Читать книгу Empires of the Monsoon - Richard Hall - Страница 18

Your Master the Lord of China greets you and counsels you to act justly to your subjects.

—Chinese envoy, addressing the Sultan of Aden, 1420

THE DRIVING FORCE behind China’s most dramatic display of sea-power in its history was a singular figure, the Grand Admiral Zheng He. Described by contemporaries as handsome, tall and burly, with fierce eyes, long earlobes, and a voice ‘as loud as a bell’, Zheng was also a eunuch. They called him the Three-Jewel Eunuch (or, more formally, the Eunuch of the Three Treasures, a title derived from Buddhism which is literally translated as ‘the Three Jewels of Pious Ejaculation’). Yet he was not a Buddhist, his original surname was not Zheng, and ethnically he was not of Chinese descent.

He was born in 1371 in the south-western Kunyang county, in the province of Yunnan. Kunyang is remote from the sea, but his family is thought to have originated even further away, beyond the Great Wall in a distant part of central Asia, and to have come to Yunnan with the Mongols. At all events, they were Muslims, both his father and grandfather having made pilgrimages to Mecca – a great achievement at that time. The family name was Ma, a common one among Muslims in China, and the boy had an elder brother and four sisters. When he was born the Mongols were still holding Yunnan, but were finally driven out by the armies of the Ming emperor Hongwu in 1382.

This was to be the turning-point in the life of the Ma family’s eleven-year-old son. A visiting general chose him, for his looks and his intelligence, to be taken to Nanjing, then the Chinese capital. Once in Nanjing, he was made a page to the prince of Yan, the future emperor Yongle. He was given the new surname of Zheng, and castrated.

The creation of eunuchs to be the personal attendants of China’s rulers was a tradition, dating back to the earliest empires. At first only criminals were castrated, and were then sent to serve in the palace; this was called gongxing, palace punishment. Gradually the stigma was removed. Eunuchs were found to be unwaveringly loyal, never liable to suspicion of plotting to found dynasties of their own; all their energies were dedicated to whatever tasks were set for them. The most obvious role for a eunuch of a menial type was as ‘guardians of the harem’. Sometimes courtiers and confidants of much higher status chose to be castrated, to rule out any danger of being accused of sexual misconduct.

The Yongle period was the heyday of the eunuchs, who had played a decisive role in the intrigues which helped the emperor to seize the throne in 1403. They came to have far more say in palace circles than the traditional wielders of power, the Confucian bureaucrats, and none was more influential than Zheng He. While still in his mid-thirties he became a senior officer in the army garrison at Nanjing, on the Yangtze river, after putting down a rebellion in his home province.

When the new emperor decided to implement the long-discussed plans for a naval venture into the Indian Ocean, he turned to Zheng whose religion made him a natural choice since so many of the ‘barbarian’ lands round the ocean were reputed to follow the rites of the ‘Heavenly Square’ (the Ka’ba in Mecca). There had been a pretence at first that Zheng He was merely being sent to look for Huidi, the deposed emperor, but this was soon abandoned. The Chinese were primarily looking for markets for the surpluses of their great factories.¹

There is no knowing whether Zheng was ever a naval commander before being appointed to lead the first expedition. Perhaps he had seen action in sea fights with Japanese pirates (wokou), who wreaked havoc among Chinese merchant shipping; the junks of the coastal defence fleet carried warriors trained to board the pirate ships and slaughter their crews. Even if Zheng was no seafarer he must have been well acquainted with naval activity, since Nanjing was near the ocean. Stupendous efforts had been made there for several decades to build up China’s fleets.

A previous emperor, Taizu, had ordered the planting on mountainsides inland from Nanjing of millions of trees, to provide wood suitable for ships. By the time of Yongle, the imperial navy consisted of 400 vessels stationed at Nanjing, 2,800 coastal-defence ships, a 3,000-strong transport fleet, and 250 ‘treasure ships’, showpieces of Chinese technology. Although the Mongol rulers had been able to assemble 4,400 ships for a failed attack on Japan a century earlier, and 1,000 for a punitive expedition to Java, most of these would have looked puny alongside the vessels now put at the disposal of the ‘Three-Jewel Eunuch’.

Armed with the emperor’s edict, Zheng prepared the first of his seven expeditions with a bravura that was to be characteristic of his entire career. The fleet assembled at Dragon River Pass (Liujiajiang) near the mouth of the Yangtze in 1405; this was to be the pattern for the next quarter of a century. The stately ‘treasure ships’, each weighing more than 500 tons, borne along by the wind in their twelve sails, and carrying hundreds of men, had names such as Pure Harmony, Lasting Tranquillity and Peaceful Crossing.² Under full sail they were likened to ‘swimming dragons’. These were the floating fortresses of the fleet, their crews armed with ‘fire arrows’ charged with gunpowder, as well as rockets and blunderbusses firing stones. By 1350 the Chinese had also invented bombards, known as ‘wonder-working long-range awe-inspiring cannon’, although these were not highly valued for naval use.

The number of big junks sailing in each of the expeditions varied from about forty to more than a hundred, and each had several support vessels. These armadas of the Xia Xiyang (‘Going Down to the Western Ocean’) were the wonders of the age. The ships carried doctors, accountants, interpreters, scholars, holy men, astrologers, traders and artisans of every sort: on most of his seven expeditions Zheng had as many as 30,000 men under his command, in up to 300 ships of varying types. Flags, drums and lanterns were used to send messages within the fleet. To work out positions and routes the heavens were studied with the use of calibrated ‘star plates’, carved in ebony.

As with all convoys, the slowest vessels dictated the speed, and this was often no more than fifty miles a day, despite the use of huge oars when winds were slack.³ Enough rice and other foodstuffs to last for a year were in the holds, lest provisions were lacking in the barbarian lands. Fresh water was stored in large tanks deep in the hulls. As a matter of pride, the Chinese never cared to feel at a disadvantage in foreign parts.

At first the Three-Jewel Eunuch ventured no further than Ceylon and the Malabar and Coromandel coasts of southern India, sending his huge fleets into such ports as Calicut and Quilon, with which Chinese merchants had been familiar for a century. By this time the South Indian pepper port of Calicut (called Kuli by the Chinese) was recognized as the most important emporium in the ‘Western Ocean’; when Calicut’s emissaries went to Nanjing in 1405 its ruler, the Zamorin, was rewarded with an elevated Chinese title. The attention Zheng’s fleets paid to this thriving city proves the commercial purpose behind his expeditions.

There were also less mundane reasons for visiting local rulers. In 1409 the Chinese invaded Ceylon, penetrated the country as far as the mountain capital of Kandy, and captured the Sinhalese king, Vira Alakesvara, together with his queen and members of the court. This was a direct punishment for the king’s refusal, several years before, to hand over to the Chinese emperor a precious relic, the tooth of the Buddha. In his time the Mongol ruler Kubilai Khan had also tried to acquire the tooth, but in vain. The king and the other captives were taken back to China as hostages and kept there for five years (although Zheng never did manage to lay hands on the holy tooth). As a reminder of this violent interlude the expedition left behind at the port of Galle a tablet inscribed in three languages, Chinese, Tamil and Persian, respectively praising Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam.

News of this hostage-taking must soon have spread along the trade routes of the Indian Ocean, ensuring that other rulers would be suitably submissive and hand over tribute, thus in effect conceding that they recognized the Chinese emperor as supreme ruler of the universe. When dealing with foreigners, the envoys from Beijing sometimes failed to hide the superiority they felt. One who went ashore in Aden could not bring himself to kiss the ground, as was customary, at the start of his audience with the sultan. This was taken by the Arabs as an insult; for their part, the Chinese thought the people of Aden ‘overbearing’.

However, the rewards were great for foreign monarchs willing to pay tribute to the emperor and acknowledge him as their ultimate overlord and mentor. They would be invited to send emissaries to China aboard one of the great treasure ships; in due course the emissaries would return with gifts more valuable than any they had taken with them, to press home the fact of Chinese superiority. An imperial edict explained: ‘They come here out of respect for our civilizing ways.’ The gifts they brought with them were seen as tribute, a proof of submission.

Yet if this was imperialism, it was of a curiously impermanent nature. Although Zheng sometimes sent punitive parties ashore – one was landed at Mogadishu in Somalia to teach its truculent sultan a lesson – he never installed a permanent garrison anywhere.⁴ When each expedition was finished, the entire fleet would turn away eastwards, sail back through the straits of Malacca, head north through the more familiar waters of East Asia, and finally drop anchor in the home port of Nanjing.

The treasure ships carrying the envoys from the Indian Ocean lands were known as ‘Star Rafts’, a term used by a certain Fei Xin in the title of his account of one expedition: Triumphant Sights from the Star Raft. This in turn came from an ancient belief, dating back at least twelve centuries, that if a ship sailed far enough it would eventually leave the earth, reach the Milky Way and come to a galactic city wherein sat a maiden spinning (the traditional representation of Vega in the Lyra constellation). Such heavenly images are mirrored in the wording on a column at Dragon River Pass commemorating Zheng’s expeditions: ‘Our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds, day and night continued their course, rapid like that of a star, traversing the savage waves.’

Although Zheng was a devout Muslim, he saw no inconsistency in erecting a column in a temple dedicated to the Taoist goddess Tianfei (the Celestial Spouse). The inscription boasts that countries ‘beyond the horizon and at the ends of the earth have all become subjects’, and goes on to thank the Celestial Spouse for her protection. The miraculous and majestic powers of the goddess ‘whose virtuous achievements have been recorded in a most honourable manner in the Bureau of Sacrificial Worship’ quelled hurricanes and saved the fleets from disaster. Her presence was revealed in times of extreme peril by a light shining at the masthead.

This inscription at Dragon Pass River also reveals how total were the powers vested in the eunuch ‘aristocracy’. The tribute to the Celestial Spouse was in the names of Grand Eunuchs Zheng He and Wang Jinghong, the assistant envoys, the Grand Eunuchs Zhu Liang, Zhou Fu, Hong Bao and Yang Zhen, and the Senior Lesser Eunuch Zhang Da. Probably all of Zheng’s senior captains were eunuchs.

The fourth expedition, launched by an imperial edict in December 1412, extended Zheng’s sphere of influence westwards beyond India, to Arabia and Africa. The commander himself only went as far as Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, but another part of his fleet was detached near Sumatra and sailed straight across the Indian Ocean to East Africa (the route taken centuries before by the Waqwaqs).

Despite some misconceptions and prejudices, the Chinese clearly knew, even before Zheng’s expeditions, far more about Africa than did their European contemporaries. Most remarkable are two maps surviving in Chinese archives. These accurately portray the triangular shape of the African continent, sharply pointed at the southern tip. One is dated 1320 and the other 1402, a time when China still regarded itself as the ‘Central Country’ in a single landmass, of which Africa was one extension. Both maps show rivers flowing northwards through Africa, and one has a great lake in the heart of the continent. At the time when they were drawn, Europe was still totally ignorant about the overall shape of Africa.⁵

Zheng’s purpose in reaching out for the first time as far as the Red Sea and the Zanj coast was largely so that Chinese merchants could make their first direct contact with these remote markets. Through intermediaries they had been buying the products of Africa for many centuries, and as early as the eleventh century the first envoys from East Africa had appeared in China. They were described as coming from Cengtan (Zangdan; that is, the Land of Zanj) and because it was such a great distance they were rewarded by the Song emperor with especially opulent gifts in return for their tribute. It had been thought worthy of note that these ‘barbarians’ were casting their own coins, which indeed was just starting to happen, and the language of Zanj (early Swahili) was described as ‘sounding like that of the Arabs’. The despatch of envoys from East Africa at that early date is less surprising than might at first appear: its ivory, ambergris and rhinoceros horn had reached China through Oman, which had itself sent a series of trade missions to the Sahib al-Sîn.

In the late twelfth century the author Zhou Qufei had written about the slave trade centred in the offshore islands of East Africa, which he called Cenggi Kunlun (Land of the Blacks). By the early thirteenth century a senior trade official, Zhao Rugua, had been able to put together a fairly detailed account of East Africa’s imports, saying that many ships went there from India and Arabia, carrying white and red cotton cloth, porcelain and copper, probably in the form of cooking-pots, lamps and ornaments.

The East African town with which the Chinese were to have most contact was Malindi, which Arab chroniclers had called the ‘capital of the Land of Zanj’, renowned for its wizards. (Ibn Battuta never mentioned Malindi, perhaps because it inclined towards religious practices, derived from strong links with Persia, of which he could not approve.)

This port on the Zanj mainland was well placed to take advantage of trading opportunities in the Indian Ocean, being only a few days’ sailing below the equator and less than a month’s voyage across the sea from Calicut. In an age when open-sea navigation relied mainly on latitudes estimated by the stars, a ship going to Africa from Calicut could stay on the latitude of 10°N, make its landfall near the tip of Somalia, then follow the coastline south-west to Malindi, the first major Zanj entrepôt. Otherwise it could sail south to the equator, then turn due west and head for the African shore, to reach Malindi at 3°S.

The rise of Malindi had mirrored the growth of Calicut. Now it was to become renowned as the source of wondrous auguries, brought to the emperor of China in the treasure ships of the Three-Jewel Eunuch.