Zheng He and the Rise of Malacca
China had always followed a policy towards the Malaysian countries of friendly but dignified isolation. She was not keen on conquest. She felt that it had little to gain from them, but she was prepared to teach them her civilization. The Ming Emperor* apparently decided to vary this old policy and to take greater interest in these countries. He does not seem to have approved of the aggression of Java and of Siam. So, to check those and to make the power of China felt by others, he sent out a vast fleet under Admiral Cheng Ho [Zheng He].* Some of the ships in this fleet were 400 feet in length.*
Cheng Ho made many trips and visited almost all the islands — Philippines, Java, Sumatra, Malay Peninsula, etc.. He even came to Ceylon and conquered it, and carried off the king to China. In his last expedition he went as far as the Persian Gulf. Cheng Ho’s voyages in the early years of the fifteenth century had great influence over all the countries he visited. Wishing to check Hindu Madjapahit and Buddhist Siam, he deliberately encouraged Islam, and the State of Malacca became firmly established under the protection of his great fleet.* Cheng Ho’s motives were, of course, purely political, and had nothing to do with religion. He himself was a Buddhist.*
* This was the Yongle emperor (r. 1402-1424), also known as the Emperor Chengzu of Ming, personal name Zhu Di. The Yongle Emperor was the third of the Mings. The first ambassador he sent was Yin Qing in 1405, followed by Zheng He (as Nehru goes on to relate, calling him Cheng Ho) two years later.
* Cheng Ho is the Malay form of Zheng He (1371-1433), a Chinese Admiral and diplomat who led seven major maritime expeditions between 1405 and 1433, known as the Ming treasure voyages. He sailed down into the South China Sea and explored what are now the Philippines, Vietnam, the states of the Gulf of Thailand, and Malaysia, moving further west into the Bay of Bengal, and south to Sri Lanka. His later voyages saw his ships round southern India to reach the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and eastern Africa. It would be two hundred years before the English reached these regions: see Sing Us a Song of Zion from Aceh in 1602, and What to Get the King Who Has Everything from Rajasthan in 1616.
* For comparison, the Tudor carrack Mary Rose, launched in 1511, was somewhere between 110 and 148 feet (45 meters) in length, with a crew of 400-500 men. It should be noted that there has been some doubt expressed by scholars over the lengths attributed to Zheng’s ships.
* In 1411, Zheng transported Malacca’s founder and king, Parameswara, his wife, his son, and a court of 540 people to China. There they paid homage to the Yongle Emperor, who recognised Parameswara as the rightful sovereign of Malacca amid all the doubts and threats of the region.
* As a matter of fact, Zheng was born into a Muslim family, and both his father and his grandfather made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. However, from the historical records it is clear that he had a strong personal devotion to the Chinese goddess Tianfei (Mazu), Queen of Heaven, the patron deity of sailors, and that he used the Emperor’s funds to endow Hindu temples as well as Muslim mosques. On his final voyage, 1431-33, he diverted his ships so he could make the hajj himelf.
