Model of Zheng He’s largest ship compared to Christopher Columbus’s.
I’ve always had a thing for explorers. When I was around six, I’d read (or have my mother read) the stories about the great explorers: Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, countless others I can’t recall the name of. The mystery, the bravery, the exploration of the uncharted and unknown held, and still holds a strong appeal to me. Imagine my disappointment when I learned that there were no white spots on the map left, no Here Be Dragons or continents waiting to be discovered. There went my dream of growing up to be an explorer.
With all the focus on Beijing lately, there’s no shortage of features on Chinese history. One explorer I’m pretty sure I didn’t read about as a child is Zheng He. He was a muslim boy who became a eunuch and eventually the commander of the unusually tolerant Yongle Emperor’s fleet. So, he went on some expeditions to the Indian sea, traveling as far as Madagascar, awing the world with the Chinese Empire’s power, decades before Spain and Portugal got their efforts started. Also, he had some badass ships.
I’m led to believe modern scholars consider the stories of his giant ships to be exaggerated (if not, his wooden sailboats from the 15th century went unrivaled until steamboats in the 19th; unlikely). I guess these models are based on the Chinese chronicles, which claim the ships were twice the accepted size. But one thing is sure: by that time’s standards, they were huge. And Zheng He was one hell of a pioneer.
There are those who hold that the Chinese explorers of this period pretty much discovered the whole world, including the Americas and Iceland, but the scholarly consensus is that this is amateur speculation with little basis in reality. Unfortunately.
(What sparked this post was a documentary on He’s patron, the Yongle Emperor. I called him tolerant because he was unusually open to other religions, but he was also not at all tolerant in other matters. The story goes, he once had 2000 of his concubines, servants and eunuchs slaughtered after one of his concubines was discovered having inappropriate relations with a eunuch. Some tolerance. He’s also the one who moved the capital to Beijing and had the Forbidden City built, and restored the Chinese canal network after a century of languish. Fascinating type.)
