History's Greatest Mistake That No One Knows About: The Ming Dynasty's Fatal Decision to Abandon the Seas

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

History’s Greatest Mistake That No One Knows About: The Ming Dynasty’s Fatal Decision to Abandon the Seas

Christian Wiedeck, M.Sc.

The Unprecedented Naval Supremacy of Early Ming China

The Unprecedented Naval Supremacy of Early Ming China (image credits: flickr)
The Unprecedented Naval Supremacy of Early Ming China (image credits: flickr)

Most people couldn’t even imagine the scale of what China achieved in the early 1400s. The Ming treasure voyages were maritime expeditions undertaken by Ming China’s treasure fleet between 1405 and 1433. The grand project resulted in seven far-reaching ocean voyages to the coastal territories and islands of the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. During the course of the treasure voyages, Ming China had become the pre-eminent naval power of the early 15th century.

The sheer size of these expeditions was mind-boggling. Zheng He commanded a veritable floating metropolis consisting of 28, 000 men and over 300 vessels, of which 60 were enormous “treasure ships,” nine-masted behemoths over 120 meters (394 foot) long. Many scholars think the larger expeditions included at least 200-300 and 28,000-30,000 ships. These weren’t mere fishing boats – they were floating cities that dwarfed anything Europe would produce for centuries.

Admiral Zheng He: The Greatest Explorer You’ve Never Heard Of

Admiral Zheng He: The Greatest Explorer You've Never Heard Of (image credits: flickr)
Admiral Zheng He: The Greatest Explorer You’ve Never Heard Of (image credits: flickr)

While Columbus gets all the credit for opening the seas, Admiral Zheng He was crossing oceans decades before Europeans even dreamed of leaving their coastal waters. During the early years of the Ming dynasty, a young Chinese Muslim boy by the name of Ma He (1371–1433) was captured by the Chinese army, along with other children. At the young age of thirteen, Ma was castrated and made a servant to one of the emperor’s sons. Ma grew into a strong warrior and favorite officer of the prince. With the help of Ma, Prince Zhu Di, fought and took the throne from his nephew to become the new emperor in 1402.

Zhu Di who assumed the title of Chengzu and became the third Ming emperor (reign name Yongle),rewarded his faithful servant by giving him the new surname Zheng. It was alleged in official records that Zheng He was an imposing figure, standing seven feet tall. Admiral Zheng He was commissioned to command the fleet for the expeditions. This towering figure would become China’s greatest naval commander and the world’s most accomplished explorer.

The Scope of Chinese Maritime Domination

The Scope of Chinese Maritime Domination (image credits: unsplash)
The Scope of Chinese Maritime Domination (image credits: unsplash)

The distances these Chinese fleets covered were absolutely staggering. The first three voyages reached up to Calicut on India’s Malabar Coast, while the fourth voyage went as far as Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. In the last three voyages, the fleet traveled up to the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa. During the first ones, Zheng He traveled all the way from China to Southeast Asia and then on to India, all the way to major trading sites on India’s southwest coast. In his fourth voyage, he traveled to the Persian Gulf. But for the three last voyages, Zheng went even further, all the way to the east coast of Africa.

The diplomatic impact was enormous. From his fourth voyage, he brought envoys from thirty states that traveled to China and paid their respects at the Ming court. In this voyage’s wake, the first to travel beyond India and cross the Arabian Sea, an estimated 18 states sent tribute and envoys to China, underscoring the Ming emperor’s influence overseas. China wasn’t just exploring – it was establishing itself as the world’s dominant superpower.

The Treasure Ships: Naval Engineering Marvels

The Treasure Ships: Naval Engineering Marvels (image credits: flickr)
The Treasure Ships: Naval Engineering Marvels (image credits: flickr)

The technological superiority of these Chinese vessels was centuries ahead of European shipbuilding. On the first voyage, the fleet numbered 255 ships, 62 of which were vast treasure ships, or baochuan. There were also mid-size ships such as the machuan, used for transporting horses, and a multitude of other vessels carrying soldiers, sailors, and assorted personnel. The treasure ships, which were alleged to be 400 feet in length (this is a disputed estimation but the ships were enormous),were the pride of the fleet.

These floating palaces weren’t just impressive – they were functional masterpieces. Over sixty of the three hundred seventeen ships on the first voyage were enormous “Treasure Ships,” sailing vessels over 400 hundred feet long, 160 feet wide, with several stories, nine masts and twelve sails. Some 600 officials made the voyage, among them doctors, astrologers, and cartographers. Imagine entire diplomatic missions, complete with specialists and advisors, sailing in luxury across the Indian Ocean.

The Fatal Decision of 1433

The Fatal Decision of 1433 (image credits: unsplash)
The Fatal Decision of 1433 (image credits: unsplash)

Then came the decision that would change world history forever. However, in 1433, the voyages ceased and Ming China turned away from the seas. Admiral Zheng He himself died in 1433 or 1435. It was on the return trip in 1433 that Zheng He died and was buried at sea, although his official grave still stands in Nanjing, China. The death of the great admiral coincided with a catastrophic shift in Chinese policy.

On his return trip, the 62-year-old admiral died and was buried at sea. Following his death, the voyages ceased, and the Treasure Fleet was dismantled. Faced with a continuous Mongol threat from the north and surrounded by powerful Confucian courtiers who had no love for “wasteful adventures” the emperor ended the naval expeditions for good. The world’s most powerful navy was intentionally destroyed by its own government.

The Three Pillars of China’s Self-Destruction

The Three Pillars of China's Self-Destruction (image credits: By Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net)., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27769499)
The Three Pillars of China’s Self-Destruction (image credits: By Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net)., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27769499)

The reasoning behind this monumental mistake wasn’t random – it was driven by three interconnected factors. First, the Yongle Emperor who sponsored Zheng He’s first six voyages died in 1424. His son, the Hongxi Emperor, was much more conservative and Confucianist in his thought, so he ordered the voyages stopped. The treasure fleet voyages cost Ming China enormous amounts of money; since they were not trade excursions, the government recovered little of the cost. The Hongxi Emperor inherited a treasury that was much emptier than it might have been, if not for his father’s Indian Ocean adventures.

The cultural resistance was equally powerful. Factions at court had long been critical of the Yongle emperor’s extravagant ways. Not only had he sent seven missions of the enormous Treasure Ships over the western seas, he had ordered overseas missions northeast and east, had sent envoys multiple times across desert and grassland to the mountains of Tibet and Nepal and on to Bengal and Siam, and had many times raised armies against fragmented but still troublesome Mongolian tribes to the north. For another, in the Confucian world order, merchants were considered to be among the lowliest members of society. Confucius saw merchants and other middlemen as parasites, profiting on the work of the farmers and artisans who actually produced trade goods.

The Mongol Threat: A Convenient Excuse

The Mongol Threat: A Convenient Excuse (image credits: wikimedia)
The Mongol Threat: A Convenient Excuse (image credits: wikimedia)

The northern frontier provided the perfect justification for abandoning the seas. Furthermore the fortuitous fragmentation of the Mongol threat along China’s northern borders did not last. By 1449 several tribes unified and their raids and counterattacks were to haunt the Ming Dynasty for the next two centuries until its fall, forcing military attention to be focused on the north. The primary reason for their termination was likely economic; the ongoing fiscal strain of the wars against the Mongols, coupled with the reconstruction of the Great Wall, meant that funds for the grand armada were reallocated elsewhere.

This seemed logical at the time, but the consequences were catastrophic. In addition, the Mongol threat in the north required vast funds to be diverted for military expenditure and the rebuilding and expansion of the Great Wall. China chose to focus inward, building walls instead of ships, defending instead of expanding. It was a decision that would haunt the nation for centuries.

The Confucian Ideology That Killed an Empire

The Confucian Ideology That Killed an Empire (image credits: unsplash)
The Confucian Ideology That Killed an Empire (image credits: unsplash)

The intellectual framework that destroyed Chinese maritime power was deeply rooted in Confucian philosophy. They further violated longstanding Confucian principles. They were only made possible by (and therefore continued to represent) a triumph of the Ming’s eunuch faction over the administration’s scholar-bureaucrats. The Ming court was divided into many factions, most sharply into the pro-expansionist voices led by the powerful eunuch factions that had been responsible for the policies supporting Zheng Ho’s voyages, and more traditional conservative Confucian court advisers who argued for frugality.

The cultural arrogance was stunning. China’s historic culture of Sinocentrism long discouraged naval investment and maritime trade. Chinese Emperors, claiming divine authority as the ‘Son of Heaven’, saw it as undignified for the imperial government to trade on an equal footing with barbarians. The earlier overseas explorations yielded to isolationism, as the idea that all outside of China was barbarian took hold, (known as Sinocentrism). This worldview would prove catastrophically wrong.

Europe Fills the Vacuum: The Rise of Portuguese Power

Europe Fills the Vacuum: The Rise of Portuguese Power (image credits: wikimedia)
Europe Fills the Vacuum: The Rise of Portuguese Power (image credits: wikimedia)

As China turned inward, Europe seized the opportunity. The Portuguese first established trade with China in 1516. Following the Ming Emperor’s decision to ban direct trade with Japan, Portuguese traders acted as an intermediary between China and Japan by buying Chinese silks from China and selling it to Japan for silver. After some initial hostilities gained consent from the Ming court in 1557 to settle Macau as their permanent trade base in China.

The Portuguese quickly established a global trading network. Over the following decades, Portuguese sailors continued to explore the coasts and islands of East Asia, establishing forts and factories as they went. By 1571, a string of naval outposts connected Lisbon to Nagasaki along the coasts of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. When the Portuguese reached India, they found a booming trade network which they then followed to China. In the sixteenth century Europeans started to appear on the eastern shores and the Portuguese founded Macao, the first European settlement in China.

The Spanish and Dutch Follow: A European Maritime Empire

The Spanish and Dutch Follow: A European Maritime Empire (image credits: wikimedia)
The Spanish and Dutch Follow: A European Maritime Empire (image credits: wikimedia)

Spain and the Netherlands quickly followed Portugal’s lead. By 1557, the Portuguese had established a permanent trading post on Macao. The Spanish took possession of the Philippines in the 1570s, and a large Sino-Spanish trade was established in Manila. By 1622, the Dutch had established a base on the island of Taiwan from which they raided the Chinese coast and looted Chinese ships. The English and Japanese also stepped up their own efforts to expand their maritime trade.

The Europeans were building exactly what China had abandoned. Dutch and English interests used this new information, leading to their commercial expansion, including the foundation of the English East India Company in 1600, and the Dutch East India Company in 1602. These developments allowed the entry of chartered companies into the East Indies. While China retreated behind its walls, Europe was constructing a global trading empire.

The Opium Wars: China’s Humiliation Begins

The Opium Wars: China's Humiliation Begins (image credits: unsplash)
The Opium Wars: China’s Humiliation Begins (image credits: unsplash)

By the 19th century, China’s withdrawal from the seas had created a power vacuum that Europeans ruthlessly exploited. The Opium Wars (simplified Chinese: 鸦片战争; traditional Chinese: 鴉片戰爭; pinyin: Yāpiàn zhànzhēng) were two conflicts waged between the Qing dynasty and the Western powers during the mid-19th century. The First Opium War was fought from 1839 to 1842 between China and the British Empire. While the first Opium War of 1839–42 did not cause the eventual collapse of China’s 5,000-year imperial dynastic system seven decades later, it did help shift the balance of power in Asia in favour of the West. From China’s historical perspective, the first Opium War was the beginning of the end of late Imperial China, a powerful dynastic system and advanced civilization that had lasted thousands of years.

The humiliation was complete and systematic. The war resulted in the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin (Tianjin), in which the Chinese government agreed to pay war reparations for the expenses of the recent conflict, open a second group of ten ports to European commerce, legalize the opium trade, and grant foreign traders and missionaries rights to travel within China. China was also required to use diplomacy in the Western, egalitarian style instead of their normal way of conducting business with lesser states through a tribute system. This treaty led to the era in Chinese history known as the Century of Humiliation.

The Unequal Treaties: China Becomes a European Playground

The Unequal Treaties: China Becomes a European Playground (image credits: wikimedia)
The Unequal Treaties: China Becomes a European Playground (image credits: wikimedia)

The consequences of China’s naval withdrawal became brutally clear in the treaty ports. The Opium Wars marked the start of the era of unequal treaties between China and foreign imperialist powers (primarily Great Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Russia, and Japan) in which China was forced to concede many of its territorial and sovereignty rights. The agreements reached between the Western powers and China following the Opium Wars came to be known as the “unequal treaties” because in practice they gave foreigners privileged status and extracted concessions from the Chinese.

The extent of foreign control was staggering. The number of treaty ports increased, with new ports opened to Western trade along the Chinese coast, on the islands of Taiwan and Hainan, and along the Yangtze River in the interior. With the opening of the Yangtze River, foreigners also gained full access to the interior, and were free to travel and conduct business or missions anywhere in China. However, a China that ceased to deal with outsiders was badly placed to deal with them, which led to her becoming a theatre for European imperial ambition. While China was never conquered by any other power (except by Japan during World War II) from the sixteenth century on, the European powers gained many concessions and established several colonies which undermined the Emperor’s own power.

The Economic Consequences: China’s Silver Drain

The Economic Consequences: China's Silver Drain (image credits: wikimedia)
The Economic Consequences: China’s Silver Drain (image credits: wikimedia)

The economic impact of China’s isolation was devastating. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the balance of trade was heavily in China’s favour. One major reason was that British consumers had developed a strong liking for Chinese tea, as well as other goods like porcelain and silk. But Chinese consumers had no similar preference for any goods produced in Britain. Because of this trade imbalance, Britain increasingly had to use silver to pay for its expanding purchases of Chinese goods.

But the British found a solution that would destroy Chinese society. In the late 1700s, Britain tried to alter this balance by replacing cotton with opium, also grown in India. In economic terms, this was a success for Britain; by the 1820s, the balance of trade was reversed in Britain’s favour, and it was the Chinese who now had to pay with silver. The continuation of the opium trade, moreover, added to the cost to China in both silver and in the serious social consequences of opium addiction.

The Lost Opportunity: What Could Have Been

The Lost Opportunity: What Could Have Been (image credits: wikimedia)
The Lost Opportunity: What Could Have Been (image credits: wikimedia)

The magnitude of China’s mistake becomes clear when we consider the alternative timeline. Moreover, Zheng He’s armed interventions in Sri Lanka and Sumatra both demonstrated an advanced military capability to support overseas campaigns. Though with the cancellation of the treasure fleet, the opportunity to establish a colonial empire was squandered, a century before the discovery of the Americas. The stele also offers a tantalizing glimpse into the unfulfilled potential of Ming China — the road not taken.

China had everything needed for global dominance. During the Ming (1368-1644) China was “…the oldest, largest, and richest civilization in the world” with an outstanding naval capacity in the early 1400s. This was a crucial period in China’s history, where China chose isolation almost precisely at the point where Europeans were beginning their outward expansion. This meant, at a time of rapidly expanding international knowledge and technological development, the leaders of China were educated in a very narrow band of knowledge which poorly prepared them for a rapidly changing world.

Why This Mistake Remains Hidden

Why This Mistake Remains Hidden (image credits: wikimedia)
Why This Mistake Remains Hidden (image credits: wikimedia)

The reason this catastrophic decision remains largely unknown is rooted in how history is taught. Nearly forgotten in China until recently, he was immortalized among Chinese communities abroad, particularly in Southeast Asia where to this day he is celebrated and revered as a god. Western education focuses on European exploration while ignoring the Chinese withdrawal that made it possible. China’s experience of Western aggression in the 1800s continues to be an important factor shaping both the nation’s foreign policy and its drive for modernization.

The consequences echoed through centuries. The lesson that Chinese students learn today about the Opium Wars is that China should never again let itself become weak, ‘backward,’ and vulnerable to other countries. As one British historian says, “If you talk to many Chinese about the Opium War, a phrase you will quickly hear is ‘luo hou

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