1434: The Year a Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance. Gavin Menzies
story is taken up by Ibn Tagri Birdi, the celebrated Egyptian historian, in his history of Egypt, Al Nujun AzZahira Fi Mulek Misr Wal Kahira, who writes in 1432:
A report came from Mecca, the honoured, that a number of junks had come from China to the seaports of India and that two of them had anchored in the port of Aden, that their goods, chinaware, silks, musk and the like were not disposed of there because of the disorders of the State of Yemen…. The Sultan wrote to them to let them come to Jedda and to show them honour.8
As Tai Peng Wang points out, there were very good reasons why the Chinese envoys should rush to Mecca—Zheng He and many of his eunuch captains were Muslims. The Ming envoys had been ordered by the emperor to announce the imperial edict of the Xuan De emperor to the kingdoms of Maijia (Mecca), Qian Lida (Baghdad), Wusili (Cairo), Mulanpi Kingdom (Morocco), and Lumi (the Papal States), to inform them that they were all his subjects.
According to the Ming Shi-lu (the official Ming history), Egypt and Morocco were among those foreign countries that in Zhu Di’s reign (1403–1424) had already received the Chinese imperial edict and gifts (the 1408 visit—Ming Shi-lu) but had failed by 1430 to return tribute to China. However, the Ming Shi-lu noted that the Papal States and Baghdad were among the foreign countries that had already sent tribute to Ming China during the reign of the emperor Zhu Di.
In 1432, Mecca was part of the Mamluk kingdom of Egypt. The Mamluks ruled by far the richest country in the Western world at that time; Cairo was the world’s largest port outside China. The ships that Hong Bao had dispatched to Mecca had also been ordered to Cairo,9 which lay farther up the Red Sea through the Red Sea–Nile canal. Evidence of the Chinese visit to Cairo comes from the description of the Pyramids on the 1418 Chinese map and in other contemporary Chinese rec ords.
We get a vivid description of earlier Chinese junks from Ibn Battutah who wrote of the im mense size of the ships, their petroleum weapons, the luxurious quarters for merchants, and the poor slave girls.
Descriptions of the Chinese Vessels
The Chinese vessels are of three kinds: large ships called junks, middle-sized ones called zaws, and smaller ones called kakams. The large ships have anything from twelve down to three sails which are made of bamboo rods plaited like mats. They are never lowered, but they turn them according to the direction of the wind; at anchor they are left floating in the wind. A ship carries a complement of a thousand men, six hundred of whom are sailors and four hundred men-at-arms, including archers, men with shields and arbalists, that is, men who throw naphtha. Each large vessel is accompanied by three smaller ones, the half, the third, and the quarter. These vessels are built only in the town of Zaitun in China or in Sin Kalan which is Sin al Sin [Canton]…. At the side of these baulks are their oars, which are as large as masts, ten or fifteen men joining together to work each of them, and they row standing on their feet. In the vessel they build four decks, [with] cabins, suites and salons for merchants. A set of rooms has several rooms and a latrine: it can be locked by its occupant, and he can take along with him slave girls and wives…. Some of the Chinese own large numbers of ships on which their factors are sent to foreign countries. There are no people in the world wealthier than the Chinese.10
Ibn Battutah also described the exchange of slaves among the potentates: “The King of China has sent to the Sultan [of India] a hundred Mamluks and slave girls, five hundred pieces of velvet cloth…. [The sultan] requited the present with an even richer one…a hundred male slaves, a hundred Hindu singing and dancing girls.”11
Trade delegations between Egypt and China had been commonplace not only centuries before Zheng He’s voyages but also centuries before Ibn Battutah’s. They were led by the Karim, a formation of Egyptian Jewish merchants who specialized in trade between Cairo, India, and China.12 A certain Bazaldeen Kulami Karimi,13 born in 1149, went to China five times, amassing a great fortune from the Chinese ceramic and silk trade. Thirteenth-century chronicler Zhao Ruqua mentions a wealthy Tazi merchant sojourner who financed an Arab cemetery in the southeast quarter of the Chinese port of Quanzhou, so that Arab merchants could be buried facing Mecca.14
Chinese merchants imported huge quantities of Arabic frankincense. Song records indicate that Chen Xin Lang, a merchant, imported frankincense valued at 300,000 guan. Karimi merchants in China lived in luxurious houses and were big spenders, the envy of all in the trading port. In consequence, the emperor instructed local officials to watch for “untoward unruly behaviour.”
Trade between Calicut and the Egyptian Mamluks flourished in the 1420s. Historian Stanley Lane Poole tells us that in 1425, a captain convoyed fourteen vessels with rich cargoes to Jeddah. The following year, no fewer than forty ships sailed from India to Cairo and Persia, paying duties to the value of seventy thousand dinars.15
Reciprocal visits were not restricted to merchants. The kingdom of Mecca sent a delegation to pay tribute to China after Zheng He’s visit in 1414; the sultan himself appeared in person with tributes of a lion and a quilin (giraffe) to be presented to Zhu Di. In 1433 the sultan sent a delegation led by Shu Xian to accompany the Chinese delegates returning to China.16
Liu Gang, owner of the 1418 map, points out a very interesting pattern in several Chinese records, including the Captivating Views of the Ocean’s Shores; Notes on the Barbarians in the Western Oceans; Rec ords on Tributes from Western Oceans; and the Ming Shi-lu itself.17 Each of the four books provides a description of Hormuz that cannot possibly correspond to the Hormuz we know today. They describe vegetation that blossoms in spring, leaves that fall in autumn, and winter with frost, little rain, and much dew. The books also state that Hormuz is one of the biggest kingdoms in the western oceans, and that businessmen from barbarian countries arrive by sea or road. Hormuz, they add, is close to the seashore at the end of the Western Sea. People are white-skinned and tall. Society is highly developed in literature, medical knowledge, astronomy, art, and technique—far superior to other barbarians. Indeed, they compare the level of civilization there to that of Zonghua (China).
None of this is applicable to Hormuz, which we know from many fifteenth-century merchants’ accounts as a small island in the Strait of Hormuz, between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, with little vegetation and no frost, a tiny, inaccessible place so intolerably hot it was inhabited only three months a year. Civilization, including astronomy and medical techniques, was hardly developed at all.
In my view, the “Hormuz” described by the Chinese books of the fifteenth century can only mean Cairo. This is substantiated by the Ming Shi Waigua Zhuan (Profiles of foreign countries in Ming history) compiled by You Ton of the Qing dynasty.18 It states that Mosili (Cairo) was called upon by Chinese envoys, including Zheng He, but that it failed to reciprocate. Descriptions of Chinese trade with Cairo proliferate. The Chinese scholar Li Anshan, in Feiizhou Hualiko Huarem (A history of Chinese overseas in Africa) identifies the Mosili kingdom as Egypt and the Jiegantou Kingdom as the port of Alexandria. Mosili was again denoted as Egypt in the pioneering research of Zhang Xing Gang and Han Zhenghua. They also identified Jiegentou as Alexandria, a Chinese transliteration of the Arabic name Zuilkarnain, which was used by the Arabs to refer to Alexander the Great. In Chinese Religions and National Minorities, the Chinese historian Bai Shouyi writes, “Mi Xi en [contemporary Egypt] had all regularly sent