Zheng He discovered and explored nothing.
He did not sail one nautical mile that others (including the Chinese and White men) had not sailed before.
His voyages were tributary expeditions along already existing trade routes. He knew the cities he visited already existed and where they were before he set out. Traders and pirates from all over Asia had long gone on the routes between the cities he visited.
The Yuan emperor (Kublai Khan) sent a fleet in 1284 to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and a fleet sent by the Khanâs great-nephew for a bride in Persia visited Ceylon in 1293. The purpose of visiting Ceylon was to obtain the Buddhist holy relic of Buddhaâs left canine tooth, by trying to buy it from the local king(s). Both fleets stopped in Singapore and Sumatra and India. Chinese artifacts are found throughout cities in the Indian ocean, so Chinese merchants didnât stop at Indonesia. They followed Malay, Indian and Arab traders where they had sailed for centuries
So the trips Zheng He made were not unprecedented, unique or new; neither were they discoveries or explorations. In fact, Marco Polo was aboard both Yuan fleets to Ceylon as a a representative of Kublai Khan. So Zheng He merely went where a White man had gone before.
Zheng Heâs routes in the Indian Ocean had been established for more than a millennia before he came along, and the sailors included Whites. More on that below.
Zheng Heâs ships were so big because they were to be filled with tribute to be brought back.
Even Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, who canât lavish enough praise on non-Whites, states:
The objective was âimpressing the ports he visited with Chinese power,â as well as âstimulating the awe of the emperorâs home constituency with exotica which the Chinese classified as the tribute of remote peoplesâ
Zheng He brought giraffes back to China because he extorted riches out of the local kings by threatening them with his huge fleet:
Imperial proclamations were issued to the foreign kings, which meant that they could either submit and be bestowed with rewards or refuse and be pacified under the threat of an overwhelming military force.[132][208] Foreign kings had to reaffirm their recognition of the Chinese emperorâs superior status by presenting tribute.[209] Many countries were enrolled as tributaries.[141]
Nevertheless, Dreyer (2007) states that it must have been a âterrifying apparitionâ when the large Chinese fleet came within visible reach before the coastline of a foreign country, bringing any state into submission by the sole sight of it alone.
And no, they were not loved wherever they went:
The MingâKotte War was a military conflict between the expeditionary forces of the Chinese Ming empire with the Sinhalese Kotte kingdom, located in the southern territories of present-day Sri Lanka. This conflict happened when Ming Chinaâs treasure fleet returned to Ceylon in 1410 or 1411. It resulted in the overthrow of the Sinhalese ruling house.
And the model is inaccurate. Accurate estimates put the treasure ships at 59 meters, 3 times as long as the Santa Maria.
And why did these voyages stop? They lasted thirty years, and then the ships were dismantled, records of the voyages destroyed and the Ming Dynasty ended all overseas trade. Why? (answers below)
Why didnât the Chinese circumnavigate Africa to the Atlantic? Why didnât the Chinese sail north to explore Manchuria, Siberia, Alaska and America? Why didnât the Chinese discover Australia or New Zealand? Why didnât they explore Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia and venture to Hawaii in the calm Pacific? Why didnât they circumnavigate the world?
Why did Chinese have advanced ships but do so little with them? As well China stagnated in shipbuilding technology afterwards. They continued to rely on sewn planks and junk rigs. They lacked the navigation technology that Europeans had in the Age of Exploration and had been using since the middle ages, portolan charts, Jacobâs staffâs, true dry marinerâs compasses, and astrolabes. The Chinese continued to use needles in bowls of water for compasses until the late 15th century. They failed to adopt the advances of their neighbours or visiting Europeans:
The remarkable number of inventions that originated in China is proof enough of the genius of the Chinese people. And yet for centuries China refused to accept ideas or inventions from outside, with the result that Chinese techniques eventually languishedâŚA willingness to imitate, or adopt, inventions made by foreigners is the first step towards the creation of an inventive and technically progressive society
The Chinese also believed the Earth was flat until Europeans corrected them in the mid seventeenth century:
The lack of instances of arguments for a spherical earth is, of course, compounded by the lack of instances of any counter-argument at all; the flat earth remained unquestioned. This situation persisted until well into the seventeenth century.
(Europeans didnât hesitate to adopt outside ideas and improve on them, e.g. the Chinese invented paper as we know it, Chinese POWs passed it on to Arab Muslim conquerors. Arabs passed it on to Europeans, but Europeans were the first to mechanize paper production with the use of water mills [which we invented]; Chinese and Arabs continued to make it manually by hand. The Chinese also failed to advance in the use of gunpowder and guns/cannons)
Most crucially, the lack of an adventurer spirit in Zheng Heâs voyages is obvious. As David Landes wrote in his The Wealth and Poverty of Nations:
Why did China not make that little extra effort that would have taken it around the southern end of Africa and up into the Atlantic? Why, decades and even centuries after the arrival of European visitors in Chinese waters were there no Chinese vessels in the harbors of Europe? (the first such vessel, a vehicle for diplomacy, visited London for the Great Exhibition of 1851.)âŚ
To begin with, the Chinese lacked range, focus, and above all, curiosity. They went to show themselves, not to see and learn, to bestow their presence, not to stay, to receive obeisance and tribute, not to buy. ⌠this desire to overawe meant that costs far exceeded returns. These voyages reeked of extravagance.
The Chinese are a very pragmatic people, they simply saw the costs of Zheng Heâs voyages as too high and had them stopped:
The Shuyu Zhouzilu then adds the following to the story.[252] The Minister of War Xiang Zhong (in office 1474-1477) had sent a clerk to retrieve the documents, but could not find them after several days of searching.[253][254] Liu Daxia eventually confessed and justified his actions to Xiang Zhong by stating that âthe expeditions of Sanbao to the Western Ocean wasted tens of myriads of money and grain, and moreover the people who met their deaths [on these expeditions] may be counted by the myriads. Although he returned with wonderful things, what benefit was it to the state? This was merely an action of bad government of which ministers should severely disapprove. Even if the old archives were still preserved they should be destroyed in order to supress [a repetition of these things] at the root.â[253][254] Minister Xiang Zhong was recorded to have been impressed by this explanation.[253][254]
And simply put, the treasure voyages were not as dangerous, difficult or daring a journey as European explorations, not simply because the routes were known, as were the kingdoms visited, but because the Pacific and Indian Oceans are much calmer and easier to navigate than the Atlantic. Joseph Needham, The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China, p.141:
There was another matter in which the Portuguese showed seemingly more originality than the Chinese, and this was in the use of regime winds and currents. The problems they [the Portugese] had to face were more difficult, and the rose gallantly to the challenge. Almost as far as Madagascar the Chinese were in the realms of the monsoons ,the âjunk-driving windsâ with which they had been familiar in their own home waters for more than a millennium. But the inhospitable Atlantic had never encouraged sailors in the same way, and though there had been a number of attempts to sail westwards, that ocean had never been systematically exploredâŚ
these voyages were essentially an urbane but systematic tour of inspection of the known world.
And the plain and simple fact is most explorers have been European/White:
Most explorers in history have been European. Concise Encyclopedia of Explorations lists a total of 274 explorers, of which only fifteen are non-European, with none listed after the mid-fifteenth century.
Frank Debenhamâs Discovery and Exploration, a broad survey published in 1960, informs us that âmanâs natural inquisitiveness has been a mainspring of discovery and exploration.â29 Yet, much of Debenhamâs book is about modern Europeans exploring the world. There is an appendix that lists a total of 203 famous explorers, of which only eight are non-Western.30
Likewise, FernĂĄndez-Armestoâs book Pathfinders is described as âa study of humankindâs restless spirit,â but once he reaches the period after the 1500s, he has no explorers outside the West to write about.
The science of geography was initiated by the Ancient Greeks. European geography, cartography and interest in the rest of the world never stopped from the time of the Ancient Greeksâ colonizing the Mediterranean, Black and Aegean Seas (The city of Miletus alone created over 90 colonies) and creating the first world maps.
Whites had different motivations for exploration. The Portuguese, a tiny nation of less than one million, circumnavigated Africa and then the Globe, not the Chinese because they were motivated by a desire of renown and superior achievement. Again, FernĂĄndez-Armesto:
we have seen evidence of one feature of European culture which did make the region peculiarly conducive to breeding explorers. They were steeped in the idealization of adventure. Many of them shared or strove to embody the great aristocratic ethos of their dayâthe âcodeâ of chivalry.
FernĂĄndez-Armesto here speaks about the Portugese and Spanish, thinking this idealization was a result of medieval romance popular in Iberia. But the same statement could be made of the Ancient Greeks who loved the Odyssey, the Vikings and their explorations, the Crusaders, Renaissance explorers like Marco Polo, even the scientific explorers in the Age of Enlightenment (Captain Cook in particular, in his own words he wanted the âpleasure of being firstâ to sail ânot only farther than man has been before me but as far as I think it possible for man to goâ).
This spirit of exploration never ceased amongst Whites even when the culture became materialist: the explorers of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Amazon basin, the explorers of the North pole and Antarctica, the mountaineers who surveyed, mapped, climbed and conquered the Alps, the Himalaya and the Andes and astronauts and cosmonauts of the Space Race. Even today the private mission to Mars is White. Exploration, restlessness, lust for the glory and lust of adventure is a White thing. Valuing prestige above all else has been the defining element of the West.
As Oswald Spengler put it, the soul of the West is a fighting one, struggling against comfort and convience for the challenge and daring:
It has been said that when Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization he answered, âI think it would be a good idea.â Academics today interpret this answer to mean that the actual history of the Westâthe Crusades, the conquest of the Americas, the British Empireâbelie its great ideas and great bookâŚ
I challenge this naive separation between an idealized and a realistic West, using Oswald Spenglerâs image of the West as a strikingly vibrant culture driven by a type of personality overflowing with expansive, disruptive, and creative impulses. Spengler designated the West as a âFaustianâ culture whose âprime-symbolâ was âpure and limitless space.â This soul type was first visible in medieval Europe, starting with Romanesque art, but particularly in the âspaciousness of Gothic cathedralsâ; âthe heroes of the Grail and Arthurian and Siegfried sagas, ever roaming in the infinite; and the Crusades,â including âthe Hohenstaufen in Sicily, the Hansa in the Baltic, the Teutonic Knights in the Slavonic East, [and later] the Spaniards in America, [and] the Portuguese in the East Indies.â
âFighting,ââprogressing,ââovercoming of resistances,â battling âagainst what is near, tangible and easyââthese are some of the terms Spengler uses to describe this soul. This Faustian being was animated with the spirit of a âproud beast of prey,â like that of an âeagle, lion, [or] tiger.â Much like Hegelâs master, who engages in a fight to the death for pure prestige, for this being âthe concerns of life, the deed, became more important than mere physical existence.â
This spirit infused every cultural sphere of Western life. As John Farrenkopf puts it: âthe architecture of the Gothic cathedral expresses the Faustian will to conquer the heavens; Western symphonic music conveys the Faustian urge to conjure up a dynamic, transcendent, infinite space of sound; Western perspective painting mirrors the Faustian will to infinite distance; and the Western novel responds to the Faustian imperative to explore the inner depths of the human personality while extending outward with a comprehensive view.â
As for why none of you idiots ever heard of Zheng He, maybe itâs because youâre uninquisitive morons? I was taught about Zheng He, but then again I was in the International Baccalaureate, so Iâm not a retard. You probably did learn about him briefly, but forgot, cos yâknow⌠youâre fucking thick. And again, Zheng He was not an explorer or discoverer.
As for why youâve never heard of Muslim travel writers, why have you never heard of Eudoxus of Cyzicus, the first Greek to sail to India in 118 BC, and possibly the first man to attempt to circumnavigate Africa?
Greeks and Roman ships sailing to India were common by 50 BC. In fact Romans sent an embassy all the way to China by sea in 166 and continued to do so until the 7th century (Showing again how Zheng Heâs route was long and well used). Why have you never heard of this?Â
Why have you never heard of Scylax of Caryanda, a Greek explorer of India who sailed down the Indus in the 6th and 5th centuries BC?
Or of Pytheas, whoâs exploration of the Northern Europe helped influence Eratosthenes conceptualization of the Earth as a sphere, his estimated size within 5% accuracy?
Or of Roman traveler Maes Titianus, who reached China?
Or of William of Rubruck, a 13th century traveler through central Asia all the way to the Khanâs court at Karakorum?
Or of Afansy Nikitin, early 15th century Russian traveler to Persia and India, who wrote Journey Beyond Three Seas?
Or of Niccolo de Conti an early 15th century traveler to China?
Or of Viking raids, conquests and explorations as far East as the southern Caspian Sea in modern day Azerbaijan and Iran?
Thereâs a lot of travelers in history.
Only some of them make a consequential impact.
Marco Polo was one who made an impact. His tales of China and Asia fascinated Europeans, so much that it helped spur the Age of Exploration. Christopher Columbus carried a copy of his book with him across the Atlantic. His works also helped create the Catalan Atlas and the Fra Maruo world map:
Niccolo de Conti also influenced the Genoese map:
Why werenât any great new world maps made of the areas visited by Zheng He? The Guang Yutu was an atlas of forty sailing maps that focused only on the coastlines of places Zheng He visited, but it made no attempt at a world map. And it failed to be popular:
This much we know: On the eve of the first Anglo-Chinese War of 1839-42, Jesuit-influenced world maps of the sort produced by individuals such as Cao Junyi and Zhuang Tingfu were at best a dim memory for most Chinese scholars and officials. From the late seventeenth century into the nineteenth, the vast majority of Chinese mapmakers ignored Jesuit constructions of the world almost entirely. Most did not even choose to pattern their cartographic productions after Luo Guangxianâs grid-oriented Guang Yutu. Far more popular were maps of the Tianxia quantu variety, which depicted India, Europe and even Africa as small entities sitting on the extreme western margins of China.
Above is an example of a map from the Guang Yutu.
Here is what Chinese world maps looked like before Europeans arrived:
As you can see Chinese world maps speak of Chinese insularity and disinterest with the rest of the world. Cartographic skill was devoted to smaller maps for navigation, world maps grew more inaccurate with time. European Jesuits created increasingly detailed detailed and accurate world maps for the Imperial Court, but again they failed to be popular.
This Korean map dramatically inflates the size of Korea:
Some better maps were actually deliberately destroyed by the Chinese imperial authorities.
The Muslim travel writers also failed to have such an impact, either in cartography or inspiring adventure, even the great Ibn Battuta. They themselves were not inspired by adventure, being mostly emissaries. They mostly visited Muslim lands, unlike European travelers who were attracted to the alien. Also notable that on that link of Muslim travel writers, two merely made pilgrimage to Mecca, a third was Greek, a fourth a late nineteenth century scholar who traveled to England and Zheng He is also on the list. So out of a list of 13 only 8 Muslim travel writers can be said to be actual travelers. Battuta himself visited only Muslim countries aside from China and even there he stayed with Muslims as he did wherever he went, and in his own words was motivated by âovermastering impulsesâ to visit âillustrious sanctuariesâ not the alien, unknown and dangerous. Muslim geography would culminate in the Tabula Rogeriana and would advance no further. These men simply did not have the impact that Marco Polo had, nor the same motivation to visit the far off and unknown.
In the same vein itâs insane to suggest that Zheng Heâs voyages were of the same consequence as Christopher Columbusâ discoveries. Columbus sailed where no man had gone before initiating the conquest and colonisation of the Americas. Zheng He was erased from history by his own people and the world promptly forgot him as if he never was, his voyages mere legends in the lands he visited. No one could have erased Columbus, Cortes, Magellan or de Vasca if they wanted to.
I could write more but I think this suffices.
"fuck western history?" No, Fuck you.
Edit: I knew I would remember something to add something: Rangaku. Europeans set out to conquer, but we were willing to learn and trade knowledge with other peoples as well, our curiosity of them initiating the sciences of anthropology and ethnography.
