Decades before Columbus, a Chinese fleet of hundreds of ships reached Africa.
Between 1405 and 1433, the admiral Zheng He led seven vast voyages from Ming China across the Indian Ocean to Arabia and the Swahili coast. His first fleet reportedly had 317 ships and nearly 28,000 crew. He brought a giraffe home to the emperor. Then China stopped sailing, and his records were played down.
Zheng He was born Ma He around 1371 into a Muslim family in Yunnan; his father and grandfather both carried the title hajji, suggesting they had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. When Ming armies conquered Yunnan, the boy was captured, castrated and placed in the household of a prince, Zhu Di. He became the prince's trusted aide, fought beside him, and when Zhu Di seized the throne in 1402 as the Yongle Emperor, he rose to the top of the imperial hierarchy.
The emperor sponsored seven naval expeditions to the 'Western Ocean'. The first left in July 1405. The fleets called at Java, Siam, Brunei, India, Arabia and the Horn of Africa, trading gold, silver, porcelain and silk for exotic goods such as ostriches, zebras and ivory. A giraffe from Malindi, on the East African coast, was presented at court as a qilin, a mythical creature, and taken as a sign of Heaven's favour. The voyages followed long-established trade routes, and they were also a show of force: Zheng He crushed a notorious pirate captain and fought a land war in Ceylon.
The famous claims about his ships need caution. Some popular accounts describe treasure ships well over 120 metres long, far larger than any other known wooden vessel. Those figures come mainly from a novel published in 1597 and are rejected by many naval experts. Uncertainty over the Ming unit of length, the zhang, also inflates them, and some historians argue the main ships of the fleet were considerably smaller.
After the Yongle Emperor died in 1424, his successor halted the voyages. Zheng He led one final expedition under the next emperor, and he died around 1433 to 1435. The voyages were expensive and represented a victory of court eunuchs over the scholar-officials, who afterwards played down his achievements in official records. The treasure fleets never sailed again.
Source: Wikipedia — Zheng He · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
