Kitabı oku: «1434: The Year a Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance»

CONTENTS

CHINESEN OMENCLATURE

INTRODUCTION

I Setting the Scene

1 A LAST VOYAGE

2 THE EMPEROR’S AMBASSADOR

3 THE FLEETS ARE PREPARED FOR THE VOYAGE TO THE BARBARIANS

4 ZHENG HE’S NAVIGATORS’ CALCULATION OF LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE

5 VOYAGE TO THE RED SEA

6 CAIRO AND THE RED SEA–NILE CANAL

II China Ignites the Renaissance

7 TO THE VENICE OF NICCOLO DA CONTI

8 PAOLO TOSCANELLI’S FLORENCE

9 TOSCANELLI MEETS THE CHINESE AMBASSADOR

10 COLUMBUS’S AND MAGELLAN’S WORLD MAPS

11 THE WORLD MAPS OF JOHANNES SCHÖNER, MARTIN WALDSEEMÜLLER, AND ADMIRAL ZHENG HE

12 TOSCANELLI’S NEW ASTRONOMY

13 THE FLORENTINE MATHEMATICIANS: TOSCANELLI, ALBERTI, NICHOLAS OF CUSA, AND REGIOMONTANUS

14 LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI AND LEONARDO DA VINCI

15 LEONARDO DA VINCI AND CHINESE INVENTIONS

16 LEONARDO, DI GIORGIO, TACCOLA, AND ALBERTI

17 SILK AND RICE

18 GRAND CANALS: CHINA AND LOMBARDY

19 FIREARMS AND STEEL

20 PRINTING

21 CHINA’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE RENAISSANCE

III China’s Legacy

22 TRAGEDY ON THE HIGH SEAS: ZHENG HE’S FLEET DESTROYED BY A TSUNAMI

23 THE CONQUISTADORES’ INHERITANCE: OUR LADY OF VICTORY

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Permissions

Photograph Credits

Index

Also by Gavin Menzies

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

One thing that greatly puzzled me when writing 1421 was the Olack of curiosity among many professional historians.

After all, Christopher Columbus supposedly discovered America in 1492. Yet eighteen years before he set sail, Columbus had a map of the Americas, which he later acknowledged in his logs. Indeed, even before his first voyage, Columbus signed a contract with the king and queen of Spain that appointed him viceroy of the Americas. His fellow ship’s captain Martín Alonso Pinzón, who sailed with him in 1492, had too seen a map of the Americas—in the pope’s library.

How do you discover a place for which you already have a map?

The same question could be asked of Magellan. The strait that connects the Atlantic to the Pacific bears the great Portuguese explorer’s name. When Magellan reached that strait in 1520, he had run out of food and his sailors were reduced to eating rats. Worse, they were convinced they were lost. Esteban Gómez led a mutiny, seizing the San Antonio with the intent to lead part of the expedition back to Spain. Magellan quashed the mutiny by claiming he was not at all lost. A member of the crew wrote, “We all believed that [the Strait] was a cul-de-sac; but the captain knew that he had to navigate through a very well-concealed strait, having seen it in a chart preserved in the trea sury of the king of Portugal, and made by Martin of Bohemia, a man of great parts.”1

Why was the strait named after Magellan when Magellan had seen it on a chart before he set sail? It doesn’t make sense.

The paradox might be explained had there been no maps of the strait or of the Pacific—if, as some believe, Magellan was bluffing about having seen a chart. But there were maps. Martin Waldseemüller published his map of the Americas and the Pacific in 1507, twelve years before Magellan set sail. In 1515, four years before Magellan sailed, Johannes Schöner published a map showing the strait Magellan is said to have “discovered.”

The mystery only deepens when we consider the two cartographers, Waldseemüller and Schöner. Were these two hoary old sea captains who had made heroic voyages across the Pacific before Magellan? Should we rename the strait after Schöner? Hardly.

Schöner never went to sea. He flunked his exams at the University of Erfurt, leaving without a degree. He became an apprentice priest in 1515 but for failing to celebrate mass, was relegated to a small village, where his punishment was officiating at early-morning mass. So how did a young man from rural Germany with no maritime tradition produce a map of the Pacific well before Magellan discovered that ocean?

Like Schöner, Waldseemüller had never seen the sea. Born in Wolfenweiler near Freiberg in 1475, he spent his working life as a cannon at Saint-Dié in eastern France—a region famed for its plums but completely devoid of maritime tradition. Waldseemüller, too, left university without a degree. Yet his map of the Americas showed the Sierra Madre of Mexico and the Sierra Nevada of North America before Magellan reached the Pacific or Balboa reached its coast.

These two rustic mapmakers were not the only Europeans with an uncanny prescience about unseen lands. In 1419, before European voyages of exploration even began, Albertin di Virga published a map of the Eastern Hemisphere that shows northern Australia. It was another 350 years before Captain Cook “discovered” that continent. Similarly, Brazil appeared on Portuguese maps before the first Portuguese, Cabral and Dias, set sail for Brazil. The South Shetland Islands were shown on the Piri Reis map four hundred years before Europeans reached the Antarctic.

The great European explorers were brave and determined men. But they discovered nothing. Magellan was not the first to circumnavigate the globe, nor was Columbus the first to discover the Americas. So why, we may ask, do historians persist in propagating this fantasy? Why is The Times Atlas of World Exploration, which details the discoveries of European explorers, still taught in schools? Why are the young so insistently misled?

After 1421 was published, we set up our website, www.1421. tv, which has since received millions of visitors. Additionally we have received hundreds of thousands of e-mails from readers of 1421, many bringing new evidence to our attention. Of the criticism we’ve received, the most frequent complaint has concerned my failure to describe the Chinese fleets’ visits to Europe when the Renaissance was just getting under way.

Two years ago, a Chinese Canadian scholar, Tai Peng Wang, discovered Chinese and Italian records showing beyond a doubt that Chinese delegations had reached Italy during the reigns of Zhu Di (1403–1424) and the Xuan De emperor (1426–1435). Naturally, this was of the greatest interest to me and the research team.

Shortly after Tai Peng Wang’s 2005 discovery, my wife, Marcella, and I set off with friends for Spain. For a decade, we’ve enjoyed holidays with this same group of friends, traveling to seemingly inaccessible places—crossing the Andes, Himalayas, Karakorams, and Hindu Kush, voyaging down the Amazon, journeying to the glaciers of Patagonia and the high Altiplano of Bolivia. In 2005 we walked the Via de la Plata from Seville, from where the conquistadores sailed to the New World, north to their homeland of Extremadura. Along the way, we visited the towns in which the conquistadores were born and raised. One of these was Toledo, painted with such bravura by El Greco. Of particular interest to me were the medieval pumps by which this fortified mountain town drew its water from the river far below.

On a lovely autumn day, we walked uphill to the great cathedral that dominates Toledo and the surrounding countryside. We dumped our bags in a small hotel built into the cathedral walls and set off to explore. In a neighboring Moorish palace there was an exhibition dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci and his Madrid codices, focusing on his pumps, aqueducts, locks, and canals—all highly relevant to Toledo.

The exhibit contained this note: “Leonardo embarked upon a thorough analysis of waterways. The encounter with Francesco di Giorgio in Pavia in 1490 was a decisive moment in Leonardo’s training, a turning point. Leonardo planned to write a treatise on water.” This puzzled me. I had been taught that Leonardo had designed the first European canals and locks, that he was the first to illustrate pumps and fountains. So what relevant training had he received from Francesco di Giorgio, a name completely unknown to me?

My research revealed that Leonardo had owned a copy of di Giorgio’s treatise on civil and military machines. In the treatise, di Giorgio had illustrated and described a range of astonishing machines, many of which Leonardo subsequently reproduced in three-dimensional drawings. The illustrations were not limited to canals, locks, and pumps; they included parachutes, submersible tanks, and machine guns as well as hundreds of other machines with civil and military applications.

This was quite a shock. It seemed Leonardo was more illustrator than inventor and that the greater genius may have resided in di Giorgio. Was di Giorgio the original inventor of these fantastic machines? Or did he, in turn, copy them from another?

I learned that di Giorgio had inherited notebooks and treatises from another Italian, Mariano di Jacopo ditto Taccola (called Taccola: “the Crow”). Taccola was a clerk of public works living in Siena. Having never seen the sea or fought a battle, he nevertheless managed to draw a wide variety of nautical machines—paddle-wheeled boats, frogmen, and machines for lifting wrecks, together with a range of gunpowder weapons, even an advanced method of making gunpowder and designing a helicopter. It seems Taccola was responsible for nearly every technical illustration that di Giorgio and Leonardo had later improved upon.

So, once again, we confront our familiar puzzle: How did a clerk in a remote Italian hill town, a man who had never traveled abroad or obtained a university education, come to produce technical illustrations of such amazing machines?

This book attempts to answer that and a few related riddles. In doing so, we stumble upon the map of the Americas that Taccola’s contemporary Paolo Toscanelli sent to both Christopher Columbus and the king of Portugal, in whose library Magellan encountered it.

Like 1421, this book is a collective endeavor that never would have been written without the help of thousands of people across the world. I do not claim definitive answers to every riddle. This is a work in progress. Indeed, I hope readers will join us in the search for answers and share them with us—as so many did in response to 1421.

However, before we meet the Chinese squadron upon its arrival in Venice and then Florence, a bit of background is necessary on the aims of the Xuan De emperor for whom Grand Eunuch Zheng He served as ambassador to Europe. A Xuan De imperial order dated June 29, 1430, stated:

…Everything is prosperous and renewed but the Foreign Countries distantly located beyond the sea, still had not heard and did not know. For this reason Grand Directors Zheng He, Wang Jinghong and others were specially sent, bearing the word, to go and instruct them into deference and submission…

The first three chapters of this book describe the two years of preparations in China and Indonesia to fulfill that order, which required launching and provisioning the greatest fleet the world had ever seen for a voyage across the world. Chapter 4 explains how the Chinese calculated longitude without clocks and latitude without sextants—prerequisites for drawing accurate maps of new lands. Chapters 5 and 6 describe how the fleet left the Malabar Coast of India, sailed to the canal linking the Nile to the Red Sea, then down the Nile into the Mediterranean. Some have argued that no Chinese records exist to suggest that Zheng He’s fleets ever left the Indian Ocean. Chapters 5 and 6 document the many records in China, Egypt, Dalmatia, Venice, Florence, and the Papal States describing the fleets’ voyage.

In chapter 21 I discuss the im mense transfer of knowledge that took place in 1434 between China and Europe. This knowledge originated with a people who, over a thousand years, had created an advanced civilization in Asia; it was given to Europe just as she was emerging from a millennium of stagnation following the fall of the Roman Empire.

The Renaissance has traditionally been portrayed as a rebirth of the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. It seems to me the time has come to reappraise this Eurocentric view of history. While the ideals of Greece and Rome played an important role in the Renaissance, I submit that the transfer of Chinese intellectual capital to Europe was the spark that set the Renaissance ablaze.

The internet has revolutionized the historian’s profession, and though it is not necessary for readers to visit the 1434 website, it does contain a great deal of additional information about China’s role in the Renaissance. On occasion in the text, I make reference to specific subjects that are discussed in greater detail on the website. I believe that many will find this interesting. The 1421 website has also become a forum for discussion, and I hope the same will be true for 1434. When you have read the book, please tell us whether you agree with its conclusions.

Gavin Menzies

New York

July 17, 2007

Notes
Introduction

1. Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Circumnavigation trans. R. A. Skelton. (Cambridge, Mass.: Folio Society 1975) p. 49.

I

Setting the Scene

1

A LAST VOYAGE

In the summer of 1421 the emperor Zhu Di lost a stupendous gamble. In doing so, he lost control of China and, eventually, his life.

Zhu Di’s dreams were so outsized that, though China in the early fifteenth century was the greatest power on earth, it still could not summon the means to realize the emperor’s monumental ambitions. Having embarked on the simultaneous construction of the Forbidden City, the Ming tombs, and the Temple of Heaven, China was also building two thousand ships for Zheng He’s fleets. These vast projects had denuded the land of timber. As a consequence, eunuchs were sent to pillage Vietnam. But the Vietnamese leader Le Loi fought the Chinese with great skill and courage, tying down the Chinese army at huge financial and psychological cost. China had her Vietnam six hundred years before France and America had theirs.1

China’s debacle in Vietnam grew out of the costs of building and maintaining her trea sure fleets, through which the emperor sought to bring the entire world into Confucian harmony within the Chinese tribute system. The fleets were led by eunuchs—brave sailors who were intensely loyal to the emperor, permanently insecure, and ready to sacrifice all. However, the eunuchs were also uneducated and frequently corrupt. And they were loathed by the mandarins, the educated administrative class that buttressed a Confucian system in which every citizen was assigned a clearly defined place.

Superb administrators, the mandarins recoiled from risk. They disapproved of the extravagant adventures of the trea sure fleets, whose far-flung exploits had the added disadvantage of bringing them into contact with “long nosed barbarians.” In the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), mandarins were the lowest class.2 However, in the Ming dynasty, Emperor Hong Wu, Zhu Di’s father, reversed the class system to favor mandarins.

The mandarins planned Hong Wu’s attack on his son Zhu Di, the Prince of Yen, whom Hong had banished to Beijing (Nanjing then being the capital of China). The eunuchs sided with Zhu Di, joining his drive south into Nanjing. After his victory in 1402, Zhu Di expressed his gratitude by appointing eunuchs to command the trea sure fleets.

Henry Tsai paints a vivid portrait of Zhu Di, also known as the Yongle emperor:

He was an overachiever. He should be credited for the construction of the imposing Forbidden City of Beijing, which still stands today to amaze countless visitors from lands afar. He should be applauded for sponsoring the legendary maritime expeditions of the Muslim eunuch Admiral Zheng He, the legacy of which still lives vividly in the historical consciousness of many Southeast Asians and East Africans. He reinforced the power structure of the absolutist empire his father the Hongwu emperor founded, and extended the tentacles of Chinese civilisation to Vietnam, Korea, Japan, among other tributary states of Ming China. He smoothed out China’s relations with the Mongols from whom Emperor Hongwu had recovered the Chinese empire. He made possible the compilation of various important Chinese texts, including the monumental encyclopaedia Yongle dadian….

Yongle [the alternative name for Zhu Di] was also a usurper, a man who bathed his hands in the blood of numerous political victims. And the bloodshed did not stop there. After ascending the throne, he built a well-knit information network staffed by eunuchs whom his father had specifically blocked from the core of politics, to spy on scholar officials [mandarins] who might challenge his legitimacy and his absolutism.3

Under Zhu Di, the mandarins were relegated to organizing the finances necessary to build the fleet. But for generations of mandarins who governed the Ming dynasty and compiled almost all Chinese historical sources, the voyages led by Zheng He were a deviation from the proper path. The mandarins did all they could to belittle Zheng He’s achievements. As Edward L. Dreyer points out, Zheng He’s biography in the Ming-Shi-lu was deliberately placed before a series of chapters on eunuchs “who are grouped with ‘flatterers and deceivers,’ ‘treacherous ministers,’ ‘roving bandits’ and ‘all intrinsically evil categories of people.’”4

As long as the voyages prospered, and tribute flowed back to the Middle Kingdom to finance the fleet’s adventures, the simmering rivalry between mandarins and eunuchs could be contained. However, in the summer of 1421, Zhu Di’s reign went horribly wrong. First, the Forbidden City, which had cost vast sums to build, was burned to ashes by a thunderbolt. Next, the emperor became impotent and was taunted by his concubines. In a final indignity, he was thrown from his horse, a present from Tamburlaine’s son Shah Rokh.5 It appeared that Zhu Di had lost heaven’s favor.

In December 1421, at a time when Chinese farmers were reduced to eating grass, Zhu Di embarked on another extravaganza. He led an enormous army into the northern steppe to fight the Mongol armies of Aruqtai, who had refused to pay tribute.6

This was too much for Xia Yuanji, the minister of finance; he refused to fund the expedition. Zhu Di had his minister arrested along with the minister of justice, who had also objected to the adventure. Fang Bin, the minister of war, committed suicide. With his finances in ruins and his cabinet in revolt, the emperor rode off to the steppe, where he was outwitted and outmaneuvered by Aruqtai. On August 12, 1424, Zhu Di died.7

Zhu Gaozhi, Zhu Di’s son, took over as emperor and promptly reversed his father’s policies. Xia Yuanji was restored as minister of finance, and drastic fiscal mea sures were adopted to rein in inflation. Zhu Gaozhi’s first edict on ascending the throne on September 7, 1424, laid the trea sure fleet low: he ordered all voyages of the trea sure ships to be stopped. All ships moored at Taicang were ordered back to Nanjing.8

The mandarins were back in control. The great Zheng He was pensioned off along with his admirals and captains. Trea sure ships were left to rot at their moorings. Nanjing’s dry docks were flooded and plans for additional trea sure ships were burned.

Then suddenly, unexpectedly, on May 29, 1425, Zhu Gaozhi died. He was succeeded by his son Zhu Zhanji, Zhu Di’s grandson.

Zhu Zhanji seemed destined to be one of China’s greatest emperors. Far more cautious than Zhu Di, he was nonetheless extremely clever. He quickly realized that China’s abdication as Queen of the Seas would have disastrous consequences—not least that the barbarians would cease paying tribute. What’s more, the dream of a world united in Confucian harmony would be dashed and the colossal expenditure that had enabled China to acquire allies and settlements throughout the world would be wasted.

Zhu Zhanji also realized that the eunuchs disfavored by his father had their virtues. He set up a palace school to instruct them9 and appointed eunuchs to important military commands. He reversed his father’s plan to move the capital south to Nanjing, restoring it to Beijing, once again facing the Mongols. Yet he also believed in the Confucian virtues espoused by the mandarins and cultivated their friendship over bottles of wine. In many ways Zhu Zhanji combined the best of his father, including his concern for farmers, with that of his grandfather, whose boldness he emulated in approaching the barbarians.

The new reign would be known as Xuan De, “propagating virtue.” For Zheng He and the eunuchs, it marked a return to center stage. Soon another great sailing expedition would be launched, to bear the word to the barbarians to instruct them into deference and submission.

Notes
Chapter 1

1. Twitchett, Cambridge History, vol. 3 p. 231.

2. Private correspondence between author and Mr. Frank Lee, 2005.

3. Tsai, Perpetual Happiness, reviewed in Journal of the American Oriental Society 122, no.4 (Oct.–Dec. 2002): 849–50. Viewable on JSTOR.

4. Dreyer, Zheng He, p. 6.

5. Tamburlaine died in 1405. His son Shah Rokh succeeded him in Persia, as did his grandson Ulugh Begh in Samarkand. Accounts of the accident are based on a Persian fifteenth-century account.

6. Dreyer, pp. 174–182.

7. Cambridge History of China p. 272. Dictionary of Ming Biography, p. 533.

8. Cambridge History of China p 278, 302. Renzong Shi Lu, ch. 1.

9. Cambridge History of China VII 286–8.

2

THE EMPEROR’S AMBASSADOR

In 1430 the young emperor empowered Admirals Zheng He and Wang Jinghong to act on his behalf, issuing them a specially minted brass medallion, in a mix of zhuanshu1 and kaishu2 scripts, inscribed AUTHORISED AND AWARDED BY XUAN DE OF THE GREAT MING.

The emperor appointed Zheng He as his ambassador. Here is the edict from the Xuanzong Shi-lu, dated June 29, 1430: “Everything was prosperous and renewed but the Foreign countries, distantly located beyond the sea, still had not heard and did not know. For this reason Grand Directors Zheng He, Wang Jinghong and others were specially sent, bearing the word, to go and instruct them into deference and submission.”3

This voyage to “instruct” the foreigners was the zenith of Admiral Zheng He’s great career. Before departing, he had two inscriptions carved in stone to document his achievements. The first inscription, dated March 14, 1431, was placed near the temple of the sea goddess at Taicang, downriver from Nanjing near the estuary of the Yangtze.

From the time when we, Cheng Ho [Zheng He] and his companions at the beginning of the Yung Lo period [1403] received the Imperial commission as envoy to the barbarians, up until now, seven voyages have taken place and each time we have commanded several tens of thousands of government soldiers and more than a hundred oceangoing vessels. Starting from Tai Ts’ang and taking the sea, we have by way of the countries of Chan-Ch’eng, Hsienlo, Quawa, K’ochih, and Kuli [Calicut] reached Hulu mossu [Cairo] and other countries of the western regions, more than 3,000 countries in all.4

The other inscribed stone was placed farther down the Chinese coast at the mouth of the Min River in Fujian. It is dated the second winter month of the sixth year of Xuan De, which makes it between December 5, 1431, and January 7, 1432. It is called the Chang Le epigraphy.

The Imperial Ming dynasty in unifying seas and continents surpassing the three dynasties even goes beyond the Han and Tang dynasties. The countries beyond the horizon and from the ends of the earth have all become subjects and the most western of the western or the most northern of the northern countries however far they may be, the distance and the routes may be calculated.5

Liu Gang, who owns a Chinese map of the world from 1418, a critical document that we will revisit later, has translated the Chang Le epigraphy as it would have been understood in the early Ming dynasty. His translation differs in some key respects from the modern translation produced above.

The Imperial Ming dynasty has unified seas and the universe, surpassing the first three generations [of Ming emperors] as well as of the Han and Tang dynasties. None of these countries had not become subjects, even those at the remotest corners in the west of the western region of the Imperial Ming and the north of the northward extension from the Imperial Ming are so far away, however, that the distance to them can be calculated by mileage.6

The full import of the distinctions become apparent once we understand what the terms “western region of the Imperial Ming” and “northward extension from the Imperial Ming” meant at the time the stones were carved. “The term ‘western region’ originated during the Han dynasty and at that time referred to the region between Zhong Ling (now in the northern Xian Jiang autonomous region) and Dun Huang (at the edge of the Takla Makan Desert),” Liu Gang explains.

By the Tang dynasty, the extent of the “western region” had been extended to North Africa. The books written in the Ming dynasty describing travel to the western region adopt an even broader definition: Records of Journeys to the Western Region and Notes on the Barbarians, both books published during Zheng He’s era, extended the western region much further westwards. This is reflected in the Taicang stele, which refers to reaching “Hu lu mo Ssu (Cairo) and other countries of the western regions.” The second stele in Fujian mentions reaching “the remotest corners in the west of the western region,” i. e., far west of Cairo.”7

The phrase “the north of the northward extension from the Imperial Ming” is even more pregnant with meaning. As Liu Gang has explained, in Zheng He’s era the Chinese had no concept of the North Pole as the highest point of the earthly sphere. Accordingly, when they traveled north from China to the North American continent, traversing the North Pole (great circle route), they believed the journey was always northward. The modern geographic understanding is that the great circle route from China to North America runs north to the North Pole, then south to North America. This concept was unknown to the Chinese.

To the Ming Chinese, “in the north of the northward extension from the Imperial Ming” means a place beyond the North Pole. This understanding is reflected in the 1418 world map, which shows a passage through the polar ice across the North Pole leading to America. (According to the Dutch meteorological office, there were three exceptionally warm winters in the 1420s, which could have melted the Arctic sea ice.)8

Thus, if we take the two steles at their word, it appears that Zheng He’s fleets had already reached three thousand countries as well as the North Pole and North America beyond the Pole.

The emperor’s order to Zheng He to instruct distant lands beyond the seas to follow the way of heaven now seems awesome. Zheng He is being ordered to return to all three thousand countries he had visited in his life at sea. The task would require a huge number of ships—several great fleets readied for voyages across the world. This explains the lengthy delay between the imperial edict and the fleets’ actual departure from Chinese waters some two years later.

Each month, a wealth of evidence comes to our website from sources in about 120 different countries. Taken together, the evidence, which includes the wrecks of Chinese junks in distant waters, has convinced me that my original estimate of the size of Zheng He’s fleet—some one hundred ships—was far too low.

Over the past three years, two researchers, Professor Xi Longfei and Dr. Sally Church, have found references in the Ming Shi-lu to the number of junks built in the years 1403 to 1419. The figures are subject to interpretation, particularly with regard to the number that can be assigned specifically to Zheng He’s fleets. But it seems the low estimate of the size of Zheng He’s fleets is as follows: 249 ships completed in 1407 “in preparation for sending embassies to the Western Oceans”; plus five oceangoing ships built in 1404, which the Ming Shi-lu explicitly states were ordered because envoys would soon be sent abroad; plus 48 “Treasure ships” built in 1408 and another 41 built in 1419. That makes a total of 343 ships constructed for Zheng He’s voyages.9

A middle estimate would include “converted” ships, the purpose of which is unspecified in the Ming Shi-lu. Of these, there were 188 in 1403; 80 in early November 1405; 13 in late November 1407; 33 in 1408; and 61 in 1413. Adding these converted ships to the 343 ships described above would give Zheng He a total of 718 ships.

The high estimate includes 1,180 haizhou, ordered in 1405, whose purpose is unspecified, and two orders of haifeng chuan (ocean wind ships)—61 in 1412 and the same number again in 1413. All together, that would mean a fleet of 2,020 ships out of a total construction program of 2,726. Even at this high estimate, Zheng He’s fleet would still have been smaller than Kublai Khan’s, though of better quality.

Based on Camões’s account of the Chinese fleet that reached Calicut eighty years before Vasco da Gama, my guess is that Zheng He had at his disposal more than 1,000 ships. “More than eight hundred sail of large and small ships came to India from the ports of Malacca and China and the Lequeos (Ryuku) Islands with people of many nations and all laden with merchandise of great value which they brought for sale…they were so numerous that they filled the country and settled as dwellers in all of the towns of the sea coast.”10

The emperor’s massive ship-building program was accompanied by major improvements in the junks’ construction. Professor Pan Biao of the College of Wood Science and Technology of Nanjing Forestry University has carried out groundbreaking work into the types of timber found in the Nanjing shipyards where the trea sure ships were built. About 80 percent of the material was pine, 11 percent hardwoods other than teak, and 5.5 percent teak.

The pine—soft, humidity-and decay-resistant, and long used for building both houses and ships—was largely from south China. Teak, which is hard, heavy, and resistant to insect attack, is ideal for main frames. However, it was foreign to China and a new material for Chinese shipbuilders.

What astonished Professor Pan Biao was the volume of hardwood and teak that was imported. “Before Zheng He, hardwood had never left its countries of origin in a single step,” he said. “But during Zheng He’s voyages, and in the one or two hundred years following his voyages, hardwood was not only massively used in shipbuilding but was also brought into Southeast Asia and transplanted there for the first time.” Professor Pan Biao argues that Zheng He’s voyages contributed greatly to large-scale international trade in hardwood and to the remarkable progress in Southeast Asia’s shipbuilding industry.11

In each of the years 1406, 1408, 1418, and 1432, fleets of a hundred or more Chinese vessels spent lengthy periods refitting in the ports of East Java. The Chinese who settled in Java played a major part in the development of Javanese shipbuilding. Professor Anthony Reid suggests that the flowering of Javanese shipbuilding in the fifteenth century was due to “creative melding of Chinese and Javanese marine technology in the wake of Zheng He’s expeditions.”12

The new building program in China, aided by better timber and the huge refitting endeavor in Java, would gradually have improved the quality of Zheng He’s fleets. We know from detailed research initiated by Kenzo Hayashida that Kublai Khan’s fleets, wrecked in Tokushima Bay in Japan in 1281, were doomed as much by the poor quality of their construction as by the fury of the kamikaze winds.

With their superior wood and construction, Zheng He’s ships would be capable of crossing the stormiest oceans. However, the scale of these vast fleets would have created enormous command and control problems, as I can attest from personal experience.

In late 1968, before taking command of HMS Rorqual, I was appointed operations officer to the staff of Admiral Griffin, who then commanded the Royal Navy’s Far East Fleet. My duties were the day-to-day operation of the fleet—an aircraft carrier, fuel tanker, supply ships, destroyers, frigates, and submarines.13 I quickly learned just how difficult it is to control a fleet of twenty ships, not least in the sudden squalls of the South China Sea, which can reduce visibility to a few yards. Changes in visibility constitute a threat, which requires that the fleet be continuously repositioned.

This experience was repeated when I was in command of HMS Rorqual. By tradition, the first Royal Navy vessel on the scene of a sunken submarine takes charge of the recovery operation, irrespective of the seniority of her captain. When HMS Onslaught was simulating a sunken submarine on the seabed, the Rorqual was the first ship there.14 So, for a brief period, I exercised operational control of the British Far East Fleet, a task that led me to greatly appreciate the value of wireless and satellite communications.

Zheng He’s admirals had no such technology. Instead, they would have relied on bells, gongs, drums, carrier pigeons, and fireworks to coordinate their movements. Consequently, they would have been unable effectively to control more than perhaps twenty junks of various types and capabilities, such as trea sure ships supplied by water carriers and grain ships protected by fighting ships. For a short period, in calm seas with unchanging good visibility, they might have been able to control as many as fifty ships. But these conditions do not last long at sea. As the weather changes, so does the threat. Capital ships, such as Zheng He’s trea sure ships, are protected more closely inshore than in the open ocean. Likewise, the threat of pirates requires a different disposition than that required for landing troops on an exposed beach.

With approximately one thousand ships under his overall command, Zheng He probably would have appointed at least twenty, and quite possibly fifty, rear admirals. On his final voyage, I believe there were four full admirals (Zheng He, Wang Jinghong, Hong Bao, and Zhou Man), eight vice admirals (Wang Heng, Hou Xian, Li Xing, Wu Zhong, Yang Zhen, Zhang Da, Zhu Liang, Zhu Zhen), and another twelve rear admirals15 in command of a total of twenty-four fleets, which is the minimum number of fleets I would expect given the number of ships.

In my opinion, the case for broad-based leadership of the fleets is reflected in the Taicang stele, which uses the first-person plural to describe the command of men and ships. (“Each time we have commanded several tens of thousands of government soldiers and more than a hundred oceangoing vessels.”) The implication is that Zheng He is acting in concert with his team of admirals.

The scope of the shipbuilding program—more than 2,700 ships—undermines the notion that Zheng He commanded just one fleet of a hundred oceangoing vessels. However, a single fleet of a thousand junks would have been impossible to control. Chinese rec ords listing dates for outbound and returning voyages make it clear that different fleets departed and returned under different commanders often years apart.

In sum, the scale of Zheng He’s voyages would have required many in de pen dent fleets to be simultaneously at sea. Some fleets were no doubt carried off by storms to unexpected destinations. Others, as evidence I’ll present in chapter 22 suggests, were surely wrecked, sometimes in the most spectacular fashion. In any case, it should come as no surprise that many, perhaps even a majority, of destinations reached by the fleets were never recorded in official Chinese records. Seafaring in the fifteenth century was an even more hazardous profession than it is today. Many ships never returned home to tell their tales. The loss of life was terrible, as was the economic and intellectual devastation of the wreckage around the world.

This voyage, from which few junks returned, was the most ambitious of them all. Zheng He’s fleets were sent to every country in the known world. Consequently the preparations would have been awesome, as I can vouch from my experience in 1969 on the staff of Admiral Griffin’s Far East Fleet.

Zheng He’s fleet was multinational and multifaith, as was the British fleet in 1969. Our ships had Ethiopian, Ira nian, Indian and Pakistani officers, Maltese stewards, Goanese engine-room stokers, Chinese laundrymen, Tamil engineers, Christians, Muslims, Taoists, Hindus, Confucians, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, and Jews. The British Admiralty took great pains to ensure that captains would know of the religion, history, culture, background, and customs of all the crew as well as of the countries the fleet would visit. In the same way the Xuan De emperor and his predecessor, Zhu Di, would also have briefed Zheng He in great detail. They had the ideal tool with which to do so—the Yongle Dadian.16 This massive encyclopedia was completed in 1421 and housed in the newly built Forbidden City. Three thousand scholars had worked for years compiling all Chinese knowledge from the previous two thousand years, in 22,937 passages extracted from more than 7,000 titles, a work of 50 million characters. The encyclopedia was of a scale and scope unparalleled in history and to my mind Zhu Di’s monumental legacy to humankind. It was contained in 11,095 books, each 16 inches high and 10 inches wide, requiring 600 yards of shelf space, 5 rows high or one third of one deck of his flagship. The encyclopedia covered every subject on the planet: geography and cartography, agriculture, civil and military engineering, warfare, health and medical care, building and town planning, steel and steel production, ceramics firing and painting, biochemistry including cross-fertilization, alcohol production, silk making and weaving, gunpowder making, ship construction, even codes, cyphers, and cryptography. We know this from the contents pages, of which there are copies in the National Libraries in Beijing and Taipei, the British Library in London, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the Asian Libraries of Oxford and Cambridge Universities.

Fortunately, one part of the Yongle Dadian remains more or less whole at Cambridge University, where it has escaped the ravages of the Boxer uprising and more recently the lunacy of Mao’s Red Guards, who burned any intellectual book they could lay their hands on. The Cambridge book is about mathematics. Joseph Needham describes the truly amazing depth of Chinese mathematical knowledge shown in this book, which contains knowledge from the year A.D. 263 onward.17

There are chapters giving practical advice on using trigonometry to determine heights of buildings, hills, trees, and towns on cliffs, and the circumference of walled cities, the depth of ravines, and the breadth of river estuaries.

No fewer than ninety-five mathematical treatises of the Song dynasty are mentioned, some on such specialized subjects as the Chinese remainder theorum and cryptoanalysis—the use of mathematics to break codes. There are mathematical methods for calculating the area and volume of circles, spheres, cones, pyramids, cubes, and cylinders and for determining magic numbers and constructing magic squares, and the principles of square-root extraction and negative numbers. It was lucky Zheng He had a prodigious memory—he could recite the entire Koran by heart in Arabic at the age of eleven.

As Needham points out, the discoveries made on the voyages of Zheng He’s fleet were incorporated into the Yongle Dadian. One can go further and say that one of Zhu Di’s leading objectives was to acquire knowledge gained from the barbarians. This is epitomized in the instructions given to the three previous eunuchs, Zheng He, Jang Min, and Li Qi in 1403—to be described in the next chapter.18

The best way to acquire knowledge, Zhu Di knew, would be to share it—to show the barbarians how im mensely deep, wide, and old was Chinese knowledge and Chinese civilization. Zheng He and his captains were thus key players in compiling the knowledge contained in the Yongle Dadian. For this of course they needed to have copies of the encyclopedia aboard their junks, and they needed also to brief interpreters about the contents so the message could be propagated. Zhu Di made enormous strides in improving Chinese printing methods, which enabled parts of the Yongle Dadian to be reproduced.19

Even “Pascal’s” triangle was included in the Yongle Dadian—centuries before Pascal. The Chinese have always been practical. Mathematics was applied to surveying and cartography. By the Eastern Han dynasty (A.D. 25–A.D. 220), Chinese surveyors were using compass and squares, plumb lines and water levels. By the third century they were using the trigonometry of right-angle triangles, by the fourteenth century the Jacob’s staff to mea sure heights and distances.

Ch’in Chiu-shao in his book Shu-Shu Chiu-Chang of 124720 (included in the Yongle Dadian) used knowledge of Chinese mathematics and Chinese surveying instruments to calculate the areas of rice fields, the volume of water required to flood those fields, and hence the size and flow rate of dykes that would be required. He gave different methods of building canals and the strength of lock gates that would be needed.

One could carry out a similar exercise for military machines available to Zheng He and how these had been developed over the centuries. The Yongle Dadian included details on how to build mortars, bazookas, cannons, rocket-propelled missiles, flamethrowers, and all manner of gunpowder bombs. This vast encyclopedia was a massive collective endeavor to bring together in one place Chinese knowledge gained in every field over thousands of years. Zheng He had the immense good fortune to set sail with priceless intellectual knowledge in every sphere of human activity. He commanded a magnificent fleet—magnificent not only in military and naval capabilities but in its cargo—intellectual goods of great value and sophistication. The fleet was the repository of half the world’s knowledge.

He also had well-educated officers who through interpreters could speak to the leaders of foreign countries in seventeen different languages including Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Tamil, Swahili, and Latin.21 Zheng He’s fleet resembled a floating university and probably had more intellectual knowledge in its library than any university in the world at that time.

Notes Chapter 2

1 & 2. A medallion has been found in North Carolina issued by the Xuan De emperor to his representative. For the arguments put forward about the authenticity of the brass medallion and refutations by Dr. S. L. Lee, refer to Dr. Lee’s website Asiawind (see below). I am convinced that the medallion issued by Zhu Zhanji found in North Carolina and now owned by Dr. Lee is genuine for the multiplicity of reasons given by Dr. Lee. Research of Dr. S. L. Lee. See 1421 website, (www.1421. tv), and Asiawind, (http://www.asiawind.com/zhenghe/).

3. Dreyer, Early Ming, p.144, translating from Xuanzong Shi-lu, The shi-lus were true rec ords of the period compiled in a highly formalized mandarin process, summarized after the emperor’s death with a shi-lu of his reign. shi-lus served as the primary source for the official history of the dynasty, frequently compiled during the succeeding dynasty, e.g., by the Qing dynasty for the Ming. Zheng He lived in the reigns of five Ming emperors, four of whom had a Shi-lu composed for their reigns. The shi-lu system has several lethal deficiencies. First, succeeding dynasties invariably loathe earlier ones and destroy much that they consider creditable from an earlier dynasty. Second, mandarin education was narrow in the extreme. If something did not appear in a shi-lu, it could not have happened. This is epitomized in the absurd conclusion reached by certain mandarin “scholars” that if the shi-lu does not say Zheng He’s fleets reached America, then they did not. Such a system ignores fleets that sailed to America, got wrecked there, or decided to stay and never returned to China. The shi-lu system leaves appalling holes in Chinese history. However, perhaps I should be thankful—if history had been properly recorded in China, Chinese scholars would have written books similar to mine centuries ago! See Dreyer, Zheng He, p.144.

4. This is J. L. L. Duyvendak’s translation, in “The True Dates,” pp. 341–345, 349. Duyvendak’s views on the voyages reached almost mythical status—taken as gospel by historian after historian. In my view Duyvendak’s restriction of Zheng He to seven voyages is ludicrous. If one takes the shipbuilding rec ords, there were more than 1,000 ships (and possibly many more) available to Zheng He on each of the “seven voyages” recorded by Duyvendak. It is not remotely possible to control fleets of that size. There were in my view between 20 and 50 fleets at sea continuously between circa 1407 and 1434, under the overall strategic command of Zheng He, who may indeed have received only seven imperial orders. There were hundreds of voyages during those years, not seven. Re “3,000 countries,” Duyvendak at p. 345, n. 2, argues that “3000” is a copyist error for “30.” He then destroys his argument by showing the Chinese symbol for “3,000” beside one for “30.” The “3,000” symbol has an extra bar on top. A “copyist error” would produce “30” from “3,000,” not the other way around. The “3000” made by the engraver is clearly deliberate.

5. Ibid.

6. Correspondence between author and Mr. Liu Gang. Full text on 1421 website, www.1421. tv. Mr. Liu Gang’s translation may be viewed on the 1434 website under the heading “The Real Discoverer of the World—Zheng He.” (See note 20 for ‘3000’ countries)

7. Liu Gang Research 2006 see 1434 website

8. Professor Xi Longfei and Dr. Sally Church references are invaluable. They should be read in conjunction with note 9. A full list of references in the Taizong Shi-lu to shipbuilding are given in Dreyer, Zheng He, p. 116–121.

9. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean, p. 241, Notes, Chapter 7, Note 29, citing Abdu’r Razzaq, Matla’al Sa’dain in Elliot and Dowson, eds., The History of India, IV, 103.

10. Camões, K. N. Chaudhuri “Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean,” Cambridge University Press, 1985. p. 154

11. Professor Pan Biao’s work was brought to my attention by Tai Peng Wang. Mr. Wang has kindly allowed me to place on our website the article “The Most Startling Discovery from Zheng He’s Treasure Shipyards.” Professor Pan Biao’s work was carried out at the Institute of Wood Material Science of Nanjing Forestry University. They analyzed 236 pieces of wood found at the bottom of no. 6 dry dock in Nanjing, which had been flooded for 600 years. Professor Pan Biao shows that hardwood was imported to China and Java on a massive scale to allow Zheng He’s junks to be built in China and repaired in Java. These finds corroborate the work of Professor Anthony Reid (see n. 11). A combination of Pan Biao’s and Reid’s work shows how building such massive fleets resulted in globalization of the timber trade in Asia. See www.gavinmenzies.net.

12. Reid, South east Asia in the Age of Commerce, vol. 2, p. 39. Professor Reid suggests that the most likely explanation for the flowering of fifteenth-century Javanese shipbuilding was a “creative melding of Chinese and Javanese marine technology in the wake of Zheng He expeditions.” “In each of the seasons 1406, 1414, 1418 and 1432 fleets of a hundred or more Chinese vessels spent long periods refitting in the ports of East Java.”

13. This exercise took place in the Andaman Sea and Strait of Malacca in January and February 1969. Singapore and Malaysian armed services participated.

14. This took place in the South China Sea, south of the Anambas Islands, in July 1969.

15. Dreyer, p.127, has a good summary. The names of the vice and rear admirals are taken from inscriptions on the steles described earlier in the chapter. Dreyer gives the names at pp. 146, 208–15.

Wang Jinghong’s name is sometimes spelled Wang Guitong, Wang Qinglian, and Wang Zinghong. He was after Zheng He the se nior admiral until being drowned. Hou Xian was later envoy to Tibet and Nepal.

16. For the efforts of the 1421 team in assisting to locate the various remaining pieces of the Yongle Dadian that are scattered around European libraries and universities, please refer to our 1434 website, www.gavinmenzies.net. The National Library of China will digitize what is left of this massive encyclopedia, which was twelve times larger than Diderot’s eighteenth-century encyclopedia, then the world’s largest outside China.

Currently the National Library in Beijing has 221 books, and 60 are stored in Taiwan.

The Library of Congress has 41 books, the United Kingdom 51, Germany, 5, and Cornell University, 5. Cornell University has an excellent website, Explore Cornell-Wason Collection. “Starting in 1403 under the aegis of the Ming Dynasty Yongle Emperor (reign 1402–1424) the entire intellectual heritage of China was scrutinised for texts worthy to be included in what was to become the editorialised expression of Chinese civilization. One hundred and forty six of the most accomplished scholars of the Chinese empire took part. (See also Needham Vol 32 p.174–5) After 16 months of work, the Scholars submitted the final product….” The Emperor however refused the tome on the grounds that it was not on the grand scale he had envisaged. Consequently he appointed another editorial committee complete with commissioners, directors, sub-directors and a staff of no less than 2141 assistants “making 2169 persons in all.” The newly assembled committee expanded greatly on the idea of literature and included sacred texts, medicine, writings on geography and astronomy, the arts and crafts, history, philosophy and the by then canonized Confucian texts…. The Emperor then ordered the entire work to be transcribed so that it could be printed which would facilitate the distribution process.”

See e-mails between Lam Yee Din, Tai Pang Weng, Liu Gang, Dr. S. L. Lee, and Ed Liu at www.gavinmenzies.net. In my opinion the most likely place to find chunks of the Yongle Dadian will be the Louvre. Napoleon took Venetian rec ords to Paris. See Needham, Science and Civilisation, vol. 19, and vol. 32, p. 174.

17. See Needham, Science and Civilisation, vol 19, p. 49–50, 109–10, and vol. 32, p. 174. In May 1913, Herbert Giles wrote to Cornell University confirming that Cambridge only has one volume. See also e-mails between Lam Yee Din, Tai Pang Weng, Liu Giang, Dr. S. L. Lee, and Ed Liu on 1434 website, www.gavinmenzies.net.

18. Tai Peng Wang kindly brought this research to my attention, as has Lam Yee Din. See 1434 website

19. Needham, Science and Civilisation, vol. 32, pp. 100–175; and Temple, Genius of China, pp.110–15.

For transcribed copies, see Cornell University Explore Cornell-Wason Collection.

20. Needham, Science and Civilisation, vol 19.

21. K. N. Chaudhiri “Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean,” Cambridge University Press, 1985. p. 154, Note 29.

3

THE FLEETS ARE PREPARED FOR THE VOYAGE TO THE BARBARIANS

In order for the barbarians to follow the way of heaven, they would first need to find their way to the wellspring of Confucian virtue, the Middle Kingdom. Such a journey would require both maps and the ability to establish position at sea. Thus the provision of accurate charts and a viable system of navigation was of paramount importance— not only to facilitate the safe passage of Zheng He and his fleets but also to encourage the barbarians to return tribute to the new emperor.

Zhu Di and his father, Hong Wu, had encouraged the development of every aspect of navigation. A handbook titled Notebook on Sea Bottom Currents, found in Quanzhou, states that, after announcing the ascension of the Yongle emperor (Zhu Di) to the throne, Zheng He and his admirals were instructed to search for navigation charts, collecting all the information about currents, islands, mountains, straits, and the positions of stars. They used this data to revise their navigation charts, including compass points and the cross-references of stars.

The Chinese cultivated Arab navigators and astronomers, especially during the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368). According to Gong Zhen, in 1403, two years before the first formal expedition, Zheng He, Jang Min, and Li Qi were sent by Zhu Di to visit countries of the western oceans. Their mission included recruiting foreign navigators capable of deep-sea navigation. For this and much other information in chapters 3 5, and 6, I am indebted to Tai Peng Wang’s research.1

The writer Yan Congjian stated in Shuyu Zhouzi Lu (Compiled information about the remotest foreign countries):

In the first year of the reign of the Emperor Hong Wu of the Ming dynasty (1368) the Emperor converted the Bureau of History into the Bureau of Astronomy. He also established the Bureau of the Chinese Islamic Astronomy. In the second year (1369) the Hong Wu Emperor summoned eleven Chinese Muslims including Zheng Ah Li, the Chinese Muslim Astronomical Officer, to the capital, Nanjing, “on a mission to improve on the Islamic calendars and to observe the astronomical-phenomena. They were each conferred upon with gifts and official titles accordingly.

In 1382 the emperor summoned a group of scholars, including the Islamic observatory official Hai Da Er and a master of Islam named Ma Sa Yi Hei, to choose the best astronomy books among several hundred volumes of Xiyu Shu (Books from the western regions) at the Yuan court in Beijing. The next year, a Chinese translation of the selected books, Tian Wen Shu (Works of astronomy), was published.

According to the Ming translator Ma Ha, the Tian Wen Shu was originally written by Abu Hassan Koshiya (A.D. 971–1029), a Yuan mathematician who played a dominant role in the development of spherical trigonometry. Ma Ha praises Koshiya as “one of the greatest scholars of all times who explained the ultimate theories of astronomy in all its great profundity and simplicity.”

The Tian Wen Shu explained the Islamic concepts of longitude and latitude. So it is clear that early Chinese concepts of latitude, longitude, and a round earth go back at least to this Ming translation of Islamic geography books. In about 1270 the Arab astrologist Jamal ad-Din had made a terrestrial globe of the earth that correctly depicted the proportions of land (30 percent) and sea (70 percent). He gave the globe to Guo Shoujing, as will be described in later chapters.

A reliance on Islamic navigators continued in Zheng He’s era. Zheng He himself was a Muslim, and given the advanced state of navigation and astronomy in the Islamic world, it’s no wonder he recruited other Muslims to his fleets. According to Chen Shuiyuan, a Taiwanese historian, many were located in Quanzhou, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world and home to special graveyards reserved for Muslim sailors. Zheng He and his team also searched the provinces of Fujian, Guangdong, and Zhejiang for superior navigators.

Foreign navigators and astronomers who voyaged on Chinese ships were given Chinese names, such as Wang Gui, Wu Zheng, and Ma Zheng. When they returned after a successful mission, they were rewarded. In 1407, for example, foreigners returning to Quanzhou received notes equivalent to fifty taeles of silver as well as rolls of embroidered silk. In 1430, when a foreign Muslim named Sheban returned from the final expedition, the Xuan De Emperor promoted him to deputy battalion commander.

In a paper titled “Instruments and Observation at the Imperial Astronomical Bureau During the Ming Dynasty,” Professor Thatcher E. Deane states:

As with the development of the calendric systems…were most evident at the beginning of a dynasty, less so at the beginning of an individual emperor’s reign, and almost never at any other time when such expenditures were not direct investments in legitimising state and ruler. Hong Wu had an urgent need to improve the calendrical system because he was the first of the dynasty; Zhu Di was accused of usurping the throne so he also had a very strong need.

Gifts for Foreign Rulers

This obsessive focus on improving navigational techniques enabled Zheng He’s fleets to reach foreign countries, where, after presenting their credentials, the Chinese ambassadors would supply maps and astronomical tables to the rulers. The gift of knowledge was intended to make it possible for them to return tribute to the Middle Kingdom.

We know from recent excavations at the Jingdezhen kilns (where the bulk of the ceramics carried in Zheng He’s fleets were fired) and from excavations in Cairo beside the Red Sea Canal, as well as from collections in Europe, that Chinese delegations offered personal gifts to foreign leaders. Ceramic copies of Mamluk candlesticks were given to the Mamluk sultans, along with blue and white flasks, ewers, porcelain cups, and pen boxes. A ewer cover decorated with an armillary sphere in cobalt was fired for the king of Portugal, as were ceramic tiles for Ottoman sultans.

Gifts for more ordinary folk made the journey as well. Playing cards, chess, and mah-jongg sets were given to merchants. Children’s whirligig toys, kites, and hot-air balloons were dispensed.

The saddest cargo of the great fleets were women. Traditionally, foreign rulers were each presented with one hundred slave girls. When the fleets returned, the Xuan De emperor observed: “Ten thousand countries are our guests.” The number of concubines and slave girls embarked must have been staggering. In a subsequent chapter, we’ll show how, after the Chinese squadron reached Venice, female slaves and their offspring made a significant impact on the domestic life and population of Venice, Florence, and Tuscany.

Finally, a word about the most valuable part of the fleet—the sailors.

Like their modern counterparts, their most prized possessions were mementoes of their loved ones at home—drawings, locks of a wife’s or children’s hair, little presents, perhaps a pet dog, a tub of roses, or a tame, flightless bird or pet duck. Chinese sailors were avid gamblers; playing cards and dice were part of everyday life, as was mah-jongg.

Like today’s sailors, they would have been keen to better themselves. As the voyage progressed and boredom set in, they would have put aside novels for progressively more serious reading. By Zheng He’s era, printed popu lar books were widely available and all kinds of pocket encyclopedias were sold. Reference books (jih yung lei shu) with illustrations and descriptions covered all manner of practical subjects: agriculture; salt and sugar manufacture; collecting ceramics and bronzes; ship and cart making; coal and fuel use; paper making and printing; welding technology; alcohol fermentation; pearl and jade collecting.

The Nung Shu, a popular encyclopedia first published in 1313, provided descriptions and illustrations of agricultural machinery, including tilt and trip hammers; rotary grinding mills; winnowing fans; bellows powered by piston rods, connecting rods, and horizontal water wheels; flour-sifting machinery drawn by a water wheel; vertical water wheels for driving textile machinery; winders or windlasses with cranks for cranes, wells, and mine shafts; salt mills; pearl-diving apparatus; scoop wheels; pallet chain pumps driven by animals; chain pumps powered by horizontal water wheels; chain pumps operated solely by the current; rotary grinding mills operated by horizontal windmills; double-edged runner mills operated by horizontal water wheels; roller mills; cotton gins; and mills for grinding rice or corn. (See examples on pages in later chapters.)

Doubtless these descriptions of how to make a wide variety of useful farm machinery would have had value to farmers in other countries. Once the Chinese sailors were ashore, they could have supplemented their wages by selling these books, just as sailors in my time would sell cigarette rations to the locals or give their rum tots to pretty girls.

Another pocket encyclopedia, the Wu-ching Tsung-yao, a collection of the most important military techniques, gave detailed accounts of the construction and functions of a vast array of military machines. Here is Professor Joseph Needham’s translation of the text next to an eleventh-century description of how to make a flamethrower:

On the right is the naphtha flame thrower (fang meng huo yu). The tank is made of brass and supported on four legs. From its upper surface arise four vertical tubes attached to a horizontal cylinder above. They are all connected with the tank. The head and tail of the cylinder are large, (the middle) of narrow diameter. In the tail is a small opening the size of a millet grain. The head end has two round openings.

The description continues for another six lines before instructions are given for loading the machine:

Before use the tank is filled with rather more than three catties of the oil with a spoon through a filter (sha lo). At the same time gunpowder (huo yao) is placed in the ignition chamber at the head. When the fire is to be started one applies a heated branding-iron (to the ignition chamber) and the piston rod is forced fully into the cylinder.2

Subsequent instructions describe how to cope with misfiring or breakdown.

There are equally detailed descriptions of other military hardware in this remarkable book. The most formidable weapon described is a water-wheeled battleship dating from the Song dynasty (A.D. 960–1279). It details a twenty-two-wheeled ship commanded by rebels and an even bigger one owned by the government. “Against the paddle wheel fighting ship of Yang Yao, the government force used live bombs thrown from trebuchet catapults. For these they used pottery containers with very thin walls, within which were placed poisonous drugs, lime and fragments of scrap iron. When these were hurled onto the rebel ships during engagements, the lime filled the air like smoke or fog so that sailors could not open their eyes.”3

What is extraordinary is that this military information seems to have been unclassified—it could have been acquired by anyone. It must have been of considerable value to realms that lacked sophisticated gunpowder weapons in the 1430s, including Venice and Florence. Perhaps Chinese officers supplemented their incomes by selling these military pocket encyclopedias.

We can be confident that Zheng He’s fleets had every weapon then known to the Chinese: sea-skimming rockets, machine guns, mines, mortars, bombards for use against shore batteries, cannons, flamethrowers, grenades, and much more. His fleets were powerfully armed and well supplied by water tankers and grain and horse ships, which enabled them to stay at sea for months on end. In addition, the ships were repositories of great wealth—both material and intellectual.

Of equal importance were the calendars carried by the fleets. Given the order to inform distant lands of the commencement of the new reign of Xuan De, an era when “everything should begin anew,” a calendar was essential to Zheng He’s mission.

Today, calendars are little more than holiday presents—Pirelli Tire calendars, featuring beautiful women, gardening calendars awash with color, others that remind us of bank holidays, when to celebrate Easter and file our tax returns. In the 1430s, Europeans had no unified calendar, for they had not yet agreed how to mea sure time. The Gregorian calendar did not come into use until a century later. To Islamic people, however, a unified calendar was essential. The Muslim calendar was based on lunar months rather than the solar year. Each month had a different purpose, such as the month to make the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, which began on the first day of the new moon. The Muslim calendar also provided the times of the five daily prayers.

The calendar was likewise of great political and economic impor tance to the Chinese, who for thousands of years had led the world in calendar making. In Ancient Chinese Inventions (page 67), Deng Yinke describes their meticulous approach.

In 1276 Kublai Khan, the first emperor of the Yuan dynasty, assigned the task of compiling a new calendar to astronomer Guo Shou Jing so that his new empire would have a unified calendar from north to south and the errors in previous calendars could be corrected. Guo was a scientist with an exceptional talent and dedication. On taking over the task, Guo said “a good calendar must be based on observations and observations depend upon good devices.” He went on to examine the Hun Yi (armillary sphere), the only instrument in the observatory of the capital Dadu (Beijing), and found that the North Star of it was set at 35° which was at the latitude of Kaifeng where the Hun Yi was made. This meant that the instrument had not been adjusted when it was transported to Dadu from Kaifeng…. Guo thus made it a priority to develop new devices. Within three years of strenuous efforts he worked out twelve astronomical devices which were far better in function and accuracy than previous ones. He also made a number of portable instruments for use in field studies outside Dadu.

As part of the calendar project, Guo presided over a nationwide programme of astronomical observations. He selected twenty-seven sites for astronomical observation throughout the country, which covered a wide area from latitude 15° N to 65° N and longitude 128° E to longitude 102° E. The items of observation included the length of the shadow of the gnomon, the angle of the North Star from the ground surface, and the beginning times of day and night on the vernal equinox and the autumnal equinox…. Guo also examined nearly nine hundred years of astronomical rec ords from 462 to 1278 and selected six figures from the rec ords for calculating the duration of the tropical year. Guo’s result was 365.2425 days, which was the same as that of the Gregorian calendar, the calendar now widely used across the world….

Guo Shou Jing and the other astronomers worked for four years and completed the calendar in 1280. They made numerous calculations converting the data of the ecliptic coordinate and the equatorial coordinate systems, and used twice interpolations to solve the variations in the speed of the sun’s movement, which affected the accuracy of the calendar. The calendar was unpre ce dented in accuracy. It adopted the winter solstice of the year 1280, the ninth year of the Yuan dynasty, as the epoch, the point of reference for the calendar, and established the duration of a tropical year of 365.2425 days and that of a lunar month 29.530593 days. The error between the duration of its tropical year and that of the revolution of the earth around the sun was only 26 seconds. The calendar was named the Shoushi, meaning “mea sur ing time for the public.”

Issuing calendars was the prerogative of the emperor alone. Accuracy was necessary to enable astronomers to predict eclipses and comets—a sign that the emperor enjoyed heaven’s mandate. If predictions proved incorrect, the astronomer responsible was severely punished, often with death.

The Shoushi calendar produced by Guo Shoujing was officially adopted by the Ming Bureau of Astronomy in 1384. This is the calendar that Zhu Di and the Xuan De emperor would have ordered Zheng He to present to foreign heads of state (discussed in detail in later chapters).

The Shoushi calendar can be viewed in the Yuan shi-lu, the official history of the Yuan dynasty. However, copies also came into the possession of Europeans, notably the diarist Samuel Pepys and the famous scientists Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. The Japanese and Koreans also copied the calendar, and translations from those languages can be viewed on our website.

The calendar contained the length of a solar day at the latitude of Beijing. This is the duration from the time when the sun is at its maximum height (altitude) in the sky from one day to the next. We tend to think of this as twenty-four hours. It is not. The earth rotates around its own axis every twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes while also traveling round the sun. The combination of the two movements means that the earth’s position relative to the sun, compared with its position relative to the stars, varies by about four minutes each day. Moreover, the earth’s trajectory around the sun is not a circle but an ellipse. The sun is not at the center of this ellipse, so that as the earth nears the sun it accelerates. As the earth recedes from the sun, on the longer leg of the ellipse, it decelerates. Its rotation also speeds up approaching the sun and slows down receding from the sun.

Thus, the length of the solar day varies throughout the year. The difference of this length is called the equation of time of the sun. To predict the length of the year at 365.2425 days, which is accurate to within ten seconds a year, Guo Shoujing had to take into account four of these movements. In order to accomplish that, he must have known how the solar system worked, including the facts that the earth travels around the sun in an ellipse and is not at the center of the universe and that the earth is attracted to the sun’s much bigger mass.

Guo Shoujing’s calculations for the lunar month of 29.530593 days were even more impressive, requiring a more complex trigonometry. The moon travels around the earth as the earth is moving in an ellipse around the sun. This means that as the earth approaches the sun, the moon’s attraction to the sun’s mass increases, so the speed at which the moon travels around the earth accelerates. Then, as the earth recedes from the sun on its elliptical path, the moon decelerates. Hence, to make his extraordinarily accurate calculations, Guo had to be aware not only that the earth travels around the sun in an ellipse but also that the moon circles the earth. He had to have understood spherical trigonometry and to have employed calculus and have had an accurate idea of the respective masses of earth, sun, and moon.

A diagram showing how the earth travels in an ellipse around the sun.

However, there are further ramifications to Guo Shoujing’s achievements. The earth’s trajectory around the sun is not constant: it changes over the years. Guo knew of these changes, which he had gathered from Chinese observations stretching back eight hundred years. The great French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace credited Guo Shoujing with knowledge of what Laplace called the “diminution of the ecliptic”—essentially, the fact that the earth’s ecliptic path around the sun had grown flatter over the centuries.

Even further refinements were taken into account by Guo Shoujing. The earth is not a perfect sphere but an oblate spheroid with flattened poles. Its center of gravity is somewhat below the center of its volume. This means the earth has a slight wobble, which can be deduced by the apparent position of the stars—in particular by Polaris, the Pole Star, which apparently moves over a 26,000-year period. This movement had been compensated for by the Chinese before Guo Shoujing’s era. Templates had been made to adjust for the apparent movement of Polaris.

Finally, Guo Shoujing knew of the planets’ orbits around the sun, and even of Jupiter’s rotation and its circling moons. The American writer Rosa Mui and colleagues Paul Dong and Zhou Xin Yan have kindly informed me of the work of Professor Xi Zezong, a Chinese astronomer based in Beijing, who has found that Jupiter’s satellites or moons were first discovered two thousand years before Galileo by the Chinese astronomer Gan De.

Since A.D. 85, Chinese astronomers have made accurate observations of the period of planetary revolutions around the sun (synodic intervals). They are correct to within a few hours—Mercury 115 days, Venus 584 days, Mars 779 days, Jupiter 398 days, Saturn 378 days. (In later chapters, we provide evidence that Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Hooke, and Newton were aware of the Chinese astronomers’ work.)