Dan Snow's History Hit - Zheng He: The Ming Dynasty Explorer

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

The Ming Dynasty emerged in the second half of the 14th century, having achieved a hard-won victory over the declining Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. Admiral Zheng He, a Muslim of Mongol descent, was born into this turmoil in a far-flung, frontier province of the Ming empire. Yet by the early 15th century, he had been made the commander-in-chief of some of the most extravagant and far-reaching naval voyages in history. How did a Muslim eunuch ascend to a position of such power in the Ming court? Where did these vast voyages take him, and how is he considered in China today? Dan is joined by Craig Clunas, Professor of the History of Art at the University of Oxford and an expert on the Ming Dynasty, to answer these questions, and more.Produced by James Hickmann. Edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got some naval history for you today, one of the greatest bits of maritime history of all time. I'm obsessed with this story and it does not originate in the dockyards of Portsmouth or even Chesapeake Bay, but in China. The Ming Dynasty emerged from the total carnage, the wreckage of the Mongol Empire in China in the late 14th century, a peasant who rose to become a warlord and their emperor. And having established themselves in China, they looked to the rest of the world. The third Ming emperor sent a series of expeditions out into Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. They were led by a man called Zheng He, a Muslim who'd been born a peasant in southwest China, a long way from the sea.

He'd been captured, he'd been castrated, he became a eunuch, and he fought in the vicious civil wars of the late 14th century. He was the man selected to lead these gigantic expeditions, Zheng He, one of the greatest mariners of all time. Several decades before Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic to the New World, He took enormous armadas with ships several times bigger, heavier, and wider than Columbus's ships. He visited as far away as the Middle East and the east coast of Africa, even Zanzibar. On board his fleet were tens of thousands of sailors, scientists, astrologers, engineers. They were extraordinary in their scale and their ambition. To tell us why they happened, why they came to an end, and why China did not go on to dominate the Indian Ocean and South Asia in the 16th and 17th centuries in the way the

European powers were allowed to do, I've got Craig Clunas. He is a professor of the history of art at Trinity College, University of Oxford. His work focuses on the Ming, and he is going to tell us all about these extraordinary voyages and what they mean today. Enjoy. Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Craig, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me.

Tell me about the rise of the Ming. So the Ming dynasty in China, one of China's great historic dynasties, is the name of the power that arises on the ruins of the Mongol Empire. So if we go back to the 13th century, the era of Genghis Khan, this vast empire that stretches across Eurasia, people might have heard of Kublai Khan, who's not mythical. He's very much a real person. But that, by the middle of the 14th century, was beginning to collapse in China into warlordism, regional powers fighting between various factions at court. And a very extraordinary man called Zhu Yuanzhang, who comes from the lowest stratum of Chinese

society. He really is a peasant. He's probably illiterate as a youth. He spent time as a monk, as a Buddhist monk. And he is one of the warlords who is fighting for domination of China in the middle of the 14th century. And he's the man who comes out on top of this period of violent multi-party civil war. And in 1368, he establishes himself as the first emperor of the Ming dynasty. Ming isn't a personal name. It means bright or lightness or shining. It's the name of the state which comes into being. And the Ming dynasty is ruled by his direct descendants from 1368 down to 1644, when China or the Ming empire is overrun by the Manchus, the people from Northeast Asia. And you've got the Qing dynasty, which is the last

of the imperial dynasties. And at the 17th century, that was another brutal period of warlordism and nastiness, which we could cover in a different podcast. Tell me about the Yongle Emperor, because his rise to power is pretty brutal, isn't it? It is, it is. So the Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, the first emperor, his intention is to leave the imperial throne to his eldest son. But that son dies before his father. So he then passes the succession to his grandson, that first son's son. So when he, the Ming founder, dies in 1398, that grandson assumes the imperial throne as the Gen 1 emperor. But, and this is where it all gets a bit kind of Game of Thrones, he has uncles. So as well as the firstborn son of the Ming founder, there are other sons. And one of them, probably the most

forceful and one of the most militarily experienced of them is a man called Zhu Di, who is Prince of Yan. He has been established in what was the Mongol imperial capital, the city that is now Beijing, because the first Ming capital wasn't in Beijing. It was in a city in the south of China, which we now know as Nanjing. And this uncle of the new emperor decides that he wants the throne for himself. And so he launches this assault on his nephew, which is really a four-year civil war. It's an enormously long and protracted event because the new emperor has other people on his side. He has members of the imperial family.

He has generals. He has armies who are willing to fight for him. So it's a very bloody and brutal and violent event over four years, which in 1402 ends with the conquest of the imperial capital of Nanjing. Nanjing is sacked. The imperial palace goes up in flames. The emperor disappears. It's almost certainly the case that he just perishes in the general mayhem, although there are lots and lots of myths about what becomes of him, that he's vanished somehow and might reappear. And the new emperor, Zhu Di, establishes himself in the capital Nanjing, and he establishes a new reign period. So what Chinese

emperors do is they give their reign a name, a title. And he gives his new reign, 1402, the title Yongle, which means something like perpetual joy or eternal happiness or something like that. And he rules, he's the third emperor, in fact, of the Ming dynasty. But essentially what he does is completely rewrite history so that his nephew's reign just never happened. As far as he's concerned, he is the direct heir of his father, the Ming founder. And the four years of the Gen 1 reign, they are written out of history. They didn't take place. There was never any such person. I am now the rightful emperor. And now why does this new rightful emperor who's trying to write his nephew out of the history

books, why does he embark on this extraordinary maritime, well, a series of extraordinary maritime expeditions. Yes. Well, of course, one of the explanations lies in the events that we've just been talking about, which is that there's a problem about his legitimacy. Because although he's rewritten the history books, everybody knows what happened. I mean, everybody who's around at the time knows what happened. He's certainly prepared to exterminate anyone who does not buy his version of events. But of course, one of the potential audiences for his version of events are those states outside China, Southeast Asia, into the Indian Ocean, with which China has always had some degree of contact. And of course, one of the signs of legitimacy for a Chinese emperor at this period is that lesser powers acknowledge you as the son of heaven, as the center of a kind of socio-cosmic order, that the world kind of revolves around you. So one explanation for this extraordinary and indeed unprecedented series of imperial voyages is to kind of impress on the rest of

the world, well, here I am, I'm in charge now, I'm the son of heaven, the mandate of heaven, the higher powers of the cosmos support me. You need to kind of acknowledge that. You need to acknowledge my supremacy. You need to engage in the kinds of ritual submission and ritual exchanges with me that mark me out as a legitimate emperor. That's one of the explanations. People have been wondering this, of course, through Chinese history. And one of the almost certainly completely implausible, but one of the ideas which keeps floating up through Chinese history is that he's looking for his nephew, that the Jianwen emperor has escaped somehow from the burning palace and is out there somewhere. It's certainly not true, but it remains a very powerful idea throughout Chinese history. There may be economic interests as well. One of the things that these voyagers do do is bring back particularly luxury goods for the imperial court and the ability to kind of marshal the luxuries of the entire world, gems and gold and rare animals and so on,

of the entire world, gems and gold and rare animals and so on, in your service, that again is one of the signs of being a true emperor. So I think like a lot of things, it probably has more than one reason. There's not just going to be one single cause. And who's the chosen instrument for this exploring? So the chosen instrument for this is, again, an extraordinary man called Zheng He. Zheng He was a eunuch, and that is a castrated male. Eunuchs have existed in China for thousands of years by this point, and they are particularly associated with close personal service to emperors. Of course, one of the ideas about eunuchs, and a number of civilizations have used them, is that as castrated males, they are the safest guards for the women of the imperial

family. But eunuchs are used for all kinds of other purposes. They, of course, they don't have any progeny of their own. They don't have any children of their own. So the idea is that, again, their loyalty is unshakable. And Zheng He, he came from the extreme southwest of China, from what is now Yunnan province. His family were Muslims. They probably originally came from Bukhara, which is now in Uzbekistan, because in the period of the Mongol hegemony, there's a great deal of personnel exchange back and forwards across Eurasia. China at that point under the Mongols is more in touch with the Islamic world than it has been at other points. So Zheng He is captured as a small boy. He's castrated, horrible, cruel, but this gives him the possibility of ascending in imperial service. And he becomes a servant early on in his life of Judea, the future emperor, when he is still

Prince of Yen. And he fights in the civil war on the emperor's side. So this is somebody that the emperor knows he can trust and somebody who's got a proven track record as a leader of men, as a military leader, as a decisive figure. And so he's the choice for this extraordinary series of voyages into the oceans. I've just been reading David Abelathia's History of the Sea, and we should say it's not quite like Christopher Columbus is heading out to the middle of nowhere on a wing and a prayer. There were quite established networks of trade and diplomacy stretching right. The Indian Ocean, the world of the South China Sea was more coherent, more connected than the Atlantic world

at the time. That's absolutely right. The Zheng He voyages, these are not voyages of discovery or exploration or boldly going where no one has gone before. China has been trading into the Indian Ocean for centuries and centuries. And he knew where he was going. They're tapping into existing trade routes, and they're joining up existing trade routes. So there are places in Southeast Asia on Sumatra and Java and so on, which form the hinges between bodies of trading networks. So by making, in some of the later voyages, voyages as far as the coast of Africa, that is something new. But people had been sailing to Sumatra and Java, and then people had been sailing from Sumatra to Africa. So you're quite right. Zheng He is not an explorer. He knows where he's

going. The people he has with him who are navigating these ships, they know these routes. They know these seas. They know the winds. They know what they're doing and where they're going. And they have a pretty good idea, I suspect, of what they might find there. What is unusual about these voyages is the scale of them and the scope and the number of ships and the number of heavily armed men involved. These have been trade routes, but they have never been routes that have seen

great armadas of armed men coming from China before. That's something new. Right, Craig, you got that. That was going to be my next question. So tell me, why do we remember these and regard them as some of the most extraordinary maritime expeditions of all time? Tell me about the scale, the size of the ships, apart from anything else, and the number of them. Well, they are very big expeditions. There's a whole academic sub-industry in kind of arguing about the size of these ships. And I'm not a naval archaeology or kind of naval architecture specialist. The ships were very big. It now

seems that they're maybe not quite as big as some of the written Chinese sources give them, but they were very big. So the biggest of the ships, the so-called Baochuan, which are the treasure ships, which are the kind of flagships of the fleet, the best estimate from people like Sally Church, who've really kind of looked into this and thought about it, is that they were 250 feet long. And as a comparison that people might be able to grasp, if you've been to Portsmouth and seen the Victory, a top-rated British naval warship of the 18th century, the Victory, I believe, is 186 feet long. So a 250 foot long ship is a good deal bigger than that. And there are more than one of them. People are pretty confident. Not all the ships were that big.

So we're talking about fleets of ships that have these great flagships in the middle and troop carriers of all kinds. But they carry very substantial military forces. So they're forces of kind of 25, 36, 27,000 men. The aim is absolute kind of shock and awe that where these fleets show up, you are meant to be overawed by the scale and the power and the majesty that they could deploy against you. And therefore, it's not a good idea to think about standing up against them. And indeed, the few people who try are quite quickly overwhelmed, because these are not all so peaceful trading voyages. They are very much about overawing the Southeast Asian and Indian Ocean worlds with the power of the Ming emperor.

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There are seven of them. They extend initially into Southeast Asia in 1404, 08, 09. By the 20s, they're going to Africa. They're going to what we now call the Red Sea, the Arabia. It is just extraordinary, the scale of it. It is amazing. Again, these are routes. So of course, they touch Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is connected to India. They go to India. India is connected very extensively by trade networks to the Persian Gulf and to the east coast of Africa. But to do this in one go, so the first trip to Africa is actually the fifth voyage, which is 14, 17 to 19. They're usually away for about two years because, of course, these are sailing ships. They're dependent on monsoon winds. You can only sail in one direction in one season and then another direction in another. So they have to take up years doing this. But yes, they do reach,

you know, remarkably distant parts of the world. Zhang He himself probably doesn't reach the Persian Gulf or Mecca. I mean, remember, he was a Muslim and indeed quite a lot of the high command or the high officers in the fleet will have been Muslims of one variety or another. And so a side trip to Mecca, to the holy city of Islam, forms part of one of the very last voyages. But yes, they touch Bengal, they touch Java, they touch a whole number of port cities in southern India, Kerala, Sri Lanka, and of course, Africa, the Persian Gulf, as you say. They go to what is now Somalia, Mogadishu, Zanzibar. They bring back the animals I always think

must be extraordinary. How do they, imagine transporting those camels, those rhinos all the way back from there to China. Yeah, we're not quite sure. We're surer about giraffes than we are about rhinos, because the seventh and the last mission brings back a giraffe. It's not the first giraffe that the imperial court have ever seen. In fact, the first giraffe that the imperial court have ever seen comes to China in 1414. And it's a gift from the Sultan of Bengal. Now, of course,

giraffes don't live in Bengal. And that reminds us that, you know, the Chinese have these connections, but other people have these connections too. So the Sultan of Bengal could get hold of giraffes from Africa. But as you say, how you keep a giraffe alive, of course, there are a lot of things we don't know about the jungle of voyages. And one of the things we have absolutely no idea about is how many kind of unfortunately dead giraffes or lions or whatever they had to heave over the side of the ship on the way home. You know, we only know about the ones that made it. We don't know about the ones that didn't make it. Why do they come to an end? And of course, they come to an end now at what looks like such a poignant time, because you've got Bartholomew Diaz, the Portuguese, literally entering the Indian Ocean, almost high-fiving each other as the Chinese leave. Why do the Chinese retreat

from these and don't build the kind of European trading and then colonial empire that does emerge shortly after that? Well, historians have argued about this kind of at least since the beginning of the 20th century. In the early 20th century, when China is being kind of bullied about by Western imperialist powers, the Zheng He voyages are kind of seized on by intellectuals as, look, look what we used to be able to do. You know, we used to be able to do this kind of great thing. And that poignancy of, you know, we could have been number one. That becomes very strong from that point. So people are arguing about that. But it seems to me that in a way the voyages end because they don't need to go on, you know, because they've done what they need to do. The Yongle Emperor's grandson, the Yongle Emperor's son, he dies in 1421. His son becomes emperor. His son tries to

cancel the voyages, but dies very quickly just of natural causes. And then his son, emperor. His son tries to cancel the voyages, but dies very quickly, just of natural causes. And then his son, so the jungler emperor's grandson, comes to the throne. And he also faces a challenge from one of his uncles. One of his uncles tries to do to him what his grandfather had done, i.e. to shove the nephew off the throne. But he sees that challenge off very quickly, very immediately. He just stamps it down. The war is over before it's even started. And so he is completely secure in his throne. He does not feel that kind of need to justify himself to the wider world. And these things are extraordinarily costly, these voyages, at a time when the imperial state has plenty of other things it wants to spend money

on. So the Yongle Emperor, as well as these voyages, he had decided to move the entire imperial capital from Nanjing to Beijing and to build a whole new imperial city. He wants to reinstate the Grand Canal, which rebuilds the economy of China, which is a huge, huge, huge civil engineering project. There is the whole issue of kind of ongoing war with the Mongols. The Mongols may have been driven out of China, but they certainly haven't gone away. There's a war going on with Vietnam. There's an ongoing attempt, failed attempt by the Chinese to kind of incorporate Vietnam into their empire. So you can imagine debates within the imperial ruling group about, you know, what are we going to spend our money on?

Even though we are, you know, an enormous empire with enormous wealth, there are limits. And what are our priorities? And actually, these voyages, they've done what they needed to do. You know, they were a success. So I think words like retreat, that's very much in hindsight. I think if you look at it from their point of view, they've been a success, they've done what they were meant to do and they just don't need to go on.

We could use 28,000 troops to do something else. And so the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia is sort of left, if you like, to these scrappy little Western Europeans who live on the peninsulas of the peninsulas of Eurasia, the Brits, the Cornish, the Devonians, the Portuguese, the Galicians. And it's often thought to be a very different kind of maritime power. What do they have in common? What's different about what the Europeans are doing and what the Chinese were doing here? Well, I think one thing that we want to remember is that at the same time as these great voyages, imperial voyages are taking place, this is also the period when there's huge emigration from China. The huge Chinese communities that live in Indonesia,

that live in Malaysia, in Vietnam, this is you know, in Vietnam. This is the period when they come. So in a way, commercially, the Chinese come to dominate that part of the world, really in a way which they continue to do right until the kind of period of high European empire in the 18th and 19th century. And although the Portuguese are establishing armed settlements on the edge of the Mughal empire, so they're not calling the shots at that point. It's much later on in the 18th and 19th centuries that empires like the Dutch and the British and the French start to really kind of control the politics or control the trade of the Indian Ocean. So there's another story, which is less dramatic, because it's done by

kind of, as it were, ordinary people, ordinary merchants. But that goes on, you know, that goes on through the 16th, 17th centuries, that Chinese ships are sailing these oceans, trading, making money out of these networks. One of the big differences is that a lot of these European seafarers, you know, a lot of them are essentially freelancers, even if they have the blessing of the state. They're doing it kind of off their own bat, on their own. And often they're using their own money. You know, I mean, Queen Elizabeth I, she's quite happy for Francis Drake and so on to sail off, but she's not going to put any money into these voyages. She's not going to pay for them.

So they have to be made to pay for themselves by piracy and the slave trade and all kinds of other things like that. Whereas the Zheng He voyages are very much state enterprises and therefore are more susceptible to the state deciding that it has other priorities and wants to spend its money somewhere else. Yes, well, thank you for correcting me about the sort of enduring nature of Chinese trade and links right across Southern Asia. What about Zheng He himself? What do we know about his end? We don't know very much about his end. I mean, one of the striking things about Zheng He himself? What do we know about his end? We don't know very much about his end. I mean, one of the striking things about Zheng He is we never hear his voice.

We don't have anything from him. We have accounts of the voyages which are written by people who were on the voyages, but he himself, he never writes anything. So kind of what he felt, what he thought, what he thought about what he was doing. He has a relatively, you know, perfectly distinguished career after the voyage's end. He's still an important unit figure at the imperial court. He's in charge of major construction projects. He's a significant figure. He dies of old age. He's buried in a tomb outside Nanjing. But in a way, he's a cipher, a blank. And of course, that has meant that throughout history, people have been able to project stuff onto him, you know, because we don't really know that much about him as a man. So the mythology that he's a huge, terrifying, ferocious giant of a man, we don't know that. We don't know anything about what he looked like.

We don't have any pictures of him. He anything about what he looked like. We don't have any pictures of him. He becomes a kind of deity later on, certainly to the Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. He's a kind of godlike figure. He's the subject of a very popular late Ming novel. You know, there's a novel about him and the marvelous adventures where he becomes a kind of mythical character who's fighting sea dragons and all kinds of things but it's because we don't really know very much about him that this kind of projection can be put on to him and as china seeks to build the world's largest navy over the next two decades i suspect we're going to be hearing and seeing a lot of idealized and sort of mythologized versions of Zheng He over the next few years.

Indeed, indeed. 2005, which was the anniversary of the 1405 mission, very big celebrations in China. You know, he's been on stamps. There are historical TV dramas about him. He's somebody that every primary school kid in China knows about now. So from years of having been a kind of mythical figure, he is very much part of the kind of usable historical past that the Chinese state now wishes its citizens to know about and to think about, even if they're more keen to portray this as a sort of, you know, our fleet is huge, but we come in peace is the message. And I'm not sure that that was exactly how it felt to people on the ground at the time in the 15th century. Craig, you've taught me a wonderful new expression, the usable past. I love that.

Politicians seeking a usable past. Craig, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Where can people learn more about your work and follow what you do? I'm on Twitter. There is stuff about the Ming exhibition on the British Museum website, the Ming exhibition about early Ming China, which happened at the British Museum in 2014 and included a number of artefacts associated with Zheng He, some of the tools from the shipyard in which his ships were made. And there'll be stuff about that still on the British Museum website. Wouldn't it be exciting? I always dreamed when I was on the beach in Kenya that I would find another one of those engraved sort of monuments that tell you that Zheng He had been there. Yeah, Zheng He was here. Yes, well, it's not utterly impossible. The great stele which tells

us that he was in Sri Lanka, that was being used as a bit of a road. It was discovered by accident in the 19th century. So, you know, the idea of another Zheng He inscription is not utterly beyond the bounds of possibility. I suspect Chinese archaeologists have already looked very hard for that because they have done a lot of work in East Africa. Africa, as we all know, is a very big place. So let's keep our fingers crossed. I'd be excited too. Wouldn't it be great? Thank you so much, Craig Klaus, for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me again. you