About This Book

🌊 From 1405 to 1433, China's treasure fleet, led by Admiral Zheng He, made seven epic voyages throughout the China Seas and Indian Ocean. 🌍 China extended its political power and influence throughout the Indian Ocean, with foreign goods and knowledge flowing into the country at an unprecedented rate. 🚢 China had the opportunity to become a great colonial power, but the emperor forbade overseas travel and the navy willed itself into extinction. 🌐 There is evidence of early contact between Asian people and the New World, with possible migrations and cultural exchanges. 📚 The maritime traditions of the Yi people in China and the seafaring skills of Southeast Asians played a significant role in the early history of Chinese seafaring.

Top Highlights

• In the brief period from 1405 to 1433, the treasure fleet, under the command of the eunuch admiral Zheng He, made seven epic voyages throughout the China Seas and Indian Ocean, from Taiwan to the Persian Gulf and distant Africa, China’s El Dorado. The Chinese knew about Europe from Arab traders but had no desire to go there. The lands in the “far w...
• Half the world was in China’s grasp, and with such a formidable navy the other half was easily within reach, had China wanted it. China could have become the great colonial power, a hundred years before the great age of European exploration and expansion. But China did not.
• Shortly after the last voyage of the treasure fleet, the Chinese emperor forbade overseas travel and stopped all building and repair of oceangoing junks. Disobedient merchants and seamen were killed. Within a hundred years the greatest navy the world had ever known willed itself into extinction and Japanese pirates ravaged the China coast. The peri...
• In 1498, when Vasco da Gama and his fleet of three battered caravels rounded the Cape of Good Hope and landed in East Africa on their way to India, they met natives who sported embroidered green silk caps with fine fringe. The Africans scoffed at the trinkets the Portuguese offered—beads, bells, strings of coral, washbasins—and seemed unimpressed w...
• Even before we can speak of “China” or the “Chinese,” Neolithic people from the mainland of Asia were the ancestors of the diverse peoples of Oceania, who conquered both the Indian Ocean and the Pacific in the first millennium B.C. Little doubt remains that there were Asian people in the New World before Columbus, and the evidence points to not one...