A Ming painting of a giraffe brought to China in 1414, led by its attendant
Tribute giraffe with attendant, after Shen Du, Ming dynasty
Marked Nanjing

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Zheng He’s treasure fleets

The Ming emperor Yongle sent the admiral Zheng He on seven voyages with fleets of huge ships, to South-East Asia, India, Arabia and the coast of East Africa. Then China stopped.

Place
Nanjing · Malacca · Calicut · Hormuz · MalindiAsia, Africa, The Middle East
Laid out as
A routeA road, a sea lane or a trade network, followed stop by stop.
Lessons
5 planned, none written yet
Image
After Shen Du, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. Nanjing
  2. Malacca
  3. Calicut
  4. Hormuz
  5. Malindi
  1. IA Muslim boy, a palace eunuch
  2. IIThe treasure ships
  3. IIICalicut and Hormuz
  4. IVThe giraffe of Malindi
  5. VWhy the voyages ended

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Zheng He
  • The Yongle Emperor
  • Ma Huan

Objects

  • The Galle trilingual stone
  • The tribute giraffe painting

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1405 to 1433. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?