Zheng He
Zheng He commanded seven Chinese fleets to the Indian Ocean, and was a Muslim eunuch from a landlocked province. Born Ma He around 1371 in Yunnan to a family descended from a Central Asian governor under the Mongols, he was about ten when Ming armies conquered the province, killed his father and castrated him with the other captured boys. He was assigned to the household of the Prince of Yan, grew up in his service, and fought for him in the civil war by which the prince seized the throne from his nephew and became the Yongle Emperor. He was given the surname Zheng for his conduct at a battle and made the emperor's chief eunuch. The command of the treasure fleets followed in 1405. The first carried some 27,000 men in over three hundred ships, and the largest vessels — if the Ming histories are right — were several times the length of any European ship of the period. His voyages reached Java, Sumatra, Ceylon, Calicut, Hormuz, Aden, Mecca and the Swahili coast at Malindi and Mogadishu. They were not voyages of discovery. The routes were long established, and their purpose was to display the emperor's authority, collect tribute, and settle succession disputes in the ports along them — he deposed a king of Ceylon and a pirate chief of Palembang and brought both to Nanjing. He died on the seventh voyage around 1433 and was buried at sea. The programme was cancelled and much of its record destroyed. Chinese temples across Southeast Asia still honour him, and his voyages are now invoked in official rhetoric as a precedent for maritime engagement without conquest.
- Lived: 1371 CE – 1433 CE
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: admiral, diplomat, explorer
