Abstract
Zheng He was a eunuch of Moslem family heritage who held great authority early in the Ming Dynasty, primarily under the Yongle emperor (reign: 1402–24), as he led seven maritime expeditions, of which three reached the eastern coast of Africa. Of recent English language projects on Zheng He, Henry Tsai (1996) explores the context of the eunuchs of the Ming Dynasty in defining Zheng He’s work, and Edward Dreyer (2007) and Timothy Brook (2010) portray Zheng He within the context of the Chinese tributary system. However, other images also hold power over the Western imagination: Louise Levathes (1994) portrays Zheng He’s travels as trade missions and Gavin Menzies’s popularized Zheng He (2002) is first and foremost an explorer designed to be compared to Western explorers. While Zheng He can be partially understood through comparison to fifteenth-century Western navigators, we limit our knowledge when we identify him and his expeditions through the lens of Western traders and explorers. It is important instead to identify Zheng He within the framework of fifteenth-century Chinese history and culture. An examination of resources and methods for teaching Zheng He in an undergraduate liberal arts curriculum can serve as a case study for important issues to consider when infusing Asian Studies into undergraduate studies.
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Notes
My focus in this article is on English-language resources, although I do take into consideration other resources when they are available in translation or are mentioned in English-language articles.
See Dreyer (2007), pp. 83, 93, 146, 155. Zheng He himself might not have been a member of the sub-group of ships that reached Africa on the seventh expedition.
See Edward Said’s foundational critique of Orientalism, with its “domestications of the exotic” and the “limited vocabulary and imagery that impose themselves as a consequence.” In Orientalism, (copyright 1978, Vintage Books, 1979), p. 60.
See especially Timothy Brook (2010), pp. 93–94, and Dreyer (2007), p. 181. For a further discussion of Brook’s attentiveness to the danger of using Western paradigms to describe Chinese events, see this article, below, pp. 12–14. Dreyer discusses two variants of Western narratives “within which ships and seafaring were major components of world history”: (1) exploration/colonial expansion and (2) commercial interests protected by a nation’s sea power (181–82). The model Dreyer follows most closely is Alfred Thayer Mahan’s late-nineteenth century theory of a nation’s commercial interests being protected by its fleets, and yet, Dreyer insists, “neither Zheng He nor the emperors he served ever had any theory of sea power of the sort made popular by the American admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan and other writers around the turn of the twentieth century” (3).
Dreyer and Levathes differ in their account of the number of ships on this second expedition: Dreyer argues that all of the expeditions were similar in size (62–63, 124–25), although there is no definitive record of the number of ships on the second expedition. Levathes does not offer her source for the sixty-eight ships she believes to have been on the second expedition. Furthermore, Levathes contends that Zheng He remained in China during the second expedition of the treasure ships, the expedition being led instead by Wang Jinghong and Hou Xian (103, 106). While conceding that “the evidence is inconclusive” (66) as to whether Zheng He led the second expedition, Dreyer leans toward the more recent scholarly view, based on Fei Xin’s report, that Zheng He was indeed present (65, 72).
See the Wikipedia entry, “Gavin Menzies” (accessed 10 June 2019), for a preliminary list of scholars who have refuted Menzies’ claims.
“Zheng He’s Seven Navigations”, pp. 153–64 in Chapter VII, “Eunuchs and Ming Maritime Activities,” pp. 141–64.
Cf. Dreyer 39–41 on the Hongwu emperor’s suspicion of private trade.
Regarding the “stench of illegitimacy” of Yongli’s claim to power, Brook writes, “Fang Xiaoru was but one of many court officials who would pay dearly for choosing loyalty to the dynasty over subservience to the man who happened to hold power at any one moment in time. Fang was not the only victim of what Yongle termed his “pacification of the south.” The coup was followed by the execution of tens of thousands in a bloodbath that rivaled the worst of his father’s purges. A second founder in the mold of the first was on the throne. The autocratic turn in Chinese politics has been laid at the feet of the Mongol emperors who ruled Yuan China, yet emperors Hongwu and Yongle were decisive in hollowing out the core Confucian values of obligation and reciprocity that the Ming regime might have nurtured in the restoration of the old imperial system” (92).
Published in the journal Xinmin Congbao; title translated in Dreyer, p. 181. An alternate translation of this influential article is “Zheng He, A Great Chinese Voyager” or “Zuguo da hanghaiji Zheng He zhuan,” Xinmin congbao 3.21:1905, cited in Wan Ming (2004), p. 17.
See the chart in Yamashita (2006), p. 27.
Quoted in Joseph Kahn (2005).
Unnumbered page facing title page, in Hum Sin Hoon (2012).
See Levathes 179 and Dreyer 173–74 for their assessments of the various seventeenth-century Chinese documents that discuss the disappearance of reports on Zheng He’s expeditions.
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Lunderberg, M. Zheng He and the American Liberal Arts Education: contexts and complications. Int. Commun. Chin. Cult 6, 295–310 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-019-00164-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-019-00164-y