Empires of the Monsoon

Islam’s roots were not deep here, the faith having been introduced by a visitor from Persia in 1153; before that the population had followed a mixture of Hinduism and Buddhism. Ibn Battuta claims that he tried to disguise his identity on arrival, through a fear that the Maldivian rulers might prove loath to let him leave again, because they lacked a qualified Muslim law-giver. He was quickly recognized none the less: ‘Some busybody had written telling them about me and that I had been qadi in Delhi.’ The suspicion that, in truth, he was only too ready to be asked to offer his services is hard to avoid.

Presents were soon being showered upon him by the Maldivian chief minister and other notables: two new slave-girls, silk robes, a casket of jewels, five sheep and 100,000 cowries. Soon the highly-prized Moroccan finds himself being offered wives from among the rival ruling families, and accepts four, the most a good Muslim can have at any one time. In all, during his eight months in the Maldives he had six different wives. This was entirely in accord with the custom of the islanders: ‘When ships arrive, the crews marry wives, and when they are about to sail they divorce them. It is really a sort of temporary marriage.’

Given little option, Ibn Battuta soon donned his robes as the islands’ chief justice and set about his duties with a will. His interpretation of the shari’a law was much stricter than anything the easy-going islanders had been used to. When he sentenced a thief to have his hand cut off, several people fainted in the courtroom. Anyone who was found to have been absent from Friday prayers was beaten and paraded through the streets. Husbands who kept divorced wives with them until they found new husbands were also beaten. Only one edict by the strict new judge came to nothing: he tried to stop the women walking around bare-breasted, ‘but I could not manage that.’

If Ibn Battuta had set out deliberately to make himself unpopular and stir up rival factions, so easing his departure, then he was successful. The breaking point came when he ordered that an African slave belonging to the sultan should be beaten for adultery; he then publicly rejected the chief minister’s appeal for the order to be rescinded. Even this did not remove all obstacles to his departure, for there was now a suspicion that when he returned to the Indian mainland he might incite potential enemies there to amount an invasion of the islands. (Such fears were justified, for as Ibn Battuta admits – or rather, boasts – he became immersed in intrigue and later came close to mounting just such an attack.) Eventually, he agreed to make a tour of the islands while emotions cooled. Then he went to say farewell to the chief minister: ‘He embraced me, and wept so copiously that his tears dropped on my feet.’

A leisurely voyage through the Maldives gave the embattled qadi time to collect material for the earliest surviving description of the islands. At last he reached an islet where there was only one house, occupied by a weaver:

He had a wife and family, a few coco-palms and a small boat, with which he used to fish and to cross over to any of the islands he wished to visit. His island contained also a few banana trees, but we saw no land birds on it except two ravens, which came out to us on our arrival, and circled above our vessel. And I swear I envied that man, and wished that the island had been mine, that I might have made it my retreat until the inevitable hour should befall me.

Ibn Battuta eventually slipped away from the Maldives after divorcing all his four current wives (one was pregnant). However, he kept his slaves. His ship sailed off-course and put into harbour in Ceylon, instead of reaching the coast of India. So he took the opportunity to collect facts about the island, noting among other things that the most powerful man in the large town of Kalanbu (Colombo) was a pirate named Jalasti, with a force of 500 Abyssinian mercenaries.

The wandering judge was tempted to Adam’s Peak, a place of pilgrimage for Muslims, Buddhists and Christians alike. At the top was a depression claimed to be the footprint of the first man, and to reach it the pilgrims had to go up a steep stairway with the aid of chains fixed to the rock. Marco Polo had also described Adam’s Peak, but Ibn Battuta’s account of struggling to the mountain-top has infinitely more drama. As he stared down from the peak through the clouds to the vivid greenery of Ceylon he remembered that he had been away from his Moroccan homeland for almost twenty years, but he was still little more than halfway to China, the ultimate goal. There was also a lingering sense of duty towards that self-styled ‘Master of the World’, the mad sultan in distant Delhi.

The route Ibn Battuta took to get to China was typically circuitous. First he made his way up the eastern coastline of India, almost being shipwrecked at one point and risking his life to rescue his slave-girls. He even dared to return to the Maldive islands, contemplating taking away his two-year-old son by the senior wife he divorced there, but soon thought better of it and sailed to Bengal – a ‘gloomy’ country where food was cheap. Next he went to Assam to meet a holy man, then arrived in Sumatra, where he stayed with a Muslim ruler and clearly felt far more at ease than Marco Polo had done during his time in the same land. Finally he landed in the port of Zayton and immediately had the luck to meet one of the Chinese ambassadors who had come to Delhi with presents from the Great Khan.

Although Ibn Battuta strives to convey the idea that he was at once elevated to the status of a visiting ambassador, and was taken in magnificent style to see the Great Khan at Peking, this part of Ibn Battuta’s memoirs lacks the vivacity of the rest. He does admit that he never saw the Mongol ruler, saying that this was because of a rebellion spreading disorder throughout north China. For all that, he is able to give a convincing account of the burial of the deposed monarch with a hundred relatives and confidants, ending with a grisly description of horses being slaughtered and suspended on stakes above the graves.6

Ibn Battuta was constantly impressed by the wonders of China, but unlike Marco Polo he did not enjoy life there: ‘Whenever I went out of my house I used to see any number of disagreeable things, and that disturbed me so much that I used to keep indoors and go out only in case of necessity. When I met Muslims in China I always felt as though I was meeting my own faith and kin.’ The nub of his unease lay in being totally outside the Bilad al-Islam, and discovering that ‘heathendom had so strong a hold’ in what was plainly the most powerful country in the world.

An emotional moment came when he met in Fuchow (Fuzhou) a Muslim doctor from Ceuta, the Mediterranean port only a few miles from his Tangier birthplace. At this encounter on the far side of the world they both wept. The doctor had prospered greatly in China: ‘He told me that he had about fifty white slaves and as many slave girls, and presented me with two of each, along with many other gifts.’ Some years later Ibn Battuta was to meet the doctor’s brother in West Africa.

Ibn Battuta returned safely by sea from China to Calicut, and there faced a delicate decision. At one moment he felt duty-bound to return to Delhi to report to the sultan all that had happened, then the idea grew too alarming: ‘on second thoughts I had some fears about doing so, so I re-embarked and twenty-eight days later reached Dhofar.’ This was in the familiar territory of Arabia. From there he began making his way home to Tangier by way of Hormuz, Baghdad and Damascus (with a detour for one more pilgrimage to Mecca).

Shortly before he reached Tangier his mother, long a widow, died from the Black Death.7 Much had changed in Morocco during the quarter of a century he had been away and little attention was spared for a weatherbeaten qadi whom most people had forgotten. Anxieties were running deep about events across the Strait of Gibraltar, because after almost 700 years Islam was yielding its control, step by step, of southern Spain.

Seemingly at a loss as to what he should do next, Ibn Battuta crossed to the European side of the Mediterranean and joined briefly in the jihad against the advancing Spaniards. His experiences there were far from happy: in one incident, Christian bandits almost took him prisoner near ‘a pretty little town’ called Marbella. He soon returned to the safety of Morocco and decided on one last adventure. He headed southwards across the Sahara desert, along trade routes pioneered by his Berber ancestors in Roman times.

He travelled for another two years (1352–53), covering thousands of miles by camel, donkey and on foot, visiting Mali and other powerful West African kingdoms. It was the region from which the fabulous Mansa Musa had emerged twenty-five years earlier to astound Egypt with his wealth. This part of Africa had been won for Islam, but it was strikingly different from the cities Ibn Battuta had visited two decades before on the Indian Ocean side of the continent. There the rulers were Arabs, controlling an African population but holding firm to a non-African culture. In West Africa the culture was indigenous, and the rulers had adapted Islam to fit their own traditions.

He was astonished by the riches of West Africa, at that time the world’s greatest gold producer, and by the scholarship he found in Timbuktu, on the bend of the Niger river.8 He commented: ‘The Negroes possess some admirable qualities. They are seldom unjust and possess a greater abhorrence of injustice than any other people … There is complete security in their country. Neither traveller nor inhabitant in it has anything to fear from robbers or violent men.’

Sadly, his conclusions about the geography of Africa were wildly astray, because he believed that the Niger, flowing eastwards at Timbuktu, later became the Nile, which he had seen flowing northwards in Egypt. (In this error he was following the theory of the twelfth-century writer al-Idrisi, and many other Arab geographers, that there was a ‘western Nile’ flowing from the direction of the Atlantic.) Ibn Battuta may even have thought that the Nile was also joined to the Zambezi. Recalling his experiences in East Africa he said that Sofala was a month’s journey from the gold-producing land of Yufi. When he came to describe what he believed to be the course of the Nile he declared: ‘It continues from Muli to Yufi, one of the greatest countries of the black people, whose ruler is the most considerable of kings of the whole region.’

He went on: ‘Yufi cannot be visited by any white man, because they would kill him before he got there.’ Since Ibn Battuta regarded himself as ‘white’ in both colour and culture this was simply a way of explaining why he had failed to make a trip to see the gold-mines, the subject of so much speculation.

When Ibn Battuta finally returned from West Africa to Fez, the Moroccan capital, he was able to claim that he had visited every region of the world where Muslims either ruled or had settled. Many people in the court insisted that it was impossible for one man to have travelled so far and survived so many dangers. These arguments were silenced by the sultan’s chief minister, who gave Ibn Battuta several scribes to whom he could dictate as he pleased, as well as a young court secretary, Muhammad ibn Juzayy. It was Ibn Juzayy, proud of his own modest journeys abroad, who wrote in admiration of his elderly charge: ‘It must be plain to any man of intelligence that this sheikh is the traveller of the age.’

The old adventurer took his time, living near the palace, sifting through his memories and dictating to the scribes. These labours seem to have been stretched out over almost three years. At times he faltered in remembering the names of people and places, but could still recall vividly those parts of India where the women were especially beautiful and ‘famous for their charms in intercourse’. Ibn Battuta was eventually despatched to be the law-giver in an unidentified Moroccan town. No more is on record about him, except that he is thought to have died in 1377 in the ancient city of Marrakesh, aged seventy-three.

By that time a momentous change had overtaken those distant lands through which he and Marco Polo had travelled. The Great Khan was no more, for Mongol rule in China had ended as swiftly as it began. The people whose mounted armies had swept irresistibly across Asia and much of Europe in the middle of the thirteenth century now vanished from the world stage. The Ming dynasty had taken power in the ‘Central Country’ and would hold it for the next 300 years.

NINE

Armadas of the Three-Jewel Eunuch

Your Master the Lord of China greets you and counsels you to act justly to your subjects.

—Chinese envoy, addressing the Sultan of Aden, 1420

THE DRIVING FORCE behind China’s most dramatic display of sea-power in its history was a singular figure, the Grand Admiral Zheng He. Described by contemporaries as handsome, tall and burly, with fierce eyes, long earlobes, and a voice ‘as loud as a bell’, Zheng was also a eunuch. They called him the Three-Jewel Eunuch (or, more formally, the Eunuch of the Three Treasures, a title derived from Buddhism which is literally translated as ‘the Three Jewels of Pious Ejaculation’). Yet he was not a Buddhist, his original surname was not Zheng, and ethnically he was not of Chinese descent.

He was born in 1371 in the south-western Kunyang county, in the province of Yunnan. Kunyang is remote from the sea, but his family is thought to have originated even further away, beyond the Great Wall in a distant part of central Asia, and to have come to Yunnan with the Mongols. At all events, they were Muslims, both his father and grandfather having made pilgrimages to Mecca – a great achievement at that time. The family name was Ma, a common one among Muslims in China, and the boy had an elder brother and four sisters. When he was born the Mongols were still holding Yunnan, but were finally driven out by the armies of the Ming emperor Hongwu in 1382.

This was to be the turning-point in the life of the Ma family’s eleven-year-old son. A visiting general chose him, for his looks and his intelligence, to be taken to Nanjing, then the Chinese capital. Once in Nanjing, he was made a page to the prince of Yan, the future emperor Yongle. He was given the new surname of Zheng, and castrated.

The creation of eunuchs to be the personal attendants of China’s rulers was a tradition, dating back to the earliest empires. At first only criminals were castrated, and were then sent to serve in the palace; this was called gongxing, palace punishment. Gradually the stigma was removed. Eunuchs were found to be unwaveringly loyal, never liable to suspicion of plotting to found dynasties of their own; all their energies were dedicated to whatever tasks were set for them. The most obvious role for a eunuch of a menial type was as ‘guardians of the harem’. Sometimes courtiers and confidants of much higher status chose to be castrated, to rule out any danger of being accused of sexual misconduct.

The Yongle period was the heyday of the eunuchs, who had played a decisive role in the intrigues which helped the emperor to seize the throne in 1403. They came to have far more say in palace circles than the traditional wielders of power, the Confucian bureaucrats, and none was more influential than Zheng He. While still in his mid-thirties he became a senior officer in the army garrison at Nanjing, on the Yangtze river, after putting down a rebellion in his home province.

When the new emperor decided to implement the long-discussed plans for a naval venture into the Indian Ocean, he turned to Zheng whose religion made him a natural choice since so many of the ‘barbarian’ lands round the ocean were reputed to follow the rites of the ‘Heavenly Square’ (the Ka’ba in Mecca). There had been a pretence at first that Zheng He was merely being sent to look for Huidi, the deposed emperor, but this was soon abandoned. The Chinese were primarily looking for markets for the surpluses of their great factories.1

There is no knowing whether Zheng was ever a naval commander before being appointed to lead the first expedition. Perhaps he had seen action in sea fights with Japanese pirates (wokou), who wreaked havoc among Chinese merchant shipping; the junks of the coastal defence fleet carried warriors trained to board the pirate ships and slaughter their crews. Even if Zheng was no seafarer he must have been well acquainted with naval activity, since Nanjing was near the ocean. Stupendous efforts had been made there for several decades to build up China’s fleets.

A previous emperor, Taizu, had ordered the planting on mountainsides inland from Nanjing of millions of trees, to provide wood suitable for ships. By the time of Yongle, the imperial navy consisted of 400 vessels stationed at Nanjing, 2,800 coastal-defence ships, a 3,000-strong transport fleet, and 250 ‘treasure ships’, showpieces of Chinese technology. Although the Mongol rulers had been able to assemble 4,400 ships for a failed attack on Japan a century earlier, and 1,000 for a punitive expedition to Java, most of these would have looked puny alongside the vessels now put at the disposal of the ‘Three-Jewel Eunuch’.

Armed with the emperor’s edict, Zheng prepared the first of his seven expeditions with a bravura that was to be characteristic of his entire career. The fleet assembled at Dragon River Pass (Liujiajiang) near the mouth of the Yangtze in 1405; this was to be the pattern for the next quarter of a century. The stately ‘treasure ships’, each weighing more than 500 tons, borne along by the wind in their twelve sails, and carrying hundreds of men, had names such as Pure Harmony, Lasting Tranquillity and Peaceful Crossing.2 Under full sail they were likened to ‘swimming dragons’. These were the floating fortresses of the fleet, their crews armed with ‘fire arrows’ charged with gunpowder, as well as rockets and blunderbusses firing stones. By 1350 the Chinese had also invented bombards, known as ‘wonder-working long-range awe-inspiring cannon’, although these were not highly valued for naval use.

The number of big junks sailing in each of the expeditions varied from about forty to more than a hundred, and each had several support vessels. These armadas of the Xia Xiyang (‘Going Down to the Western Ocean’) were the wonders of the age. The ships carried doctors, accountants, interpreters, scholars, holy men, astrologers, traders and artisans of every sort: on most of his seven expeditions Zheng had as many as 30,000 men under his command, in up to 300 ships of varying types. Flags, drums and lanterns were used to send messages within the fleet. To work out positions and routes the heavens were studied with the use of calibrated ‘star plates’, carved in ebony.

As with all convoys, the slowest vessels dictated the speed, and this was often no more than fifty miles a day, despite the use of huge oars when winds were slack.3 Enough rice and other foodstuffs to last for a year were in the holds, lest provisions were lacking in the barbarian lands. Fresh water was stored in large tanks deep in the hulls. As a matter of pride, the Chinese never cared to feel at a disadvantage in foreign parts.

At first the Three-Jewel Eunuch ventured no further than Ceylon and the Malabar and Coromandel coasts of southern India, sending his huge fleets into such ports as Calicut and Quilon, with which Chinese merchants had been familiar for a century. By this time the South Indian pepper port of Calicut (called Kuli by the Chinese) was recognized as the most important emporium in the ‘Western Ocean’; when Calicut’s emissaries went to Nanjing in 1405 its ruler, the Zamorin, was rewarded with an elevated Chinese title. The attention Zheng’s fleets paid to this thriving city proves the commercial purpose behind his expeditions.

There were also less mundane reasons for visiting local rulers. In 1409 the Chinese invaded Ceylon, penetrated the country as far as the mountain capital of Kandy, and captured the Sinhalese king, Vira Alakesvara, together with his queen and members of the court. This was a direct punishment for the king’s refusal, several years before, to hand over to the Chinese emperor a precious relic, the tooth of the Buddha. In his time the Mongol ruler Kubilai Khan had also tried to acquire the tooth, but in vain. The king and the other captives were taken back to China as hostages and kept there for five years (although Zheng never did manage to lay hands on the holy tooth). As a reminder of this violent interlude the expedition left behind at the port of Galle a tablet inscribed in three languages, Chinese, Tamil and Persian, respectively praising Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam.

News of this hostage-taking must soon have spread along the trade routes of the Indian Ocean, ensuring that other rulers would be suitably submissive and hand over tribute, thus in effect conceding that they recognized the Chinese emperor as supreme ruler of the universe. When dealing with foreigners, the envoys from Beijing sometimes failed to hide the superiority they felt. One who went ashore in Aden could not bring himself to kiss the ground, as was customary, at the start of his audience with the sultan. This was taken by the Arabs as an insult; for their part, the Chinese thought the people of Aden ‘overbearing’.

However, the rewards were great for foreign monarchs willing to pay tribute to the emperor and acknowledge him as their ultimate overlord and mentor. They would be invited to send emissaries to China aboard one of the great treasure ships; in due course the emissaries would return with gifts more valuable than any they had taken with them, to press home the fact of Chinese superiority. An imperial edict explained: ‘They come here out of respect for our civilizing ways.’ The gifts they brought with them were seen as tribute, a proof of submission.

Yet if this was imperialism, it was of a curiously impermanent nature. Although Zheng sometimes sent punitive parties ashore – one was landed at Mogadishu in Somalia to teach its truculent sultan a lesson – he never installed a permanent garrison anywhere.4 When each expedition was finished, the entire fleet would turn away eastwards, sail back through the straits of Malacca, head north through the more familiar waters of East Asia, and finally drop anchor in the home port of Nanjing.

The treasure ships carrying the envoys from the Indian Ocean lands were known as ‘Star Rafts’, a term used by a certain Fei Xin in the title of his account of one expedition: Triumphant Sights from the Star Raft. This in turn came from an ancient belief, dating back at least twelve centuries, that if a ship sailed far enough it would eventually leave the earth, reach the Milky Way and come to a galactic city wherein sat a maiden spinning (the traditional representation of Vega in the Lyra constellation). Such heavenly images are mirrored in the wording on a column at Dragon River Pass commemorating Zheng’s expeditions: ‘Our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds, day and night continued their course, rapid like that of a star, traversing the savage waves.’

Although Zheng was a devout Muslim, he saw no inconsistency in erecting a column in a temple dedicated to the Taoist goddess Tianfei (the Celestial Spouse). The inscription boasts that countries ‘beyond the horizon and at the ends of the earth have all become subjects’, and goes on to thank the Celestial Spouse for her protection. The miraculous and majestic powers of the goddess ‘whose virtuous achievements have been recorded in a most honourable manner in the Bureau of Sacrificial Worship’ quelled hurricanes and saved the fleets from disaster. Her presence was revealed in times of extreme peril by a light shining at the masthead.

This inscription at Dragon Pass River also reveals how total were the powers vested in the eunuch ‘aristocracy’. The tribute to the Celestial Spouse was in the names of Grand Eunuchs Zheng He and Wang Jinghong, the assistant envoys, the Grand Eunuchs Zhu Liang, Zhou Fu, Hong Bao and Yang Zhen, and the Senior Lesser Eunuch Zhang Da. Probably all of Zheng’s senior captains were eunuchs.