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The Maritime Adventures of Grand Eunuch Ho

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

William Willetts
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Extract

In 1368 a native Chinese dynasty, the Ming, received the Mandate of Heaven, and after a century and a half of alien rule a true son of Han ascended the Dragon Throne. A burst of diplomatic activity followed. It took the form of a grandiose series of naval expeditions designed to announce to the more-or-less petty rulers of South Asia the advent of a new native house, and to receive their tribute. Over the next hundred years the Chinese established themselves as the dominant naval power in the Indian Ocean.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian History , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , September 1964 , pp. 25 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1964

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References

1. ‘Coromandel’ is Europeanised Cholamandala meaning the area (mandala, or circle) controlled by the South Indian Chola dynasty (ruled roughly 900 – 1250 A.D.). The Arabs called the Coromandel Coast Ma'abar (not to be confused with Malabar, their name for the south-west coast of India), and the Chinese utilised this name in the form Ma-pa-êrh. The dynasty they called So-li (Chola).

2. Debenham, F., Discovery and Exploration, London 1960, pp.121–2Google Scholar. Chêng Ho was born in the K'un-yang prefecture of Yunnan Province about 1350. The family name was Ma. which in Ho's case was changed to Chêng. His great grandfather was called Pai-yen, probably equivalent to Bayan, and was in all probability a Mongol. Chêng Ho served as Superintendent of the Eunuch's Office in the Capital (Nanking) before being appointed Commanderin-Chief, in which capacity he made his great series of interoceanic cruises. Ho died at about the age of 90, and was buried at Nanking. His biography in Chapter 304 of the official history of the Dynasty, Ming, Ming shihGoogle Scholar, has been translated in part by Groeneveldt, W. P. in his ‘Notes on the Malay Archipelago and Malacca compiled from Chinese Sources, Batavia 1876.Google Scholar

3. The key work is “The true dates of the Chinese maritime expeditions in the early fifteenth century” published in T'oung pao, vol. xxxiv, (Leiden 1938), pp. 341–412.Google Scholar

4. To prospectors for these historical documents, I must issue a warning that the stone bearing a trilingual inscription (in Arabic, Canarese, and ‘an unknown language’) set in the wall of Machchinda mosque in the Nagaram quarter of Calicut town is not one of them. See Sewell, R., The Historical Inscriptions of Southern India vol. i, p. 246.Google Scholar

5. See Goodrich, L. C., “Archaeology in China: the first decades”, in The Journal of Asian Studies vol. xvii, no.1 (Harvard 1957), pp. 5–15.Google Scholar

6. Indeed the Yung-lo Emperor's own mother was a Muslim from Anhwei Province surnamed Ma. Sheppard, M.C. ff., writing in Malaya in History, vol. iii, no. 2 (Kuala Lumpur, 07, 1957)Google Scholar, argues that the conspicuous favouritism shown to Muslims at this time, and the very appointment of ChÊng Ho as Commander-in-Chief, was due to the fact that the Emperor was himself a Muslim. Taboo on use of royal names probably explains why it was found necessary to change Chêng's surname from Ma (see footnote 2).

7. The Galle Stone bears a date corresponding to February 15th, 1409, and must therefore have been carved on Chinese soil before the fleet left Liu-chia-chiang in October of that year. The ceremony of its installation at Devundara on the southernmost tip of the Island of Ceylon, is described by an eye-witness, Fei Hsin. The existence of a stone (or stones) at Devundara, carved in China and bearing Chinese characters, is noticed as late as 1687 by de Queyroz in an undoubted reference to the same stone. The whole history of the Galle Stone, inscribed with what is essentially the same text in Tamil, Arabic, and Chinese, is fascinating. How it got to Galle, where it was discovered in 1911 by Mr. Tomalin, the Provincial Engineer of the Southern Province, serving as a cover-stone for a culvert, remains a complete mystery; Galle and Devundara are about 40 miles apart.

8. One gets the impression they were mostly Muslims. Perhaps also they constitued a special division of the castraiti recruited and deprived of their manhood for the particular purpose of service overseas.

9. Among the novels are San pao ta jên chüan, ‘Biography of His Excellence Sanpao’, and Lo Mou-têng's ‘Western Sea Cruises of Eunuch San-pao’ (1597). Ming shih says that there was a temple (or temples) in Siam where Chêng Ho was worshipped; and it is said that in Malacca a well and a suburb still bear his name. Certainly his prestige in South-East Asia was enormous at its peak.

10. This refers only to the ch'i-lin; the giraffe, excellent creature, is dumb.