88 China in World History
the Confucian model of a great emperor. He had scholars prepare the
defi nitive edition of The Four Books (Analects,Mencius,Doctrine of
the Mean, and The Great Learning), as interpreted by Zhu Xi, for use
in the civil service examinations. He also commissioned the compilation
of all known works in Chinese into the massive Yongle Encyclopedia,
which had 22,000 chapters and fi fty million words—the largest work of
its kind in the fi fteenth century.
The Yongle Emperor led fi ve military campaigns into Mongolia to
prevent any powerful federation of Mongols from threatening China. He
rebuilt the Grand Canal, and late in his reign he built a magnifi cent new
capital (with three massive concentric walls) in Beiping, now renamed Bei-
jing, “Northern Capital.” He designed the awesome Imperial Palace in the
heart of Beijing. Its large courtyards between massive ceremonial halls on
raised marble platforms comprised the Outer Court, where the emperor
met with his offi cials and attended to his public duties. To the north of
these were smaller buildings and courtyards, the Inner Court, where the
emperor lived with his many servants and consorts. With some 9,000
rooms, the entire complex extended for 961 meters from north to south
and 753 meters from east to west. The Ming and Qing emperors lived in
this large complex, known as the Forbidden City, from 1421 to 1911.
The most unusual undertaking of Emperor Yongle was to commis-
sion Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch admiral, to assemble the largest naval
fl eet the world had ever seen, or would see for the next fi ve hundred
years. In 1405, Zheng He led a fl eet of 62 large “treasure ships” and 225
smaller ships carrying 28,000 men southward around Vietnam through
the Indonesian archipelago and into the Indian Ocean as far as Ceylon
(today’s Sri Lanka) and the southern coast of India. Some of these trea-
sure ships were 400 feet long and 160 feet wide, about ten times the size
of the ships Columbus used to sail to the New World almost a century
later. From 1405 to 1433, Admiral Zheng led seven such expeditions, all
of a similar size, and some as far as the Arabian Peninsula and the east
coast of Africa. The Yongle Emperor claimed that the missions were to
fi nd the young emperor he had deposed, as there had long been rumors
that he had escaped when his palace was burned in 1402. But the main
reason was to display the power of this new Ming dynasty and to solicit
more tributary states to recognize and send tribute to the Ming court.
Admiral Zheng He presented foreign rulers with Chinese luxury
goods like silks and porcelains as well as everyday goods such as clothes,
calendars, books, and Chinese money. The foreign rulers presented
Zheng He in return with luxury goods from their own country, and in
the case of Africa, with such rare animals as giraffes, zebras, lions, tigers,