Zheng He at Jinghai Temple

Some seventy years before Columbus sailed to the Americas, China’s Zheng He was sailing to S.E. Asian islands, India, the Middle East, and Africa, leading a vast fleet (numbering as many as 300 ships) from the deck of a ‘treasure ship’ that was several times the size of Columbus’ own vessel. He led seven expeditions over the period 1405-1433…. with some claiming that he even got as far as the west coast of the U.S. These voyages established the Chinese as the dominant power within the region (or the entire world, in their eyes), with other countries merely vassals offering tribute to the Middle Kingdom.

Zheng He was a eunuch admiral who did all of this at the behest of the Ming Emperor Zhu Di – and since the Ming capital at that time was Nanjing, it is perhaps not surprising that many of his ships (and certainly the large treasure ships) were built and sailed from a shipyard in this city. And so on a recent beautiful October weekend, I went to visit the site of that shipyard, now a memorial park with relics of its docks & ship-building materials, & complete with a full-size replica of one of the treasure ships.

With the success of the initial voyages, the Emperor ordered a temple built nearby, dedicated to Tianfei, the goddess of the sea. She would protect the sailors on their hazardous voyages, and could ensure the success of the sea-faring missions. The original Jinghai Temple may – or may not – have housed one of the Buddha’s teeth…. a complicated story very well told by Louise Levathes, in her 1994 book When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433.

An interesting part of Levathes’ book describes the political infighting between Eunuchs & Confucians, two powerful groups within subsequent Ming courts after the emperor died…. & the self-imposed, inward-looking retrenchment and actual destruction of naval resources that these court battles brought about.

Replica treasure ship in Nanjing shipyard

Today’s Jinghai Temple is a small remnant of the original one, which was destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion and later during the Japanese invasion of WWII. It has a section honoring Zheng He, and – in another part that many find quite ironic – a section documenting the ‘Treaty of Nanking’ of 1842. That treaty marked the beginning of a ‘Century of Humiliation’ in Chinese eyes, when they lost the First Opium War and were forced to cede Hong Kong over to the British. The treaty was the first of many ‘unequal’ treaties signed over subsequent decades, with China in an exceedingly weak position – the exact opposite of its former days of naval glory. The treaty was negotiated and signed on the British warship HMS Cornwallis, anchored near the temple.

I didn’t realize until reading the Acknowledgments at the end of her book that Levathes had spent time at HNC in 1990, doing historical research. The historians here (formerly Prof. Fowler, noted in earlier postings; and now Prof. Joe Renouard) would no doubt find it fully credible that Ming court intrigue from more than half-a-millennium-ago could have such a lasting impact on today’s world.