Jottings from the Granite Studio

From the TLS, Jonathan Mirsky reviews Ming historian Edward Dreyer’s new Zheng He book, China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty 1404–1433. In the interest of full disclosure, I haven’t read it yet but based on Mirsky’s review, I’m looking forward to doing so as soon as I can. If nothing else, it appears that Dreyer puts a few more nails into the coffin of Gavin Menzies’ career as a serious historian of China. Discussing Zheng He’s intentions as well as his legacy, Mirsky writes:

In more modern years, especially after the humiliations of foreign dominance in the nineteenth century, Chinese nationalists contended that if China was once the mightiest naval power on the planet, it could be so again. In recent years, Beijing has claimed that Zheng He’s benign voyages, and contacts with rulers throughout South-East Asia and along the east coast of Africa, parallel the People’s Republic’s slogan of “China’s peaceful rise”. Dreyer dismisses such “sentimentalising” that prefers, he says, Chinese tranquil history to the violent expansion of the West. Although here, I think, he is unfair to the late Joseph Needham, who in Volume Four Part Three of Science and Civilisation in China, suggested that “while the entire Chinese operations [of Zheng He] were those of a navy paying friendly visits to foreign ports, the Portuguese east of Suez engaged themselves in total war”. But Needham correctly avers – as does Dreyer – that Zheng He engaged in three battles, one of them a sensational victory over a pirate force whose much-feared chief was carried back to the Ming capital and executed. Portuguese and other Western expansion into Eastern oceans, based in part on firepower, was far more violent than that of the Ming fleets, which established no colonies, enslaved no rulers or subjects, and made no attempt to corner the goods of the East for China alone.

Whether or not Zheng He “came in peace,” one can’t help but ponder the counter-history of an armada of these giant warships, each filled with well-armed and well-trained soldiers, appearing off the coast of Iberia or in the River Thames during the first decades of the 15th century and whether or not that would have made the Europeans that much less eager to pursue their later policies of exploration and armed mercantilism on the high seas.

Via Arts & Letters Daily
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Image top right: A rough comparison of one of Zheng He’s ships compared to Columbus’ Santa Maria.