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Author Topic: Chinese Admiral Zheng He voyages of trade and discovery
mena7
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In the middle age the Arabs and Chineses were the greatest sea traders in the Indian Ocean and South China sea. Chinese sea trading ships carrying porcelains and silks traded in South East Asia (Malacca coast), Indonesia, India (Malabar coast), Persia, Arabia (Yemen, Mecca), Egypt (Cairo and Alexandria, Swahili states and Monomotapa. There was a Chinese trading community in Cairo during the Mameluke era. There was an Arab trading community in the city of Guangzhou in China.

Depicted to the right is a comparison of one Admiral Zheng's massive treasure junks to the Santa Maria that carried Columbus. He used these ships under the service of the Chinese emperor in an effort to explore the vast chinese empire of the middle ages and to bring wealth back to the emperor. Zheng He was a muslim eunuch who eventually became commander of the Chinese Navy as his master, the emperor Yongle, ascended through the ranks of the chinese nobility. The first of his six voyages was in 1402 and by the end of his sixth he had sailed west around the Indian ocean all the way to the coast of Africa and brought vast amounts of gold for the emperor. (1 pg 1-2)


Chinese naval technology was well advanced over that of the Europeans. By the 11th century they had a fleet of ocean going junks which were extremely sea worthy. They were also immense as the picture above shows. They could reach well over 400 feet and be over 150 feet wide. There were several decks below the main deck and several decks above at the stern of the ship. They were typically complemented with a crew of any where between 450-700 members and they remain some of the largest wooden vessels ever built. They were able to handle deep ocean weather due to their very deep, sharp keel which gave them more stability, that fact combined with water tight compartments made for a very sturdy ship. However, even with all their technological adaptations during their first expeditions they never sailed very far from land though there is solid evidence that they sailed all the way to the eastern coast of Africa and possibly even Australia. (1) Thus it seems the only limitation to Chinese exploration was the tenacity and daring of their leaders , however, recent evidence seems to suggest that they may have been much more daring than anyone dare believe.

There have tails among the aborigines of Australia for centuries about a group of people who came before either the Indonesians or the Europeans called the Baijini. The legend tells of a people of light golden-colored skin which seems to be a fairly accurate description of an asian complexion. They came and stayed for period of about six months hunting and fishing as well as planting fields of rice. Also their homes were made from stone and bark which is uncharacteristic of the Indonesians. In addition anchors have been discovered off the coast of Australia that fit the design of those known to have been used by the Chinese. There are also Chinese tails that involve creatures whose descriptions seem to point to wildlife characteristic of Australia. These items are just a small part of a great deal of evidence that seems to prove that China had discovered Australia long before any other group which means that the Chinese may have not been as limited to sailing along coasts as first thought. (2)

However even the idea of the Chinese reaching Australia pales in comparison to the claims made by Gavin Menzies in his book 1421: The Year China Discovered America. Most historians agree that it is extremely likely that the great fleet of Zheng He rounded the Cape of Good Hope but Menzies insists that they made it further sailing up the African continent crossing the Atlantic and discovering the New World. Not only that he claims that another explorer Zhou Man crossed the Pacific and explored the Western coasts of North and South America. His theories are based on a variety of evidence. First and foremost he seems to have discovered the wrecks of several junks in places where no one would ever dream of looking. One such junk seems to be buried in the bottom sands of the Sacramento River just off the north-east corner of San Fransico Bay. Not only that it seems that divers were able to retrieve bits of what seems to be medieval chinese amour before the ship was entirely covered with sands. He also claims that the Chinese actually founded colonies along the Pacific coasts of the Americas, giving such evidence as Venezuelan indians with Chinese DNA, anchors up and down the coast, a Peruvian village with Chinese speakers, and more. In addition he says that Chinese maps clearly show the eastern seaboard and Caribbean islands and that there are wrecks there that also prove his theories. However, even if all of this is true it was not to last because after the death of Zheng He there was a great philosophical shift in the leadership of the Chinese and they turned their focus inward and even forbade any further exploration leading to a complete collapse of what could have been a great imperial empire. (3)


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Admiral Zheng He

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Zeng He boat compare to Colombus boat.

http://precolumbianoceanictravel.weebly.com/chinese-exploration-the-journey-of-zheng-he-and-others.html


4 IMPACTS AND SPIRIT

Zheng He’s expedition scores perpetual contribution to the politics, economy, and culture, external contacts of the ancient China, as well as the world civilizations and other expeditions followed. It helped China know the world in ancient time (Fig 8). It has turned to be a spiritual wealth and an excelling cultural legacy of China and even of the world.

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1418 Chinese world map

Figure 8. 1763 Chinese map of the world, claiming to incorporate information from a 1418 map. Discovered in Shanghai by Liu Gang in 2001

According to Menzies (2003), Magellan never claimed to be the first man to have circumnavigated the world; never the less, he was still in an amazing feat. Magellan, Dias, da Gama and Cabral were very skilful navigators and seamen; they were also brave and resolute men with awesome qualities of leadership, but not one of them actually discovered “New Lands”. When they set sail, each one of them had a chart showing where he was going. All their “discoveries” had been made nearly a century earlier by the Chinese. Nor did Christopher Columbus ‘discover’ the Americas. Far from setting sail full of fear that his fleet might fall off the edge of the world, he knew where he was going, as can be seen in excerpts from his logs when he was still in mid-Atlantic. Since that Vasco da Gama was not the first to sail to India round the Cape of Good Hope, that Christopher Columbus did not discover America, that Magellan was not the first to circumnavigate the world, why they deserve these glories? Because they were on the shoulders of giants! All the charts they used contain information that can only have come from cartographers aboard the pioneering Chinese fleets.

Unlike conquering other nation, collecting treasure or expanding territory, peace and amicability are Zheng He’s spirit. In undertaking the ocean-going voyages, Zheng He pursued a policy of peace as laid down in the imperial edict, which said: “you may go the way of the heavenly kingdom, strictly abide by words, keep in bounds, and refrain from bullying the weak and share peace and happiness in the world” (Information Office of Fujian Province 2005). Through the voyages, Zheng He safeguarded peace, sowed the seeds of amicability/friendship and deepened the understanding of the people of other countries.

As a friendly envoy of the Chinese people, Zheng He got on quite well with the local people. During his voyages, group after group of foreign envoys and business people came to China and more and more Chinese went down the seas to seek a living outside China and they got melt into the local communities.

Zheng He treated countries with a relatively backward economy and culture equally and spread the civilization of the Chinese nation, thus contributing to the cultural exchange and mutual understanding between China and foreign countries. Many neighbouring countries sent their envoys to China. In some countries, even the kings went in person to China to conduct exchanges. The kings of the kingdoms of Sulu and Borneo all headed their ministers and other official to China to learn. When the King of Sulu died in China, the Ming government buried him with a ceremony.

According to statistics, there were 90 diplomatic missions coming to visit China during the period of Emperor Zhu Di alone. During the more than 30 years, 292 Asian and African countries sent 400 diplomatic missions to China, with each mission making up of 60-70 people or even as many as 500-600 people. Historical records show that in the 21st year of the reign of Emperor Zhu Di, a diplomatic mission of more than 12000 people came to visit China (Information Office of Fujian Province 2005).

http://mycoordinates.org/zheng-he%E2%80%99s-sailing-to-west-ocean/all/1/

Posts: 5374 | From: sepedat/sirius | Registered: Jul 2012  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
mena7
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Does this map from 1418 prove historian's controversial claim that the New World was discovered by the CHINESE 70 years before Columbus?
Gavin Menzies, a British historian, claims Chiense Admiral Zheng He set up colonies and sailed round South America before Columbus
Menzies' new book, 'Who Discovered America?' also claims the Chinese have been sailing to the New World since 40,000 BC across the Pacific Ocean
His theories are not widely accepted by academia and he has been labeled a 'pseudo-historian'

A copy of a 600-year-old map found in a second-hand book shop is the key to proving that the Chinese, not Christopher Columbus, were the first to discover the New World, a controversial British historian claims.

The document is purportedly an 18th century copy of a 1418 map charted by Chinese Admiral Zheng He, which appears to show the New World in some detail.


This purported evidence that a Chinese sailor mapped the Western Hemisphere more than seven decades before Columbus is just one of Earth-shattering claims that author Gavin Menzies makes in his new book ‘Who Discovered America?’ - out today, just in time for the Columbus Day holiday.


‘The traditional story of Columbus discovering the New World is absolute fantasy, it’s fairy tales,’ Mr Menzies told MailOnline

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Chinese 1418 world map

Among Menzies other claims are that the first inhabitants of the Western hemisphere didn’t come over land from the Bering Strait, but instead were Chinese sailors who first crossed the Pacific Ocean 40,000 years ago.

He also writes that DNA markers prove American Indians and other natives are the descendants of several waves of Asian settlement.


Furthermore, he says a majestic fleet of Chinese ships, commanded by Zheng He, sailed around the continent of South America - 100 years before Ferdinand Megellan supposedly became the first the undertake the task.

Columbus features heavily in the book - insofar as Menzies has devoted the last 20 years to finding and laying out evidence that Columbus not only didn’t discover America - he was 40 millenia late.

Mr Menzies believes that Columbus actually had a map of the world that was plotted by the Chinese Admiral Zheng He, who created the map when he sailed to the New World in 1421, more than seven decades before Columbus

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2449265/Who-Discovered-America--Controversial-historian-Gavin-Menzies-claims-Chinese-reached-New-World-first.html

Posts: 5374 | From: sepedat/sirius | Registered: Jul 2012  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
mena7
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Zheng He (1371–1433), formerly romanized as Cheng Ho, was a Hui court eunuch, mariner, explorer, diplomat, and fleet admiral during China's early Ming Dynasty. Zheng commanded expeditionary voyages to Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and East Africa from 1405 to 1433.

As a favorite of the Yongle Emperor, whose usurpation he assisted, he rose to the top of the imperial hierarchy and served as commander of the southern capital Nanjing (the capital was later moved to Beijing by Yongle). These voyages were long neglected in official Chinese histories but have become well known in China and abroad since the publication of Liang Qihao's Biography of Our Homeland's Great Navigator, Zheng He[3] in 1904.[4] A trilingual stele left by the navigator was discovered on the island of Sri Lanka shortly thereafter

The Yuan Dynasty and expanding Sino-Arab trade during the 14th century had gradually expanded Chinese knowledge of the world: "universal" maps previously only displaying China and its surrounding seas began to expand further and further into the southwest with much more accurate depictions of the extent of Arabia and Africa.[51] Between 1405 and 1433, the Ming government sponsored seven naval expeditions. The Yongle Emperor – disregarding the Hongwu Emperor's expressed wishes[52] – designed them to establish a Chinese presence and impose imperial control over the Indian Ocean trade, impress foreign peoples in the Indian Ocean basin, and extend the empire's tributary system.[citation needed] It has also been inferred from passages in the History of Ming that the initial voyages were launched as part of the emperor's attempt to capture his escaped predecessor,[51] which would have made the first voyage the "largest-scale manhunt on water in the history of China".[53]

Zheng He was placed as the admiral in control of the huge fleet and armed forces that undertook these expeditions. Wang Jinghong was appointed his second in command. Preparations were thorough and wide-ranging, including the use of such numerous linguists that a foreign language institute was established at Nanjing.[51] Zheng He's first voyage departed 11 July 1405, from Suzhou[54]:203 and consisted of a fleet of 317[55][56][57] ships holding almost 28,000 crewmen.[55]

Zheng He's fleets visited Brunei, Thailand and Southeast Asia, India, the Horn of Africa, and Arabia, dispensing and receiving goods along the way.[57] Zheng He presented gifts of gold, silver, porcelain, and silk; in return, China received such novelties as ostriches, zebras, camels, and ivory from the Swahili.[54]:206[57][58][59][60] The giraffe he returned from Malindi was considered to be a qilin and taken as proof of the favor of heaven upon the administration.[61]

While Zheng He's fleet was unprecedented, the routes were not. Zheng He's fleet was following long-established, well-mapped routes of trade between China and the Arabian peninsula employed since at least the Han Dynasty. This fact, along with the use of a more than abundant amount of crew members that were regular military personnel, leads some to speculate that these expeditions may have been geared at least partially at spreading China's power through expansion.[62] During the Three Kingdoms Period, the king of Wu sent a diplomatic mission along the coast of Asia, which reached as far as the Eastern Roman Empire.[citation needed] After centuries of disruption, the Song Dynasty restored large-scale maritime trade from China in the South Pacific and Indian Oceans, reaching as far as the Arabian peninsula and East Africa.[63] When his fleet first arrived in Malacca, there was already a sizable Chinese community. The General Survey of the Ocean Shores (瀛涯勝覽, Yíngyá Shènglǎn) composed by the translator Ma Huan in 1416 gave very detailed accounts of his observations of people's customs and lives in the ports they visited.[64] He referred to the expatriate Chinese as "Tang" (唐人, Tángrén).




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The Kangnido map (1402) predates Zheng's voyages and suggests that he had quite detailed geographical information on much of the Old World.
Zheng He generally sought to attain his goals through diplomacy, and his large army awed most would-be enemies into submission. But a contemporary reported that Zheng He "walked like a tiger" and did not shrink from violence when he considered it necessary to impress foreign peoples with China's military might.[65] He ruthlessly suppressed pirates who had long plagued Chinese and southeast Asian waters. For example, he defeated Chen Zuyi, one of the most feared and respected pirate captains, and returned him back to China for execution.[66] He also waged a land war against the Kingdom of Kotte on Ceylon, and he made displays of military force when local officials threatened his fleet in Arabia and East Africa.[citation needed] From his fourth voyage, he brought envoys from thirty states who traveled to China and paid their respects at the Ming court.[citation needed]

In 1424, the Yongle Emperor died. His successor, the Hongxi Emperor (r. 1424–1425), stopped the voyages during his short reign. Zheng He made one more voyage during the reign of Hongxi's son, the Xuande Emperor (r. 1426–1435) but, after that, the voyages of the Chinese treasure ship fleets were ended. Xuande believed his father's decision to halt the voyages had been meritorious and thus "there would be no need to make a detailed description of his grandfather’s sending Zheng He to the Western Ocean."[52] The voyages "were contrary to the rules stipulated in the Huang Ming Zuxun" (皇明祖訓), the dynastic foundation documents laid down by the Hongwu Emperor:[52]


Some far-off countries pay their tribute to me at much expense and through great difficulties, all of which are by no means my own wish. Messages should be forwarded to them to reduce their tribute so as to avoid high and unnecessary expenses on both sides.[67]

They further violated longstanding Confucian principles. They were only made possible by (and therefore continued to represent) a triumph of the Ming's eunuch faction over the administration's scholar-bureaucrats.[51] Upon Zheng He's death and his faction's fall from power, his successors sought to minimize him in official accounts, along with continuing attempts to destroy all records related to the Jianwen Emperor or the manhunt to find him.[52]

Although unmentioned in the official dynastic histories, Zheng He probably died during the treasure fleet's last voyage.[51] Although he has a tomb in China, it is empty: he was buried at sea.[68]

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Posts: 5374 | From: sepedat/sirius | Registered: Jul 2012  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
zarahan aka Enrique Cardova
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It is well worth remembering the redoubtable Cheng Ho.

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Note: I am not an "Egyptologist" as claimed by some still bitter, defeated, trolls creating fake profiles and posts elsewhere. Hapless losers, you still fail. My output of hard data debunking racist nonsense has actually INCREASED since you began..

Posts: 5905 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Clyde Winters
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The thing that made his voyages successful was tha ship building technology developed by the Black Chinese and the fact he could speak Arabic.

Arabic was a lingua franca of the Indian Ocean trade.

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C. A. Winters

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Tukuler
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Very enlightening update beyond the thread
8th century documentation of Sino-African contact

Posts: 8179 | From: the Tekrur straddling Senegal & Mauritania | Registered: Dec 2011  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
   

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