Zheng He: The Chinese Admiral Who Reached Africa 70 Years Before Columbus Reached America

In 1405, the largest fleet the world had ever seen left the ports of southern China and sailed into the Indian Ocean. The fleet comprised over 300 vessels. This included 62 enormous treasure ships reportedly over 400 feet long, nine-masted wooden behemoths carrying hundreds of sailors across multiple decks. The total personnel numbered around 28,000 men. For context: when Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, he sailed with three ships and 90 men.

The man commanding this armada was Zheng He, a Chinese Muslim eunuch who had been castrated as a child, enslaved by the Ming army, and risen to become the most trusted admiral of the most powerful emperor in the world. Between 1405 and 1433, he led seven voyages across the Indian Ocean. These reached Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Peninsula, and the east coast of Africa. He arrived in Africa around 1418. Columbus reached the Americas in 1492.

Who He Was

Zheng He was born around 1371 in Yunnan, a landlocked province in southwestern China, into a Muslim family. His birth name was Ma He. When he was about ten years old, Ming armies invaded Yunnan during the conquest of the region. His father died in the fighting. Ma He was captured, castrated, and brought to serve in the household of Zhu Di, the Prince of Yan, one of the sons of the Ming emperor.

This was not an unusual fate for boys taken in conquest. Eunuchs in the Ming court occupied a specific and powerful role, trusted with sensitive positions precisely because, as with the eunuchs of ancient Rome, they could not establish rival dynasties. Ma He proved exceptional. He became a trusted advisor and military ally to Zhu Di. He fought alongside him in a civil war that eventually put Zhu Di on the throne as the Yongle Emperor in 1402.

The Yongle Emperor rewarded his loyalty generously. Ma He received the honorific surname Zheng, becoming Zheng He. He also received the commission to command the greatest naval expedition in Chinese history.

The Ships and the Scale

The treasure ships at the heart of the fleet were extraordinary by any standard of the era. Sources describe them as around 400 feet long and 160 feet wide, with nine masts and twelve sails, carrying several stories of cabins, including staterooms with balconies for senior officials and ambassadors. Most historians accept these vessels were genuinely massive, though some debate the precise dimensions given in the sources. What nobody debates is that they dwarfed anything being built in Europe at the time. For comparison, a map showing a treasure ship next to the Santa Maria, Columbus’s flagship, shows the Santa Maria at roughly a tenth the size.

The fleet also carried water tankers, supply ships, warships with cannon, and patrol boats. This was not a trading caravan supplemented by some protection. It was a mobile demonstration of Chinese imperial power that happened to conduct trade as one of its activities.

The Seven Voyages

The first three voyages, from 1405 to 1411, established China’s dominance of the sea routes from the South China Sea through the Strait of Malacca to the Indian Ocean and onward to India. Zheng He used diplomatic gifts, tributary relationships, and when necessary direct military force to extend the Ming emperor’s influence. He defeated a pirate lord in the Strait of Malacca and sent him back to China in chains. He intervened in a civil war in Ceylon, captured the king, and brought him to Nanjing to apologize to the emperor. Generally speaking, he just achieved what he came to do.

The fourth voyage extended the fleet’s reach to the Persian Gulf. The fifth, sixth, and seventh voyages pushed further, reaching the Arabian Peninsula and, for the first time, the east coast of Africa. Zheng He’s fleet visited Malindi in what is now Kenya and Mogadishu in what is now Somalia. He arrived bearing silk, porcelain, and manufactured goods. He left with tribute gifts including exotic animals: ostriches, zebras, and a giraffe, which became a sensation at the Ming court.

The sultan of Malindi presented the giraffe as a gift. Zheng He transported it back to Nanjing. Chinese court scholars identified it as a qilin, a mythological beast of good omen associated with the appearance of a great emperor. The Yongle Emperor was delighted.

The Decision to Stop

Zheng He died in 1433, probably during or shortly after the seventh voyage. He was buried at sea, as befitted a Muslim. His official tomb in Nanjing is empty.

His death coincided with a political shift that had been building for years. The Confucian scholar-bureaucrats who dominated the civil service had always viewed the treasure voyages with suspicion. The voyages were enormously expensive. They enriched the eunuch faction that managed them at the expense of the scholar class. Additionally, they were contrary to traditional Chinese values of frugality and self-sufficiency. The new emperor after the Yongle Emperor’s death was less interested in foreign projection. He was more concerned with the Mongol threat in the north, which required funds and attention the southern voyages consumed.

After Zheng He’s death, the voyages stopped. Then something more drastic happened. Officials, particularly under a chancellor named Liu Daxia, deliberately destroyed the records of the voyages. Maps, charts, logs, accounts: officials burned or suppressed much of the documentation. The argument was that the voyages had been an extravagance, a violation of proper governance, and that their records should not tempt future emperors into repeating the error.

The most comprehensive naval operation in the history of the premodern world was essentially erased from official Chinese history. It took scholars in the 20th century to piece together what had happened, from scattered surviving records. They used the inscriptions Zheng He commissioned in port cities as memorials to his voyages. They also pieced together stories from the accounts of the foreign rulers he had visited.