What is zheng he remembered for

Millions of trees were planted and new shipyards created. Soon, Kublai commanded a force numbering thousands of ships, which he deployed to attack Japan, Vietnam, and Java. And while these naval offensives failed to gain territory, China did win control over the sea-lanes from Japan to Southeast Asia.

The Mongols gave a new preeminence to merchants, and maritime trade flourished as never before. On land, however, they failed to establish a settled form of government and win the allegiance of the peoples they had conquered.

Its first emperor, Hongwu, was as determined as the Mongol and Song emperors before him to maintain China as a naval power. Hongwu also decreed that no oceangoing vessels could have more than three masts, a dictate punishable by death. The Ming Dynasty built the Great Wall. Find out if it worked. Yongle was the third Ming emperor, and he took this restrictive maritime policy even further, banning private trade while pushing hard for Chinese control of the southern seas and the Indian Ocean.

The beginning of his reign saw the conquest of Vietnam and the foundation of Malacca as a new sultanate controlling the entry point to the Indian Ocean, a supremely strategic location for China to control.

In order to dominate the trade routes that united China with Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, the emperor decided to assemble an impressive fleet, whose huge treasure ships could have as many masts as necessary.

The man he chose as its commander was Zheng He. Although he is often described as an explorer, Zheng He did not set out primarily on voyages of discovery. Rather, his voyages were designed as a display of Chinese might, as well as a way of rekindling trade with vassal states and guaranteeing the flow of vital provisions, including medicines, pepper, sulfur, tin, and horses.

The fleets that Zheng He commanded on his seven great expeditions between and were suitably ostentatious. On the first voyage, the fleet numbered ships, 62 of which were vast treasure ships, or baochuan. There were also mid-size ships such as the machuan, used for transporting horses, and a multitude of other vessels carrying soldiers, sailors, and assorted personnel.

Some officials made the voyage, among them doctors, astrologers, and cartographers. The ships left Nanjing Nanking , Hangzhou, and other major ports, from there veering south to Fujian, where they swelled their crews with expert sailors. They then made a show of force by anchoring in Quy Nhon, Vietnam , which China had recently conquered.

None of the seven expeditions headed north; most made their way to Java and Sumatra, resting for a spell in Malacca, where they waited for the winter monsoon winds that blow toward the west. They then proceeded to Ceylon present-day Sri Lanka and Calicut in southern India, where the first three expeditions terminated. The fourth expedition reached Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, and the final voyages expanded westward, entering the waters of the Red Sea, then turning and sailing as far as Kenya, and perhaps farther still.

Chinese ships had always been noted for their size. More than a century before Zheng He, explorer Marco Polo described their awesome dimensions: Between four and six masts, a crew of up to sailors, 60 cabins, and a deck for the merchants. Most marine archaeological finds suggest that Chinese ships of the 14th and 15th centuries usually were not longer than feet.

Even so, a recent discovery by archaeologists of a foot-long rudder raises the possibility that some ships may have been as large as claimed. A 1,year-old shipwreck reveals how the world traded with China. At age 23 he served as an interpreter for the fourth expedition. He served on the sixth and seventh voyages as well.

It has the tail of an ox and the body of a deer Historians have long speculated as to why the Ming would have abandoned the naval power that China had nurtured since the Song. He is a superior explorer to his European counterparts: Christopher Columbus in with three ships; Vasco de Gama in with four ships; and Ferdinand Magellan in with five ships.

He rounded the Cape of Good Hope seventy-six years before Vasco de Gama did, circumnavigated the globe one hundred years before Ferdinand Magellan, and some say that he reached the Americas decades before Christopher Columbus. Zheng He was commissioned to start his voyage by the first ruler of the Ming dynasty, Emperor Yongle. By his last expedition in , which he made while in his sixties, He established many diplomatic relations with more than twenty realms of the Indian Ocean world.

Emperor Zhu Gaozhi relieved Zheng He from the treasure fleet and put him in military control in Nanjing. Statesman Deng Xiaoping, regarded as the chief architect of China's "opening up" in the s, said China would never seek hegemony. And President Hu Jintao has said many times that peaceful development is a strategic choice of the Chinese government.

Prof Geoff Wade, a historian who has translated Ming documents relating to Zheng's voyages, disputes the portrayal of a benign adventurer. He says the historical records show the treasure fleets carried sophisticated weaponry and participated in at least three major military actions; in Java, Sumatra and Sri Lanka. The way Zheng He is being represented is part of this. The International Zheng He Society in Singapore disputes this "Western thought", and says the battles that Zheng was embroiled in were either retaliatory or an effort to rid the high seas of pirates.

Many layers of myth surround China's ancient mariner. According to Kenyan lore, some of his shipwrecked sailors survived and were allowed to stay and marry local women. DNA tests have reportedly shown evidence of Chinese ancestry and a young Kenyan woman, Mwamaka Shirafu, was given a scholarship to study Chinese medicine in China, where she now resides. Hunt for year-old China ship.

China hails legacy of great adventurer.