Zheng He's Treasure Fleet: How a Captured Boy From Yunnan Became Ming China's Admiral of Seven Voyages

Zheng He sailed remarkably far: between 1405 and 1433 he commanded seven treasure voyages for the Ming dynasty that crossed the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean and reached Southeast Asia, India, the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa and the Swahili coast of East Africa. The first three voyages went as far as Calicut on India's Malabar Coast, the fourth reached Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, and the last three continued to Arabia and East Africa. That is the short answer. The longer answer is a story about a boy taken prisoner in a war, a prince who became emperor, and a fleet so large that historians still argue about how big its ships really were.

A Muslim boy from Yunnan

Zheng He was born in 1371 as Ma He, into a Muslim Hui family in Kunyang, near Kunming in the southwestern province of Yunnan. At that time Yunnan was still ruled by a Mongol prince loyal to the fallen Yuan dynasty. His family had deep roots in that world. He was descended from Sayyid Ajjal Shams al-Din Omar, who had governed Yunnan for the Mongol Empire, and both his grandfather and his father carried the title hajji, which suggests that they had made the pilgrimage to Mecca.

That background matters for the rest of his life. The man who would later lead Chinese ships to Arabian ports grew up in a family that already knew about distant lands and long journeys. It is easy to imagine a child hearing stories of the road to Mecca, even if we have no record of what he was actually told.

Captured, and placed in a prince's household

The Ming army invaded Yunnan in the early 1380s, and Ma He's father died during the fighting. The boy himself was captured by Ming soldiers, castrated between the ages of ten and fourteen, and sent to serve in the household of Zhu Di, the Prince of Yan, who governed the northern city of Beiping, today's Beijing.

It would be hard to think of a worse beginning. Yet the young eunuch slowly won the prince's trust. He spent his early years as a soldier on the northern frontier and took part in Zhu Di's campaigns against the Mongols. He also received a proper education in Beiping, something that might not have happened in the capital, Nanjing, because the founding Hongwu Emperor distrusted eunuchs and preferred to keep them illiterate. In the prince's household he was also known as Sanbao, a reference to the Three Jewels of Buddhism, and that nickname later became the name by which many people remembered him.

From rebel commander to "Zheng"

When the new Jianwen Emperor tried to strip his uncles of their power, Zhu Di rebelled in 1399. Ma He defended Beiping's city reservoir against the imperial armies and was one of the commanders in the 1402 campaign that captured Nanjing. Zhu Di became the Yongle Emperor, promoted Ma He to Grand Director, and in 1404 gave him the new surname Zheng, in recognition of his service at the reservoir.

So the name we use today, Zheng He, was itself a reward. A prisoner of war had become one of the most powerful men at the new emperor's court, and his loyalty to Zhu Di was the foundation of everything that followed.

Building the treasure fleet

The Yongle Emperor ordered the construction of a great fleet in 1403 and put Zheng He in command of it. Preparations were on a huge scale: the expeditions needed so many interpreters that a foreign language institute was set up in Nanjing. The first voyage left on 11 July 1405 with a fleet of 317 ships and almost 28,000 crew.

Why send such a fleet at all? Historians give several answers. The emperor wanted to establish a Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean, control its trade, impress foreign rulers and widen the circle of states that sent tribute to China. Some passages in the official History of Ming have also been read as a hint that the first voyages were partly a search for the deposed Jianwen Emperor, who was rumoured to have escaped. The two motives do not exclude each other. A ruler who had taken the throne by force had good reasons to show the world, and his own subjects, that heaven was on his side.

Gifts, giraffes and guns

The fleet carried gold, silver, porcelain and silk as gifts, and brought back ostriches, zebras, camels and ivory from the Swahili coast. The most famous souvenir was a giraffe from Malindi in East Africa. At the Ming court it was taken to be a qilin, a lucky mythical creature, and presented as proof that the emperor ruled with the Mandate of Heaven.

It would be wrong, though, to picture the voyages as peaceful sightseeing trips. The fleet carried soldiers, and Zheng He used them. He destroyed the pirate fleet of Chen Zuyi at Palembang, fought a land war against the Kotte kingdom on Ceylon, and helped defeat a rival claimant to the throne of Semudera in northern Sumatra. Envoys from many states travelled back with the fleet to pay their respects at the Ming court. Trade, diplomacy and military power were all part of the same project.

The routes themselves were not new. Chinese, Arab and other merchants had sailed between China and the Arabian Peninsula for centuries, and when the fleet first reached Malacca there was already a sizable Chinese community living there. What was new was the scale and the fact that the state, not private traders, was in charge.

How big were the ships?

Popular books often say that Zheng He's largest "treasure ships" were about 127 metres long, far bigger than any wooden ship built in Europe for centuries. But that figure comes from a novel published in 1597, long after the voyages, and many scholars consider such dimensions unlikely, proposing much shorter lengths of about 60 to 75 metres. Excavations at the Treasure Shipyard in Nanjing in 2003 and 2004 found building basins that were long enough for a giant ship but far too narrow and shallow for one, suggesting that the largest vessels built there probably did not exceed about 75 metres.

Even the smaller estimate describes very large wooden ships, and a fleet of hundreds of vessels was still an astonishing sight in the early fifteenth century. The debate is a good reminder that famous numbers are worth checking.

The end of the voyages

When the Yongle Emperor died in 1424, his successor, the Hongxi Emperor, stopped the voyages. Zheng He was made defender of Nanjing and later supervised the rebuilding of a great Buddhist temple there. The next ruler, the Xuande Emperor, sent him on one final, seventh voyage in 1430. He probably died in 1433 during or shortly after that last expedition, possibly at Calicut, although another theory says he lived on in Nanjing until 1435; his tomb in Nanjing is a cenotaph.

Why did China stop? Part of the answer is politics at court. The voyages were run by palace eunuchs, and the civil officials who opposed them gained the upper hand after Yongle's death. Money was also needed for wars against the Mongols in the north, and later for the Great Wall. Official histories then said little about the voyages. Modern historians also point out that Chinese maritime trade did not simply end after Zheng He; Chinese ships stayed active in Southeast Asian commerce for centuries.

Legacy: from forgotten admiral to national hero

Zheng He was long neglected in official Chinese histories and became widely known again only after the writer Liang Qichao published a biography of him in 1904. Today 11 July, the date his first fleet set out, is Maritime Day in both the People's Republic of China and Taiwan.

Among Chinese communities in Southeast Asia he became an object of folk veneration, and there are temples linked to him in Indonesian cities such as Semarang and Surabaya. In Sri Lanka, the Galle Trilingual Inscription, written in Chinese, Tamil and Persian, records the fleet's donations to a temple. That single stone, carved in three languages, captures the world he moved through better than any statistic.

He also lives on in fiction and culture. A 1597 Ming novel turned his voyages into a fantasy adventure, the science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge named a trading civilisation the "Qeng Ho" after him, and Chinese television marked the 600th anniversary of the voyages in 2005 with a drama series. A Chinese navy training ship carries his name too.

For language learners, Zheng He is a useful figure because his story touches so many cultures. You can talk about him in English, Chinese, Malay, Arabic or Swahili and each language will remember a slightly different side of him: the admiral, the diplomat, the Muslim, the man behind a temple on a faraway coast.

Learn with Zheng He: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to set sail	to begin a voyage or a big project	The fleet set sail in July 1405.
uncharted waters	a new, unknown situation	Our team is in uncharted waters with this product.
on a grand scale	very large, ambitious	The voyages were planned on a grand scale.
to show the flag	to make your presence visible abroad	The ships were sent to show the flag.
to take something with a grain of salt	to doubt it a little	Take the 127-metre figure with a grain of salt.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a trip or project you started, using "to set sail" and "uncharted waters".