Empires of the Monsoon

TEN

Ma Huan and the House of God

You must know that the giraffe is short in the body and slopes down towards the rear, because its hind legs are short … It has a small head and does no harm to anyone. Its colour is dappled red and white. And a very pretty sight it is.

—Marco Polo, Description of the World (1298)

ON 20 SEPTEMBER 1414, the first giraffe ever seen in China trod delicately along the road leading to the palace in Beijing. It was a gift from the sultan of Bengal, Saif-ud-Din, who in turn had been given it by the sultan of Malindi. At the outset the response of the emperor Yongle was cool. ‘Let congratulations be omitted,’ he replied, as courtiers vied to assure him that this long-awaited vision was proof of imperial virtue and wisdom. Good government depended upon peace, said the emperor, not upon the appearance of an animal which was being hailed as the magical qilin. His ministers should simply work harder ‘for the welfare of the world’. In any case, the emperor knew, and even his most sycophantic courtiers knew, that this was nothing like a qilin, that legendary, single-horned animal with the ‘body of a deer and the tail of an ox’, the Chinese equivalent of the unicorn.

The giraffe was just the most extraordinary of all the creatures being sent at this time to Beijing from distant barbarian countries. Chinese official records soberly called it a zulafu, which was as close as they could come to the Arabic word zarafa, but exotic animals like these had fascinated China from the earliest times. During the Western Han dynasty (206 B.C. to A.D. 24) there had been a vast imperial park, with a perimeter of 130 miles, full of zoological and botanical rarities. The animal-loving mother of one of the Han emperors had been buried with a rhinoceros, a giant panda and other creatures. Envoys going to distant lands were always enjoined to bring back unfamiliar species, and many old geographical works by Chinese scholars contain sections in which real and mythical beasts are jumbled together.1

Although the mythical qilin had been written about for 4,000 years – some accounts saying it had blue eyes and red-tipped horns with magic qualities – a realistic description of the giraffe had been lacking until the foreign trade official Zhao Rugua gave a hearsay account. This was undoubtedly garnered from Arab merchants: ‘There is also in this country [the Horn of Africa] a wild animal called zula; it resembles a camel in shape, an ox in size, and is of a yellow colour. Its forelegs are five feet long, its hind legs only three feet. Its head is high up and turned upwards.’ Zhao Rugua also noted that the giraffe’s skin was very thick, which is true; it is often used for making whips.

Public delight with the first African giraffe ever seen in China was to prove stronger than the imperial desire to belittle it as a portent. Although, in these early years of the Ming dynasty, there was a widespread interest in natural science – the emperor’s own brother had written a serious work on botany – the people had long awaited a qilin, and the giraffe seemed as near to one as the animal kingdom was likely to provide. A member of the Imperial Academy called Shen Du caught the mood with his poem, which was prefaced by a flowery dedication to the emperor: ‘I, Your Servant, joining the throng, behold respectfully this omen of good fortune and kneeling down a hundred times and knocking my head on the ground I present a hymn of praise as follows.’ Amid a welter of rhetoric comes Shen Du’s highly fanciful description of the giraffe:

In a corner of the western seas, in the stagnant waters of a great morass,

Truly was produced a qilin whose shape was fifteen feet high,

With the body of a deer and the tail of an ox, and a fleshy boneless horn,

With luminous spots like a red cloud or a purple mist,

Its hoofs do not tread on living creatures.

This apparent harmlessness (although its hind legs do possess a lethal kick) was the characteristic the giraffe most visibly shared with that mythical unicorn.2 The admiring crowds had no fear as this latest gift from foreign lands walked through Beijing with its curious, camel-like stride. Its head, far above the admiring crowd, turned constantly from side to side as it sniffed the autumn air. In the words of Shen Du: ‘Ministers and people gathering to behold it vie in being the first to see the joyful spectacle.’ Another courtier wrote in a similar vein: ‘Its two eyes rove incessantly. All are delighted with it.’ The creature was strange in so many ways: despite having a tongue nearly as long as a man’s arm, it could not utter the faintest sound. A Chinese painting survives in which the animal is being led on a rein by the Bengali keeper who has accompanied it across the seas; he looks up devotedly at his charge.3

So when yet another tame giraffe appeared, directly from Malindi, in the following year – the precise date, 10 October 1415, can be calculated from Chinese records – the emperor had to yield to the enthusiasm of the populace. He went himself to welcome it. Two other most auspicious creatures were being led towards him behind the chestnut-coloured giraffe: a ‘celestial horse’, a zebra, and a ‘celestial stag’, an oryx. This time the emperor’s pronouncement was less dismissive, but suitably modest. He attributed this symbol of harmony and peace to ‘the abundant virtue of the late emperor, my father’, enhanced by the support of his own ministers. From now on, it would be his duty to hold ever more resolutely to virtue, and the duty of his ministers to remind him of any shortcomings.

A certain testiness can be discerned in the emperor’s comments on the excitement aroused by Malindi’s giraffes. After all, the transporting of gifts was only incidental to the intensely serious business of the great expeditions. The giraffes are not even mentioned by Ma Huan, a chronicler who went with Zheng He on several voyages. Ma Huan was intent on describing the countries he visited, and without his book, Yingyai Shenglan (Triumphant Visions of the Ocean’s Shores,, the reputation of his master would rest only upon fragmentary writings.

Ma Huan was also a Muslim, his surname being the same as the one Zheng had originally possessed, although he is not known to have been a eunuch. He was recruited at a time when Zheng was coming to realize that the further he sailed the harder it would be to understand the languages of the barbarian envoys brought back to the imperial court. (Sometimes it was proving necessary to resort to ‘double translation’, in which the envoys’ messages were relayed through two interpreters before a Chinese version could be conveyed to the emperor.) Zheng had already set up a foreign languages school in Nanjing, and Ma Huan was one of a corps of seagoing interpreters whose first duty was to be in attendance when audiences were held with foreign monarchs. The interpreters would also help the Chinese merchants accompanying Zheng’s fleets.

In personal references in his book, Ma is self-deprecatory in the typical Chinese style of the time. He calls himself a ‘simpleton’ and a ‘mountain-woodcutter’, for whom the expeditions were ‘a wonderful opportunity, happening once in a thousand years’. Nevertheless, Ma was well educated, with a mastery of written and spoken Arabic. His book begins with a laudatory poem, with these opening lines:

The Emperor’s glorious envoy received the divine commands,

‘Proclaim abroad the silken sounds, and go to the barbarous lands’.

His giant ship on the roaring waves of the boundless ocean rode,

Afar, o’er the rolling billows vast and limitless, it strode.

The poem goes on to list some of the twenty countries he saw on the expeditions, and declares that the foreign peoples were ‘grateful, admiring our virtue, showing themselves loyal and sincere’. He says proudly that merchants from the ‘Central Glorious Country’ were now travelling as far as Misr (Egypt).

Measured by the information his book gives on social customs, trade and current affairs, Ma is on a par with Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta. Since less than a century separates them, it is especially rewarding to set Ma’s accounts of the Indian Ocean alongside those of Ibn Battuta. For example, both exerted their descriptive talents in praising Calicut and its people.

By the time Ma came to Calicut in 1414, the port had grown to become a city-state, and with some hyperbole he called it ‘the great country of the Western Ocean’. Almost a tenth of his entire book is devoted to Calicut, which the grand eunuchs leading the expeditionary fleets used as the pivot of their operations. One reason for Ma’s praise for Calicut (apart from an eagerness to mirror the judgement of his superiors) was the strong Islamic leanings of a town which had more than twenty mosques and a settled Muslim population of 30,000. Everywhere in its streets Arabic could be heard. To a young Chinese Muslim, one of whose main goals in life was to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, Calicut’s atmosphere must have been exhilarating. Arabia was just across the ocean, no more than a fortnight’s voyage away with a fair wind.

It may have been a desire to please Chinese readers that led Ma to assert that the Zamorin, the Sea-King of Calicut, was a Buddhist. In fact he was a Hindu. But the ‘great chiefs’ who advised the ruler were all Muslims, and the two most senior had been given high awards by Zheng He on the emperor’s orders. The envoys of Calicut were granted precedence over all others when they went to China to present tribute. Ma applies a string of laudatory epithets to the people of the city: honest, trustworthy, smart, fine and distinguished. He gives a detailed picture of the way trade was conducted between the representatives from a Chinese ‘treasure ship’, bringing ashore their silks, porcelains and other goods, and the local merchants and brokers. It was a slow process, taking up to three months, for prices had to be agreed separately, but eventually all parties would clasp hands and swear that the settlement would never be repudiated. The presence of ‘His Excellency the Eunuch’ at the hand-clasping ceremony confirms the importance attached to trade on the expeditions, notwithstanding all the grandiose rhetoric about their civilizing role.

It intrigued Ma – he calls it ‘very extraordinary’ – that the merchants of Calicut did not use an abacus in the Chinese fashion when making calculations: ‘They use only their hands and feet and the twenty digits on them, and they do not make the slightest mistake.’

He goes into detail about the vegetables grown in Calicut, about which animals are bred for food, the varieties of rice planted and the imports of wheat. He notes that the wealthy people invest in coconut plantations, some growing as many as 3,000 trees; the numerous uses of the coconuts and the trees themselves are carefully listed. The cultivation of pepper on hillside farms, the time of year when it is picked and dried, the prices paid and duties levied by the king; all these are recorded. Ma even gives an account of Indian music, conceding that ‘the melodies are worth hearing’.

He ends his portrayal of Calicut with a graphic account of a gruesome ‘boiling oil’ method used to test the innocence or guilt of miscreants. A cooking pot of oil is heated until leaves thrown into it shrivel up with a crackling noise.

Then they make the man take two fingers of his right hand and scald them in the oil for a short time; he waits until they are burnt then takes them out; they are wrapped in a cloth on which a seal is affixed; he is kept in prison at the office. Two or three days later, before the assembled crowd, they break open the seal and examine him; if the hand has a burst abscess, then there is nothing unjust about the matter and the punishment is imposed; if the hand is undamaged, just as it had been before, then he is released.

Although Ma’s chapter on Calicut stands out from the rest of his book, wherever he goes the oddities of life capture his attention. At times he can be as earthy as Marco Polo in describing social customs, notably in his account of the popular Thai manner of enhancing masculine charms:

When a man has attained his twentieth year they take the skin which surrounds the penis and with a fine knife shaped like the skin of an onion they open it up and insert a dozen tin beads inside the skin; then they close it up and protect it with medicinal herbs. The man waits until the opening of the wound is healed, then he goes out and walks about. The beads look like a cluster of grapes. There is indeed a class of men who arrange this operation; they specialize in inserting and soldering these beads for people; they do it as a profession. If it is the king of the country or a great chief or a wealthy man who has the operation, then they use gold to make hollow beads, inside which a grain of sand is placed, and they are inserted in the penis; when the man walks about they make a tinkling sound, and this is regarded as beautiful. The men who have no beads inserted are people of the lower classes.

He ends blandly: ‘This is a most curious thing.’

Sometimes his anecdotes closely echo those of Marco Polo: ‘If a married woman is very intimate with one of our men from the Central Country [China], wine and food are provided, and they drink and sit and sleep together. The husband is quite calm and takes no exception to it; indeed, he says, “My wife is beautiful and the man from the Central Country is delighted with her.”’

When Ma comes finally to conduct his readers through Arabia and Mecca, all such hints of raciness are absent. It was not merely that as a Muslim he was filled with a sense of reverence for the holy places of his religion, but also that two decades had passed since he first went to sea with one of the great Indian Ocean fleets; he was now in his fifties, accompanying the last of Zheng’s expeditions. Ma must have been surprised that the Three–Jewel Eunuch had won consent, after a gap of ten years, to mount another huge and costly venture to distant lands, because the death of the Yongle emperor in 1424 had seemed to mark the end of an era.

The coterie of predominantly Muslim eunuchs round the emperor had now been challenged by a rival élite, the Confucian civil servants. For six of the intervening years Zheng had been posted as garrison commander at Nanjing, watching his great treasure ships swing idly at their moorings in the Yangtze river. There were signs that the court of the Xuande emperor had turned its back on the idea of asserting a permanent mastery over a vast and dangerous ocean which nowhere touched China’s own borders.

Somehow, however, Zheng managed to override this indifference, and in January 1431 his final voyage began. Many of the veterans of former expeditions were among the 27,550 men under his command; others were performing compulsory service, in obedience to the laws of the Ming era, to expiate crimes committed by their fathers or grandfathers. Calicut was once again the base for the main fleet, and detachments were sent off to various countries. Ma Huan probably went to Arabia as the interpreter for a group of Chinese who took musk and porcelain as their trade goods and returned with sundry ‘unusual commodities’, as well as ostriches, lions and yet another giraffe; such animals were easily transported across the Red Sea from Ethiopia.

As might be expected, Ma offers no criticism of life in Arabia: ‘The customs of the people are pacific and admirable. There are no poverty-stricken families. They all observe the precepts of their religion and law-breakers are few. It is in truth a most happy country.’ When he describes the Ka’ba (House of God), there are many similarities to an account Ibn Battuta had given a century earlier. Ma even goes to the trouble of listing the number of openings (466) in the wall around the Ka’ba, and the exact number of jade pillars on each section of the wall. Although generally accurate, he makes some curious mistakes, saying that Medina, the site of Muhammad’s tomb, was a day’s journey west of Mecca, whereas it was ten days’ distance to the north. He goes on to describe the holy Well of Zamzam as being beside Muhammad’s grave, whereas it is in the centre of Mecca. This must arouse the suspicion that although he certainly went to Arabia he never reached Mecca itself, perhaps because of fighting near the southern end of the Red Sea.

It was a time when Aden was challenging the Mamluke monarchs of Egypt for control of western Arabia, including Mecca and Medina. The instability this caused is shown by the predicament of two large junks, loaded with trade goods, when they reached Aden in June 1432. Their captains wrote letters to the sharifin Mecca and the port controller in Jeddah, seeking permission to sail up the Red Sea. These officials in turn sought the approval of the ruler in Cairo, al-Malik al-Ashraf Barsbay, who said that the junks should be ‘welcomed with honour’. It is not recorded that the ships ever did reach Jeddah; it may have been this disorder which forced Ma in the end to rely upon hearsay about Mecca and Medina.

In March 1433, as the great fleet was reassembling to return to China, the Three-Jewel Eunuch died in Calicut. His body was carried home in one of the treasure ships, to be buried in Nanjing; as was the custom with Chinese eunuchs, his genitals – kept in a sealed jar since his castration – were buried with him, so that he could go complete into the afterlife.

Never again would the great fleets make their majestic progress across the Indian Ocean. Only memories lingered: according to an Arab ambassador who visited India in 1441, the ‘adventurous sailors of Calicut’ liked to call themselves Tchinibetchegan (Sons of the Chinese); by the end of the fifteenth century there were only confused legends of men with strange beards who had arrived in huge ships and came ashore carrying their weapons.

Despite all the imperial honours bestowed upon Zheng He, his lifelong efforts to forge permanent bonds with the lands of the Indian Ocean had come to nothing. China retreated into itself, once more indifferent to the world beyond the straits of Malacca.4 After his death the silken screens of Confucian authority closed around his reputation, and the ‘Star Raft’ records were destroyed. When another influential eunuch, hoping to organize a seaborne attack on Annam, asked to see them, he was told they could not be found. Only at the end of the sixteenth century, 160 years after Zheng’s death, did the author Luo Maodeng try to restore his fame with a 1,000-page novel called The Western Sea Cruises of the Eunuch San Bao (San Bao means Three Jewels). It contained a portrait of the grand admiral, seated aboard his flagship, his features awesome. But the book made little impact, for the civil servants had done their work well, and China’s greatest naval commander was consigned to oblivion. As for Ma Huan, he finally managed to have his book printed in 1451, when he was in his eighties; although he had spent his later life lecturing about his travels, his name was soon forgotten.

Viewed in historical perspective, Zheng’s seven expeditions seem a perplexing, almost irrational, phenomenon. The Indian Ocean in the fifteenth century was a trading arena of great wealth (no other region of the world had a comparable output of manufactured goods and raw materials); into this arena the Chinese intrusion had been sudden, massive and forceful. Yet just as suddenly it ended, leaving scarcely a trace behind. Indeed, there is only one known piece of tangible evidence throughout the whole of the Indian Ocean to prove that Zheng was ever there with his vast armadas and tens of thousands of men: that is the trilingual tablet set up in Ceylon in 1410.5

The rest of the tantalizing evidence survives in China, and apart from narratives such as Ma Huan’s book and the temple pillars there is a nautical chart more than five metres long. This was compiled during the expeditions and names more than 250 places in the Indian Ocean, from Malacca to Mozambique. Although known as the Mao Kun map, it is not a map in the normal sense, but lists ports, landmarks, bays, havens and dangerous rocks along a course drawn from right to left. There is no scale, and the space devoted to various regions varies according to the data available; thus China has three times as much as Arabia and East Africa combined. The correct routes are carefully defined, giving currents, prevailing winds and depth soundings. By means of compass bearings and the positions at precise times of sun and guiding stars (jian xing fa) the compilers were able to show with astonishing accuracy the sea lanes of the fifteenth century.