Zheng He’s Treasure Fleets

1371 O.S. – 1477 O.S.39 items

chinamaritime
Treasure ships under the sea goddess Tianfei and her retinue, frontispiece of a Daoist scripture to the goddess printed in the Yongle reign (1414–1420), Tenri Library, Japan. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Treasure ships under the sea goddess Tianfei and her retinue, frontispiece of a Daoist scripture to the goddess printed in the Yongle reign (1414–1420), Tenri Library, Japan. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Seven voyages from China to East Africa, 1405–1433

Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming court sent seven great fleets into the “Western Ocean” under the eunuch Zheng He, a Muslim from Yunnan who had been taken captive as a boy. The largest ships of any navy of the age carried tens of thousands of men to Java, Sumatra, Ceylon and Calicut, then on to Hormuz, Aden, Mecca and the Swahili coast. They came home with envoys, a captured king and a giraffe. Then the court stopped them, and China did not send a fleet so far again.

How it is built

Each voyage is a period, drawn on the map as a route through its main landfalls; on the later voyages, squadrons split off to Aden, Mecca and Africa, and their branches are drawn too. A voyage runs from the emperor’s order to the fleet’s return, on Edward Dreyer’s reckoning. The landfalls that matter are events inside it. The three reigns that sent and stopped the fleets are bands of their own, and a little of Zheng He’s life before and the story after frame the voyages.

Dates in the Julian calendar

The Ming sources date everything in the Chinese lunisolar calendar: a reign year, a lunar month and a day. The app does not have that calendar, so each date is given as its Western equivalent in the Julian calendar, the convention for dates before 1582. Where the Chinese record gives only a month or a year, the date here does too.

Threads to follow

  • maritime: the ships, the fleets and the sea road

  • diplomacy: envoys, seals and kings brought to court

  • war: the three times the fleet fought

  • inscriptions: the stelae that record the voyages

  • religion: offerings to Buddha, Allah and the sea goddess

  • court: the emperors and eunuchs behind the fleets

We have traversed more than one hundred thousand li of immense water spaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising sky-high. — The Changle inscription, 1431, translated by J. J. L. Duyvendak (1939)

Items

  1. Ma He is born in Yunnan

    Kunyang, Yunnan

  2. ≈ 9 years, 6 months

  3. Captured by the Ming army and castrated

    Kunyang, Yunnan

  4. ≈ 17 years, 7 months

  5. The Jingnan campaign

    ≈ 2 years, 11 months · The Yan army from Beiping to Nanjing, 1399–1402

  6. Zhu Di takes Nanjing

    Ming palace, Nanjing

  7. Yongle reign

    ≈ 22 years

  8. Given the surname Zheng

  9. The treasure ships

    Longjiang treasure-ship yard, Nanjing

  10. First voyage

    ≈ 2 years, 2 months · First voyage: Nanjing to Calicut, 1405–1407

  11. 170 of the fleet’s men killed on Java

    East Java

  12. Battle of Palembang

    Palembang, on the Musi

  13. Second voyage

    ≈ 1 year, 9 months · Second voyage: Siam, Java, Cochin and Calicut, 1407–1409

  14. A new king of Calicut, and a stele

    Calicut (Kozhikode)

  15. The Galle trilingual inscription

    Galle, Ceylon

  16. Malacca made a kingdom

    Malacca, at the river mouth

  17. Third voyage

    ≈ 1 year, 8 months · Third voyage: Calicut, and war in Ceylon, 1409–1411

  18. War in Ceylon: Alakeshvara captured

    Kotte, Ceylon

  19. Fourth voyage

    ≈ 2 years, 7 months · Fourth voyage: on to Hormuz, 1413–1415

  20. Hormuz

    Hormuz (Jarun island)

  21. A giraffe from Bengal is hailed as a qilin

    Ming palace, Nanjing

  22. Sekandar captured at Semudera

    Semudera (Samudera Pasai), Aceh

  23. Fifth voyage

    ≈ 2 years, 7 months · Fifth voyage: Hormuz, Aden and the Swahili coast, 1417–1419

  24. Incense at the Muslim tombs of Quanzhou

    Lingshan Islamic tombs, Quanzhou

  25. Mogadishu, Brava and Malindi

    Brava (Barawa), Somali coast

  26. Sixth voyage

    ≈ 1 year, 6 months · Sixth voyage: taking the envoys home, 1421–1422

  27. Fire in the new Forbidden City

    Forbidden City, Beijing

  28. Zhou Man’s squadron at Aden

    Aden (Crater)

  29. Hongxi reign

    8 months, 24 days

  30. The voyages are halted

    Forbidden City, Beijing

  31. Xuande reign

    ≈ 9 years, 7 months

  32. Seventh voyage

    ≈ 3 years, 23 days · Seventh voyage: Hormuz, Aden, Mecca and Africa, 1431–1433

  33. The Liujiagang inscription

    Liujiagang (Liuhe), Taicang

  34. The Changle inscription

    Changle, Fujian

  35. Champa

    Thị Nại (Quy Nhơn), Champa

  36. Surabaya

    Surabaya, Java

  37. Seven men go to Mecca

    The Kaaba, Mecca

  38. Hormuz, the turning point

    Hormuz (Jarun island)

  39. Zheng He dies

  40. ≈ 16 years, 5 months

  41. Ma Huan’s book is published

  42. ≈ 25 years, 6 months

  43. The lost archives of the voyages