And where is King Cheng?
Chinese maritime engineering was far superior in size and scale to European ones from a century later, yet they did not colonize or plunder. So what did they do and why did they stop?
Chinese explorer, Zheng He
A battered man is brought to court and thrown in front of the emperor. Blood drips from his eyes, ears and mouth and he is asked to confess to the charge of sedition. He cannot speak for his tongue had been carved out, one of many ordeals suffered in confinement. He shoves his broken fingers in his blood-soaked mouth as if dipping a pen in ink. Sprawling in front of the emperor he smears on the palace floor: And where is King Cheng?1
This exceeds the emperor’s patience. A gesture to the guards has the man’s limbs dismembered one by one. He is shortly decapitated not because he has sufficiently writhed in agony, but because the horrifying screams coming from his tongueless mouth have become distasteful to His Majesty. The emperor’s name was Zhu Di, better known as The Yongle Emperor.
Posing the question of King Cheng was tantamount to questioning the emperor’s legitimacy and a questioned legitimacy made for shaky empires. The seeds of doubt had been originally sown in 1403 when the Yongle emperor sacked Nanjing by claiming that he was coming to the aid of the young Jianwen emperor by acting as regent (de facto emperor). The Jianwen emperor was said to have escaped during the sack.
When the tongueless man had uttered King Cheng’s name he was referring to the 1042–1021 BC ruler whose uncle assumed control as regent while the prince came of age. His uncle had then transferred all power to King Cheng and stepped down as regent, marking a significant moment in Chinese history when an emperor in power voluntarily relinquished it. It was seen as an act of great honor and the story of the uncle (Duke of Zhou) is firmly entrenched in Chinese lore2. The tongueless man’s accusation against the Yongle emperor was plainly that he was a usurper, not a regent.
As time passed with no word from the missing Jianwen emperor, the rumblings of the emperor’s legitimacy came into greater question. It is said that the Yongle emperor moved the capital to Beijing because the blood from the tongueless man’s words would not wash from the palace floor. In reality, the Jianwen emperor is most likely to have died during the sacking of Nanjing and his body burned along with large parts of the city. This did not benefit the Yongle emperor as the calls upon his legitimacy were increasing despite mass slaughters of anyone who questioned it and their extended families.
The response to this problem lay in an astute Muslim, Ma He, who had been captured in the sack at the age of 11, spared death on account of his potentially useful mind, and instead castrated before being sent to serve at court. Ma He was renamed to Zheng He and became the Yongle emperor’s trusted advisor. The Yongle emperor called on Zheng He with simple instructions: the missing Jianwen emperor had taken flight and even if it meant going to the ends of the earth, he would be found so that the Yongle emperor’s conduct would be vindicated. This was all theater because it is highly likely that the Yongle emperor knew very well that the Jianwen emperor was in fact dead.
This ostentatious search for the emperor yielded one of the greatest pre-modern engineering feats, as Zheng He went on a mass shipbuilding and subsequent exploratory missions3:
There were seven such voyages between 1405 and 1421. All were commanded by Zheng He; each included between 100 and 300 ships carrying in total up to 27,000 men; and of these ships, around fifty were usually ‘treasure ships’, colossal constructions about five times the size of any wooden vessel built elsewhere in the world at the time and ten times the capacity…the largest vessels stretched to over 130 metres (425 feet), and with a beam of around 50 metres (164 feet) could have displaced 20,000–30,000 tonnes. They were the size of small cruise liners. (By way of comparison, later in the century the pioneering voyages commanded by Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama involved only three or four ships, none longer than 20 metres (65 feet) and whose capacity barely amounted to one twentieth that of a Ming treasure ship.)
To further contrast the size and scale of Zheng He’s ships, it was not until 1595 and 1601 (almost 200 years later) when expeditions by the Dutch and English, respectively, commandeered ships that came close to that size, but still fell short.
Not only is the infrastructure of Zheng He’s voyages impressive but so is its scope. As seen below, Zheng He reached Western Africa, the Middle East, India and South East Asia well before European had endeavored to colonize. Yet these feats are rarely mentioned when discussing sea exploration.
The fourth voyage of Zheng He, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
What is particularly interesting about Zheng He’s voyages is that they were not colonizing missions and served a specific purpose: to show the Chinese the lands that were under Beijing’s dominion, despite the nations visited by Zheng He having not offered formal suzerainty to Beijing. It was enough for Zheng He to return with art, animals and goods from these lands and show them at court, which helped emphasize imperial centrality and demonstrate how Heaven’s Favour (see previous post) was bestowed upon the emperor. It also helped make the case that despite the Jianwen emperor gone “missing”, God still favored the Yongle emperor.
For Europeans, exploration led to trade, which led to colonization, which led to empire. It was the other way round for China. Having an empire preceded exploration and despite ample opportunity to colonize, no conquests were contemplated and no colonies planned. This was partially because of Khubilai Khan’s earlier ill-advised ventures into Java and Japan which had failed, and had been frowned upon to begin with by the the Confucian court. They were not supporters of sea voyages unless there was a strategic reason such as tributary systems related to foreign relations. They were simply too costly and unlike the Europeans it was never contemplated that their cost could be covered ten times over by looting foreign subjects.
The exception to this was neighboring Vietnam which despite being on the list of countries never to invade respected by every emperor, the Ming dynasty invaded out of sheer hubris with disastrous results. With Mongol excursions in the north and Vietnam to the south, China decided that, despite having ample ability to do so, it would cease to look to the seas and concentrate on matters at home. An expansionist view of the world was not consistent with Confucian ideas.
This world would have been a completely different place if Zheng He would have continued his voyages with an aim to deepen relationships with foreign lands. Europe would not have dominion over the Indian Ocean or the Arabian Sea, and it would be Chinese traders with a view to trade and not colonize that would have met India instead of the East India Company. More on that in a previous post. Even if Europe did manage to extend out to the seas, the Chinese non-colonial, Confucian counterweight would make for a landscape which would possibly have seen much less bloodshed, oppression and significantly changed the shape of the world as we know it today.
https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295981246/perpetual-happiness/,%20pp.70%E2%80%9371.
Edward L. Shaughnessy in Cambridge History of Ancient China, page 311.
https://www.harpercollins.ca/9780007372089/china-a-history/