ZHENG HE AND CHINA’S GREAT ARMADA

A short century or so after Marco Polo a great Ming armada made history with seven epic voyages ranging throughout the entire South Pacific waters and as far West as the coast of Africa. The fleet was possible because in Marco Polo’s time China had planted some 1 billion trees suitable for lumber -- reportedly 50 million trees in a single year ----figures that make today’s environmental effort seem puny by comparison. The admiral was a towering man from, a non-Chinese Muslim from China’s remote interior Yunnan province. The fact that such a man, castrated for service in the Imperial court, could rise to this level says much about the meritocracy that apparently prevailed in China’s leadership at the time.

The ships dwarfed anything in Europe at the time, not only in size (a single ship in the Chinese fleet could accommodate on one deck the combined fleets of Columbus and Vasco da Gama) but were superior in navigation and weaponry as well. Zheng He saw a new world leadership role for China and set out to initiate it.

In 1435 the Imperial court’s Confucian scholars persuaded the Emperor that foreign contacts and the taste for foreign wares would lead to a decline of the dynasty. It may or may not be true historically, but it is certainly valid symbolically, that the emperor ordered Zheng He beheaded and the fleet burned.

China thus moved from a progressive outward-looking empire to a country that purposefully isolated itself from the rest of the world. The implications of this trajectory affects China through the centuries that follow going as far as the social and political environment at the first years of the 20th century.