For the seven weeks of late summer in 1405, the Yangtze at Liujiagang, downstream of Nanjing, looked less like a river than like a transplanted forest. Three hundred and seventeen hulls, with their great battened lugsails furled and their oars shipped out of sight, lay against the muddy current, waiting. Among them moved the largest wooden sailing vessels the world has ever built: the so-called treasure ships, the baochuan, said in the Ming histories to be four hundred feet long from stem to stern, one hundred and sixty feet across the beam, with nine masts and twelve sails, four decks, and as many as a thousand men aboard each. The water tankers sat low in the water on the flank, the horse transports rolled gently, the supply vessels stretched in tied units of a dozen at a time. Across the silk awning of the lead treasure ship, in vermilion lettering too small to read from shore, the command pennant snapped westward. The command was Zheng He, the chief envoy of the Yongle emperor, the commander of the largest single deployment of naval power in human history up to that point, and the man in whose hands the Ming were about to try to move the centre of their world from the Han heartland out to the Indian Ocean. The first of the seven voyages was about to begin.
The reason for sending this fleet was not trade in the sense that European maritime expansion would later come to mean it. The Ming, in 1405, had no shortage of imports and no urgent need to reach the markets of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, which they had been trading with for centuries through the established maritime networks of Song and Yuan merchants. The reason was politics. The Yongle emperor, Zhu Di, had taken the throne in 1402 by a violent usurpation; he had marched on Nanjing from his fief at Beijing with a rebel force, taken the city, displaced his nephew the Jianwen emperor, and inaugurated his own reign after years of civil war. His legitimacy was contested: his nephew had been the deceased Hongwu emperor’s designated heir, and a thousand officials and a substantial body of imperial princes had been killed in the suppression that followed the takeover. The treasure voyages were, in substantial measure, a way of reorienting the gaze of the empire outwards, of opening up fresh sources of prestige for the dynasty, of bringing home exotic tribute that would be displayed in the capital as a sign of the Mandate of Heaven and the new dynasty’s standing among the kings of the south and west. The fact that the ventures failed to establish a permanent Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean does not change the fact that the political purpose was largely served; the voyages projected Ming prestige through the South China Sea and across the Indian Ocean on a scale that the kings of the South Asian and African coast had never seen and would not see again for centuries.
The Yongle Commission
The Yongle emperor was a military man who had spent twenty years as a frontier prince at Beijing, fighting Mongols across the northern steppe, before marching on his own capital. He came to the throne in 1402 and began the treasure voyages three years later. The institutional vehicle for the voyages was the Directorate of the Imperial Equipage, the household office that controlled the eunuchs, a deliberate choice that bypassed the Confucian bureaucracy in the six ministries and especially the Ministry of War, whose officials were hostile to large-scale maritime undertakings. The eunuch establishment, which had been severely reduced under the Hongwu emperor, was allowed to grow again under Yongle. Zheng He was a eunuch; the chief medical officer on the voyages was a eunuch; the interpreters and the astronomers and the deputies were eunuchs. The Confucian bureaucracy lost the argument about whether to undertake the voyages.
The political reasons for the voyages were reinforced by a strategic calculation. The Yongle court was at war in the north, intermittently, with the Mongol successor states of the Northern Yuan. The Mongol leadership, based in Mongolia or in Karakorum, retained access to Central Asian trade routes that brought it into contact with the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea through the Timurid successor states. If the Ming needed to project power to the western oceans, it had reasons of its own to control the sea lanes through which the Mongol successors might one day reach the Indian Ocean by sea. The voyages served as a kind of long-distance containment of the Mongol territories, a maritime statement of Chinese strategic interest in the seas south of the continental Eurasian landmass. The decision to send large fleets rather than small diplomatic missions was a reflection of the political and strategic stakes; a small fleet would have given the same gestures without the same prestige, but a single spectacular voyage also shifted the political balance of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean in a small fleet’s worth of time would not have done.
The Yongle usurpation left the dynasty looking for fresh legitimacy, and the new emperor looked in two directions for the pageantry that would confirm it. The first direction was northward. The Yongle capital was moved from Nanjing to Beijing in 1421, a thousand-kilometre march inland that brought the court closer to the Mongol frontier and built the great imperial compound that became the Forbidden City. The second direction was southward, into the maritime spaces of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, where a parade of foreign envoys and tributary kings would return to Nanjing and Beijing with their local delicacies and their testimonies of the Ming’s superiority. The treasure voyages were an extension of the empire in search of the people who would agree to be its dependents. The court archive of the reign, the Yongle dadian, records the names and gifts of dozens of foreign courts who sent envoys in the wake of the voyages; the inscriptions on the route-stelae erected at Yunnan and elsewhere by the early voyages name the foreign ports that had been visited and the foreign kings who had been received.
The Fleet Itself
The literary sources describe the great treasure ships as four hundred feet long and one hundred and sixty feet across, with nine masts and twelve sails; the modern estimates, based on the unfinished ship excavated at Nanjing in 1957 (the so-called Nanhai No. 1, a mid-fifteenth-century vessel about 130 feet long), put the largest treasure ships at perhaps 200 to 250 feet, with a few scholars going higher. The treasure ships were in any case much larger than any contemporary European vessel; Columbus’s largest ship the Santa Maria was eighty-five feet long, ninety years after the seventh voyage. The Yongle fleet of 1405 is reported in the Ming histories as 317 ships with 27,800 men, a figure that includes six hundred sailors and soldiers for the larger vessels and twenty for the smallest; the second and later voyages are reported with somewhat smaller numbers. Even the smaller estimates place the Ming fleets at three times the size of the contemporary fleets of the Indian Ocean states and an order of magnitude larger than the European maritime forces of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
The fleet was not uniform. It included, in addition to the great treasure ships that gave the voyages their name, several specialised classes of warship and transport. There were the horse ships (mǎ-chuan), each capable of carrying eight to ten horses across the equatorial stretches of the Indian Ocean, and providing the cavalry mounts that the fleet’s small army of infantry needed to be able to skirmish on land. There were the supply ships, each holding a year’s worth of rice and preserves for several hundred men, with barrels of fresh water, dried fruit, and salted pork. There were the water tankers, smaller vessels that ferried fresh water from rivers and wells along the coast to the larger ships. There were the escort cruisers, fast-sailing warships with cannon and incendiary arrows, used for patrolling the routes and handling any small piratical activity the fleet encountered. There were the small boats, used for landings on the smaller rivers and the smaller islands where the treasure ships could not enter for lack of water under the keel. The composition of the fleet in 1405 appears to have followed a deliberate table of organisation, with the great treasure ships at the centre and the supporting vessels arranged around them in a layered defence.
The armament of the fleet was formidable for the time. The larger ships carried small-calibre bronze cannon, including the so-called folangji, the handguns and back-arms of the late fourteenth century that were the direct ancestors of the modern artillery of the early modern centuries. The Ming arsenals had developed reverberatory furnaces and water-powered bellows that allowed them to cast large numbers of bronze cannon in the 1380s and 1390s; the same arsenals fitted out the treasure fleet with cannon capable of discharging both solid shot and, in some cases, incendiary arrows. The arquebus and the hand cannon were both present in the Ming armies of the early fifteenth century; the same technologies were likely present on board the fleet, although the surviving inventories of the fleet’s armament are fragmentary. The timber of the larger ships is reported in the Ming sources as teak imported from Southeast Asia or from the southern provinces of the Ming empire, with fastenings of iron and brass and rigging of bamboo and palm-fibre rope. The Chinese shipwrights of the Yongle era were the most advanced wooden-boat builders in the world, and the ships they produced were a deliberate expression of that craftsmanship.
Seven Voyages
The voyages are conventionally numbered one to seven, with the dates given as 1405-07, 1407-09, 1409-11, 1413-15, 1417-19, 1421-22, and 1431-33. The first voyage, in the summer of 1405, was the largest and the most broadly designed. The fleet called at Champa (modern central Vietnam) and Siam (modern Thailand), stopped at the ports of Java, sailed through the Straits of Malacca, and crossed the Bay of Bengal to Calicut on the southwestern coast of India. The Yongle court had chosen Calicut as the principal foreign destination of the voyages, partly because the longstanding trade of the South China Sea had made the king of Calicut a recognised intermediary in the Sino-Indian Ocean trade, and partly because the commodities of Calicut – pepper, cinnamon, precious stones – were the most prestigious in the Chinese luxury market. The first voyage returned to Nanjing in 1407 with a small fleet of foreign envoys on board, an ex-slave of Calicut who had been given a blue robe and a velvet cap and treated as a visiting dignitary, a considerable cargo of tribute, and the formal declaration of the vassal status of the kings of Siam and Calicut. The Magnificent Banner, the silk flag that the Yongle emperor had given Zheng He in 1405 for the duration of the voyages, was carried back to Nanjing in his hand and was hung from the rafters of the imperial ancestral temple.
The first voyage was the most thoroughly documented of the seven; its details were recorded in the Yongle dadian, the imperial archive compiled after Yongle’s death, and were extensively quoted in the Ming histories. The subsequent voyages were less completely documented, partly because the official histories were rewritten in the Hongxi and Xuande reigns when the Confucian court was attempting to diminish the prestige of the voyages. The later voyages were nevertheless substantial. The second voyage, in 1407-09, sent sixty-eight ships to Calicut and the smaller ports of the eastern Indian Ocean, with the result that the Ming court was able to record seventeen foreign kings who were willing to be presented at Nanjing, including the king of Calicut, who sent his son. The second voyage’s return to the Straits of Malacca was the first time the Ming fleet had carried envoys from several South Asian kings to be presented to the Hongwu emperor’s successor and to be received as tribute bearers.
The third and fourth voyages, in 1409-15, included the most dramatic confrontations of the entire series. The third voyage, with Zheng He personally commanding forty-eight large ships and thirty thousand men, was the first to land substantial Chinese armed forces on Ceylon, in 1410. The king of Ceylon at the time, Vira Alakeshvara, was the head of a fractious confederation of the southern Sinhalese states that had been emboldened by the Ming foreign policy of accepting tribute from each state at a time. When Zheng He’s fleet sailed to the Sinhalese port of Colombo, the local king refused to provide the customary horses and supplies; the king’s refusal was unusual enough that Zheng He ordered a force of two thousand men to march inland and to capture the king at his palace in the hills. The capture was followed by a Chinese garrison at Colombo for several months, the deportation of the king to Nanjing, his public trial before the Yongle court, the public humiliation of the king’s chief minister, and the deportation of the king back to his island with a vivid warning about the consequences of obstructing the Ming. The episode left a record in both the Ming and the Sinhalese chronicles; it remains one of the few instances of a Ming armed action on the Indian Ocean coast during the voyages.
The fourth voyage, 1413-15, extended the route further. The fleet sailed from Calicut across the Arabian Sea to Hormuz at the head of the Persian Gulf, which the Ming histories describe as the most prosperous and well-administered port in the western Indian Ocean. Some accounts have the fleet sailing further down the coast to the Red Sea and back, with a small subsidiary fleet visiting Mecca itself; the surviving evidence of Mecca on this voyage is limited but consistent with Ma Huan’s report of the Muslim pilgrims’ reception of Chinese official visitors. The fifth voyage, 1417-19, was the easternmost of the voyages in two senses: it had to carry seventeen foreign envoys (and several foreign kings) from Asia and Africa back home to their own courts, and it then went on to the Swahili coast, calling at the city-states of Mogadishu, Brawa and Malindi. The Ming accounts of these visits are the earliest Chinese descriptions of those East African polities that have survived.
The sixth voyage, 1421-22, was a partial re-run of the fifth, with the smaller complement of ships, and is sometimes known as the return voyage of the African tributary kings. The sixth voyage is also the one that brought home the giraffe and the zebra whose arrival in the Forbidden City is recorded in the Ming archives; the giraffe became the totem of the voyage, presented to the court as a living proof of the Mandate of Heaven. The seventh voyage, 1431-33, was undertaken after a lull of nine years, ordered by the Yongle emperor’s successor the Xuande. The seventh voyage was the largest after the first, with more than a hundred ships and twenty-seven thousand men, and revisited all the principal ports from Java to the Swahili coast. It was on the homeward leg of the seventh voyage that Zheng He died, in 1433, off the coast of Calicut or Gujarat (the sources differ). His deputy Wang Jinghong brought the fleet home.
The Eunuch World
The voyages were the work of a Chinese world on the cusp of modernity, in which the eunuch institution was the administrative and military arm of the dynasty and the Confucian bureaucracy was the political opposition. Zheng He himself was a Hui, a Chinese Muslim, born Ma He in Kunyang in Yunnan, taken prisoner in the Ming conquest of the southwest in 1381, castrated and sent to the household of the then-prince of Yan (later the Yongle emperor). He had been a trusted military commander of the prince for twenty-five years, with particular service in the suppression of the Mongol incursions and in the civil war of 1402. The Yongle emperor chose Zheng He for the voyages both for his military experience and for his personal trust; the emperor is also recorded as having given Zheng He a new surname (Zheng) in 1405, when the emperor granted him the surname of the campaign general Zheng Chenggong, in honour of his victory at the battle of Zhenglunzha in 1404.
Zheng He’s court included a substantial Muslim component. The two principal interpreters of the voyages, Ma Huan and Fei Xin, were both Chinese Muslims; Ma Huan was the principal chronicler of the four voyages on which he sailed (1413-15, 1417-19, 1421-22, and 1431-33) and his Yingya Shenglan, the General Survey of the Oceanic Shores, is the principal contemporary Western source for the voyages, more detailed than the official histories. The Muslim component of the voyages fit the broader political calculus of the Yongle court: the court wanted to project power across the western Indian Ocean to the Islamic world of the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the African coast, and the Muslim Chinese interpreters were the technical link between the Ming and the rulers of those regions. The voyages made stops at Hormuz, at Mecca, and at Mogadishu, all of which were predominantly Muslim polities. The Muslim interpreters were the diplomatic interlocutors, the religious experts, and the cultural intermediaries on those legs of the voyage.
Ma Huan, the principal chronicler, was a man of considerable literacy who had passed the lower level of the Chinese civil service examinations but who, on conversion to Islam or on acceptance into the eunuch system, was unable to continue in the Confucian administration. He had joined the voyages as the senior Muslim translator, with the rank of deputy director of the Interpreters Bureau of the Directorate of the Imperial Equipage, and his participation on the fourth voyage in 1413 was a deliberate strategy of the Yongle court, who wanted a literate Chinese Muslim on board to record the events in a form suitable for inclusion in the imperial archives. Ma Huan’s record of the voyages is the most extensive of the surviving first-person accounts. The other principal chronicle, Fei Xin’s Xingcha Shenglan, the General Survey of the Star Raft, is less complete, but provides information about the personnel and the route of the voyages that Ma Huan’s account does not.
The Chinese maritime traders of the Yuan and early Ming dynasties, who had maintained a substantial commerce across the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, were the economic backdrop of the voyages, but their role in the official missions was not the lead one. The size of the treasure fleet was the political signature of the dynasty, not the commercial volume of the trade it represented. The fleet sailed with cargoes of silk, porcelain, gold, silver, brocades, iron implements, and copper money, but the cargoes were gifts for foreign kings, not commodities for sale. The commercial trade of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean was dominated by private Chinese merchants, who operated outside the treasure fleet’s structure; the relation between the imperial fleets and the private traders was distant and sometimes competing. The treasure fleet was not an instrument of trade; it was an instrument of prestige. The fact that it was one of the most expensive instruments of prestige ever fielded by an empire is part of the story.
The other side of this picture is the Confucian opposition to the voyages. The civil bureaucracy of the Ming, recruited through the civil service examinations from the landed gentry of southern China, had limited appetite for the maritime grand strategy of the Yongle court. The Confucian doctrine of the inferiority of the merchants and the priority of agriculture was inconsistent with the projection of power into the maritime space; the Confucian doctrine of the priority of the northern land frontier as the strategic direction of the empire was inconsistent with the Yongle decision to send the fleet into the Indian Ocean. The Confucian leadership of the civil service, after the Yongle death in 1424 and the brief Hongxi reign of 1424-25, succeeded in suspending the treasure voyages and in reducing the eunuch establishments of the maritime directorate. The Hongxi and Xuande emperors’ courts were dominated by Confucian scholars, who persisted in their opposition to the voyages; the Xuande emperor eventually ordered the seventh and final voyage in 1431 as a concession to the prestige of the dynasty, but it was a concession that did not have to be repeated. The Confucian victory was complete by the 1440s and the Yongle programme of maritime prestige was over.
The Swahili Coast and the South
The most unexpected stretch of the voyages was the African leg. The fifth, sixth, and seventh voyages all called at the Swahili coast, principally at the city-states of Mogadishu, Brawa, Malindi, and the small ports of the Mozambique Channel, where Chinese porcelain shards have been recovered from nineteenth-century excavations and where the words for several Chinese commodities entered the Swahili language. The Swahili cities of the early fifteenth century were the principal entrepots of the Indian Ocean gold trade, connected to the gold mines of the Zimbabwe plateau by a long but well-established caravan route. The kings of the Swahili cities, in particular the king of Malindi, had been in contact with Chinese merchants since at least the late Song period, and they greeted the Ming fleets as honoured returning customers.
The story that the Chinese fleets had specifically intended to establish a permanent Chinese presence on the East African coast is a popular image of the voyages, drawn from the late nineteenth-century literature, but the diplomatic record in the Ming sources gives no support for it. The fleets were diplomatic missions, not colonial expeditions; their principal activity at each Swahili port was a formal reception, the exchange of gifts, the declaration of the king’s vassal status, and the loading of the foreign king or his representative onto a return ship for the journey to Nanjing. The fifth voyage returned to Nanjing in 1419 with a Malindi prince aboard, who received a Chinese title and a small stipend and was sent home four years later on the sixth voyage. The prince brought with him on his return a giraffe, which was the foundation of the story that had the Chinese discovery of Africa in the early fifteenth century and which kept the legend of the voyages alive in the Chinese popular tradition for the next five centuries.
The South Asian legs of the voyages worked through an established system of Muslim and Hindu merchant networks across the Bay of Bengal. The principal mediator of the voyages’ commercial politics in the eastern Indian Ocean was the king of Calicut, whose court had been the focus of Chinese maritime trade since the late Song period and whose Muslim merchants had been the principal intermediaries for the spice trade between Kerala and the Red Sea. The Ming fleet’s working assumption was that any state that held an Indian Ocean port was a tributary of the Ming once the Ming fleet had called at it once, and the king’s readiness to be a tributary was the small cost the king paid for the largess of the Chinese fleet’s visit. The Chinese sources record that eighteen states sent tribute and envoys to the Yongle emperor on the basis of the voyages, an indication that the Ming court’s tributary framework, even at its most inflated, did not match the actual political geography of the South Asian port cities.
End and Legacy
By the time the Confucian court reasserted itself after the Yongle emperor’s death, the fleets themselves had begun to deteriorate. The wooden vessels required constant maintenance; the larger treasure ships needed dry-docking and recaulk every few years; the supply vessels had to be replaced more often. The Yongle fleets had been built in the Nanjing and Taicang shipyards; the maintenance regime of the next decade declined sharply. The later Ming court was reluctant to undertake the scale of work needed to keep the fleets seaworthy, and the seventh voyage’s return fleet was more or less the last large-scale deployment of the treasure fleet. The surviving ships were dismantled and sold for timber or brought up onto the slipways of the southern shipyards and left to rot. The archives of the voyages were kept in the imperial storehouses in Nanjing and Beijing until the mid-fifteenth century, when a sustained campaign by the Confucian court resulted in the destruction of most of the records. The classical quotations from the original archives that survive in the Ming histories, the Yingzong Shilu, and a handful of contemporary chronicles are all that has come down to modern scholars.
After the seventh voyage, the Ming maritime policy turned decisively inward. The Hongwu emperor’s haijin, the sea ban, had forbidden private sea traffic in the early Ming; the Yongle voyages had been exempted from this policy by the emperor’s direct command. The Xuande emperor’s continuation of the seventh voyage was a one-time exception; from the 1430s until the mid-sixteenth century, the Ming court enforced the sea ban with renewed vigour. The effect on the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean was to remove the principal Chinese state presence from the western seas and to leave the maritime space open to private Chinese merchants, who were often pirates in the period from the 1430s to the 1540s, and to the rising European maritime powers, who arrived in the early sixteenth century. The Portuguese reached Calicut in 1498 and Malacca in 1509; the Spanish reached the Philippines in 1565 and began the slow conquest of the south China coast. The Ming court’s failure to maintain the treasure fleets left a power vacuum that the European empires would spend the next four centuries filling.
The rediscovery of the voyages began in the early twentieth century with the publication of the Chinese historical sources in the West, but the systematic study of the voyages had to wait for the late twentieth century. The English maritime historian Edward L. Dreyer published the first comprehensive Western account of the voyages in 1957, drawing on the Ming sources and the Arabic and Persian sources. Subsequent scholars – Joseph Needham with the Science and Civilisation in China treatment of Chinese shipbuilding, Louise Levathes with the journalistic synthesis, Sally K. Church with the Zheng He in Context work on the historical geography of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean – filled in the picture. The discovery of the wrecks at Quanzhou, the medieval Chinese port that had been the principal shipbuilding centre of the Song and Yuan dynasties, and the medieval wrecks in the South China Sea off the coast of Sumatra and Malaysia, have given the physical evidence for the types and dimensions of the ships of the South China Sea. The wrecks have confirmed the Ming accounts on the dimensions of the smaller vessels, while leaving the contested dimensions of the great treasure ships a matter of legitimate scholarly dispute.
The Ming treasure fleets are remembered now as a historical pivot, a moment at which the centre of gravity of the Eurasian world could have shifted to the maritime sphere. The Chinese fleets of 1405 were the largest and most technically sophisticated maritime forces in the world; the European maritime voyages that followed three generations later – Bartolomeu Dias to the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, Vasco da Gama to India in 1498, Columbus to the Bahamas in 1492, and Magellan’s circumnavigation 1519-22 – were, in scale, a tenth of the Ming fleets of the early fifteenth century. Yet the European voyages had consequences that the Ming voyages did not. The European voyages established permanent presence along the African coast, in the Indian Ocean ports, and in the Americas; they initiated three centuries of European colonial empire that would transform the political economy of the world. The Ming voyages did not. The political will that put the fleets on the water was limited to one emperor’s reign and one successor’s last gasp; the strategic culture of the Confucian bureaucracy was hostile to the maritime sphere; the trade that the voyages might have encouraged was already being conducted by private Chinese merchants who did not need the imperial fleets to accompany them. The Ming treasure fleets are a road not taken, an alternative history of the early modern period in which the centre of maritime power had been East Asia rather than Iberia. They remain one of the great stories of an empire that, in 1405, had the world in its hands and could not hold it.
References
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- Zheng He – Britannica Editorial, Zheng He Achievements (Encyclopaedia Britannica, last updated 2025).
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