Empire: World History - 107. China's Greatest Admiral: The Story of Zheng He

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

In the 15th century, Admiral Zheng He, on the orders of the Emperor of China, embarked upon a series of extraordinary voyages of exploration. These voyages were undertaken in fleets of up to 300 colossal ships, with tens of thousands of men, at great cost to the court of the Ming dynasty. Initially they went all over South-East Asia and finished in India, but as time went on they went further afield, going to Arabia and even reaching East Africa on the seventh and final voyage. Zheng He even brought back a giraffe. China looked set to become a great maritime power, with more advanced naval technology than anywhere else in the world - but Zheng He was mysteriously called home, further voyages were cancelled and all the records of the different expeditions cancelled. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Rana Mitter to discuss Zheng He in the first instalment of the Christmas miniseries on the Ships of Empire. For bonus episodes, ad-free listening, reading lists, book discounts, a weekly newsletter, and a chat community. Sign up at https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/ Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duripur. Yes, and you know what? This is the very first in our special mini-series over the Christ. Christmas period, we're very, very proud of this little idea because we're taking, hang on, hang on. You're all very proud of this idea.

Shut up, you're proud. Shut up and be proud. We're taking a little pause from the Persia experience because we wanted to bring you three ships of empire, three ships that have very broad and deep stories behind them, which tell you about the state of the world at the time. And today's is a very exciting. It's a very exciting. You haven't explained why you thought this was a good idea. Well, look, there is a Christmas Carol, which it has become vastly apparent. Nobody under the age of 40 knows, but we all know. It's the three ships. I know. I know, Cal, who is our incredibly and disgustingly young and talented producer, had no idea, just looked at us blankly.

But it is a Christmas carol. I saw three ships come sailing by on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day. And I think everybody should know this, but they do not. I saw three ships. There you go. Yeah, all that. Lovely. We could do harmonise as a bonus.

Do you know, Rana? You know that shit, I do. I saw three ships come saying, bye. We haven't introduced him. You've got a zombie voice suddenly coming in there from nowhere. He does this. He just wrecks the format every time. The special guest, we have got, we might as well introduce him.

We have heard him now. We are very, very lucky to have our very special guest, Professor Rana Mitter, who I'm just in all that we could grab you at this time of the year, Ron. Rana, thank you so much. We knew Rana Mitter when he wasn't even a doctor, never mind a professor. Okay. His stratospheric rise. I hasten to add not that kind of doctors, so if anyone needs any aspirins or broken bones

set, I cannot help. I'll tell you, I am getting a headache. Can we introduce him properly? Let's do that first, can we? Getting through right. Rana Mitter, S.T. Lee Chair in US-Asia relations at Harvard University, no less, was very recently at Oxford. We had to track you down to America.

Yeah, you can't blink, but Rana's got a new. University. And they get grander and grander by the second. It is, well, we are delighted. But you, the ship that we are starting this mini series off with is, well, it's really sort of around the voyages of a man. And I'm going to try and pronounce this correctly. And Rana, you leap in and correct me if I'm wrong. Is it Zhang Heur? Is that right? Jong He. John He, that's absolutely right. Yep, very good. Absolutely. Oh, it's a star for me. I should say that the first podcast series I think I ever listened to in its entirety was runners, one of which was on this very subject.

The wonderful Chinese characters. So if you get bored of us, highly recommend going to Chinese. What are you doing? What are you doing? Since you've brought it up, Willis, still available free for download on BBC sounds. Other podcasts are available. Oh my goodness. Oh, my goodness.

Can I just reiterate? Thank you, Willie. Okay. Shall we start? So first of all, before we talk about Zheng He, let's talk about the China that existed in the 15th century. I mean, it's the Ming dynasty. And most people all they know about Ming is the Vars or Flash Gordon's nemesis. But what is the Ming dynasty and what was it like?

Absolutely, Anita. Well, such a pleasure to be here with you, Anita and Willie. I've admired both of your work, both oral and literary, so to speak, over many years. And it's a huge pleasure to be here on your podcast. I also was very impressed by your attempt to try and impose order. I mean, William is a book, Willie is a guy who's written a book called The Anarchy Afterall. I think he's obviously trying to live through it. He's a bloody embodiment of the same, honestly.

I just have reminded of the first line of one of my favorite children's books, which was, say, is Emel and the Three Twins by Eric Kessner, which has in it the line, Order and All Things shouted Uncle Carl and smash the last of the plates against the wall. Having taken a moment to do that, Let's turn to the Ming dynasty. So let's just say a few words about the Ming itself, and then let's talk about the astonishing Admiral, Zheng He you've mentioned, who became such a major figure in the early 15th century in Ming Dynasty China. So the Ming Dynasty, first

all, it gets the dates in there, begins in 1368, and it ends in 1644. So it's a really good long chunk of time. And for those listening who may be more used to European history, it coincides really with what you might call the end of the medieval period, the beginning of the early modern period. But just coming out of what, the Mongol period, the whole, the Yuan. Yeah, in China. I'm just to give a sort of sense of parallel, you know, if people, for instance, you might think of the age of Elizabeth I first, that was the end of the Ming dynasty as far as the Chinese were concerned. The Ming emerged essentially from a rebellion, a peasant rebel, essentially, from the countryside, a man named Zhu Yuan Zhang, was exceedingly dissatisfied with,

the, as he saw it, crumbling state of the existing dynasty, the yuan, the word yuan means primal or originary or first. And this was the dynasty essentially established as part of the Mongol Empire, which had existed really for well over a hundred years. When Marco Polo goes to China, he meets Kubla Khan, who is one of the Yuan dynasty emperors. It very much does, indeed. And it was part also of a wider Mongol Khanate, as you might call it. In other words, a wider Mongol emperor of which the territory which we now think of as China was one very important part, but just one part. And one of the things that makes Jiuang's rebellion against the Yuan dynasty, the Mongol dynasty, so notable, is that he does so almost in the name of restoring China.

In other words, the idea of a much more culturally Chinese empire that is established under his name. The word Ming can mean lots of things, but bright is the usual translation of it. But it's worth noting, it's very interesting because as well as being very Chinese, it's also very imperial, by which I mean it not only draws on the Confucian traditions, the ideas of philosophy and ethics and norms that have been handed down for at that point, you know, one and a half thousand years from thinkers from the very early Chinese period when Confucius was alive, but also imperial in the sense that it doesn't throw off all of the norms of the Mongol period either. In other words, the Ming emperor also essentially lays claim to what the Mongol Khan would have done in terms of territory.

So there is a sense that it's a Chinese empire, but it's not just a Chinese empire. And that's worth thinking about because in a moment we're going to talk about these astonishing journeys, these voyages with fleets of something like 250, 350, 300 ships that Admiral Zheng He leads. And understanding the wide range of reference that Ming Dynasty China has, it's not an inward-looking kind of parochial sort of empire. is in many ways we're outward looking, comes actually from its very first foundation when that rebel Zhu Yuan Zhang first sets up the Ming. But when we talk about the China of the time, are we talking about a land that is orderly and that has a central command? Are we talking about a land that's rife with banditry and violence? Because I mean, certainly, you know, Zhong Heur's own story is full of violence at the beginning, isn't it? It is. And actually the violence continues even after

the beginning of the Ming. So by the end of the Mongol dynasty, the UN, dynasty, it's fair to say that the bonds and the systems that are holding together the broader Chinese Empire and the Chinese section of the Mongol Empire are beginning to fall apart. This is something that you get over the centuries, indeed millennia, that empires come together, they form a unified state, a broadly unified state at least for a while, and then internal tensions, they can be economic, they can be military, they can be personal ambition, there'll be leaders who suddenly rise up and decide to try their luck for the, for the emperorship, will disintegrate the empire over time. And certainly the 1350s, 1360s were indeed in many ways a very turbulent

time when the empire was not stable. But it's worth noting that even when the first Ming emperor founds the dynasty, all is not calm. There is also plenty of competition within his own family. And Zheng He, the man who will go on to lead these amazing treasure fleet journeys to the wider oceans of the Eurasian world, is actually brought to. prominence because he helps one of the asphorants to the throne, a usurper, you might say, a cousin of the original emperor or family member of the original emperor called Joudi, who essentially overthrows the existing emperor, the Gen 1 emperor, who's number two in the list, and kicks him off the throne. Gen 1 disappears, either he's killed or he disappears. You don't

know exactly where he ends up. But the usurper, Joudi, then takes the throne as the Jungler emperor. That's his reign title. That's how the period is known. And because he had been important in assisting the Jungler in terms of his rise to power, Zheng He was very well placed to be a favoured and in many ways, a very important member of the wider Ming Dynasty court under the Jungler emperor. We've kind of not mentioned a certain slight issue he might have faced. Castration, my friend. What was that all about?

Commonplace, I have to say, Anita, in terms of power structures in China of the time. And in other courts of the time as well, as much elsewhere in Asia as the Chinese court. It's very true. So I would say that there are two elements of Zheng He's identity that are worth noting that were not completely out of court, not particularly unique, but certainly distinctive in the period of the Ming Dynasty. One was his identity as a eunuch who had been castrated. The other was actually as a Muslim. And again, we should remember that of the many religious practices that existed in the time of the empire, Islam was for a very long time, and it had always been actually really, since the religion's early days,

an important part of the religious tapestry of China. You see in Tang China for the first time, didn't you? A large number of moths being erected and in Shian in the capital, the whole quarter. And just a reminder that the Tang dynasty is really, you know, a long time before this. that's 618 CE to 906 CE. So certainly a good half millennium before the period we're talking about. And he's an ethnic person. That's the other important thing, isn't he?

He's not Chinese. He's not even a Uyghur. He's from right over the other side of Asia. I'll just push back a bit on the he's not Chinese, because what I would say is that, of course, one of the important things about Chinese dynasties at their most expansive, and the UN and Ming was certainly that, is that a great deal of identity had to do with your identification with the dynasty.

In other words, by becoming, they wouldn't have said Chinese, they would have said probably Ming Ren, a person of the Ming dynasty, your ethnic background to some extent didn't really matter that much. It might be distinctive, but it wasn't an exclusionary element. But in terms of the ethnic categories you might use today, yes, of course, you're absolutely right. It's worth noting his original name was Mahler, which actually is one of the renderings of Muhammad, the name of Brian. Oh, really? That's interesting. In Chinese. Yeah, so, Junger was a name that he took on later on. I mean, I don't want to sound obsessive.

No, no. We're going to get to castration in a moment, Alita. I just want to add one other. Desperate to know more why this is going on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just one other note as well, that both Junger's father and his grandfather, as far as we know, actually have the title of hajee, indicating that they had meant the pilgrimage to Mecca as well. So, you know, this was actually a family that was properly embedded in Islamic tradition. Rana, when we have, in previous episodes, talked about slaves and eunuchs in the Ottoman context, we've seen very much that they stay in touch with their families, that someone like Sinan, for example, remains close to and sends money to and gives to his family in the Ottoman Empire.

Is there an indication that Zheng He was also in touch with his family, and the fact that he'd been castrated and was working at the court, didn't mean that he'd lost touch with them? I doubt it was the case, and I'll tell you why I say I doubt it's because I couldn't swear this to a fold, but he basically gets kidnapped when he's 11 years old. So in other words, that's the period at which he moves from his family background into the world that would eventually bring him to seniority at court. So in 1881, when the Ming army invades Yunnan in Yunnan in southwest China, which is where Maher, as he then was, was from, basically to try and push back against the last remnants of. of the rebels who were loyal to the old Mongol dynasty amongst the fighting and the turbulence that goes on.

11-year-old Marha was captured, he was a prisoner of war. That, to answer your question, Anita, see, we did get to it there, is when he was castrated. Finally, right. Do you want any more details, Anita? Is there any more little bits and bombs you'd like to know about it? Wait, wait, I do, I do, because what I noticed when I was reading up in preparation for the Great Rana Mitter,

was that actually there were a lot of eunuchs who rose through the ranks. Now, was it an accident? or was it that they were preferred, you know, for promotion, eunuchs were? They were preferred for promotion. And there's one very good, clear reason that that will be the case, which is that eunuchs clearly were not going to be able to have children, and therefore they couldn't have children who compete for the imperial throne or for essentially positions that the imperial family might want to reserve to their own blood relatives.

So in those terms, a eunuch was a safe choice. And this is a commonality, whether you're talking about Byzantium or the Ottoman, or the Delhi Sultan, there were any of these different contemporary kingdoms? In terms of what you might call practical statecraft, you know, this is a pretty kind of gruesome form of practical statecraft. But yes, in those terms, absolutely. However, it's worth noting that this was not a universally shared affection. I should think not.

Well, I mean, it is the idea that eunuchs were a good idea, I meant, because the eunuchs did not have a good reputation in what you might call the Confucian literature of statecraft. There was, you know, basically the prejudices that one often sees about all sorts of minority groups were certainly placed there about Unix, in other words, untrustworthy, corrupt. They're always kind of doing dodgy stuff behind the scenes. There's no particular evidence, I think, that Units are any more or less corrupt than anyone else had called. That's the Game of Thrones stereotype, too, isn't it?

Oh, lots of throwing, lots of gaming. But the idea here is that, of course, most bureaucrats, and of course China was distinctive in having a bureaucracy that was chosen through competitive the examinations, you know, long before you had several service fast stream in the UK by several centuries, you have official examinations to choose the best public servants done on anonymized conditions, thousands of candidates every year, ever since the Song Dynasty, in other words, since probably about the 11th or 12th century. So that's well established in the Ming, and most of those people who are going up through the bureaucracy in that system are not eunuchs. They are, you know, men, of course, always, but they would not expect to be castrated. And therefore,

that grouping who basically made it through the examination, system always regarded Unix as being an online influence at court who somehow were not part of the mainstream. Okay, but am I right in saying that the Ming dynasty, because there was an act of self-castration that was going on by people who wanted to get up in the ranks, people were, were they cutting their own bits off? And a law had to be passed to stop that from happening. Yes, I mean, this is basically one of the things that in some cases, I would say it was commonplace, partly because clearly it would be a rather sort of specialized way of choosing to advance oneself. I think it's fair to say. But yes, broadly speaking, there are cases, I think, of people deciding to

go this particular path because it would enable them essentially to seek imperial preference. I have to say that being a unit was, by no means, the only qualification. You also had to show competence and statecraft, knowledge of the Confucian classics, you know, all sorts of other things that don't come simply from undertaking this particular, you know, bodily change. And for that reason, I think it's fair to say that, you know, it's a starting point, but it's not the end point in terms of why the Unuk cohort became so important at court. We should add that it's, it is quite a easy way to kill yourself. I've worked with a unit community in Delhi here. And in the old days of simple Hidra self-crustrations, there's about a kind of 25% fatality rate.

We're talking about an era before anesthetics as well. We're talking about an era when, you know, yeah, clearly like anything to do with the body, in this earlier era. This was dangerous. It was something that would not be undertaken without, you know, a great deal of both kind of ritual behind it. I'm thinking about that 11-year-old Zheng He, Maher, as he then was, being subjected to this. And again, imagine, you know, from his point of view, I mean, we don't have any sense of what his own feelings would have been at the time. But I'm assuming, you know, even in Ming China, you could argue that 11 years old is something that he would have done voluntarily in that sense. So, you know, it is a very

traumatic starting point. Just to pause a second that you dropped in the fact he was from Yunnan. I'd always read that he was of Persian extraction. If he's from Yunnan, is he more like one of those sort of Burmese Muslims just over the border, basically like a Rohingya or that sort of thing? What we seem to know is that he emerges from Central Asia broadly defined. So, you know, Persian could be, you know, a broad description. Obviously, today's map boundaries don't always fit exactly the way in which people talk about identity and ethnicity, particularly in Chinese texts, but his family background and his actual upbringing was in Yunnan in southwest China. Well, I'm sort of very cognizant to the fact we haven't even

got near a ship yet. So let's motor through his rise in the ranks. So he does very well at court, this young man who's now entered the fray as you like. I mean, what is it that sets him apart? Do we have writings about why he's special at this time? Yes, he's a very good warrior. essentially in the internal battle in the civil war that brings Judy the usurper to power to become the Jungler emperor, the emperor who essentially is responsible for commissioning six of the seven great treasure ship voyages that we're going to talk about. Essentially, his military prowess is regarded as extraordinarily fine. So I mentioned his original name was Mah He, and then he gets given the name Zheng He, which basically is a sort of assumed name, that's a sort of assumed name,

given him in honour of his military skills. So that's a large part of why he essentially rises to prominence. Okay, so he's a good warrior. He's smart. He's clever. He's also a eunuch. So, I mean, he's well placed to do well. When does he meet ships? When does he meet the thing that's going to actually distinguish him for the rest of eternity? Yes, the brand name proposition when it comes to Zheng He. So I think that an awful lot of his personal qualities, and let me just briefly say something about that to bring us to ships, I think did a great deal to bring him into contact with the idea. So as I said, he was known for being a strategic, great military thinker. By the way, he also apparently practiced Buddhist rights as well as Muslim ones. So he was very

religiously eclectic, and that's just a broad, you know, broad-mindedness. As you'd expect from Yunnan, where you'd have both of the United States. But actually from China as a whole, which tends tended to be religiously very syncretic. And you mentioned before his ethnic background. He may well have known Central Asian languages. So the linguistic capacity that comes from that is also something that maybe put him in mind for this kind of unusual mission. So the question then comes as to why on earth would he come to contact the ships, to use the way that you put it? So the Jungler emperor, Judea has been, as had been, who usurp the throne and took it over in 1402, needed to do something not only to prove his legitimacy as the emperor

having seized the throne, but also to show that he was special. Now, he couldn't be special in the way that Julian Zhang, the founder of the dynasty was, because only one person ever gets to found a dynasty. So what else could he do? Let me get to the heart of one of the issues. We still don't have an absolutely slam-dunk, proven, cast-iron set of reasons as to why the Chinese emperor of the time, Jungler, did this extraordinary thing of deciding to commission these ships. It always remains slightly in the shadows as to why. But one perfectly plausible explanation is that he was doing a what you might call sort of soft power, shock and awe. In other words, sending out bigger fleets than probably the world had ever seen at that point to show off Chinese civilization, to trade in a

broad sense to show how great the empire was, to parts of the world where China was not unknown, but had never been seen with that kind of level of power. And Zheng He, with his skills, linguistic, military, whatever, was seen as essentially a suitable commander to be an admiral for this fleet. Rano, in earlier Chinese history, you have enormous ships, the dragon ships which are used on the Yagsee in military campaigns, when, for example, North China's invading South China, the reunification, and you have descriptions of massive, massive ships, but they are inland. It's an inland navy being used on the rivers.

It's not a navy that's being used on the high seas to go and reach other countries. In the intermediary, has there been a tradition of shipbuilding, which is aimed at the international. Oh, yes, yes. So you're right, first of all, absolutely, willy, that there is a tradition of ships that, you know, ply the mighty rivers of China in war and in peace. But also, actually, there was an ocean-going tradition,

maybe not into the deep, wide blue oceans, but definitely offshore. And Fujian province on the southwest of China, people might know today because it's the one opposite Taiwan, which is the source of some geopolitical conflict, Fujian province became very much a headquarters, kind of, you know, shipyard headquarters, for building ships. And there's a particular sorts of ocean-going ships are quite well-known at that

time, a type called sandboats, which basically have a flat hull, and they could be used basically in the relatively shallow coastal waters around southern China. So for this mission, for the big treasure fleets, the decision we're going to send them out much further than we've ever sent official vessels before, the design had to change. And they knew they were going to go to South China Sea, to the Indian Ocean. And that meant that they had to have much more. capacity to travel in deeper oceans. So the masts had to be more numerous. The ships, the bigger ships had nine masts. They had to have something like 12 sails. They had to be much stronger in terms of the cloth to make sure that they didn't get ripped apart by the

winds on the open ocean. The hulls are differently shaped, they're sort of knife-like, they're pointed so that they kind of go in the direction of travel in the deep oceans. Rudders were redesigned also to make them more capable of operating in these wider oceans as well. And of course, huge amounts of space in all of these ships for the immense crews. Overall, there were seven of these expeditions. And a good rule of thumb in terms of the number of sailors that was going on them would be on each occasion, you know, possibly a fleet of something like 27, 28, 30,000 sailors. So these are huge.

Wow. Yeah. I mean, and we're talking about a fleet of around two or two or. 150 ships. I mean, this is massive. Or more. In some cases, the 1405 voyage has, I think, you know, over 300. Okay, so we've got the size of the fleet. We've got the size of the retinue that is manning these ships. Join us after the break when we find out what they are about to do. Welcome back. This vast, vast fleet, which is manned by some 27,000, maybe more sailors.

What are they going to do? Yes. What I was interested, Rana, is that, you know, obviously today, as we said at the beginning, we know the Ming because of their porcelain. and we know the porcelain because it reaches the West. And there's a major export trade in this. Who is exporting all this Chinese stuff? Is it the Chinese themselves in their own fleets? And so do we have a more modest fleets of Chinese merchantmen traveling abroad? Or is it other merchants from the Arab world and so on?

Like I saw the Belletong wreck in Singapore lately, which is, I think, an Indonesian vessel full of Chinese porcelain selling Chinese porcelain to the Arab world. Yes, absolutely. it's all of those things and more. So it's worth noting that although the treasure fleets, these astonishing fleets we've been talking about with, you know, 300 plus vessels on some of the seven expeditions in total, fleets of nearly 30,000 men, and special ships that, you know, did things like carrying horses, supplies and so forth, these were unprecedentedly large, but they weren't unprecedented. In other words, China was not some country that simply looked

inward to the land side and never thought about the sea. There was lots of trading going on, as you said, the Arab world was also very much involved with that with their own fast-sailing merchant ships too. Now, these expeditions, the Jung Herks expeditions, did include trade in a broad sense as part of their mission. It's a bit like sort of expos in the 20th century, you know, showing off your goods and wares. So lots of fine wares, porcelain, cloth and so forth. The sense, we don't have much of a sense of the economics of it, I have to say. The sources don't seem to tell us much. But extremely expensive.

Yes, the point was I think a lot of it was given away at a lot. on the grounds. It was really about showing off the glory of the Ming Dynasty and not about actually trying to turn a commercial buck. Whereas actually lots of the smaller ships, which have not become so famous, but much more part of that wider trading network, they were much more about actually the bottom line. And a port like Malacca in the Southeast Asian Straits was central to that Chinese trade. Well, I was going to ask you, I mean, how far do these ships fan out? Where are they going and what are they trying to, you know, take on board? They go far and wide, an east.

So, as I said, there's seven voyages in total. I won't go through each of them individually. But the places, amongst the places they go are what's now Sri Lanka, Ceylon. There is that famous obelisk that he leaves that's now in the museum in Colombo. Absolutely. And he basically has a confrontation there as well. In 1411, he's on his way back from Calicut in India, somewhere I think you know. They kidnap a prince, yeah.

Well, they would say that Alagahonara, who's the king of that part of Salon, tries to kidnap Jung He first. So Zhang He's turning the tables and then gets him and he brings him back to Nanjing, the southern capital of the Ming. They are in fact later shipped back and repatriated to here his retinue back to Salon, but not until after they've been impressed by the power of the Chinese court. But where else do they go? Well, they also go to the Straits of Hormuz. They go to Southeast Asia. And perhaps in some ways, the furthest and the most interesting places, they go to East Africa. Malindi, Mombasa. They even bring back with them. A giraffe? Exactly. Well, actually, they say they bring back the chilin, which is a legendary

creature which brings fantastic good luck with it. And if you ever see a chilin, they're very, very rare, you know, unicorn-type creatures. That means that that rain is particularly blessed. So it was brilliant PR to be able to bring back this chilin, aka the giraffe, to China to show just how brilliant the emperor had been. So, I mean, I've just started, as I do in podcast, Googling his image. And honestly, he does look a lot like virus. from Game of Thrones. You've got a smooth-cheeked, round-bodied man. There's a statue of him in Malaysia.

I mean, I don't know how, whether there were contemporary images made of him, were there? I'm not sure that there were. I mean, again, your reference points, Anita, I believe the young people like you are very keen on these television. Yes, we are. We need to see things. Yes, yes. I'm a bit busy looking at parchments myself.

It may actually be a statue of Varus that they've just put up with his name. Yeah, I thought Varus was the bloke who lost his, legions in the Toitaburger Forest and the emperor kept saying, Varus, Varus, bring me back my legions. Is that a different empire? That is why you are a professor. Right. That was Tacitus, I think. Yes, that's Tacitus versus

televiguous. Okay, so look, I mean, was he travelling routes that were on maps or was he sort of making maps as he went along? Is he sort of pushing into the world that China doesn't know? He certainly brings back information and actually we have not Zheng He himself, but people who are along on the voyage and are associated

with it, left two very, very detailed Chinese language, of course, accounts of the journeys, which is basically most of what we have to reconstruct them. The reason I say that is that, going back to your point about the eunuchs and the jealousy they engendered from the bureaucracy more broadly, after the voyages were over, because basically after the very last one in 1433, they are basically taken off the agenda, you know, the budget is cut. And actually all the archives, tragically, all the archives kept by the Ming dynasty of the voyages are destroyed by the bureaucracy. Deliberty. They don't want people. Deliberately, because they don't want at that point. It's not later.

It's at that point because the bureaucrats, they don't trust the eunuchs who they think are behind it. They don't trust, you know, Jungho, who's dead by that stage. But also, they don't want anyone coming up this idea again. One of the reasons actually is, it's a reason that seems very familiar to anyone living in our own times, which is the government budget can't manage it, you know. All this money is being wasted and spent on these showy PR journeys. And what have we got to show for it? You know, we need to be spending. on bureaucracy at home. So it's great that we have these other records because the Ming dynasty's own records are very, very patchy on these voyages. And these other records are by the kind of, another of our boats on the series is going to be the endeavour, Joseph Banks. I mean,

do we have a kind of Chinese Joseph Banks sitting on the back of the prow of one of these ships collecting stuff? More bureaucrats than biologists, I would say. I mean, these were in a sense diplomatic journeys. So you might argue it's more like having people who, are, you know, part of the PR, the comms team. Coms team? How about that? The comms team on the... You've been in America too long, I don't know.

We need to bring you back to Oxford. Ah, come on, the thick of it, I think it's full of people who do comms. Combs team. Anyway, think of the Remain Dockins, maybe like Terry from Combs from the thick of it. That'll be a television reference. And he said, I'm sure you will recognise when you're not watching your throne of games or whatever it is that you watch. Oh, don't pretend.

You know, you know Game of Thrones. you do. Carry on. I mean, you were saying that this is a, you know, the comms department, the kind of projection of China. I mean, how successful is he being? This is the big point. This is the much bigger point. The reason in the end, we think, to have undertaken these seven immensely expensive voyages. And the point is they were very, very costly, you know, with huge amounts of investment, was essentially a point about the Ming dynasty being what the historian Tim Brooke would call a da'u, you know, a great state. The empire itself, you know, all under heaven had to demonstrate that it had this capacity to shock, to awe, not in this case

to conquer. I mean, you can argue in many cases that China is a place where territorial conquest is a fierce part of its history over the centuries. But in this case, actually the aim, for whatever reason, of Jungler's expeditions was neither to conquer territory. There were these dust-ups as in Ceylon, but they were relatively rare, I think it's fair to say, nor even actually to set up embassies or kind of trading stations like you get with the British and the Dutch, just a fair.

few years, a few years later. So this really did seem to be, you know, it may be the world's most massive PR exercise, but yes, it was in some ways a very successful war. We have a sense that in the Persian Gulf, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, these huge voyages were certainly noticed. Rana, in Chinese contemporary politicisation of these voyages, they're presented always very much as the peaceful Chinese in opposition to the kind of the wicked Brits doing the opium wars and kind of, you know, pitching Hong Kong from us and that kind of thing. Is that also basically true? There were warriors on board these ships.

They were military vessels. They were military vessels. There were troop ships. And also, Jung He, as I've said, you know, a couple of times, was actually a hugely trained strategic thinker and actor. He was an admiral. I think that's actually the way to put it, a military figure. That said, and of course, there were these incidents, you know, very, you know, violent

incidents such as the mutual kidnapping of the king of that part of Salon. But overall, in terms of the seven journeys as a whole, as far as we can tell, broadly speaking, they were much more about PR and a certain amount of trade, even if it wasn't economically very profitable trade. There's also cultural interaction. I mean, I've mentioned that, you know, Zhang He was a Muslim, but he was someone who also knew Buddhist rights extremely well. And there's evidence, as you say, in Ceylon of this famous, well, I say famous, let's describe it, this steely, this obelisk. that's set up, which has religious inscriptions, it's inside of Buddhist temple, in fact, in Chinese, in Persian and in Tamil. So in other words, there's a sort of gesture there

towards intercultural, you know, diversity and, to use a modern word. Yeah, he's not just addressing subsequent Chinese. He's definitely... No, no, no. It means it's very much about China projecting itself as a great empire. And bear your mind, if you think about what I'm saying at the beginning, the UN dynasty, the Mongol dynasty, always regarded itself as one that existed over a wide stretch of space, but with a huge amount of ethnic, as we'd now say, they wouldn't say that themselves, ethnic difference within it. The Ming also wanted to lay claim to this idea that, of course, they were a Chinese empire, and of course they followed the Confucian classics and all the cultural repertoire that defined what we'd think of as Chineseness, but they were also an empire

that stretched beyond that, and where people could find ways to incorporate themselves into the imperial system. And basically, the interactions that the treasure fleet undertook, were in that spirit of trying to essentially argue. You know, it was very much from superiors to inferiority. The Chinese women had not seen themselves as speaking to equals, but it was also very much about trying to incorporate them into that system of understanding, not in terms of setting up a kind of empire that would then take up the territory. Very different from Western China, where during the Qing dynasty in the 18th century,

you get something that looks much more like imperial conquest of the West, what we now think of as the West of China. I mean, the only sort of modern-day equivalent I can think of is sort of the Royal Yacht Britannia going around and sort of projecting British Martin presence. I mean, it's, you know, the floating advertisement. Not a zillion miles away, I'd say, in that sense. Or as I've said, you know, just briefly before, I think international exhibitions also have a certain amount of similarity. In other words, they're not primarily being done for economic value, but for sort of, you know, kind of cultural value and showing the splendor of particular civilizational culture. Yeah. Now, coming back to him, Zheng He himself, how long was he out at sea and was he sort of nipping back in between and was he welcomed like a hero? What was his projection back at home? So he went back and forth pretty frequently between the voyages,

and certainly there was a 10-year gap between the sixth one in 1421 and the very last one in 1431, which was the only one undertaken, not by Jungler, but commissioned by Xender Emperor, his successor. Yes, he was praised. He was given actually tremendous amounts of honours. He was, you know, regard to someone who really had done a great deal to promote the name of the dynasty, he was very well respected.

He didn't, of course, actually end his life back. in China. He died on the last voyage off the coast of India, as far as we know, in 1433. We think he was probably buried at sea. We don't absolutely know that for a fact. Off the coast of where? I think somewhere near Calicut, in fact, but not entirely sure. But yeah, off the coast of India somewhere. And what is his legacy? I mean, do people still celebrate him now in China or is he largely He's very much a part of the political story, isn't he? He is part of political story now, but that hasn't always been the case.

partly because, of course, the Ming dynasty bureaucrats were intent on essentially preventing too much glorification of this episode taking place. A, because as Anita was mentioned more than once, he was a eunuch, which they didn't always like, and second, because the expense of these particular voyages, also, apart from making them think that it was extravagant, they also weren't sure whether this was the right sort of direction for China to be traveling. So essentially, there wasn't much market in praising these voyages after the death of the emperor. and the Admiral concerned. And so for many, many decades,

for centuries they were known about, but they weren't really given a sort of first level of prominence. That changed really only in the 20th century. When was he rediscovered? Was there a kind of moment of historiographical discovery? It's always been known, but I think it's fair to say that actually the late 20th century has been very important

because many of the elements of historical importance that end up being praised, not just by China, but certainly by the Chinese, tend to fit with a particular political term on their part. And in this case, what I think we can say is that at a time when, say, China was turned inwards like the cultural revolution of the 60s, there wouldn't be any political mileage in talking about how China had had a previous admiral who kind of looked and out to the greater world.

In the era of the so-called Belt and Road Initiative, when China in the 2000s is looking really to sort of invest overseas and see itself as a global power, talking about that first set of voyages back in the Ming, one where China, you know, spread its glory to the world but didn't try and set up colonies, or that sort of discourse, suddenly becomes very powerful. And so I would say that, you know, the prominence has certainly been very great in the 21st century. Runners, there's a parallel to that in the way that the Chinese have also politicized

what they call the maritime Silk Road. They've taken this idea of a peaceful Chinese trade route. And they're trying to push it through UNESCO as a sort of cultural institution. in the same way they politicise Zheng He. Yes, I think that's fair to say that the image of Zheng He that's been put forward very much is in service of the idea that China today is a global sea power as well as a global land power. And in terms, obviously, again, one of the things the Chinese Party, the Chinese Communist Party would like to stress is the idea of Zheng He is essentially a kind of peaceful ambassador of Chinese values

to the outside world. Now, we have to understand that historically speaking, there's a lot of things that are very different between the Ming Dynasty and the present day. But that wider message is certainly one that is meant to echo, as you say, the idea of the Maritime Silk Road, the One Belt One Road Initiative, policies of the present day. Rana, it's such an exceptional story. We would love to have you back because we're going to do Chinese empires in the future. Will you come back for us then?

I would like you to make as many journeys as you would like me to make back to the podcast. We'd like you to be the jug her of our focus. Yes, yes. No, yes. Yeah, that would be delightful. Listen, thank you so much for being our first ship. Stay tuned because we've got another ship for you next week. So do join us again next Tuesday. Until then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnhanen.

And goodbye from me, William Drimple.