In 1398, as Tamerlane advanced in the west, the old monster Hongwu finally died, buried with thirty-eight sacrificed concubines. His twenty-year-old grandson Zhu Yunwen, gentle and intellectual, became the Jianwen (Establishing Civility) Emperor, cancelling his grandfather’s brutal edicts. He diminished his overmighty uncles, but the strongest – Zhu Di, aged thirty-eight – resisted.
Visionary, flamboyant and arrogant, an energetic warrior as bloodthirsty as his father yet a student of Confucian classics, Zhu Di was a dangerous enemy. Before the emperor could move against him, he marched south with his army. In July 1402, he burst into the Southern Capital – Nanjing. When the palace caught fire, the emperor vanished, but his charred body and those of his empress and eldest son were conveniently found in the ashes and displayed (while a surviving son was imprisoned for fifty-four years). All this, despite romantic tales suggesting that the kind young emperor had escaped, allowed Zhu Di to succeed as the Yongle (Perpetual Happiness) Emperor.
He dealt with the resistance sustained by his nephew’s supporters by dismembering thousands, using his father’s Embroidered Uniform Guard but also creating a secret police of eunuchs, the Eastern Depot. When his nephew’s tutor, Fang Xiaoru, was sentenced to extermination to the ninth degree, he shouted, ‘Never mind nine! Make it ten!’ Yongle agreed. As Fang was bisected at the waist, with 872 relatives waiting to be dismembered, he drew the word usurper in his own blood.
Yongle regarded the Central Country as the world’s paramount power, declaring that his father ‘had received the Mandate of Heaven and became the master of the world’. But one man stood in his way: Tamerlane.
FOLLOW THE CHINESE WAY: THE EUNUCH ADMIRAL AND TAMERLANE’S TOMB
Straight after his accession in 1403, Yongle ordered the thirty-three-year-old Zheng He, his director of palace servants with the rank 4A – the highest rank a eunuch could hold, wearing a red instead of blue robe – to build a massive fleet to project Chinese power into the Indian Ocean, a region familiar to Chinese sailors. There is no record of Yongle’s conversations with Zheng He, but the coming clash with Tamerlane surely played a role. Zheng’s project was not a voyage of exploration or trade or conquest – ‘The four seas are too broad to be governed by one person,’ said Yongle. The armada was designed to overawe local rulers into recognizing Chinese paramountcy and paying tribute, though it could also, if necessary, eliminate pirates and crush resistance.
Given Tamerlane’s jihad, the choice of Zheng He was ironic: he was the great-grandson of Omar of Bukhara, Kublai’s Muslim governor of Yunnan, a descendant of Muhammad, who had converted many in his province to Islam. The boy’s father and grandfather had both made the
As the fleet was being built, in early 1405 news reached Yongle that Tamerlane was approaching with a vast army. Tamerlane ‘was already weak in health’, Clavijo noted. ‘He could no longer stand for long on his feet, or mount his horse, having always to be carried in a litter.’ But Tamerlane had never lost a war. Frontier defences were tightened and Zheng He’s fleet was almost ready to sail. Yet just after joining the army, Tamerlane, around sixty-eight, died, unleashing war among his sons and grandsons, from which his youngest son Shahrukh emerged as the successor.* Ruling from Herat (Afghanistan), Shahrukh made peace with Yongle, who in July ordered Zheng to sail, with his fleet of 255 ships each with twenty-four cannon, bearing 27,500 men. The sixty-two nine-masted ‘treasure ships’ were gigantic, 400 feet long and 170 broad.*
‘Palace Official Zheng He and others,’ reported the Court Chronicle, ‘were sent bearing imperial letters to the countries of the Western Ocean with gifts to their kings of gold, brocade, patterned silks and silk gauze.’ Zheng sailed to Champa, which recognized Chinese overlordship, then to Malaya and Java and on to Sri Lanka and Calicut (India); on the same voyage he defeated a pirate fleet, killing 5,000 pirates. He left inscriptions at various stops, invoking Buddha, Allah, the sea goddess Tianfei and Hindu gods too, combining political mastery with poetical respect for the seas: ‘We have crossed 100,000 li of vast ocean and beheld great ocean waves, rising as high as the sky … Whether in dense fog and drizzling rain or wind-driven waves rising like mountains … we spread our cloudlike sails aloft and sailed.’
