When was zheng he born

He was born in , into a Hui family from Kunyang, Yunnan. His original name was Ma He. Zheng He had one older brother and four sisters. He was raised a Muslim, and he studied Islam when he was quite young. His grandfather and father influenced his interests in other lands. In , the Ming armed forces killed his father and captured him when he was ten years old. As a young adult he was very tall, most likely around six and a half feet. He learned military and fighting tactics, as well as studied the works of Mencius and Confucius.

He became a very close confidant of the prince. In , Zheng He was promoted to Grand Eunuch. The Yongle Emperor appointed He commander of a large treasure fleet and over twenty thousand men. Zheng He, at thirty-five years old, had the highest rank of any eunuch in the history of China.

The fleet left Nanjing in the autumn of This was the first of seven expeditions of the treasure fleet that Zheng He commanded from to But for Shutz, what made the armada most impressive was the sheer logistics necessary to build and command it.

In inland cities, an additional team focused on dredging the river once the treasure ships were ready to float out to sea. A partial replica of one of Zheng He's treasure ships at the Maritime Experiential Museum in Singapore displays its below-deck cargo.

In Melaka, Malaysia, he visited the enormous storehouses Zheng built to house goods going to and from points further afield. The communities that grew up around the storehouses were among the first of many permanent overseas Chinese populations that would dot the continent and eventually grow to a majority in nearby Singapore.

But, Shutz says, after decades of travel and trade, the sheer logistical and labor costs of maintaining what amounted to a floating metropolis began to wear on Emperor Zhu Di—especially as the Mongols began threatening from the north, forcing the Chinese capital to move to Beijing. Producing and stocking giant ships became prohibitively expensive. Then Zhu Di died, and a new ruler with deeply different priorities replaced him. They were more focused inward, on protecting China from the Mongols with the construction and expansion of the Great Wall.

Zheng embarked on his last voyage in , and he died en route in what is now Kolkata formerly Calcutta. He was buried at sea. Soon after, the new emperor outlawed most formal maritime trade. When they returned to the ocean, the world would be a very different place. Performers atop a replica of a treasure ship sailed by Zheng He at a launching ceremony in Nanjing, China.

In the decades that followed, any suggestion of China returning to the high seas was firmly rejected. After the state abandoned virtually all maritime trade, coastal communities stepped back in, some residents turning to smuggling and piracy to meet market demand.

Other families instead emigrated to one of the many new overseas Chinese communities taking root in places like Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Many of those new communities sprang up at nodes where Zheng had stopped to develop trade relationships. Those trade networks, Shutz says, were also essential to the spread of two Chinese technologies that helped build our modern world: gunpowder and compasses.

Both items were conceived and commonly used for different purposes in China: compasses for divination practices and gunpowder for firecrackers. Thanks to the trade relationships Zheng helped establish, they were much more widely taken up for navigation and warfare across Asia and Africa—and eventually used by Western colonial powers to reshape the world for the next several centuries. In particular, he cites a set of stone tablets Zheng left behind in a temple in Sri Lanka as evidence of this mindset.

Image Credit: Chongkian, Wikimedia Commons. Would the two powers have traded or gone to war? How would that have affected the violence European powers inflicted as they divided up the world for colonization? In this small change, Shutz sees the beginning of a bigger trend in the American approach to world history. Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens.