When China ruled the seas, the treasure fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-33. By Louise Levathes. NY, U.S.A.: Simon & Schuster, 1994. This is a first printing in immaculate MINT unread condition with no shelf wear.. ISBN: 0671701584. First Edition. Hard Cover.
In this discussion of the fifteenth-century treasure fleets of the Chinese dragon throne, Levathes shows how China "discovered" the West--not the other way around--nearly 100 years before European explorers Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus set out for Asia.
The story is compelling. In May 1403, when Europe was still emerging from the Middle Ages, the Yongle Emperor, Zhu Di (1402-1424) was busy putting together a fleet of 1,681 ocean-going ships. In 1405, Zhu Di commissioned the Muslim eunuch, Zheng He, to take 317 of these ships to the Middle East and Eastern Africa. Zheng He's fleet was impressive, including a handful of the so-called "treasure" ships, vessels that were 400 feet long. By contrast, when Christopher Columbus sailed in 1492, he had only three ships under his command, and his own, the Santa Maria, was a measly 85 feet.
Zheng He led seven voyages between 1405 and 1433, routinely passing through what we now call Southeast and South Asia, with regions in the Middle East and the eastern coast of Africa as his final destinations. But after Zheng He died at sea in 1433, and Zhu Di's grandson, the Xuande Emperor, Zhu Zhanji (1425-1435), died several years later, China began a slow turn inward. A century later, the act of venturing abroad, even to trade, had become a criminal offense. By the nineteenth century, this isolationism left China vulnerable to Western imperialism, creating wounds that are still in evidence today as China struggles to regain what it considers its rightful position at the apex of the world order, a spot it held with such confidence more than 500 years ago.
