well-traveled monsoonal pathways of trade with which the Chinese had long been
familiar. China’s maritime career had really commenced centuries earlier, when
the Song dynasty moved south and the Chinese began to link themselves to the
wider South China Sea trading world, which extended southward to Indonesia
and westward into the Indian Ocean.
Zheng did not seek to conquer, colonize, or convert on behalf of his govern-
ment. His was at least ostensibly a mission of persuasion, of demonstrating
totheworldthepowerandwealthofChinaandconvincingitofChina’s
moralauthority.InaspeechatHarvardinNovember1997,PresidentJiang
Zemin lauded Zheng He as a disseminator of Chinese culture abroad. This was
consonant with the Confucian ideal, and casting Zheng He as a player of that
irenic role is a way of looking at the past that many Chinese favor today.
But the reality is something else. China’s near neighbors would certainly
argue any assertion that the Chinese are a uniquely pacifistic people. The Yong
Le emperor’s maritime ambitions bear comparison with, for example, his expan-
sive continental policies against Vietnam, where he waged a twenty-year war.
Zheng He’s policy was implicitly one of force. Beneath any moral gloss, his
immensely powerful fleets formed what today would be called an oceanic strike
force.
The Grand Director’s ships were quite ready to shoot their fire weapons if
ordered to do so. Their complement was made up overwhelmingly of fighting
men, not merchants or priests. The number of military aboard, as Robert Finlay
points out, was larger than the entire male population of almost all of the
individual seaports the fleet would visit after leaving the Chinese coast. Zheng
He’s 28,000 men numbered more than the entire army of France at the time;
his fleets were far more formidable than any of the Portuguese fleets that entered
the same Indian Ocean waters a century later.
The objective of the enterprising, pugnacious emperor who caused the ships
to be launched and ordered them to sail was to bring more nations into the
tributary system, using the ocean to enlarge China’s international sphere of
influence—thus reinforcing what the Chinese perceived as a proper relationship
between China and the inferior world outside.
The larger ships, called treasure ships, were built on the banks of a tributary
of the Yangzi at the city of Nanjing, then the nation’s capital. And they were
monsters, probably the largest wooden ships ever built anywhere. They were
not junks but flat-bottomed and of shallow draft. Edward Dreyer likens them
to great barges. They had immense capacity, but they could not have been suffi-
ciently seaworthy to weather the rough oceanic waters of large parts of the world
ocean, such as the stormy North Atlantic from whence Europeans first came by
sea to Pacific Asia.
The great Ming expeditions ended abruptly and without consequence and
therefore may seem a magnificent failure. But they were not as isolated and exotic30 Asia Looks Seaward