Who knew Chinese history could bear such relevance for America now? Learning about Zhenghe, the great Chinese admiral whose ships were so large that Columbus’s ships look life rafts, was an epic adventurer and sailor during the Ming Dynasty. He made it all the way to Africa and the Middle East and even brought back a few giraffes for the emperor. Imagine that, just walk out the back gate of the forbidden city in downtown Beijing to see a few giraffes roaming the park. In true Chinese style of naming things in a very straightforward manner, they were called long necked deer.
One of Zhenghe’s ships even crashed on an island off the coast of Somalia and the sailors integrated with the locals, a story that was long considered myth until DNA testing showed the Chinese genetic markers present in the population. There is even some discussion as to whether he discovered America before Columbus (an absurd idea. He easily could have had he sailed that direction, but he didn’t). So why is he relevant to us now?
Let me throw out a hypothetical. Say that Zhenghe and his ships hadn’t been denied funding for further missions and had gone back out, this time coming around Africa and ending up in either the Mediterranean or off the French Coast. These ships were so big that it wasn’t until the age of the great battleships that a ship surpassed his in size… And he had an entire fleet of them. Just imagine what would have happened had the Italian or Dutch or English seen such a fleet pop up one day in the Aegean or sailing up the Themes, how different history would be. Europeans wouldn’t have gone on for centuries thinking of China as a city-state and the Dutch and English wouldn’t have been nearly so bold in going for control of the trading routes in that part of the world, something they were only able to accomplish due to the vacuum created when the imperial court refused to fund further exploration for Zhenghe and the fleet was scuttled.
I see this as an interesting parallel to NASA now. Sure, it’s expensive and it may seem like we’ve gone far enough for what it costs– we don’t have moon giraffes, but we do have moon rocks– but space exploration is winding down just when it should be pushing farther and harder. Who knows what we might miss out on discovering or claiming if we quit and let other countries take the lead, not to mention the numerous military advances that stem from NASA research and technology.
The Chinese dynasty system collapsed for many reasons, but the status quo satisfaction that allowed the European powers to enter China with such overwhelming force in the 19th century could have all been avoided had Zhenghe been allowed to keep exploring, to keep pushing the boundaries. It’d be a real shame if America suffered the same fate for the same reasons. Then again, learning from history has never been our strong suit.
Perhaps it’s time to make it one.
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Kunming, China |
