Script

INTRO

Regular listeners of My Dark Path know of my great affection for China and the city of Shanghai in particular.  I had an episode all about Shanghai in season one of My Dark Path, called "Genuine Fakes."  It was all about the history of Shanghai, the origins of Chinese theatre and film, and the industry that produces "genuine fakes" – luxury knockoffs that can almost pass for the original.  My fascination with the city has extended even further in my research and writing. My fourth novel Like Clockwork is a thriller set in the city of Shanghai.  If you’d like to support me and the show, consider purchasing it or my other novels on Amazon or other online book stores.

Now, I've lost track of the number of times I've been to mainland China.  It's an astonishing country – from the rise of modern cities like Shanghai to the likely permanent effects of the one-child policy to the beautiful human kindness I’ve found in people I’ve met across the country.  Two dear friends from Shanghai even found their way into the novel…under other identities, of course.  But what continues to amaze me is the history of the country that stretches well over several millennia.  And that fact reminds me of the quote from philosopher George Santayana, who wrote, "he who forgets history is doomed to repeat it."  That idea has many useful applications as we observe some of the insanity present in today’s society, but it's intriguing to flip the premise around, allowing me to suggest that "he who seeks to learn history is humbled by it."  I use the word humbled here to observe that, despite having more knowledge at our fingertips than ever before, we can often be filled with hubris about our supposed knowledge instead of being in awe of the past, which we only briefly glimpse.

And so, let’s take a quick look at a fragment of history which can be easily overlooked.

In 1974, Chinese archeologists discovered a junk, that's a term for a Chinese ship, that abandoned sometime around 1270 in the port of Quanzhou.  Onboard was cargo that conclusively proved the ship had been up and down the east coast of Africa.  Subsequent investigations showed extensive contact between Africa and China from as early as 800.  Chinese coins and pottery have been found in archeological digs in East Africa from present-day Somalia to Tanzania, and even a few artifacts in present-day Zimbabwe.

During the Yuan Dynasty, from 1279-1368, Mongols ruled China, and little exploration and trade with overseas nations took place.  But in the periods before and after, especially during the Tang and Song Dynasties (roughly from 618 to 1130), the Chinese were both curious about distant nations and desirous of trade with them.  The east coast of Africa, all of Asia, and perhaps even the coasts of the Americas were visited by Chinese ships in search, not of conquest or colonies, but information, novelty and trade. 

We know historically that the Chinese have gone through periods of exploration and trade with distant nations.  China had contact with Africa during the Han dynasty, which lasted from 206 BCE to 220 CE.  In the book Universal Christian Topography by sixth-century Byzantine monk Kosmas, Sri Lanka is described as a trading center for both Chinese and African sailors.  A Chinese map from the fourteenth century shows Madagascar and the southern tip of Africa nearly two decades before the Portuguese “discovered” the Cape of Good Hope.  This is not to mention the silk road, which linked trade between China and Europe from the second century BCE to the fifteenth century, whose most famous traveler was Italian merchant and pool game inspiration Marco Polo.  Europe, at this time, lagged behind the Chinese when it came to maritime exploration and trade.

In 1414, during the Ming Dynasty, which was established when the Chinese overthrew the Mongols, driving them both from power and the Chinese nation, a Chinese admiral sailed into the Indian Ocean with a fleet that dwarfed Columbus’s meager ships 78 years later.  This voyage marked the third time the Admiral had sailed the Pacific and Indian oceans, exploring the world.  He brought back information, trade goods, and a Giraffe, a gift for the emperor of China

Join us today as we sail the dark paths of the Pacific and Indian oceans with Cheng Ho, also called Zheng He, The Chinese Columbus.

Hi, I'm MF Thomas, and welcome to the My Dark Path podcast.  In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal.  So, if you geek out over these subjects, you're among friends here at My Dark Path.  We’re putting out new videos regularly on Youtube.  One comment gave us a like and said: “and you look so normal too!  I like normal people with twisty brains.”  Well, dear viewer, thank you.  I’m glad that we’ve found each other! 

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Finally, thank you for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me.  Let's get started with Episode 52: Eunuch, Emperor, and Giraffe – the Chinese Columbus

PART ONE

Some historians theorize that Chinese explorers reached the west coast of the Americas around 458 C.E., over a millennia before Columbus reached the Caribbean.  We know that in 1559, Spanish explorers sailed from the Philippines to present-day Acapulco in Guerrero State, on Mexico's Pacific coast.  Over the next century, Spanish galleons roughly followed the routes of Chinese junks that knew of the winds and the currents and had been along the American coast upon occasion over the centuries since 458, sometimes driven by storms and at other times for trade or exchange of native culture.

Long before the Europeans began sailing the wine-dark seas seeking first trading partners and then lands and people to colonize and convert, the Chinese had sailed the same seas as actual explorers.  And the man that is considered by China to be greater than Columbus, often times called The Chinese Columbus, is Cheng Ho, also called Zheng He.

Columbus, as every American schoolchild knows, had three ships on his first voyage – the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.  The Niña and Pinta were tiny by today's standards—only 50 to 70 feet from bow to stern each.  The Santa Maria, Columbus' flagship, was slightly larger as a heavy cargo vessel.  The Niña had 20 sailors and the Pinta 26.  Santa Maria had a crew of 40.  These 86 men and Columbus spent 35 days crossing the Atlantic to land on the island of Hispaniola, present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti (interested listeners, by the way, may remember our history of Hispaniola on the season two episode, “The Parsley Massacre in the Land of Mountains.”  If you haven’t heard it, go check it out!)  Later voyages would feature much larger ships with far more crew and soldiers, designed to begin the conquest of the new world.  We learn at an early age about Columbus, but I suspect it is hard for the modern mind to think about exactly how small these ships actually were and how terrifying these initial voyages must have been.

Let us remember that the Chinese were far ahead of the Europeans at this point in terms of technology, maritime exploration, and sheer size of ships.

By contrast to Columbus’s tiny (in every sense of the word) fleet, Cheng Ho had sixty-two heavy junks (called “Treasure Ships”) in his fleet, as well as over a hundred auxiliary vessels.  He traveled with a full armada.  The largest of his ships had three decks and weighed 1500 tons each.  Columbus's ships, in total, weighed 450 tons.  That's all three ships together.  Cheng’s largest ships had nine masts and twelve sails each.  They were said to have measured 440 feet long and 180 feet wide.  All three of Columbus's ships would have fit inside Cheng Ho's largest ship with room to spare.

In contrast with Columbus’ 86 sailors and officers, the official record states that Cheng’s contingent was: 93 commanders, 868 civil officers, 26,800 soldiers, 140 senior captains (who were in command of one thousand men each) 403 captains (who commanded one hundred men each), 180 medical officers, seven ambassadors, two military judges (for crimes committed by men during the voyage), 53 eunuch chamberlains, ten junior eunuchs, a senior secretary of the Board of Revenue (to ensure the voyage paid proper taxes to the Emperor upon return), and a geomancer.  The last is a practitioner of Geomancy, a method of divination that interprets markings on the ground or the patterns formed by tossed handfuls of soil, rocks, or sand.  The Chinese version is called Feng Shui, which means "wind water" and is a traditional practice that claims to use energy forces to harmonize individuals with their surrounding environment.  The onboard Feng Shui geomancer would study landscapes and the water to understand and interpret the flow of Qi (pronounced “chee”), a universal energy that flows through all things.  The fleet would voyage successfully if the commanders followed the advice of the geomancer, who would instruct them on the most fluid and harmonious paths of travel that would keep the fleet in harmony with the environment.  Apparently, the practice was useful as the fleet was very successful.

Like Columbus, Cheng Ho was supported by the government, which encouraged his voyages.  Like Columbus, he undertook multiple voyages of discovery.  Unlike Columbus, though, as a eunuch of the court of the emperor, Cheng Ho had no personal financial stake in the voyage.  He served at the pleasure of the Son of Heaven, and nothing he brought back was his; no honors would accrue upon him.  Unlike Columbus, Cheng Ho sailed where others had already sailed.  What separated him, however, was the size and scope of his fleet and his voyages.

The Emperor who sponsored Cheng Ho was Yong’le (formerly known as Chu Ti, more on that later), who reigned from 1402 to 1424.  Yong’le had been a soldier who deposed a younger, gentler relative who sat on the imperial throne.  In order to make his regime more legitimate, he claimed his predecessor was still alive somewhere in the Indian Ocean, plotting against China.  The fleet was first mobilized to find this deposed monarch.  A secondary objective of exploration and trade was also given.  Yong'le charged the eunuch admiral with scouring the territories of the Indian Ocean to find luxury goods for the court.  He presided over an era of wealth and expansion, and after his death, the name assigned to his era was “Yung Lo” – “The Time of Lasting Joy.”

Cheng Ho’s ships carried Chinese silk and porcelain for trade.  As a result, the fleet was sometimes called "The Treasure Ships."  They initially set out for Arabia.  Centuries before, the Chinese had established trade with Arabia, seeking Islamic pottery.  The same Mongol invasion that resulted in the Yuan Dynasty in China, however, also reached as far as what we now call the Middle East, and the trade was interrupted.  The voyage of Cheng Ho was in part thus also to re-establish this trade.  The Chinese had learned, however, that Islam had spread down the East coast of Africa, and thus it might be possible to trade there instead of Arabia.

But Cheng Ho was destined to bring home more than just pottery or a missing monarch.  Like Columbus, he had multiple voyages; in Cheng Ho's case, there were five, two more than Columbus's three, and each subsequent one took on greater significance for international relations as well as Cheng Ho’s own reputation at home.

Cheng Ho’s first voyage began in the summer of 1405 with a fleet of 63 large ships and 255 smaller support vessels, with a total crew of 27,800 men.  The fleet set out from Liu-chia-Kang at the lower estuary of the Yangtze River, passing my much-admired Shanghai on the way into the East China Sea, where they turned south through the South China Sea, passing through the Malacca Strait where a pirate named Ch’en Tsu-I had been marauding for years, preying on Chinese trade vessels and local fishermen and voyagers alike.  Cheng Ho demanded Ch’en’s surrender.  At first, Ch’en said he would comply, but then attacked Cheng’s fleet, killing five thousand of his crew and burning and sinking ten of his ships. Cheng, however, captured Ch’en and his lieutenants, pacified the Malacca Strait and made it safe for Chinese trade.  He then returned to the court, presenting Ch’en as a gift to the emperor, who had the pirate executed publicly in October of 1407.  Cheng Ho then refurbished his fleet and, in late autumn of that year, set out on his second voyage.  

PART TWO

Cheng Ho was born in 1371 in K’un-yang in central Yunan province.  His family name was Ma.  We know his great-grandfather was named Bayan, and his grandfather and father were both named Hajji.  This rather unusual name suggests the family had visited Mecca in Saudi Arabia and were actually of the Islamic faith and possibly of Mongol-Arab descent.  Indeed, his Moslem heritage might have been one of the reasons why he was selected as the admiral to the Middle East and Africa – his familiarity with the customs and beliefs of Islamic nations.  He also recruited a Chinese Moslem named Ma Huan to serve as an interpreter for Arabic-speaking countries.  Upon their return from the voyage, Ma Huan wrote a memoir of all he saw and did – one of several detailed records we have of Cheng Ho’s journey.

At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the generals fighting on the front lines of western China were responsible for recruiting men to serve as eunuchs at the Imperial court back in Beijing.  In 1381, Yunan was pacified by the Chinese army, and the generals sought intelligent young men for this purpose.  At the age of ten, Cheng Ho was recruited and castrated so that he might serve the emperor as a eunuch. 

The practice of creating and using eunuchs at court has existed in China since about 146 CE (AD).  It initially began as one of the so-called "Five Punishments," possible penalties on the body for criminal offenses in early China.  These included tattooing, cutting off the nose, amputation of the foot, full castration, and death through dismemberment.  Later, becoming a Eunuch was perceived as a more positive thing, a means of entering into the high ranks of imperial service.  At some points in imperial court history, self-castration became a regular occurrence in order to secure promotion.  Eunuchs were believed to be reliable and dedicated imperial civil servants as they could not have children, and thus could not beget a dynasty, and thus remained focused on their work instead of a family and would not betray the emperor in order to replace him with themselves and their children.  Castration as a punishment was banned at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, thus leaving only voluntary castration for the creation of court eunuchs.  Cheng Ho falls into this category.  By the time he was an adult, court eunuchs were responsible for every aspect of court life, every department in the imperial palace, and much of the military.  Their presence and power increased significantly, driving Confucian scholars and other court officials to accuse the eunuchs of spying, intrigue and plotting against everyone else.  They were not trusted because they were allowed to serve in the harem of the emperor and be alone in the presence of women of the imperial family, as they were perceived as representing no threat.  As their power grew, so, too, did their reputation for being cunning, greedy, and duplicitous.  Literature from the period often features an evil eunuch plotting against some young man or woman.  Yet many palace eunuchs served faithfully and well and led China to success in trade, military encounters, and efficient government, and that was the world Cheng Ho entered at the age of ten when he was castrated and joined the imperial service.

He was assigned to the entourage of Chu Ti, the fourth son of the Ming emperor and celebrated military strategist.  By his early twenties, Cheng had accompanied Chu Ti on a series of military campaigns throughout China.  Cheng Ho’s family records note, “When he entered adulthood, he reportedly became seven feet tall and had a waist five feet in circumference.  His cheeks and forehead were high but his nose was small.  He had glaring eyes and a voice as loud as a huge bell.  He knew a great deal about warfare and was well accustomed to battle."  While his size might be a bit of an exaggeration, his fearsome appearance and military skill were not.  Reading more about the process and consequences of making eunuchs, I’ve studied a few clinical articles about the effects of castration.  I’ve left links to a few in the show notes on the website.

Before the expeditions that made him famous, Cheng Ho achieved renown as a soldier and commander.  He fought the Mongols north of the Great Wall from 1393 to 1397 and distinguished himself as a mighty warrior.  When the Ming Emperor, Chu Ti’s father, died, in keeping with imperial and Confucian tradition, the eldest grandson, Chu Yun-wen, son of the emperor’s eldest son, became emperor.  Chu Ti did not believe his nephew would be a good emperor and so launched a civil war with the same troops that successfully fought the Mongols north of the Great Wall.  During the Chu Ti rebellion, Cheng Ho fought on his behalf, leading the blockade of Beijing in August of 1399.  He then led the southern campaign that ended with the capture of Nanking in July of 1402.  Chu Ti became the emperor, and Cheng Ho became his most trusted advisor.  The previous emperor, Chu Yun-wen, fled China and vanished somewhere in the south seas.  The search for Chu Yun-wen is what allegedly inspired Cheng Ho's first voyage.  But once he set out, Cheng Ho seemed to forget the search for the previous monarch in the quest for trade and knowledge, pacifying the Malacca Strait and bringing a pirate king back for the emperor’s justice.

The second voyage of Cheng Ho entered the Indian Ocean in late 1407.  His mission was to sail to Kolkata (Calcutta) in India and establish trade and territorial understandings with the local rulers.  Cheng Ho was there also to deliver gifts and greetings to the king, as he had often sent tribute and gifts to the Ming court.  This set the pattern for how Cheng Ho encountered other cultures: an arrival full of ceremony, a greeting to the local monarch, and the offering of gifts.  In Kolkata, a pavilion was erected to celebrate the occasion, the visit of Cheng Ho, and the new understanding between the Son of Heaven and the king of Kolkata.  Cheng Ho and his fleet then sailed on to Java, which was not a united nation but a group of principalities ruled by warlords.  The Chinese referred to the two most powerful as “the East King” and “the West King.”  Unaware that the East King had gained ascendancy and was now the mortal enemy of the West King, Cheng Ho landed on land he thought was controlled by the East King and sent greetings to the West King (thinking him the East King) from the Emperor of China.  The West King slaughtered one hundred and seventy of Cheng Ho’s men before realizing the fleet was as large as it was and that he was facing down Cheng Ho's army.  The West King offered sixty thousand gold coins to make up for the loss, but the Chinese then simply deposed him and set up an ally of the East King on the throne of the West King and promptly left.  Java did not become a colony or subsidiary of China, nor was the placing of a new king on the throne designed to establish a client state.  Cheng Ho simply removed a monarch who attacked him and replaced him with someone who would not make the same mistake.

By the summer of 1409, Cheng Ho had returned to Nanking to report the results of this second expedition.  He built a temple in honor of T'ien-fei, the goddess of the sea, as thanks for her protection and guidance during the voyage.  Remember that Cheng Ho is a Muslim, so this act may have been just as much political as it was devotional.  He spent a few months in the capital in service to the emperor, but it was not long before the Son of Heaven again sent his greatest admiral out to sea again.

PART THREE

From September 1409 to June 1411, Cheng Ho sailed to the Malabar coast of India, with stops along the way in Siam, Malacca, Sumatra, and Ceylon or modern-day Sri Lanka.  The fleet harvested lumber along the way, both to repair the ships and to bring exotic woods back to China.  They stopped in the Sembilan Islands to gather and trade for fragrant herbs.

The third voyage is best known for two events.  The first was an exhibition in Sri Lanka in which Chinese products and crafts were put on display in public.  Silk embroidery, gold and silver candlesticks, textiles, incense burners, Buddhist ritual objects, and Chinese pottery were all presented as examples of Chinese craftspersonship and potential trade goods.  To commemorate the occasion, a tablet was erected at the site, with the same message written in Tamil, Persian, and Mandarin.  Amazingly, this tablet is still present in Sri Lanka.  One can stand on the spot where Cheng Ho displayed the best of Chinese finery.

However, one other event occurred, perhaps marring the visit.  The local monarch, King A-laga-kkon-ara, wanted that Chinese finery, not to mention Cheng Ho's fleet, for himself.  He attacked at midnight as the fleet readied to sail on to India.  Cheng Ho, however, as we now know, was a master strategist.  King Alagakkonara was captured by the Chinese soldiers, who took him and his family and ministers prisoner, bringing them to Nanking for judgment from the Emperor.  Chu Ti offered respect to his fellow monarch and, in an act of mercy, released the entire group, who were then set free and sent home, perhaps a little more wary of attempting to fight the emperor’s navy.  Thus ended the third voyage of Cheng Ho.

In 1415, just as Henry V was headed towards Agincourt in France and in Rome, Pope Gregory XII resigned, becoming the last pope to resign until Benedict XVI in 2013, a Giraffe arrived in Beijing from Malinda, Kenya, as part of Cheng Ho's famous and fateful fourth voyage.

A few years before, another eunuch admiral sailed into the Bay of Bengal to trade with the local Indian government.  While there, he saw a giraffe, recently carried to India by envoys of the King of Malindi.  A new king had just been enthroned in Bengal, and the giraffe may have been a gift from his fellow Muslim ruler.  The Chinese were fascinated with the giraffe and wanted one for their emperor.  The King of Bengal offered his Giraffe as a gift to the Chinese emperor, and the Chinese flotilla took it and sailed back to China, but were concerned that a single animal on a long voyage might not make it.  A decision was made to go to Malindi, establish diplomatic relations and get a giraffe for the emperor from the source.

For context, Vasco de Gama, the Portuguese explorer, met with the Mwenye Mui of Malindi in 1498, 84 years later.  Mwenye Mui is the Chief of Chiefs who speaks for the people, which the Portuguese simply translated as "king."  The Chinese had been there a century earlier.

Less than two years after he had returned with the entire royal court of Ceylon as his prisoners, Cheng Ho was again sent out in 1413 with the express purpose of more giraffes!  This time he had 63 large vessels, hundreds of smaller auxiliary craft totaling over 400 ships and boats, and 27,670 men in his fleet.

This expedition once again touched on a number of new sites and encountered a number of cultures for the first time.  Cheng Ho visited the Maldives, Hormuz in the Gulf, the Hadramaut coast in present-day eastern Yemen, and the Gulf of Aden.

Stopping in Sumatra, just as in Java, Cheng Ho was drawn into a local political struggle.  A usurper named Su-wa-la had murdered the previous king and taken the throne.  Cheng Ho would not have cared otherwise, but Su-wa-la then ordered the Sumatran forces to attack the Chinese fleet.  He was defeated and fled, but Cheng Ho ordered some of the fleet to pursue him while the rest continued on.  Su-wa-la was captured in Lambri, in northern Indonesia, along with his family.  They were held prisoner by Cheng Ho for the rest of the voyage and then brought to China with the rest of the tributes and envoys from Africa almost two years later. 

During this fourth voyage, Cheng Ho sailed down the Madagascar Channel and sailed as far south as the Kerguelen Islands, which are closer to Antarctica than they are to Africa.  Some historians theorize other Chinese sailors might have also sailed all the way to Australia around this time.  Cheng Ho also established bases as he went, allowing small parts of the fleet to go on side missions, representing the Chinese emperor to dozens of cultures.  When Cheng Ho returned to Beijing from this voyage, he not only brought a giraffe, he brought envoys from nineteen nations to pay tribute to the Ming Court and establish diplomatic relations.

Cheng Ho’s fleet arrived in Malindi in 1414, there mostly to get a pair of giraffes.  Word had spread from the previous envoys that the Emperor of China really, really liked giraffes and that other African animals might also make a most auspicious gift.  The Giraffe itself has had a mystique that has made it a favorite of kings and commoners alike throughout history. Giraffes are the tallest living terrestrial animal, not to mention the largest grazing herbivore, found naturally only in sub-Saharan Africa.  Its height – up to 19 feet in an adult male – unique coloration and exotic physiology have made the giraffe a global source of fascination.  The ancient Egyptians depicted them in images and kept them in captivity, sending them to other ancient Mediterranean civilizations.  An ancient African people called the Kiffians created a life-size rock engraving of two giraffes over 8,000 years ago that is believed by some to be the world's largest rock art petroglyph.

The Chinese believed that the giraffe was a unicorn of some kind, despite obviously having two horns.  The entire world has been fascinated with giraffes when first encountered.  Julius Caesar brought the first giraffe to Rome in 46 BCE, where it was displayed for the masses.  The later Romans told stories about them and brought many back to Rome, including several to fight in the Colosseum.  The Arab nations revered the giraffe as a sacred creature and shared stories and images of them with Europeans during the Renaissance.  In 1486, explorers from East Africa gifted a giraffe to Lorenzo de Medici in Florence for his zoological garden.  It would be three hundred and fifty years before another giraffe set foot in Europe.

In the early nineteenth century, the Sultan of Egypt sent a giraffe as a gift to Charles X, the King of France.  On June 30, 1827, more than 100,000 people gathered in the streets of Paris to welcome the arrival of the beast they referred to as “the tall horse.” It seems to see a giraffe is to want to have one for your nation.  More recently, Salvador Dali considered the giraffe to be a masculine symbol, and in his paintings, a flaming giraffe was meant to be a "masculine cosmic apocalyptic monster."

By December 1416, Cheng Ho was back in Beijing with Su-wa-la and his family as prisoners, as well as the envoys and ambassadors of nineteen nations.  Also arriving at this time were two giraffes, a gift for the emperor from the King of Malindi.  The envoys who later returned to Africa noted the delight of Chu Ti as he laid eyes on a giraffe for the first time.  He was overjoyed and enthralled to have, in his own private menagerie garden, two masculine cosmic apocalyptic monster unicorns.  Those envoys reported to their nations that the way to gain the emperor’s favor was to gift him with unique animals, so on his next two voyages, his final ones, Cheng Ho would return to China with a number of African animals: lions, leopards, camels, ostriches, zebras, rhinos, and antelope, all gifts to the emperor so that he might appreciate the variety of African animals.  The giraffes, however, remained his favorites.

PART FOUR

Cheng Ho’s fifth voyage most likely went no further than the Persian Gulf.

His sixth and final voyage saw Cheng Ho headed straight for Africa.  On both of these voyages, he again met with local rulers, brought gifts from China, and in exchange, brought gifts, including, as I have said, a number of animals, back to the Chinese court.  The voyaging might have continued but for the loss of his benefactor and king.

Emperor Chu Ti died in 1424.  The death of his patron and protector also resulted in the downfall of Cheng Ho as a major player in the Chinese government.  With the death of Chu Ti, the critics of the voyages of Chang Ho and the Confucian bureaucrats, the longtime adversaries of the court eunuchs, conspired to dismiss the eunuchs, including Cheng Ho, from their positions.  The next emperor, Chu Kao-chih, was Chu Ti’s son, who only reigned nine months before dying himself.  Although Chu Ti had promised to stop his expeditions in 1421, it was not until September of 1424 when Chu Kao-Chih, as one of his first acts, canceled Cheng Ho’s maritime expeditions permanently.  Various accounts from the period claim that the new emperor either ordered the fleet to burn down or ordered that they be abandoned on the beaches to decompose.  After the death of Chu Kao-chih, his son, Chu Chan-chi, authorized one final voyage of what was left of the fleet.  After that, the isolationist policies of the bureaucracy won out, not least of which because the expense of maintaining and provisioning such an extensive fleet was proving unsustainable.  

His seventh and final voyage took Cheng Ho back to some of the same nations he had first visited decades before, sailing through the Indian Ocean from 1431 to 1433 at the behest of the grandson of his mentor.  His fleet set out to return to Beijing with more giraffes, horses, and elephants for the new emperor.  By this point, however, Cheng Ho was in his sixties and had led a long and challenging life.  It is likely he stayed with the main fleet, and smaller groups were sent out to places from Mecca to Malindi to again offer a gift exchange from China.  It is here where the historical record offers conflicting accounts of the end of the voyager and eunuch who brought exotic animals to the court of China and the court of China to the lands of the Indian Ocean.  One account has him dying in Kolkata, the fleet returning with the giraffes and elephants without him.  Another has him returning to China and passing upon his arrival back at court.  We do not know where he died or even where his final resting place is.  He has no tomb, no monument.  His private life remained remarkably private, not least of which because he was a eunuch and thus had no family to honor or remember him.  Regardless of where he ended his days, as the Chinese historian Chang Kuei-sheng observes, “He had sailed the longest distance and covered the widest expanse of water during his lifetime of anyone in the world up till then.” And indeed, of almost anyone in the century to follow, including Columbus.  It was not until Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigated the globe in 1521 and 1522 that someone finally exceeded Cheng Ho’s voyages.

Sadly by 1470, Cheng Ho’s own records of his voyages were burned by the bureaucrats as “unsuitable for human inspection,” perhaps a final attempt by the enemies of the eunuchs to remove any memory of Cheng Ho and his accomplishments.  It’s a reminder to be wary of anyone who declares that the past is evil and its memory ought to be destroyed.  By that same year, only 140 ships from a fleet of over 400 remained as China retreated from exploration and trade by sea.  His accomplishments were downplayed after his death by those who wished to discount him and his expeditions, but his career was too large and too unique to be erased, as I hope we have shown here.  To do what he did, Cheng Ho must have been a man, a leader, and a sailor of extraordinary abilities, and there are at least six temples in the south Pacific and in China that bear his image and celebrate him as the greatest explorer of Chinese history.

Cheng Ho was a Muslim leading expeditions for a nation predominantly Buddhist and Confucian.  He himself was interested in Buddhism and, despite his success with Muslim heads of state in the gulf and in Africa, eventually took the Buddhist name Fu-Shan. As Edwin Reischauer and John Fairbank note in their history East Asia: The Great Tradition, “The voyages [of Chen Ho] must be regarded as a spectacular demonstration of the capacity of early Ming China for maritime expansion, made all the more dramatic by the fact that Chinese ideas of government and official policies were fundamentally indifferent, if not actually opposed, to such an expansion.  The contrast between capacity and performance, as viewed in retrospect from the vantage point of our modern world of trade and overseas expansion, is truly striking.”

Equally fascinating is the idea that by the end of the fifteenth century, the Chinese and the European explorers of the south of Africa and the Indian Ocean were often near each other within a few days of sailing, and yet their paths never crossed.  They heard of each other from various African communities, but Europeans and Chinese never met at sea during this century.  Imagine what might have happened, what reports might have been sent back to the crowned heads of Europe had a Portuguese or Spanish ship had run into Cheng Ho's fleet of 400 ships.  Imagine what might have been if the imperial bureaucracy, rather than burning Cheng Ho’s ships and records, funded further missions past Africa and into the Atlantic.  What might have happened had the British woken up to 400 Chinese ships anchored off the coast?  History might have gone very differently indeed.

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path.  I'm MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with our engineer and creative director, Dom Purdie.  This story was prepared for us by Kevin Wetmore; big thank yous and a giraffe to them and the entire My Dark Path team.

Please take a moment and give My Dark Path a 5-star rating wherever you're listening.  It really helps the show, and we love to hear from you.

Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science, and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night.