG'S EARLY YEARS

The origins

The capture and servitude

THE NEW EMPEROR

The end of the reign of Hong Wu

The civil war

The new reign of Yong Le

Ma Sanbao becomes Zheng He

THE TRAVELS AND THEIR MOTIVATIONS

Perpetual happiness

The foreign policy of Yong Le

The role of eunuchs in the Ming diplomacy

The purpose of the fleet

The investiture of Zheng He

THE SHIPS

The creation of the Fleet

The size of the Chinese ships

The Shipbuilding

The types of ships that made up the fleet

The navigation tools

CHINA ON THE SEA

The Indian Ocean

The Chinese navy

The places

The routes

The key players

The witnesses

Prologue to the journeys

THE FIRST VOYAGE, FALL 1405 - FALL 1407

Champa, Vietnam

Surabaya and Sunda, Java

Palembang, Sumatra

Melaka, Malacca

Semudera and Lambri, Sumatra

Ceylon

Quilon, Cochin and Calicut, India

The Voyage

THE SECOND VOYAGE, WINTER 1408 - SUMMER 1409

The Siam

Temasek (Singapore)

Aru

Kayal

The phantom voyage

The second mission

The second journey to India

Return home

THE THIRD VOYAGE, FALL 1409 - SUMMER 1411

The trilingual inscription

A delicate situation

The relic of the Buddha

The Chinese intervention

Return to China

THE FOURTH VOYAGE, WINTER 1413 - SUMMER 1415

The journey begins

Expedition to Maldives

The Arab navigators

The Persian Gulf

The Oman Gulf

The Arabian sea

The Indian coasts

The travel to Hormuz

Hormuz

The Silk Road

Return to India

Civil war in Semudera

The envoys crisscrossing

THE FIFTH VOYAGE, WINTER 1417 - SUMMER 1419

The new routes

Kannur

The Arab coast

Qalhat

Zufar, Dhofar

Lasa

Aden

The African coast during XV century

The Swahili civilization

Toward Africa

Zeila and Berbera

Mogadishu, Barawa and Jubu

Pate, Malindi and Mombasa

Zanzibar and Kilwa

Sofala, Mapungubwe and Grand Zimbabwe

The travel to the South

THE SIXTH TRAVEL, AUTUMN 1421 - SUMMER 1422

A lesser trip

Transoceanic routes

The three squads are on their way

Return of the Fleet

A REST BREAK: HONG XI

The new Emperor

The Fleet's enemies

Zheng He in Nanjing

An unexpected event

A NEW TRAVEL, WINTER 1431 - SUMMER 1433

The Xuan De Emperor

A difficult start

The last voyage

Towards the Western Ocean

The Mamluk report

Sail to the South

Hung Pao toward Bengal

Zheng He toward Hormuz

Towards the Maldives, Africa and Arabia

Expedition to Mecca

Final repatriation

Zheng He death

Xuan De death

THE END OF EVERYTHING

The Child Emperor

The Fleet decommissioning

The Mongol captivity

The Fleet and the Wall

THE ZHENG HE LEGACY

Tianfei, the Celestial Bride

Chinese Islam in Indonesia

The worship of Zheng He

The destruction of documents

THE CONSEQUENCES

A century later

The Portuguese reach China

The last Fleet

WHAT IF ?

Chinese in Australia

Chinese in the Atlantic

Chinese in America

Alternative History

THE FLEET RETURN

The Senkaku - Diaoyu Islands

The Spratly Islands

The Malacca Straits

The Indian Ocean

The New Silk Roads

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND THANKS

INSCRIPTION ON FUJIAN STELE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Treasures Ships

STEFANO CARIOLATO

Ming China on the seas: history of the Fleet that

could conquer the world and vanished into thin air

Ebook Edition

to Roberta

PREFACE

The intent of this book is to tell the history of the Chinese Treasures Ships and their extraordinary ocean missions, integrating unfortunately scarce documentary information with widely known data on sea conditions and the prevailing winds in each season and in each sea area.

Many historians, especially in recent decades, have examined and described this fundamental story, making obvious reference to all possible and regrettably scant available sources, but rarely they have verified them, in their possible interpretation, with the actual conditions of winds and currents in various periods, so important in seas subject to strong seasonal variations caused by the monsoon cycle. This work instead, in addition to simply telling the development of carried out journeys, compare their implementation with the actual weather conditions during the corresponding period, reaching to confirm and sometimes exclude historical hypotheses unluckily remained unclear due to the complete loss of logbooks and original chronicle of the Chinese fleet.

Obviously, the end result of this search is not intended and can not be an exact historical reconstruction, but simply the attempt to re-propose a chronicle compatible with the real conditions of navigation in those seas: certainly not aiming to identify an impossible historical accuracy but at least of further limiting the range of possible hypotheses and provide a basis for a plausible narrative of the fleet's journeys.

We will see that the abandonment of ocean missions by the Chinese, with the surrender of a deep-sea fleet and the consequent dissolution of the operational experience and shipbuilding capability, later exposed the country to a centuries-long period of weakness during the European colonial expansion, followed by the Japanese aggression, so finally generating immense human costs: China learned that the experience is the hardest teacher, before you do the exam then it explains to you the lesson.

This story is now topical again because China has now changed its maritime strategy from pure protection of coastal waters to a broader presence in every ocean, witnessed by the current frictions caused by China's desire to appropriate the domain of the South China Sea and its islands, as well as by the recent manoeuvres in the Mediterranean in collaboration with the Russian Fleet. It's very likely that military directives issued to the Chinese fleet and its future areas of influence may follow what has already been done 600 years ago, and the knowledge of past history can help in anticipating of what awaits us in the coming years.

Like all of the Orient history books this too must necessarily bring dates now buried, distant places and characters sometimes with unpronounceable names, thus risking to make less fluent the account and weigh down the reading, but this should not discourage because, for reasons later clarified, these historiographical data, although interesting, lose their importance facing the global value of Zheng He's fleet adventure. The exact dates are not in fact, with few exceptions, neither known nor reconstructed beyond a certain degree of approximation, the places are sometimes known but often undetected, as for the protagonists then it is important their historical role and not the name by which the Chinese identified them. This book does not want nor can be, given the particular circumstances, a detailed history, but rather the fresco of a particular historical moment and of an exceptional daring enterprise that might also have changed the world we live in. If the reader gets tired must not repent of neglecting dates, places and characters encountered, but simply continue to grasp the overall meaning of the story of the Treasures Ships. *

The reason we do not know the historical data? Because they have been deleted. And who did it? But the Chinese, of course.

* As the author is not an English mother tongue, the text may sometime have a weird taste to you, bound to raise a few eyebrows and to think " With the greatest respect .....".

So the author begs your pardon for possible mistakes and, counting on your good will, hopes that it be at least understandable and possibly clear, what was his true target.

Thanks

INTRODUCTION

We have traversed more than one hundred thousand li of immense water spaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising sky-high, 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 falling star, traversing those savage waves as if we were treading a public thoroughfare. *

- Stele erected by Zheng He, Changle, Fujian, 1432

A man has left us these words, and we perceive both the immensity and power of the ocean and the pride and determination of a fleet running through it effortlessly. This man was Zheng He, the Chinese admiral who in the 15th century accomplished seven long trips in the Indian Ocean, arriving in India, Persia, Arabia and Africa. Its fleet was huge, consisting of hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men, built precisely in order to communicate to the world the power of China and the will of the Ming Dynasty.

Colossal ships destined to the Chinese emperor’s delegates were part of the fleet, carrying gifts and precious merchandise to the visited countries and were therefore called the Treasures Ships.

In the first half of the fifteenth century, nearly a century before the European geographical discoveries, a large Chinese fleet crossed for thirty years the Indian Ocean, from China to Africa and Arabia, establishing a sort of Chinese naval hegemony in those seas. It's been 600 years since then, but only recently these endeavours have got out from the circle of historians of the Far East, both at home and elsewhere. Especially in China, until recently, Zheng He was forgotten, first because the Celestial Empire had exercised its great refusal to open up to the world, erasing almost all of its memory, then because the communist regime was determined to bury the past to impose his new vision of society and history.

Today things have changed, China has begun to dig into its history to recover the sense of its great past. In 2005 China celebrated the six-hundredth anniversary of the first voyage of Zheng He, carried out 87 years before Columbus's voyage to America. A colossal undertaking which stands as an isolated mountain in the Chinese history. But in 1435 China took the historic and unfortunate decision not to continue any more such naval expeditions, in fact it was forbidden to build ships capable of facing ocean voyages and even to exercise offshore fishing, and all the ships of the fleet were dismantled. Reports and log records regarding the ocean voyages undertaken were also deleted. A real "damnatio memoriae". This position of absolute rejection towards the sea voyages was then maintained by successive Chinese dynasties: it was therefore not just a temporary decision due to economic difficulties or disagreements on foreign policy, it was instead an almost philosophical stance on the attitude to be taken toward the outside world. China, therefore, locked up in its own territory going back to its traditional and proud isolationism and to a foreign policy of only terrestrial conception. Less than a century after the Europeans were exploring the rest of the world in search of new trade routes, colonizing vast territories and creating huge colonial empires.

Only to the end of the nineteenth century Chinese people had to accept the sad and shocking truth that they were no longer the centre of the world, as they had always believed, firmly, for thousands of years, but they had indeed to suffer the siege of the western European colonialism, the territorial concessions, the opium wars and finally the Japanese invasion. The historical continuity of their empire gave rise to the belief that the past was the master of both the present and the future, so the consequent blind faith in the tradition ended up betraying them.

Obviously, we can not know what would have been the chain of historical events if China had continued the overseas expeditions or at least had maintained an ocean fleet able to defend it, but surely the Westerners would have found an obstacle to their expansion and a bulwark against their aggression. For this reason both the maritime enterprises of Zheng He and their subsequent sentencing are an exceptional turning point in the history of the Celestial Empire, and that is what this book aims to tell . **

* 100,000 li equal 50,000 kilometres or 30,000 miles (1)

** The reader who wants to learn more will find in the notes to each chapter the required references. Sometimes are reported the Internet address (URL) of the reference, but please note that these can change in time. Please also note that the display of the book in digital format and its quality depend heavily either on the used device and the reading software, and that their characteristics, if unsuitable, can result in significant effects; for example, tables inserted in the text may or may not show correctly, and the same thing can be said of the images. It is therefore recommended to choose the best software, specialized for playing this digital format (EPUB).

NOTES

1) Chinese medieval Units:Since there was no common standard the measurement units ranged not only in time but also between the different provinces, including money; previous conversions must therefore be interpreted as approximate.

CHINA AT THAT EPOCH

The beginning of the Ming

In 1211 Temujin, later known as Genghis Khan, attacked the North-East China then ruled by the Jin Dynasty, conquering and plundering the capital of Yanjing (now Beijing) in 1215: perhaps this great historical upheaval was caused by the medieval warm period that ignited the expansion of the Mongolian population, followed by the successive temperature’s drop and by the resulting famine, masterfully exploited by Temujin's personality. The expansion to the South and West of the Mongol Empire continued after the death of Genghis until 1279 with the fall of the Chinese Southern Song Dynasty, when the conquerors of a China by then unified began to govern as the Yuan Dynasty. The Mongols, the temperament of which was more aggressive and pragmatic than the Chinese one, concretized their influence on the history of China through increased militarization of the country and greater social mobility, facilitated by the development of trade, of a new merchant class and culture of the popular strata.

The Mongols ruled China substantially not as their homeland but as a country occupied by a colonial power: in fact, not only all military and government positions were the preserve of the Mongols, but the Chinese were even banned from any public office, so as to make them discriminated in their own country even compared to foreigners. As a matter of fact the Mongols had divided the population into four distinct hierarchical categories, obviously placing themselves to the top of the pyramid of power and opportunities, regardless of the specific personal characteristics such as wealth or talent; then followed the foreigners like the Muslims or the Nestorian Christians, then the Chinese of the Northern Jin Dynasty who had surrendered, and finally the Southern Han of the Song Dynasty that for more than sixty years had resisted the invasion gaining a pariah position at home.

When in the fourteenth century the Mongol power began to weaken, partly because of the terrible plague that claimed millions of lives in Asia, Africa and Europe, the militaristic culture that they had injected in the Chinese society turned against them, leading to the creation of regional militias by dissident leaders, blandly fronted by a central power now corrupt and undermined by internal rivalries. In 1351 in fact an immense and disastrous flood reduced to despair hundreds of thousands of peasants already affected by the plague, the same pandemic that killed over the same period a third of Europeans, leading them to open rebellion against the central government and giving dissidents the manoeuvring mass and the popular support that could tip the scales in their favour. Then followed almost twenty years of riots and secessions that shattered the country and its economy, often captained by lower classes leaders, one of whom was finally able to gain the upper hand and decreed the end of the Mongol power in China: his name was Zhu Yuanzhang.

The extraordinary story of this man took him from abject poverty to the glories of the empire and the founding of a new dynasty: born to a peasant family in the Northwest of China, at seventeen he was orphaned of parents and found refuge in the Buddhist monastery of Hoangkiosé as a novice, where he grew up and studied. A period of three years during which he wandered as a beggar monk made him know the real situation of misery of the population, something that he did not forget later when he was at the head of the Empire. As a young adult, he abandoned the religious life to join the Hongjin (Red Turbans) militias of one of the dissident leaders who were fighting the Mongol army, distinguishing himself for the military ability and gathering under his command ever greater forces, of which eventually became the absolute leader.

In 1368, after having unified the various provinces, on September 14 the forces of Zhu invested the capital of the Mongol Dynasty Dadu (today's Beijing), the last Yuan Emperor fled and the winner proclaimed himself Emperor in turn, taking the name of Hong Wu (Big and Valiant). *

Thus the dynasty of Mongol origin collapsed, replaced by the Ming dynasty, which means Splendour: the consolidation of the new Chinese Empire occupied Hong Wu for another thirty years, bringing the Chinese armies to fight in the north to Mongolia, East to Manchuria, to the West in Central Asia almost to the Baikal lake, and South to the borders of Burma and Vietnam. The rebellion led by Hong Wu was the beginning of the heyday of Chinese civilisation, regarded by historians as one of the greatest eras of sensible government, vigorous economic development and greater social stability. The Ming Dynasty re-established also the influence and prestige of China abroad, both to the immediately bordering satellite states that recognised its authority, and to the more distant powers that exchanged with the Ming Emperors gifts and ambassadors.