(^46) Chapter Two
waters of the Grand Canal, and the seagoing warships were allowed to
rot away without being replaced. Shipbuilding skills soon decayed,
and by the mid-sixteenth century the Chinese navy was unable to fend
off the pirates who became a growing nuisance along the China
coast.^47
This withdrawal was partly a result of bureaucratic infighting among
rival cliques of courtiers. Cheng Ho was a Moslem by birth, probably
of Mongol descent.^48 This gave a foreign flavor to his overseas ad
ventures; and Chinese Confucian officials grew to distrust things
foreign. He was also a eunuch, and eunuchs, too, came under attack in
the Ming court when one of them recklessly led an expedition against
the Mongols in 1449 and succeeded only in allowing the barbarians to
capture the emperor in person.^49 But this episode pointed to a more
fundamental reason for official abandonment of overseas ventures. A
formidable and feared enemy existed across the land frontier,
whereas, until the rise of “Japanese” piracy in the late fifteenth cen
tury, there was no rival on the seas whom the Chinese had to fear.
The issue, accordingly, became a choice between an offensive as
against a defensive military policy. In 1407 the Ming navy led an
expedition to Annam (modern Vietnam), but between 1420 and 1428
Chinese forces there met a series of reverses. A decision to withdraw
was finally made in 1428. Against this background the memorial to the
emperor, written in 1426 when the struggle in Annam was at a critical
stage, sounds strangely familiar to American ears:
Arms are the instruments of evil which the sage does not use
unless he must. The noble rulers and wise ministers of old did not
dissipate the strength of the people by deeds of arms. This was a
far-sighted policy.... Your minister hopes that your majesty...
would not indulge in military pursuits nor glorify the sending
of expeditions to distant countries. Abandon the barren lands
abroad and give the people of China a respite so that they could de
vote themselves to husbandry and the schools. Thus there would
be no wars and suffering on the frontier and no murmuring in the
villages, the commanders would not seek fame and the soldiers
- Lo Jung-pang, “The Decline of the Early Ming Navy,” pp. 149–68; Kuei-sheng
Chang, “The Maritime Scene in China at the Dawn of the Great European Discoveries,”
Journal of the American Oriental Society 94 (1974): 347–59. - Cf. John V. G. Mills, ed. and trans., Ma Huan, Ying-yai Sheng-ian: Overall
Survey of the Ocean’s Shores [1433] (Cambridge, 1970), Introduction. - For a detailed account of this ill-fated military enterprise see Fredrick W. Mote,
“The Tu-mu Incident of 1449,” in Kierman and Fairbank, Chinese Ways in Warfare, pp.
243–72.