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When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433 | 
 enlarge | Author: Louise Levathes
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy Used: $7.42
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Avg. Customer Rating:  29 reviews
Sales Rank: 88950
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.7
ISBN: 0195112075
Dewey Decimal Number: 951.02092
EAN: 9780195112078
ASIN: 0195112075
Publication Date: January 9, 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Used book in great condition, no markings on pages, in excellent readable condition. (C2)
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Product Description
A hundred years before Columbus and his fellow Europeans began making their way to the New World, fleets of giant Chinese junks commanded by the eunuch admiral Zheng He and filled with the empire's finest porcelains, lacquerware, and silk ventured to the edge of the world's "four corners." It was a time of exploration and conquest, but it ended in a retrenchment so complete that less than a century later, it was a crime to go to sea in a multimasted ship. In When China Ruled the Seas, Louise Levathes takes a fascinating and unprecedented look at this dynamic period in China's enigmatic history, focusing on China's rise as a naval power that literally could have ruled the world and at its precipitious plunge into isolation when a new emperor ascended the Dragon Throne.
During the brief period from 1405 to 1433, seven epic expeditions brought China's "treasure ships" across the China Seas and the Indian Ocean, from Taiwan to the spice islands of Indonesia and the Malabar coast of India, on to the rich ports of the Persian Gulf and down the African coast, China's "El Dorado," and perhaps even to Australia, three hundred years before Captain Cook was credited with its discovery. With over 300 ships--some measuring as much as 400 feet long and 160 feet wide, with upwards of nine masts and twelve sails, and combined crews sometimes numbering over 28,000 men--the emperor Zhu Di's fantastic fleet was a virtual floating city, a naval expression of his Forbidden City in Beijing. The largest wooden boats ever built, these extraordinary ships were the most technically superior vessels in the world with innovations such as balanced rudders and bulwarked compartments that predated European ships by centuries. For thirty years foreign goods, medicines, geographic knowledge, and cultural insights flowed into China at an extraordinary rate, and China extended its sphere of political power and influence throughout the Indian Ocean. Half the world was in China's grasp, and the rest could easily have been, had the emperor so wished. But instead, China turned inward, as suceeding emperors forbade overseas travel and stopped all building and repair of oceangoing junks. Disobedient merchants and seamen were killed, and within a hundred years the greatest navy the world had ever known willed itself into extinction. The period of China's greatest outward expansion was followed by the period of its greatest isolation.
Drawing on eye-witness accounts, official Ming histories, and African, Arab, and Indian sources, many translated for the first time, Levathes brings readers inside China's most illustrious scientific and technological era. She sheds new light on the historical and cultural context in which this great civilization thrived, as well as the perception of other cultures toward this little understood empire at the time. Beautifully illustrated and engagingly written, When China Ruled the Seas is the fullest picture yet of the early Ming Dynasty--the last flowering of Chinese culture before the Manchu invasions.
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 Review: When China Ruled the Seas February 27, 2008
The brutality of castration and the adventure of seafaring are vividly described in this history of the Ming Dynasty's seven epic commercial and military voyages of the early fifteenth century. Led by the eunoch Zheng He, the right-hand man of Yongle emperor Zhu Di, the voyages of the treasure ships established Chinese dominance at sea from Indonesia to the east coast of Africa and the Persian Gulf. Traveling in armadas of hundreds of ships with 25,000 or more men the Chinese adventurers traded silk, porcelain and other goods for western products, sought and received tribute for three successive emperors, and sometimes intervened in the affairs of foreign nations to ensure the best trade conditions for China.
At ten years old, in 1382, Zheng He was captured by Ming soldiers following a retreating Mongol army in Yunnan province. "As was the custom since the first millennium B.C., young sons of prisoners were castrated. Thousands of young boys - some no more than nine or ten years of age - were stripped naked, subjected to one brutal stroke of a curved knife that cut off both penis and testes, and left with a plug in the urethra. Hundreds never recovered ... Those who did were taken to the capital to serve as court eunochs," Levathes relates. Zheng He was castrated and made a servant of Zhu Di, the prince of Yan and fourth son of the emperor and Ming dynasty founder Zhu Yuanzhang. Zhu Di was a fighter; he took his eunoch sidekick on campaigns against the Mongols and others and Zheng He became a good warrior himself. Zhu Di was not in line for the throne but won it in 1402 after much hard fighting. As a usurper the Yongle emperor might have had unusual incentive to establish the legitimacy of his mandate, Levathes suggests - and he did so with huge gestures such as the treasure fleet voyages and the construction of the Forbidden City in Beijing. To command his great fleet the emperor selected his trusted eunoch lieutenant, Zheng He, whose time in the field with his master might have contributed to his virility and strength, unusual for a eunoch. "Eunochs like [Zheng He] who were castrated before puberty were called tong jing, meaning `pure from childhood,'" Levathes states. "They were especially favored by court ladies and tended to behave like young girls themselves. As adults, they were said to have shrill, unpleasant voices, and they were often temperamental and emotional, quick to anger and cry. [Zheng He] clearly departed from this stereotype. Family records report that he was 'seven feet tall and had a waist about five feet in circumference.'"
The Yongle emperor's thirst for foreign contact was not new in China. Levathes relates Chinese shipping adventures dating back hundreds of years to the Tang dynasty. But war had depleted Zhu Di's treasury and he needed money. He also might have sought his nephew, who had assumed the throne on the death of Zhu Di's father the Hongwu emperor. After Zhu Di's capture of the capital of Nanjing, the nephew was rumored to have fled the country.
Zheng He never found Zhu Di's nephew, but he found pirates and others to fight on his expeditions cleaning the sea lanes of criminals and stabilizing trade. Levathes suggests the sight of the Chinese armada must have been breathtaking for some coastal residents, especially those of east Africa, and many immediately surrendered before the large force and offered tribute to the emperor. By 1415, Zheng He's voyages had made China the leading sea power in the world. Tribute missions from Malindi brought giraffes to China, and some of the most compelling reading of this book is the case of mistaken-identity over the tribute giraffes. The Chinese believed these creatures to be qilin, the mythical creature that is one of four sacred Chinese animals - the others being the phoenix, the dragon and the tortoise, according to Levathes. The appearance of the "qilin" in Ming China was seen as a sign of prosperity and peace in the empire.
Levathes states: "At this moment [1415] Chinese influence abroad was at its peak ... While Europe was still emerging from the Dark Ages, China, with her navy of giant junks, was poised to become the colonial power of the sixteenth century and tap the riches of the globe. The appearance of the qilin indeed heralded an auspicious time, ripe with possibilities, but the emperor was already beginning to focus his and his empire's energies inward. That moment at the pinnacle would last barely more than five years."
At home the Yongle emperor engaged in expensive warring including an ill-fated campaign against the Tartars to the northwest of China. The emperor also spent China's energies moving the capital from Nanjing to Beiping, which he renamed Beijing and where he built the Forbidden City (the construction of which engaged one-in-fifty Chinese before its designation as the capital in 1420). Palace sex and intrigue play a leading role in Levathes' book - from Zhu Di's usurpation of the throne to his own purge of palace eunochs and concubines in 1421 after "two concubines were discovered having intimate relations with a eunoch," as Levathes relates. "This was not an unusual occurrence, but for some reason, perhaps because the women were also having relations with each other, they committed suicide. The emperor was furious when he learned of their deaths because he had been fond of one of the women. He immediately ordered an inquiry. Palace servants slandered the dead women, saying they had been plotting to kill the emperor. Before the investigation was concluded, 2,800 concubines and eunochs had been implicated in the alleged treason, and it was reported the emperor himself killed many of them."
The warrior sea captain Zheng He comes across in this book as more gentle, in his way, than the emperors he served. Though he commanded the greatest fleet of wooden ships ever assembled, Levathes paints him as generally fair to his men and the people he encountered at the tip of China's long sword. Zheng He remained a devout Muslim and supported various temples until his death at sea in 1433, during the seventh expedition of the treasure fleet and the reign of the Yongle emperor's grandson, the Xuande emperor. Though Zheng He could not have children, he left a family through an adopted nephew. He is worshipped as a saint to this day and is one of China's greatest real-life legends. As Levathes relates, his voyages spread Chinese influence to the "four oceans," and though overseas travel would by 1550 be illegal for Ming Chinese, and the country would never regain the maritime supremacy it achieved in his age (and indeed, would soon be suffering under the crunch of the Manchurian invasion), the effects of the treasure fleet voyages would be felt for hundreds of years to come. - THOMAS BRENT ANDREWS / more reviews at [...] ##
 Awful February 9, 2008
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
To call this book "unrestrained speculation" as some academic reviewers have is far too polite; it's rubbish, with no basis in facts at all.
Avoid.
 entertaining but not history January 25, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book does entertain with its numerous anecdotal bits of trivia, such as footbinding and gratuitous references to slavery. But as a book on the maritime history of China, it is seriously deficient. The author's lack of grounding in Chinese history and its traditions is evident from her focus on the sensational, mixing myth and reality. The Ming period, was truly a very controversial historical hiatus in China, coming as it were between two foreign regimes, the Mongol and Manchu. Its insecure rulers sought to emulate the great Tang Dynasty (7th to 9th AD), copying even its robes and headwear, but they did not possess the vision or openness of the Tang rulers and deep down were very suspicious of foreign influence. The eventual closing of inquiry and inward focus sowed the seeds of later decay. The story of Zheng Ho needs to be told by examining the various forces operating in China at the time, not only historical but cultural and philosophical. Read for entertainment, not reference.
 Not much to treasure in this book August 27, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Louise Levathes had me at "Treasure Fleet." Those two words next to each other inevitably make for a winning combination. But, while she had me at Treasure Fleet, she soon lost me after that. Which is a shame, because the topic is so darn intriguing. What went wrong? I'm not sure. Throughout the reading of the book, I kept asking myself the same. I wondered if maybe it was the author or the sources or some other unknown factor. All in all, however, the book just was not that interesting--which frustrated me, since I thought it should be. Here's what it felt like. It felt like Louise Levathes had enough information for a nice long National Geographic article, but not near enough for a book. So, to fill in the missing gaps, she added a bunch of pre-history and cultural quirks--many of which had absolutely nothing to do with the era where China ruled the seas. On occasion such offenses are forgivable, especially if the asides are interesting, but I found them to be annoying divergences. Then, when Levathes gets to the meat of the tale, the actual Treasure Fleet, it is surprising how little she actually tells about the treasure fleet's voyages. Certainly, they take several chapters worth and destinations are revealed, foreign countries dabbled on, but it feels so empty of actual, researched material. I understand if Levathes is limited in the information she could have garnered about these expeditions, but if that is the case, it would have been nice to explain the lack of resources to the reader so that the scarcity of knowledge on the voyages can be explained. Here's what I would have liked to see. I would have liked the author to skip past the distant, pre-history of China--or at least summarized the essentials in one, short chapter, and then moved on to the Treasure Fleet, dwelling there for the rest of the book. This could be filled in with accounts from the fleet or from the countries visited or compared with European progress at the time. That is what I would have enjoyed reading. To give Levathes credit, she does drop interesting tidbits here and there, such as the constant philosophical struggles between the Confucians and the Eunuchs in the royal court and how the personalities of the Chinese rulers controlled the fate of the fleet. But those things are verdant oases in an otherwise colorless text. It's possible that there are books out there (or articles, even) that do a better job presenting the world of the Chinese treasure fleet, but it will probably take a while before I'll dare pick them up.
Interesting topic with complicated explication July 20, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I bought this book because of the long-term interest in the treasure fleets. I have known of their existence for 30 years but did not really know much about them. This book provided a great deal of information and context about an interesting topic. I wonder, however, whether someone who did not already know some Chinese history would be able to follow the narrative. She covers an amazing amount of ground, and I would think that it would be easy to lose track of who was who and what was what. So I would highly recommend the book to someone who is interested in the topic and has some background in Chinese history. I would be more cautious in recommending it to a general reader with no real knowledge of China.
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