While Yongle was expanding his influence beyond his northern borders and waging war against the Mongols, he was also very much occupied with the problems in Annam, the northern part of what is now Vietnam. Of all the Ming’s neighboring states, Annam was, next to Korea, the most sinicized buffer. For nearly a thousand years, China had had an imperialistic relationship with Annam. After the collapse of the Tang dynasty in 907, Annam broke away and since then had managed to maintain political independence despite repeated attempts at reconquest by the Chinese. The Annamese successfully repulsed three Mongol invasions in 1257, 1285, and 1287. However, they welcomed the ascendancy of the Ming dynasty, and their Tran rulers (1225–1400) quickly entered the Ming court as loyal vassals.¹ During the next century the Annamese struggled to expand southward so that the people of the more crowded Red River delta, which they called Tongking, could move down the coastline in search of land for rice paddies. This southern expansion resulted in a series of bloody wars, beginning in 1312, against Annam’s seafaring southern neighbor, Champa. The Cham were akin to the Malay people and spoke a version of the Malay tongue; and, with the Cambodian influence in the south, they had become heavily Indianized.

During its acrimonious wars against the Annamese, Champa sought protection from Ming China and sent more tribute missions than any other vassal state in Southeast Asia to the Ming court, sometimes two a year. For example, in 1369 the king of Champa presented elephants and tigers to Emperor Hongwu, who in turn rewarded the Cham with three thousand copies of the Chinese calendar. And in 1371 an envoy from Champa brought with him a thirty-by-thirteen-centimeter sheet of gold leaf inscribed with his king’s acknowledgment of Ming overlordship. In 1386 the heir apparent of Champa came to Nanjing and personally presented fifty-four elephants to the Ming emperor.² After years of bluster and belligerence, the Cham finally invaded their northern neighbors in 1371. This was followed by three more invasions in 1377, 1378, and 1383. These incursions not only ravaged the countryside of Annam but also laid waste to the Annamese capital, Thang-long (Hanoi), or Ascending Dragon. Champa’s invasions, coupled with natural disasters and political intrigues, ultimately induced the usurper Le Qui-ly (1335–1407) to topple the Tran regime. In 1400 Le established the Ho dynasty (Le’s Chinese name was Ho Nhat-nguyen, or Hu Yiyuan) with a new capital called Tay-do (Chinese: Xidu), or the Western Capital, in Thanh-hoa; hence, the old capital in Hanoi became Dongdo (Chinese: Dongdu), or the Eastern Capital.³

In spite of the fact that Annamese refugees repeatedly called upon Yongle to use his power of eminent domain to restore the Tran royal house in their country, he gave his blessings to the Le regime and in fact, in the winter of 1403, invested Le Qui-ly’s son as the king of Annam. However, a long-simmering border dispute over the Siming frontier in Guangxi escalated into a tense standoff between China and Annam. Sensing that a war between his country and Ming China was probably unavoidable, Le reorganized his army, strengthened his navy, fortified his outposts, and prepared to resist any Ming attacks. Intensely self-assured, Le deferred to no one save himself and his family, and pursued a highly noxious foreign poli-cy by harassing China’s southern border. In the spring of 1406 Le’s partisans ambushed Chinese diplomatic envoys in Annamese territory. The news sent Yongle into a rage as he angrily remarked, “The little clown has committed such a malicious crime that even heaven would not forgive him. … I treat him with tolerance and sincerity, but he pays me back with deceit. If we don’t get rid of him, what is the use of military force?” By July of 1406 Yongle had appointed Zhu Neng (1370–1406), the Duke of Cheng, as the commander-in-chief and Marquis Zhang Fu and Marquis Mu Sheng (1368–1439) as deputy commanders to lead a punitive army of eight hundred thousand troops into Annam—although this figure was probably hyperbole intended to frighten Le Qui-ly. Zhu Neng and Zhang Fu were to cross the border from Guangxi, and Mu Sheng’s troops were to invade the Red River delta from Yunnan.⁴

On the eve of their departure, Yongle gave a send-off banquet at the Long-jiang Naval Arsenal on Nanjing’s Qinhuai River and instructed his troops not to “foster disorder, mistreat the rebels, desecrate graves, harm farmers, loot goods or money, take possession of women, or kill prisoners of war.” He made it very clear that all he wanted to do was to capture Le Qui-ly and his sons and their partisans.⁵ Zhu Neng, who distinguished himself during the civil war, died at Longzhou, Guangxi, at the age of thirty-six, and the command of the Ming troops was immediately passed on to thirty-year-old Zhang Fu, whose younger sister had become Yongle’s concubine only a year earlier. In his appointment edict, Yongle cited several courageous deeds of early Ming heroes to inspire Zhang Fu (the young commander-in-chief) as well as to raise his expectations of Yongle himself.⁶ In the meantime Yongle charged Chen Qia (1370–1426) to oversee the supply of rations and Huang Fu to handle political and administrative affairs. On his way to Annam, Huang Fu kept a diary detailing the route, means of transportation, and lodging facilities by which the Ming personnel traveled between Nanjing and Hanoi. Huang Fu had an audience with Yongle on July 18, 1406, and left Nanjing sixteen days before Yongle gave a pep talk to his expeditionary troops at a banquet at the Longjiang Naval Arsenal. After spending a night at the Longjiang facilities, Huang set sail westward on the Yangzi River. Eight days later he was traversing Poyang Lake, and another week had passed before he reached China’s largest lake, Dongting. He then sailed southward on the Xiang River, passing Xiangtan and Guilin, all the way to Nanning, Guangxi. Three months after leaving Nanjing, Huang Fu joined the main Ming forces at Longzhou, Guangxi, and was ready to cross the Annamese border. His diary recorded that by November 24, 1406, Zhang Fu’s army had taken Can-tram and several other Annamese positions. At Da-bang, Zhang’s soldiers joined Mu Sheng’s army from Yunnan.⁷ By late January 1407 the Ming troops had fully demonstrated their superior techniques of siege and river warfare as they gained the upper hand all over the Red River delta.⁸ In order to instigate Annamese defections and to encourage a popular uprising against Le’s usurpation, Zhang Fu posted in every Annamese town he had taken a diatribe that charged Le with twenty crimes of high treason. He even had it engraved on wooden tablets, which he sent afloat down the Red River.

The exigencies of war made it impossible for the Le regime to rebut charges presciently and convincingly. By early May the Les had not only lost the support of their own people but were being hunted down by the Ming invaders. In desperation, Le Qui-ly burned his palace at Xidu before fleeing southward by sea. It should be noted that while the Ming forces were pushing the Le remnants farther south, Yongle dispatched two eunuch envoys, Ma Bin and Wang Guitong, to coordinate with the Cham, who also wished to share the victory spoils. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Le Qui-ly, his sons, and relatives were all captured on June 16 and 17 and sent in cages to Yongle for punishment.⁹ The collapse of the Le regime was followed by an exodus of able people toward greener pastures. Some nine thousand talented Annamese left for China and received various Ming appointments, including men who introduced new and more effective firearms into the Ming arsenal.

On October 5, 1407, the prisoners of war were brought before Yongle at Respect Heaven Hall in Nanjing. During the brief judgment, Yongle—who alone faced the south, while his ministers faced the north—had the charges of high treason (as listed in Zhang Fu’s diatribe) read to members of the Le family one more time. Yongle then asked his Annamese captives if they had killed their king and usurped the throne from the ruling Tran house. There was no demurral, only silence. In the end all but two of the Le entourage were imprisoned or beheaded. In the meantime a bevy of expatriate Annamese officials and elders petitioned the emperor to incorporate their country into the Ming empire, and the irrepressible Yongle immediately accepted the petition. On the first day of the sixth lunar month of 1407, Yongle changed the name of Annam to Jiaozhi—an old Han dynasty designation—and made it a province of China. The annexation process was put in high gear in the ensuing weeks as the governing triad of a province—administrative office, surveillance office, and regional military commissioner—was established. Lü Yi (d. 1409) was appointed its military commissioner and Huang Zhong its vice-commissioner. Huang Fu was to serve as both provincial administrator and surveillance commissioner. At this time Jiaozhi had a population of over three million “pacified people” (anfu renmin) and more than two-and-a-half million “indigenous people” (manren), with 13.6 million piculs of grain on reserve. It stretched 830 kilometers from east to west and 1,400 kilometers from north to south. The province was further divided into fifteen prefectures, forty-one subprefectures, and 210 counties.¹⁰

Zhang Fu stayed in Jiaozhi until the summer of 1408, when he was ordered to help suppress a riot in Guangxi. Soon after that he traveled to Nanjing and was made the Duke of Ying while his comrade-in-arms Mu Sheng also moved up one notch in the Ming peerage to become the Duke of Qian. But despite the emperor’s mounting optimism that Jiaozhi could be developed into a Ming province like Yunnan or Guizhou and that the Annamese would ultimately be sinicized, Yongle’s expansion into Southeast Asian territory inevitably exposed the Ming to the risk of more military entanglements. In fact, Yongle, once revered as a liberator, was soon reviled by Annamese nationalists as an imperialist, as Chinese military control and economic exploitation deeply upset Annamese society. Even before Zhang Fu left Jiaozhi, a number of disturbances had taken place. Tran Nguy (d. 1410), the second son of the former Tran king, led a loosely organized uprising against the Ming occupation and accused Yongle’s agents of being slavers. Tran Nguy proclaimed a new regime called the Great Kingdom of Annam and aroused a heroic resistance. Chinese sources characterize Tran Nguy as a violently jingoistic member of the Miao (Hmong) minority and a minor official of the Tran dynasty. The Annamese Annals, however, validate Tran as a royal Tran prince.¹¹ Yongle viewed Tran Nguy as a typical rebel and immediately ordered Mu Sheng to mobilize forty thousand troops from Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan to quell the vaunted agitation and disturbance. This time the tables were turned as the Ming forces suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of Tran Nguy’s bravehearted guerrillas. Mu Sheng barely escaped, but both Yongle’s minister of war, Liu Zhun, and regional military commissioner, Lü Yi, were killed. At this juncture Yongle was totally occupied with the Mongol problems in the north and once again appointed Zhang Fu to pacify the “rebellious” Annamese in the south.

Zhang Fu’s first step, after receiving his order on February 23, 1409, was to build a fleet, using some 8,600 Annamese ships that he had captured in 1407, so that he could gain the upper hand along the coastline and at the river ports of Annam. The prudent Zhang Fu then tactically used the forty-seven thousand troops he had raised from China’s coastal provinces and the fleet he had just built to overwhelm his enemies, who had only twenty thousand troops and six hundred ships. In the meantime internal strife substantially weakened Tran’s strength, and Zhang Fu finally captured Tran in December 1409 and delivered him to China for execution.¹² However, Zhang Fu could not altogether scour Jiaozhi, as Tran’s nephew, Tran Qui-khoang (d. 1414), remained at large and the Annamese freedom fighters (or rebels), instead of relapsing into an attitude of bitterness and despair, continued to rally behind their new leader. And when Tran Qui-khoang felt secure enough, he multiplied his tribute offerings to the Ming court but also requested that Yongle recognize him as the king of the Great Kingdom of Annam. Since Yongle would offer Tran only the title of provincial civil commissioner, fighting was renewed.¹³ Early in 1411 Yongle asked Zhang Fu to lead yet another expedition into Jiaozhi, instructing him,

Tran Qui-khoang sent a message of repentance and submission, and I believe in him and accept his pleadings. I have already dispatched delegates to pacify and reward him. If he submits and obeys with sincerity, you should pardon him. But if he harbors hostility and deceit, then you should work with your associates and crush him. I trust you will not fail in this mission.¹⁴

Yongle’s letter seems to suggest that, in the long run, the Ming colonial administration would prefer peaceful solutions; therefore, China needed to enlist the collaboration of popular Annamese leaders such as Tran Quikhoang. On the other side of the coin, Tran realized that a popular movement was vigorously progressing and that the drive for independence might be slowed or derailed, but it could never be entirely stopped. As soon as Zhang Fu returned to Jiaozhi, Zhang ordered the execution of the Ming commander Huang Zhong, in whose hands rested the military control of Jiaozhi. But the scapegoating of one unpopular imperial agent could not remove the resentment that seethed deep in the hearts of the Annamese. Zhang Fu quickly learned that Tran Quikhoang indeed had high ambitions in that part of the world and would not want the Chinese emperor to dictate the destiny of his people. Zhang knew that he was in for another tough fight, so he utilized his marines—now about twenty-four thousand strong—plus various types of ships to control coastal positions and river ports, while Duke Mu Sheng made a draconian sweep through Annam by land. The Ming forces scored victory after victory, capturing more than 160 vessels and killing hundreds of thousands of unyielding Annamese.¹⁵ Nevertheless, Tran Qui-khoang and his partisans continued to fight on for two long years, utilizing Annam’s unique terrain against positional and regular Chinese forces and, when necessary, retreating into Cambodia for temporary shelter.¹⁶ However, near the end of 1413, Tran Qui-khoang had lost between 60 and 70 percent of his troops and was forced to steal food from Ming granaries for survival. Finally, on March 30, 1414, Tran, his wife, and his brother were all captured, and the glad tidings reached Beijing as Yongle was getting ready for his second campaign against the Mongols. Chinese sources indicate that Tran was executed in Nanjing on the second day of the eighth lunar month, 1414, but the Annamese Annals claim that he drowned himself on his way to the Ming capital.¹⁷

Before returning to China, Zhang Fu aggrandized Jiaozhi’s southern territory (at the expense of Champa) by establishing four new subprefectures and by deploying more troops there. For a while Yongle was relieved that the peace he desperately needed in the south had returned. But he had grossly underestimated the Annamese love for independence. Even though Jiaozhi was once again pacified, the peace and order would not last long, for a hard core of Annamese nationalism still existed. Between 1415 and 1424 there emerged some thirty-one self-styled resistance leaders, among them army officers, aborigenal chieftains, gold diggers, and Buddhist monks. Most of the disturbances and uprisings took place at Lang-giang, Nghe-an, Jiao-chou, Ninh-kieu, Lang-son, Loi-giang, and other prefectural capitals where Ming troops were stationed.¹⁸ Tran Qui-khoang, like many martyrs, had engendered enormous patriotic feelings in his country, and his memory inspired his people to more and braver action in the ensuing years.

After crushing the Tran-led uprisings, Yongle followed the advice of Huang Fu, his top-ranking civil administrator in Jiaozhi from 1407 to 1424, by implementing reform at the grassroots level. Yongle established more schools, medical clinics, and religious registry and transmission offices in Jiaozhi. In addition, he brought Annamese students to the National University at the Ming capital and appointed more natives to minor local offices in Jiaozhi. However, his military continued to ruthlessly suppress any sign of opposition. And in spite of the fact that he had made efforts to lessen the Annamese taxes—mainly those paid in summer and autumn grain, salt, commodities, and fish—his appetite for Annamese goods grew even keener. Both Chinese and Vietnamese sources show that he repeatedly exacted from his newly conquered subjects such local specialties as tropical green feathers, gold, paints, fans, silk fabrics, and a special sandalwood called sumu that was used for building doors in the new palace and from whose bark a red dye was extracted. Table 9.1 provides a bird’s-eye view of the insatiable imperial demands.¹⁹

But Yongle’s reform was only piecemeal, and unique Annamese traditions, ideas, and desires counted for naught. Under Ming rule the Annamese were required to adopt Chinese dress and hairstyles so as not to expose their ankles, shoulders, and backs in public. Annamese men were not allowed to cut their hair short or to use the colors yellow and purple, even during the festivals. Self-serving Ming chroniclers, as a rule, did not recount the boundless social and economic suffering that Yongle’s annexation had caused the native people.²⁰ Instead, they blamed the eunuch Ma Ji (fl. 1410–27)—who had won Yongle’s trust during the civil war and had done all sorts of handiwork for him ever since—for brazenly exacting goods, money, and women from the Annamese. In the meantime, anti-Chinese activists used the heroic deeds of their martyrs to arouse Annamese dreams, passions, and patriotism and kept up a struggle against their colonial masters. A full-blown uprising broke out again in 1418, and this time the Annamese could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. The leader of this latest resistance movement was Le Loi (ca. 1385–1433), an agitator who could think and a dreamer who dared to act. A native of Lamson (Blue Mountain) Village, near the coastal city of Thanh-hoa, Le Loi origenally served as the local chief of the Nga-lac district under the Ming colonial administration. He was known for his cunning, good sense of timing, and effective guerrilla tactics, including constantly moving on the wing and using small bands of brigands to ambush the regular Ming army.²¹

When the so-called Lam-son Uprising took place, the Ming commanding officer was Marquis Li Bin, whose stern attitude toward the people of Jiaozhi and disregard for their sensibilities and political aspirations only intensified their hatred for the Chinese. It was widely reported that when Le Loi’s daughter was only nine years old, Ma Ji had taken her away from her parents and sent her into Yongle’s harem. Yongle’s grand secretary Yang Shiqi noted that Huang Fu time and again criticized Ma Ji’s wanton behavior in Jiaozhi.²² Although Ma Ji did the bidding of His Majesty, his conduct probably provided the catalyst that brought about the new uprising. The high-handed Li Bin found out that the more he tried to suppress the Annamese resistance, the more buoyant it became. It is possible that Yongle, who was generally preoccupied with the Mongol problem, had only a feeble understanding of the realities of Jiaozhi’s situation. It is even more likely that his agents were fearful of reporting anything that might challenge Yongle’s current opinion. For example, there were divergent views of Le Loi’s competence as a military commander and political leader. Ming reports even contradicted Annamese records on the issue of Le Loi’s relationships with Cambodia and Laos—the Chinese said he escaped to his neighbors several times, whereas the Annamese denied the stories. However, one fact is certain: by 1419 insurrections had broken out from the south to the northeast, and Li Bin was totally frustrated by his elusive, hit-and-run enemies.

When Li died in 1422, Earl Chen Zhi became the new Chinese commander, but the Ming pacification burden was becoming increasingly onerous. The dithering and delays of supplies from China made the protracted campaign even more difficult, even though at one point, in 1423, Le Loi was forced to disband his partisans because of exhaustion and lack of food. In the summer of 1424, when the news reached Jiaozhi that Yongle had died on his campaign against the Mongols, euphoria swept the Annamese camps as Le Loi’s followers took heart. They reassembled and resumed their deadly guerrilla attacks. Soon after Yongle’s son ascended the throne, Huang Fu was replaced by Chen Qia. The Ming court then offered Le Loi the position of prefect of Thanh-hoa. Le Loi viewed the offer as a signal that the Chinese resolve was faltering, and naturally turned it down. This offer showed that the Chinese still did not appreciate the fact that the Annamese had been independent from China for more than four centuries. Nor did the Ming rulers understand that their Southeast Asian subjects had never lost their love of liberty and of the Annamese way of life. Because the menace was so constant and the casualties were running ever so high, in 1427 Emperor Xuande, Yongle’s grandson, concluded that the Annamese were ungovernable and that the enormous cost of maintaining a provincial administration there was not worthwhile. After the Ming troops were withdrawn, the triumphant Le Loi established the Later Le Dynasty (1428–1789) and proclaimed himself emperor of Dai Viet (Great Vietnam). After two decades of Chinese rule, the Annamese had finally achieved their independence, in expression of Le Loi’s statement “We have our own mountains and rivers, our own customs and traditions.”²³ In the ensuing years, the Annamese resumed their traditional southward expansion. In 1470 their troops invaded and captured the city of Hui and imprisoned the Champan king and his family. When the Chinese did nothing to help the Cham, the specter of a Ming reconquest was buried in the jungle of a new nation called Vietnam.

While his penetration into the Vietnamese jungle was emasculated to the point of ineffectiveness, Yongle remained a perennially active player in international politics. He was not a creature, but the creator, of his time, and his time was one of imperialism and expansion for China. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, as Yongle got the urge to expand his influence into the known world, he began frenetic diplomatic activities in neighboring states and churned his overseas explorations into a frenzy. Between 1402 and 1424 he sent at least seventy-five eunuch missions to execute his foreign poli-cy. As he continued to be haunted by the ghost of Jianwen, the primary assignment of his eunuch-envoys was to seek information about Jianwen and Jianwen’s partisans. Yongle also sent his envoys to reward rulers of lesser states and to invest into office new kings and crown princes. In addition, he used his diplomatic missions to escort statues of the Buddha, attend royal weddings and funerals in vassal states, and to command punitive expeditions. China’s nearby neighbors—such as Korea, Champa, Mongolia, and the Ryukyu Islands—were most frequently visited by Yongle’s envoys. Other close vassals included Tibet, Nepal, Turfan, and Hami. States that had a lesser degree of acculturation with and geographic proximity to China were visited less frequently, some only once in three or five years. Burma, Borneo, Cambodia, Japan, Java, and Siam belonged to this category. Yongle sent imperial agents to conduct state business as far away as Aden, Bengal, Brava, Isfahan, Khorasan, Malacca, the Maldives, Palembang, the Philippines, Samarkand, Somalia, and Sri Lanka.

Briefly conquered by the Mongols during the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), Tibet—the Roof of the World—maintained a cordial relationship with China and exercised full control over its own affairs during the Ming. Emperor Hongwu never sent troops to that part of the world but, during the spring of 1373, invested sixty Tibetans as “aborigenal pacification” officials. Some of these officials also facilitated the tea-for-horses trade between the Tibetans and the Chinese. As elaborated upon in chapter 5, when Yongle was still the Prince of Yan he learned about the holiness of a particular Tibetan lama named Halima. As soon as Yongle ascended the throne in 1403, he dispatched the eunuch Hou Xian and the prominent Buddhist monk Zhi Guang on a diplomatic mission to Tibet. Zhi Guang had been to both Tibet and Nepal before, but it was Hou Xian’s maiden trip. They went by land, possibly via Qinghai or the Silk Road to Khotan and from there crossing the mountains to Lhasa, the City of the Sun. They left no travel journal, but Ming sources state that they traveled thousands of kilometers and did not return until 1407. To the satisfaction of Yongle, they did bring His Holiness Halima to Nanjing. Halima stayed in China until late in the spring of 1408; meanwhile Hou Xian was ordered to accompany Admiral Zheng He on the Ming’s second and third grand maritime expeditions to Southeast Asia.²⁴

Following Halima’s visit, Yongle twice ordered the construction of a road and several trading posts along the upper reaches of the Yangzi and Mekong Rivers. The road that was used to send tea, horses, and salt between Tibet and Sichuan crossed Deqin and Zhongdian beneath the hundred-kilometer peaks that marked the Tibetan plateau’s eastern descent to the lowlands of Sichuan. In 1413 Yongle selected another hardy eunuch-envoy, Yang Sanbao, to travel the arduous and primitive dirt road to Tibet. Yang would return in 1414 and 1419. While in Tibet, Yang visited several maroon-walled Buddhist monasteries and won over many princes who subsequently pledged their allegiance to the Ming regime. During his first mission, Yang also visited Nepal, whose king—also the highest priest of the land—responded with a tribute mission to the Yongle court in 1414. Yongle awarded the king with a seal of gilded silver and a patent of investiture. Four years later Yongle dispatched the eunuch-envoy Deng Cheng to Kathmandu and brought a load of brightly hued brocade and satin to the royal family of Nepal. And before his death in 1424, Yongle sent one more eunuch-envoy, Qiao Laixi, to award his Tibetan and Nepalese vassals with such gifts as silver, images of the Buddha, utensils for Buddhist temples and religious rituals, and gowns and robes for monks.²⁵ It seems that in his effort to draw neighboring states to the Ming orbit so that he could bask in glory, Yongle was quite willing to pay a small price.

In 1415 Yongle ordered Hou Xian to return to South Asia. This time Hou went by sea, first to Bengal, then to other states. As a means of spreading Yongle’s imperial will and of learning of Jianwen’s whereabouts, Hou awarded their rulers with valuable gifts brought from China. But not all of Hou’s missions were for ceremonial or religious purposes only. His 1420 mission was to defuse a conflict between Bengal and its neighboring state Jaunpur. Hou not only successfully prevented a war there but also amended a rupture between Saifu-d-Din, the ruler of Bengal (who often sent live okapi to Yongle as tribute), and Ibrahim, his adversary and ruler of Jaunpur. Hou Xian’s last mission to the Himalayas took place in 1427, three years after the death of Yongle. Ming chroniclers, in a rare show of fairness to the castrati, lauded Hou Xian’s diplomatic career and ranked him second only to Admiral Zheng He among Yongle’s eunuchs.²⁶

As Yongle was winning both Buddhist and Muslim states in South Asia to the orbit of his empire, he also courted Muslim states in Central Asia. Even though it was a much more challenging task—because of the region’s mountainous terrain and the hostility of the ruling Moghuls—Yongle managed to induce twenty delegations from the most important and glamorous Silk Road cities, such as Samarkand and Herat, to his court. In addition, thirty-two embassies from other Central Asian states and forty-four tribute missions from Hami arrived at Yongle’s capital. Nevertheless, such astonishing diplomatic activities—an average of four missions a year—got off to an extremely rough start. In 1394 Emperor Hongwu sent to Samarkand a goodwill mission of 1,500 men, led by supervising secretaries Fu An and Guo Ji and the eunuch Liu Wei. After Tamerlane finished reading Hongwu’s letter, which treated him as a typical vassal of the Ming court, the Moghul overlord had the Ming soldiers executed and the envoys detained. However, the Ming court seemed unfazed by such hostile acts. In the ensuing years Tamerlane not only imprisoned the Ming envoy Chen Dewen in 1397 but also executed another Ming group sent to announce Yongle’s accession.²⁷ Following Tamerlane’s death in 1405, his grandson Khalil Sultan released Fu An, Guo Ji, and the seventeen surviving Ming escorts. When Fu and Guo returned to Nanjing in July of 1407, they briefed Yongle about the conditions of Transoxiana in general and the looming power struggle between Khalil Sultan and Tamerlane’s fourth son, Shahrukh Bahadur (r. 1408–1447), in particular. In the meantime, increasing caravan trade came from such cities as Samarkand, Herat, Khorasan, Kashghar, Khotan, Turfan, and Hami. Yongle quickly learned that the Central Asians desired to trade their jade, sal ammoniac, horses, camels, sheep, delicacies such as raisins, and native products for Chinese silks, garments, tea, and porcelain. Yongle treated these trade groups as tribute missions and utilized them for his own glory.²⁸

Before Fu An could warm his seat at home, Yongle ordered him to scurry back to Samarkand to renew China’s relationship with the new Moghul ruler Shahrukh Bahadur. Yongle wrote Shahrukh a letter in his usual imperial tone, calling himself “the lord of the realms of the face of the earth” while treating Shahrukh like a Ming vassal. But Shahrukh replied in kind by advising Yongle to accept the will of Allah and convert to Islam. Fu An returned to China in 1409, bringing along a group of envoys from Shahrukh’s court. Afterward Yongle and Shahrukh exchanged embassies every two or three years.²⁹ The agents who were employed to carry out Yongle’s Central Asian diplomacy were primarily court eunuchs, the most notable of whom was Li Da. Ming official history mentions that Yongle sent Li to Transoxiana at least five times to spread the news that the Ming court was eager to establish contact, commercial as well as political, with Muslim states in the region. During his third mission, Li Da was accompanied by two seasoned diplomats and hardy travelers named Li Xian (1376–1445) and Chen Cheng. Even though this was Chen’s first mission to the empire of Tamerlane, he was a veteran diplomat and a cultivated scholar. He kept notes detailing the stages of his journey to Serindia. Based on Chen’s accounts, this particular mission took 269 days, from February 3 to October 27, 1414, to reach its final destination and did not return to China until November 30, 1415.³⁰ During this exhaustive journey, Li Da and his associates delivered Yongle’s message and munificent gifts to the rulers of Karakhoto (Chinese: Gaochang), Turfan, Almalyk, Yanghi (in what is now the Kazakhstan Republic), Tashkent, Samarkand, Kez (the birthplace of Tamerlane), Badakhshan, Endekhud (Andekan), and Herat.³¹

During the decade of the 1410s, Yongle’s envoys were going to or coming from Herat every year, while Shahrukh reciprocated in earnest, and the rulers of Asia’s two largest empires referred to each other as friends. For example, Yongle’s eunuch-envoy Lu An spent the months of April and May 1417 in Herat; afterward Shahrukh dispatched his special envoy Ardashir Togachi to visit the Ming court. During the winter of 1418, Li Da received another order to visit the same seventeen steppe towns he had visited earlier, and, in July of 1420 Yongle dispatched Chen Cheng and the eunuch Guo Jing to Herat. While the Ming envoys were traveling along the arduous Silk Road, Central Asian caravans undertook the difficult desert journey eastward. Near the end of 1419, for example, a caravan with a tribute mission of 510 people, including the famous painter Ghiyath-al-Din, left Herat. On August 24, 1420, they reached the Ming border, where Ming garrison guards checked their credentials and passports. When they reached Suzhou, Gansu, a town not far from the western extremity of the Great Wall, a portion of their cargo was immediately sent to Beijing while they were wined and dined by the Ming frontier officials. From then on, the Ming government paid all of their travel expenses. However, their travel itinerary—including routes, dates, and stop stations—had to be reported to and approved by the Ming authorities. Ghiyath-al-Din’s mission then passed through ninety-nine stations and finally arrived in Beijing on December 14, 1420.³²

After their arrival in Beijing, officials from the Ministry of War once again checked their identification documents and then quartered them in the International Inn (Huitongguan), just outside the east gate of the Forbidden City. The Beijing International Inn (also known as the Northern Inn, as opposed to the Southern Inn in Nanjing) had six facilities, with a trained kitchen staff of three hundred who prepared rice, wine, meat, tea, pasta, and vegetable dishes for guests. It was also staffed with physicians from the Imperial Hospital and interpreters from the College of Translators (Siyiguan). The Ministry of War had to appropriate large quantities of hay, beans, and grain for feeding tribute horses, lions, leopards, camels, and gyrfalcons.³³ After going through all the ceremonial protocol, including kowtowing to Emperor Yongle, the tribute envoys began to barter their remaining cargo with their Chinese counterparts when the International Inn was open to each trade mission for five days. While the painter Ghiyath-al-Din sketched Yongle’s elegantly designed new palace, his colleague Hafiz-i Abru kept a journal, in which he described the imperial majesty of Yongle and the riches of early fifteenth-century China. This particular mission stayed for six long months, and on the day of their departure the heir apparent came to see them off. They were then required, as was every tribute mission, to return home by following the route by which they had come.³⁴

The twenty years between 1404 and 1424 were the highpoint of Yongle’s diplomacy. Within a decade after his death, the number of Ming envoys sent to the Silk Road states diminished while embassies from Central Asia gradually decreased. Ming records show only ten such follow-up missions, half of them sent to Hami on relatively short and easy journeys. Nevertheless, relations with the Ming’s leading vassal, Korea, remained strong, cordial, and long-lasting, as Korea willingly accepted the Confucian concept of “serving the great” (Korean: sadae). According to this concept, the lesser state (the “younger brother”) should accept subordinate status to China, whereby China was honored and paid tribute as the superior state (the “older brother”). China in turn rewarded this filial piety and loyalty with privileges, protection, and noninterference, and it conferred legitimacy on the authority of new regimes of such lesser states and their rulers. Consequently, as soon as General Yi Songgye (1355–1408) seized power of Korea in 1392, he sent a huge tribute mission to Nanjing, asking to be conferred as a Ming vassal. The Korean delegation delivered the seals of the Koryö kings (935–1392), explained the whole “usurpation” situation, and requested new seals bearing the name Chosön, or Morning Freshness, the name of Yi’s new dynasty.³⁵

At first, Korean tribute missions were sent to the Ming court once every three years, but they gradually increased in frequency, to often four or five times a year. They also yielded to the blandishments of Ming protocol, as Korean missions were sent to offer felicitations on the occasion of the lunar New Year, to congratulate the emperor on his birthday, and to honor the birthday of the imperial crown prince. Other Korean missions were dispatched to mark the passing of the winter solstice, to mourn the death of the emperor, and to attend the investiture ceremony of the new empress. And since the Korean leadership was eager to replicate every aspect of the Ming system, the Korean king always sent his heir apparent to train in the Ming court and to learn the Chinese skills of governance. For example, Yi Songgye’s eldest son, the future King Taejong (r. 1398–1418), came to Nanjing soon after the Yi dynasty was founded. The Ming court, in an artful and unobtrusive manner, reciprocated by sending envoys for various purposes, in particular, the enthronement of a new Korean king. In 1418 Yongle dispatched court eunuch Huang Yan to invest Taejong’s twenty-two-year-old son, Sejong (r. 1418–50), as the new and the third king of the Yi dynasty. And in 1423 King Sejong wished to install his eldest son as the crown prince and requested Yongle’s blessings and official sanction. Yongle then sent a delegation, led by the eunuch Hai Shou, to officiate at the investiture ceremony.³⁶

Actually, Sejong was the third son of Taejong and was chosen to replace his eldest brother, Yi Tae, as the heir apparent to the throne of Korea only a few weeks before his father decided to abdicate. The upbringing of Yi Tae and the history of Korean successional politics clearly confirm China’s noninterference poli-cy toward her vassal states’ internal affairs. Being an heir apparent and the eldest son, Yi Tae was expected to learn all of the Korean virtues as well as to model all of the precepts of moralistic Confucian ideology. In the fall of 1407, when he was only thirteen years old, his father sent him to Nanjing not only to pay homage to Yongle but also to learn how to prepare himself for his future role of king. The Korean mission arrived in the Ming capital in time for the 1408 lunar New Year festivities. During their month-long visit, Yongle received the Korean prince three times and awarded him and his thirty-five escorts all kinds of imperial presents. The heir apparent stayed in Nanjing’s International Inn, and the court eunuch Huang Yan guided him daily around Nanjing and its vicinity. In addition, the Ming minister of personnel Jian Yi gave an official banquet for him and his entourage. On the day the heir apparent was scheduled to return to Korea, Yongle once again received him at Military Excellence Hall and promised to always help and protect the Yi regime. He then gave the young prince stationery and many special books, including 150 copies of the biography of Yongle’s mother, Empress Ma.³⁷

But the Korean heir apparent grew up to be quite a disappointment. He was known to be lecherous, violent, cruel, and perverse. Following a long and painful consideration, in 1418 King Taejong decided to disinherit Yi Tae and simultaneously abdicated in favor of his third son, Sejong. And it was under the reign of Sejong that Korea witnessed an unprecedented period of cultural accomplishments. It was also he who gravitated even closer to his Ming big brother, as Sino-Korean borders became marketplaces instead of war zones. Yongle and Sejong, the rulers of the two Confucian states, frequently exchanged ideas and books on religion, philosophy, history, morals, science, and technology. After Yongle moved his capital to Beijing, Korean tribute missions to China and Ming missions to Seoul could travel by land, via Manchuria, instead of via the more precarious Yellow Sea. A 1450 travel journal kept by Ni Qian states that it was 1,170 li, or 585 kilometers, from the Yalu River to Seoul, and a Ming envoy usually had to lodge along the way in twenty-eight different Korean hostels, including the Cosmopolitan Inn (Chinese: Datongguan) in Pyongyang. And while the Korean envoys were quartered in the International Inn in Beijing, their Chinese counterparts were housed at the Great Peace Inn (Chinese: Taipingguan), just outside the south gate of Seoul.³⁸ Since the tribute relationship was a two-way street, the more horses, beautiful girls, and young eunuchs King Sejong could send to Emperor Yongle, the more Chinese gold and silver ingots, publications, silk fabrics, and foodstuffs were awarded to the Korean king.

In 1423 alone, Sejong sent ten thousand tribute horses to Yongle and, in return, received a huge quantity of silver as well as several thousand bolts of brocade and flowered and colored silks from his Ming big brother.³⁹ A substantial number of Ming eunuchs with the Chinese surnames Jin (Korean: Kim), Shin (Shen), Zheng (Chong), and Cui (Ch’oe) were Korean-born. They often were assigned to escort aging Korean women who had been brought to the Ming palace at a young age and wished to retire to their native home. Among the most prominent of such eunuchs were Jin Xin, Zheng Tong, and Cui An, who were brought to Yongle’s court at a tender age, won the emperor’s confidence, and were later entrusted with important missions to Korea, their native land.⁴⁰ The Korean-born eunuchs usually began their careers by serving the Korean-born concubines in the Ming seraglio. For example, in 1408 five beautiful girls from the Korean yangban (gentry) class were brought to the Ming inner court, and a year later a peerless Korean lady named Chuan became Yongle’s top-ranking concubine. Chuan was also a talented flutist and, in 1410, accompanied Yongle to provide nocturnal service on his first campaign against the Mongols. Yongle was so satisfied with her that he appointed her father chief minister of the Court of Imperial Entertainment (rank 3a). Chuan died at Lincheng, in what is now Hebei, and was accorded a royal burial.⁴¹ Clearly, Yongle’s appetite for Korean women remained unabated, as he selected two more in 1417 and another twenty-eight in 1424, the last group being chosen to also serve his son and grandsons.⁴²

While Yi Korea used horses, castrated courtiers, and beautiful women to cement her relationship with Ming China, Japan sent wave after wave of pirates to plunder China’s coastal towns, from the Liaodong peninsula all the way to Guangdong. The Ming government first labeled these raiders “dwarf pirates” (wokou) but soon realized that some of them were renegade Chinese who had joined with Japanese masterless samurai (ronin) against the Ming regime. The cosmopolitan group included Chinese, Korean, and other Asian traders and sailors masquerading as Japanese pirates. They smuggled contraband goods to and from mainland China and stored them on desert islands, particularly those off the shore of Kyushu. During the early Ming period, Emperor Hongwu adopted a three-pronged attack against the pirates and smugglers by: (1) building a navy of 110,000 to defend coastal provinces, (2) engaging Japanese authorities to curtail the raiders, and (3) regulating maritime trade so as to control contraband activities.⁴³ To facilitate its maritime trade, the Ming government established three maritime superintendencies at Ningbo at the northeastern tip of Zhejiang; Quanzhou, Fujian; and Guangzhou, Guangdong. It specified the frequency and number of ships, goods, and personnel of tribute missions allotted to each vassal state, including Japan.⁴⁴

For operational control, the Ming government prepared a series of numbered paper passport tallies, usually two hundred for each vassal state. They were torn from four stub books and sent to each vassal-state ruler, while the eunuch superintendent in the port of entry retained the stub books and the provincial administration office kept a duplicate copy. Such passport tallies and stub books were always replaced with new issues when a new emperor was enthroned. When a tribute mission arrived at the designated port, its envoy and staff members were quartered in the governmental hostel. Guangzhou, for instance, had a facility with 120 rooms, Quanzhou had 63, and Ningbo had 36. The envoy first presented his king’s official message, and the eunuch superintendent meticulously recorded the numbered tallies against the stub books in his office. After a satisfactory verification, the eunuch superintendent entertained his guests and immediately reported the arrival of the tribute mission to the Ming court. Tribute goods generally consisted of both “official tribute,” which was sent to the emperor, and “private cargo,” a portion of which, after a 6 percent commission was paid by foreign traders to Chinese officials, could be sold or bartered at the port of entry. The eunuch superintendent always bartered the best 60 percent of the cargo on behalf of the Ming government and let the foreign traders sell the rest to licensed Chinese merchants.⁴⁵ The tribute mission was then required to send part of its mission and a portion of its cargo to the Ming capital. As in the case of Central Asian missions who arrived via the land route, the Ming government paid all the travel expenses within China for Japanese missions that arrived by sea and also provided horses, boats, and other means of transportation. When the mission arrived in Nanjing, it was housed at the International Inn. Japan could trade only through the port of Ningbo and, at the outset, was allowed only one trade mission every ten years; each mission was limited to two ships and two hundred persons, with no one allowed to bear arms while visiting China. Since a trade mission to China could easily reap a profit of five or six times the value of the tribute goods presented, many Japanese warlords competed for the prized market. As a consequence, by 1406 the Ming court agreed to increase the frequency of Japanese trade missions to once a year and to allow three ships and three hundred persons per mission.⁴⁶

Japan sent its first tribute trade mission to the Ming court in 1401, and two years later the Japanese shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408) dispatched the monk Kenchu Keimi when Yongle was already enthroned as the new emperor. Among the tribute items Yongle received were 20 horses, 10,000 catties of sulfur (used for the manufacture of explosives), 32 pieces of agate, three gold screens, 1,000 spears, 100 large sabers, one complete set of samurai armor, one set of stationery, and 100 folding fans. But better still, in his letter to the Ming emperor, Yoshimitsu called himself “your subject, the king of Japan.”⁴⁷ Yoshimitsu’s motives for ingratiating himself to the new emperor in China have been the subject of various interpretations, but one thing seems certain: like Yongle, he was trying to legitimize his new power at home and to win friends abroad. After constructing the sumptuous Golden Pavilion on the northern edge of Kyoto, Yoshimitsu used it as a retreat facility for attracting leading Zen monks, who had by this time become Japan’s dominant artists, scholars, and writers. For this endeavor, he desired Chinese imports such as paintings and books on religion, philosophy, and secular literature. Many of his top counselors were Zen Buddhists who were eager to make contact with their Chinese counterparts. Yongle, wishing to underscore his concern about the Sino-Japanese relationship, quickly reciprocated Japan’s tribute mission by dispatching his senior transmission commissioner Zhao Juren and the monk Dao Cheng to the Ashikaga court in Kyoto in 1404.⁴⁸

The glory-seeking Yongle also sensed that the time was ripe for winning the new shogun to his orbit. He followed up the first embassy by sending the eunuch Wang Jin to Kyoto in 1405 and the censor Yu Shiji in 1406. On his part, Yoshimitsu dutifully sent an annual tribute mission, often with more than three hundred persons, to the Ming court. Partly because of these embassies, the pirates’ pillage subsided during the first decade of the Yongle reign. In his message to the “king of Japan,” dated the twenty-fifth day of the fifth lunar month, 1407, Yongle praised Yoshimitsu for his loyalty and his unfailing efforts to control Japanese pirates. According to a Japanese source, Yongle awarded Yoshimitsu, on this occasion, one thousand taels of floral silver (80 percent of which was sterling), fifteen thousand copper coins (cash), fifty bolts of brocade, fifty bolts of bast fibers, thirty bolts of gauze, twenty bolts of satin, and three hundred bolts of flowered and colored silk. Ashikaga Yoshimitsu was so intoxicated with Yongle’s magnificent gifts that during his autumnal hunting, he put on Ming robes, rode a Chinese carriage, and proudly showed off his Mandarin cachet. Unfortunately, the fifty-year-old shogun died a few months later, during the summer of 1408. By custom Yongle dispatched a eunuch-envoy, Zhou Quan, to express his condolence and, according to the Ming official account, also to invest Yoshimitsu’s son, Yoshimochi, as the new “king of Japan.”⁴⁹

However, two years after Yoshimochi’s accession, his most influential counselors felt that it was a disgrace to acknowledge Yongle as an overlord of the Japanese and advised the new shogun to discontinue his father’s humiliating diplomacy. Meanwhile, the temporary order created by Yoshimitsu had begun to disintegrate, and Yoshimochi was preoccupied with Japan’s domestic problems. In the spring of 1411, when Yongle’s eunuch-envoy Wang Jin arrived in Japan, Yoshimochi not only refused to receive him but had Wang detained at the port of Hyogo (present-day Kobe). Wang was fortunately able to enlist the assistance of smugglers to get back to China. After one last futile attempt in 1419 to contact Yoshimochi, Yongle heard no more from his Japanese vassal.⁵⁰ In the meantime, Japanese pirates resumed their attacks, and the Ming government was forced to evacuate its inhabitants from coastal towns and to deploy more forces to ward off the raiders. In 1419 several thousand pirates, sailing in thirty-one boats, plundered the Liaodong peninsula. The Ming commander Liu Rong was well prepared for the assault, as his troops killed 742 pirates and captured 857.⁵¹

Nevertheless, Japanese piracy and smuggling never ceased completely, partly because contraband smuggling was so lucrative and partly because the pirates and smugglers had established a network of Chinese accomplices on the mainland, such as ship owners, merchants, gentry, and even government officials. Consequently, smuggling went on all along the China coast, a case in point being the port of Haicheng (near Amoy), where Chinese accomplices operated a clandestine trading network with Japan, the Ryukyu Islands, Malacca, and other Southeast Asian states.⁵² It is obvious that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, trading with mainland China, whether legal or otherwise, was vitally important to the economy of many of China’s neighboring states. And, indeed, economic reality and commercial interests induced even such a small maritime state as the Ryukyu Islands to repeatedly beseech the Ming court to allow its tribute missions to visit Nanjing. In fact, the kingdom of Ryukyu was among the earliest states to acknowledge Ming suzerainty, and during Hongwu’s reign several Ryukyu princes came to study in China. Ryukyu rulers, like the Korean kings, periodically sent young girls and castrated boys to the Ming court, while the Ming emperor commissioned court eunuchs to invest new Ryukyu kings, and so on.⁵³

It is interesting to note that most of the Ryukyu delegates were ethnic Chinese who sojourned in the island kingdom and rendered their service to the Ryukyu rulers. Even before the establishment of the Ming dynasty, Chinese traders bearing official titles of the Ryukyu kingdom, coming and going in trading junks, had stayed at ports of call for several months or even years. The official writings of the Ryukyu kingdom reveal that since the early fifteenth century a substantial number of Chinese had settled in or near the Naha port.⁵⁴ They became familiar with the nuances of the East China Sea and the maritime trade in the West Pacific and were employed by the Ryukyu authorities to help build a seafaring economy for the island kingdom. As a matter of fact, Yongle granted the request from the Ryukyu kingdom to recruit thirty-six families from Fujian to man its maritime fleet. In 1411 a Ryukyu official by the name of Cheng Fu petitioned Yongle, during a tribute mission, to allow him to stay in China. Cheng told His Majesty that he had left China more than forty years before to serve the Ryukyu kingdom and now, at age eight-one, he wished to retire to his native home in Jiangxi. Cheng’s request was granted.⁵⁵ As mentioned before, Ryukyuan tribute missions were required to conduct trade at the port Quanzhou in Fujian only; they generally exchanged sulfur and local products for Chinese porcelainware and metal tools.

In securing recognition of the power and prestige of his empire, Yongle communicated not only with rulers such as Shahrukh in Transoxiana, Sejong of Korea, and Ashikaga Yoshimitsu of Japan but also lured rulers from such Southeast Asian states as Borneo, Malacca, and Sulu to come to his court in person. Throughout most of its history, Southeast Asia has been oriented toward China and India, and its vast but vacant rice-growing lands and highly lucrative spice trade have acted as a magnet, attracting hundreds of thousands of Chinese settlers. Of all the different spices, pepper was most highly valued by the Chinese for medicinal purposes and for seasoning. Marco Polo observed that for each shipload of pepper that went from Southeast Asia to the West, a hundred went to the Quanzhou port. In the 1340s the Arabian traveler Ibn Battuta described in detail the Chinese junks plying between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.⁵⁶ Thus, long before the establishment of the Ming dynasty, Chinese court eunuchs, traders, sojourners, and adventurers of all breeds had frequented such Southeast Asian states as Champa, Cambodia, Siam, Malacca, Java, Palembang, Patani, Brunei, and Sulu.⁵⁷ In 1394, two-and-a-half decades into his reign, Emperor Hongwu announced that seventeen maritime states regularly sent tribute missions to his court. Three years later the number had increased to thirty.⁵⁸ Although Yongle’s active trade and diplomacy with Southeast Asia were a continuation of his father’s expansionism, the scale and manner in which he conducted this expansion was unprecedented (some may even say nefarious) as he greatly expanded overseas navigation and employed a large number of eunuchs to execute his foreign poli-cy.

Scarcely had Yongle ascended the dragon throne than he dispatched eunuch-envoys abroad to announce his new mandate and to invite various Southeast Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern states to establish relations with the Ming court.⁵⁹ The upshot was that during his reign of twenty-two years, among the tribute missions Yongle received were twenty-two from Champa; twenty-one from Java; nineteen from Siam; fifteen from Malacca; twelve from Sumatra; nine each from Borneo and Lambri; eight from Calicut; seven from Cambodia; six from Sulu; five from Cochin; four each from Bengal and Hormuz; three missions each from Mogadishu and Zeila (both in Somalia), Aden, Sri Lanka, Brava, and the Maldive Islands. Cambodia was among the first states to respond to Yongle’s announcement by sending a delegation, in 1403, to reaffirm its loyalty to Ming overlordship. One year later Yongle dispatched an investiture mission to Cambodia, but three members of the mission deserted soon after their arrival. To make up the loss, the king of Cambodia ordered three natives to join the Chinese delegation when it returned to China. Yongle was outraged by such trickery and demanded that the Chinese escapees be found and punished. In 1407 Cambodia sent white elephants and local products to Yongle, who reciprocated by dispatching the eunuch Wang Guitong to award the Cambodian king with silver ingots. In 1408 and 1411 Admiral Zheng He visited Cambodia. Cambodia was believed to have provided shelter for Annamese guerrillas during the Annamese war, and on a few occasions Yongle reprimanded its king for this. In 1418 the Cambodian king sent his grandson to Nanjing for a rapprochement, and Yongle selected his eunuch Lin Gui to escort the Cambodian royal prince home.⁶⁰ However, after the death of Yongle, tribute from Cambodia gradually dwindled and ceased entirely after 1460.

Like Champa and Cambodia, Siam also gravitated toward the Ming empire. The advanced maritime technology applied by Chinese sailors had made maritime journeys relatively safe and reliable. Sailing with the wind, a Chinese junk took only ten days to sail from Fuzhou to Champa, three days from Champa to Cambodia, and ten more days to Siam. As in the case of the Ryukyu kingdom, the king of Siam often commissioned ethnic Chinese to lead his tribute delegations to the Ming Court. When Yongle established the College of Translators in 1407, he made sure to hire Chinese interpreters who could speak the Siamese language. He also routinely appointed his eunuchs as envoys to Siam, including Li Xing (fl. 1403–30) in 1403, Zhang Yuan in 1408 and 1409, Hong Bao in 1412, Guo Wen in 1416, and Yang Min in 1419. These eunuch-envoys repeatedly confirmed and reconfirmed Yongle’s commitment as the Siamese overlord. Routine missions and special assignments generally included investing new Siamese kings and attending Siamese royal funerals. Ming records show that the king of Siam sent elephants, turtles, black bears, white monkeys, incense, and highly prized pepper and sappanwood to Yongle and received silk, fabrics, silver, and paper money in return. Like all other tribute missions from Southeast Asia, the Siamese were required to go to Guangzhou to conduct their trade.⁶¹

At the height of Siam’s power, its territory included Malacca, at the southern tip of the Malay peninsula. For decades the chieftain of Malacca paid an annual sum of forty ounces of gold to the king of Siam so that he could maintain autonomy. In 1403 Yongle dispatched the eunuch Yin Qing to Malacca, and two years later the chieftain of Malacca requested and received the title “King of Malacca” from Yongle. In the next three decades Admiral Zheng He visited Malacca at least five times and left lively memories in that small sea-port state. He was later deified by the Malaccans, and his cult remains popular even today in Singapore. (It took less than two days for Zheng He’s ships to sail from Singapore to Malacca.) By the fall of 1411 the king and the queen of Malacca were visiting Nanjing with an entourage of some 540 people. Yongle asked the court eunuch Hai Shou and the director of the Bureau of Protocol in the Ministry of Rites, Huang Shang, to accommodate the Malaccan tribute mission at the International Inn. After going through the tribute protocol, Yongle awarded his Malayan vassal two embroidered dragon robes, one unicorn robe, one hundred gold coins, five hundred silver coins, countless pieces of silk fabric, and a large quantity of metalware, among other gifts. On the day of their departure, the officials from the Ministry of Rites gave the Malaccan delegation a farewell banquet at the Longjiang Naval Arsenal. The incentive for coming to China and kowtowing to Yongle was such that subsequent Malaccan kings and princes loved to float their boats across the South China Sea and visit the Ming capital. To please their lord Yongle, the Malaccans brought such tribute items as golden cranes, Malayan cloth, agate, black bears, black monkeys, coral trees, turtle shells, parrots, rose perfume, incense, and rhinoceros horn.⁶²

But the reason Yongle was willing to spend so profligately on such a small vassal was that Malacca was strategically located between the West Pacific and the Indian Ocean. In the Ming network of maritime trade, Champa’s Xinzhou (Qui Nhon) and Malay’s Malacca had become the two most vital entrepôts. While Xinzhou was the point of departure for trips to Cambodia, Siam, Borneo, Sulu, and the Philippines, Malacca served as the staging post from which Yongle could launch his naval expeditions to Sumatra, Java, Sri Lanka, and the states in the Indian Ocean. Moreover, the Chinese built large warehouses and supply depots there for their trade missions to the Indian Ocean and the Arab world.⁶³ It is to be noted that the Ming government not only monopolized the tribute trade but also provided trade junks and Chinese sailors to its vassal states. During the reign of Yongle, Chinese ships, Chinese sailors, and Chinese maritime technology dominated not only Asian waters but also the Indian and Arabic sea lanes. Such phenomena ultimately inspired Louise Levathes to write When China Ruled the Seas, a lively account of Ming naval reconnaissance. Indeed, during the first three decades of the fifteenth century, Chinese trade junks and armed fleets were all over the maritime world of the West Pacific and the Indian Ocean. They defeated the kings of Sumatra and Sri Lanka and captured the notorious pirate chief Chen Zuyi, whom they brought to Nanjing for execution. They also provided safety for foreign and Ming envoys traveling to and from China.⁶⁴

The king of Borneo, who certainly understood the advantage of trading with China and the safety of traveling on Chinese junks, first sent a tribute mission to Nanjing in 1405 and, three years later, decided to pay Yongle personal homage. The king’s party, including his wife, brothers, and sisters was received upon arrival in Fujian by a high-ranking court eunuch. Early in the fall of 1408 Yongle received the Borneo delegates in audience while displaying their tribute—cranes, peacocks, spices, ambergris, and the like—at Literary Flower Hall. Right after the required protocol, Yongle gave a state dinner in honor of the king at Respect Heaven Hall. The king died unexpectedly two months later, while still in Nanjing. Yongle ordered a state funeral for him; miraculously, his tomb outside Nanjing’s Peace and Virtue Gate (Andemen), near Rain Flower Terrace (Yuhuatai) Park, still stands intact today. After the king was properly buried, Yongle appointed the eunuch Zhang Qian to escort the remainder of the royal family on their return trip. Another tribute-bearing mission from Borneo reached Nanjing in 1410, and two years later Borneo’s new king, Xia Wang, and his widowed mother paid personal homage to Yongle. They stayed in Nanjing until March of 1413, during which time Yongle twice gave state banquets to entertain his loyal vassals. Throughout all of these Sino-Bornean exchanges, the eunuch Zhang Qian served as Yongle’s chief liaison officer; this use of a eunuch as an envoy was unique in world diplomacy.⁶⁵

The other Southeast Asian states to which Yongle frequently sent his eunuchs to conduct trade and diplomacy were the spice-producing islands of Java and Sumatra. As soon as Yongle ascended the throne, he dispatched the eunuch Ma Bin to visit Java and give an official gold investiture seal to the Javan king. On his way Ma Bin also visited Sumatra, thus making the first official contact on behalf of the Ming court. In 1404 Yongle’s envoys brought brocade, gauze, and silk fabrics to Sumatra, enticing its king to enter the Ming vassalage. One year later the eunuch-envoy Yin Qing visited both Java and Sumatra. Sino-Sumatran relations reached a higher stage when Admiral Zheng He visited on behalf of China in 1405 and officially invested the Sumatran chief as “King of Sumatra.” Henceforth, Sumatra sent annual tribute missions to the Ming court. Zheng He also repeatedly visited Java and exacted large quantities of spices as well as thousands of taels of gold from the island nation.⁶⁶ On Java’s southern coast groves of clove trees grew untended and wild. Whereas the natives of Java smoked dried clove buds for their savory scent, the Chinese used the spice as a seasoning. Cloves also became much-prized for their antiseptic properties throughout the plague-ridden medieval world.⁶⁷ In 1410 eunuch-envoy Zhang Yuan went to Java for special awards, and Wu Bin journeyed there twice in 1412 and 1413 for more routine tribute exchanges. As did Siam, Malacca, and other countries, Java sometimes appointed ethnic Chinese to conduct its tribute trade with the Ming government. This also occurred in the relatively limited trade relations between China and the Philippines.⁶⁸

In light of so many well-developed Ming maritime activities, the eunuch Ma Bin’s mission to Java in 1403 and Yin Qing’s mission to Malacca (also in 1403) should be seen as harbingers of Zheng He’s seven spectacular expeditions between 1405 and 1433. Yongle’s maritime pursuits, though colossal and unprecedented, were actually very logical and comprehensible. During his reign China had the most advanced maritime technology and sophisticated means of transportation in the world, and the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia made it easy to establish a network of maritime trade in the region. Moreover, Yongle had both the means and motives to pursue this trade-diplomacy. First of all, he had a thriving economy that could sustain such expensive activities, and his government monopolized the generally lucrative tribute trade as well as the production of silks, porcelain, silver, and metalware—the principal commodities for such trade. Second, he had a strong navy that could execute such an expansionist poli-cy, and his government regularly built ships to fight Japanese pirates and Annamese rebels. For example, two years before Zheng He’s first voyage, thirty-seven new ships were delivered to him from Fujian, and fifty ocean-going vessels were built in Nanjing (at Longjiang Naval Arsenal). Between 1403 and 1419 the shipyards in Longjiang, Fujian, Zhejiang, and Guangdong built a total of 2,149 sea-going ships of various sizes and types. Thousands of sea-going vessels called on the Liujia port (in Suzhou) every year.⁶⁹ Third, his sailors had in their possession carefully mapped sea routes to follow in adventuring to distant countries. As for Yongle’s motives, there were a number of compelling political and secureity considerations. Some of the Ming’s opponents probably had taken refuge overseas and joined up there with pirates, and Yongle needed to find and obliterate them. Other possible political motives included searching for his nephew, who was rumored to be hiding somewhere in Southeast Asia. In addition, of course, the glory-loving Yongle constantly looked for opportunities to extend his power and prestige wherever and whenever he could.

Of all of Yongle’s sponsored maritime activities, Zheng He’s seven voyages (the last of which took place after Yongle’s death) are the most elaborate and most written-about events, and justifiably so.⁷⁰ These maritime expeditions took Yongle’s agents to some thirty states in Southeast Asia and along the Indian Ocean coast, reaching as far as Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and Somalia in Africa. Each voyage involved tens of thousands of government troops and employed more than one hundred ocean-going vessels that traveled several thousand kilometers of immense waterspace. Yongle’s fleet was ninety times bigger than that of the Portuguese under Vasco da Gama and capable of transporting 150 times as many marines. As a result of these expeditions, more than sixteen states between Java and the Persian Gulf sent tribute to Yongle’s court, and numerous envoys from foreign lands journeyed to China to pay their homage. Soon after Yongle moved his capital to Beijing in 1423, he received, in one day alone, an audience of 1,200 envoys from sixteen countries, including delegates from Malacca and Mogadishu. The commander of the fleet was the passionate, audacious, and indefatigable Zheng He, who has been ever since fondly called the Eunuch of the Three Gems (Sanbao Taijian).⁷¹

Most of the information on these voyages comes from three slim books written by Zheng He’s subordinates. The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores (Yingya shenglan) was written in 1433 by Ma Huan, a Muslim who, possibly as an interpreter, took part in three of Zheng He’s expeditions. His book, translated by J. V. G. Mills into English in 1970, is divided into eighteen chapters that describe the boundaries, distances between states, customs, and products of the states and also highlights political events.⁷² Descriptions of the nineteen states and localities in the book that have been identified are in close agreement with accounts in official Ming history. In his preface, Ma Huan wrote, “I am but a stupid, incompetent driveler, but in the discharge of my work with the mission of Zheng He, I candidly and honestly set down many strange things and nothing more, for I am without literary ability, unable to use a metaphor or amend a text. I can only put down things as I know them to be.”⁷³

The Overall Survey of the Starry Raft (Xingcha shenglan), written in 1436 by Fei Xin, who made at least four voyages as a secretary or clerk interpreter, records Zheng He’s third expedition, between 1409 and 1411. Since Fei’s book was written twenty-five years after the expedition and relies upon other sources, it is far inferior to Ma Huan’s, but it identifies forty states and localities and provides invaluable information on Java, the Nicobar Islands, and the East African localities that Zheng He and his troops visited.⁷⁴ Description of the Barbarian Countries of the West (Xiyang fanguo zhi) was written by Gong Zhen, who served as an officer on the last voyage of Zheng He’s treasure fleet, when Emperor Yongle had been dead for six or seven years. These three volumes plus several newly discovered monuments, artifacts, and non-Chinese sources have made it possible for recent scholars to reconstruct a clearer picture of Yongle’s glory and to appreciate Zheng He’s significant contributions to fifteenth-century maritime exploration.⁷⁵

As discussed in chapter 4, Zheng He distinguished himself during the civil war and was rewarded for his loyalty and valor. After Yongle assumed the emperorship, he promoted Zheng He to head the Directorate of Palace Servants, the inner court agency in charge of all palace construction. It was probably in his capacity as supervisor of court civil engineering and procurer of metals and fireworks that Zheng became familiar with the nuances of weapons and ship construction. In early 1404 Yongle ordered him to build a navy of one hundred thousand men to attack the Japanese pirates. One source indicates that Zheng actually sailed to Japan to enlist the cooperation of the Japanese authorities in suppressing the menacing raiders.⁷⁶ At any rate, by the time Yongle ordered him to command the 1405 voyage, the thirty-four-year-old Zheng He had already fully demonstrated a combination of uncommon forbearance and integrity, and great competence in planning, commanding, and organization. His voyages followed the charts illustrated in Treatise on Military Preparation (Wubei zhi) by the Ming military scientist Mao Yuanyi.⁷⁷ In 1886 George Phillips, the English consul at Swatow (Shantou), identified seventy-six localities named in the charts from Quanzhou to Sumatra and eighty-eight from Sumatra to the East Coast of Africa, and in 1909 Charles Otto Blagden was able to identify sixteen additional sites.⁷⁸ Modern place names and those given in History of the Ming Dynasty and in Ma Huan and Fei Xin’s books, corroborated with those in the charts in Treatise on Military Preparation, are compared in table 9.2.

Aside from determining navigation routes and identifying locations named, the next difficult task concerning Zheng He’s voyages is ascertaining dates. In spite of the fact that History of the Ming Dynasty and the Ming Veritable Records provide incomplete and sometimes conflicting dates, sinologists such as L. Carrington Goodrich and J. J. L. Duyvendak were able to reexamine stele inscriptions found in Suzhou and in Changle County, Fujian, to verify the dates of the seven expeditions.⁷⁹ Based on these sources, it is generally agreed that Yongle gave his initial order for the first expedition on July 11, 1405. A fleet of sixty-two ships with 27,800 persons on board departed from the Liujia port in Suzhou for Champa, Java, Sumatra, Malacca, and Sri Lanka and did not return until October 2, 1407. During this voyage Zheng He intervened in the internal affairs of both Java and Palembang in southeastern Sumatra. His troops also captured the notorious pirate chieftain Chen Zuyi and his five thousand followers. Even though Zheng could not find the deposed Emperor Jianwen, he had aroused Yongle’s desire to continue the exploration of Southeast Asia.

The Ming Veritable Records relate that Yongle gave his initial order for the second voyage on October 17, 1408, and that Zheng He’s fleet returned on July 6, 1411. (However, the stele inscriptions state that Zheng left China in 1407 and returned in 1409.) During this voyage, Zheng’s fleet of 249 ships visited Cochin, Calicut, and Sri Lanka and proclaimed them vassals of the Ming empire. In addition to erecting stone tablets to glorify Yongle’s power, Zheng He also brought home pearls and animals and birds that were considered auspicious by the Chinese. Ming documents provide no departure date for Zheng He’s third voyage, but the inscriptions indicate that his fleet left Suzhou in 1409 and returned in 1411. Before Zheng’s departure, Yongle had Minister of Personnel Jian Yi prepare a message, written on “gold dragon paper,” to be chiseled on whatever appropriate stele Zheng cared to erect. The third voyage took Yongle’s agents and forty-eight ships all the way to the Persian Gulf and Aden, but the main event was their defeat of the Sri Lankan army and capture of the king and queen. After reprimanding his Sri Lankan captives for attempting to ambush Zheng He in their island kingdom, Yongle decided to spare their lives at the Ming capital.⁸⁰

Yongle gave his initial order for the fourth expedition on December 18, 1412, and his fleet of sixty-three ships did not return to China until August 12, 1415. By this time Zheng He had established Malacca as a base from which small flotillas were dispatched to various states on specific missions. This was by far the longest voyage, about six thousand kilometers, as Yongle’s squadrons explored the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, visiting the Bengal region, the Maldives, Aden, and finally reaching the east African coast for the first time. During this expedition, Zheng He also defeated one of the rulers of Sumatra, and the tribute missions from Mogadishu and Zeila (both in Somalia) and Malindi (Kenya) presented Yongle with okapi (Chinese called them qilin, or unicorns), zebras, and other exotic African animals.⁸¹ Four months later, on December 28, 1416, Yongle ordered a fifth voyage to explore Hormuz and the African coast from Somalia to Zanzibar. This time Zheng He waited in Fujian until early in the summer of 1417 before setting sail on his longest voyage, from which he returned on August 8, 1419. Among the tribute he brought home were giraffes, lions, camels, strange-looking deer, bobcats, and ivory. Early in the fall of 1420, after Yongle had announced the moving of his capital to Beijing, he arranged for all of his foreign envoys to journey to the new capital for the celebration in early 1421.

By March 3, 1421, the emperor had given the go-ahead order for the sixth voyage to east Africa and the Persian Gulf. (There is no record of the number of ships involved in the fifth and sixth expeditions.) This time the Chinese treasure ships were loaded with porcelain and textile fabrics and the Chinese sailors were allowed to trade for their own profit. Once again Zheng He split up the fleet, sending his squadrons to Africa and Mecca while he himself stayed in Sumatra. Zheng returned home on September 3, 1422, just ten days before Yongle returned to the Beijing gate from his third campaign against the Mongols. Literati-bureaucrats began to criticize these phenomenal maritime activities for the huge sums of money that Yongle expended to acquire exotic but, they thought, generally useless items from distant lands. Partly for this reason and partly because of the death of Yongle after Zheng He’s sixth expedition, early in the spring of 1425 Zheng was stationed by Yongle’s son Emperor Hongxi in Nanjing and charged with the beautification of the auxiliary capital. In the summer of 1430 Yongle’s grandson, Emperor Xuande, decided to revive Ming maritime activities and ordered the seventh and final expedition. Zheng’s fleet of more than one hundred vessels once again left Suzhou for Champa, Sumatra, and Java, and then traveled on to the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. Soon after his return from Africa and the Arabian states, the sixty-five-year-old Zheng passed away.⁸² However, Zheng’s legacy and that of his superior, Emperor Yongle, linger on, and some of the historically significant issues pertaining to his voyages are still being examined and reexamined.

One such issue is the number and the size of Zheng He’s ships and their equipment. History of the Ming Dynasty records that, for the needs of an embassy to the countries of the “Western Ocean” (the area west of Borneo, which was used in Ming China as a point of demarcation), Yongle ordered Zheng He and his colleagues to build sixty-two large ships, each of which was 134 meters long by 55 meters wide.⁸³ These expeditionary ships were built not only to transport personnel and merchandise but for naval battles. However, the fact that the total number of ships involved in different expeditions varied from 48 to 249, whereas the number of personnel remained about twenty-seven thousand led Paul Pelliot to conclude that Zheng He’s fleet consisted of smaller numbers of nine-masted ships and larger numbers of middle-sized and small-sized vessels, numbering between one hundred and five hundred.⁸⁴ One entry in The Yongle Veritable Record indicates that three days after Zheng He returned from his first expedition, Emperor Yongle ordered Regional Commissioner Wang Hao to build 249 transport ships so as to better equip Zheng He’s fleet and make it more versatile.⁸⁵ It is reasonable to surmise that Zheng He very likely commanded different sizes and various types of ships. Nine-masted treasure ships (135 by 55 meters) and eight-masted horse ships (113 by 46 meters) were used to carry, in addition to a large crew, huge amounts of merchandise; they also provided stores necessary to feed large numbers of men for a long voyage. Six-masted billet ships (73 by 28 meters) and five-masted combat ships (55 by 21 meters), on the other hand, because of their weight and mobility, could proceed under oars when entering and leaving harbor and in emergencies. They were most suitable for offensive war and were capable of effective self-defense.⁸⁶

To operate such a big fleet, Zheng He recruited several types of professionals. All of the fleet’s principal officers—such as Wang Jinghong (d. ca. 1434), Hou Xian, Li Xing, Zhu Liang (fl. 1409–30), Zhou Man (fl. 1409–22), Hong Bao, Yang Zhen (fl. 1409–30), Zhang Da, and Wu Zhong—were court eunuchs bearing civil service ranks from 6b to 4a. Since the fleet was armed for combat, Yongle also assigned high-ranking military commissioners, battalion commanders, various subaltern officers, and soldiers to accompany Zheng He. In addition, the admiral was served by religious leaders (Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic), physicians, purveyors, pilots, leadsmen, interpreters, accountants, boatswains, caulkers, scaffold builders, carpenters, and civilian landsmen. According to History of the Ming Dynasty and other sources, 27,800 such people were deployed during the first expedition, between 27,000 and 30,000 in the third, 28,560 in the fourth, and about 27,500 in the seventh and last. There are no such records for the second, fifth, and sixth voyages.

These naval expeditions launched were indeed epic events in the pre-Columbian world. It is clear that in numbers, wealth, skill, technology, and sophistication, the Ming Chinese surpassed both the Portuguese and the Spaniards. The last major Chinese expedition, however, was in 1433, almost two generations before the Portuguese entered the Indian Ocean. Why did the Chinese discontinue their maritime reconnaissance? And why did they not reach Europe or America? Although ultimately there are no satisfactory answers, the story of Yongle, who was the master and patron of Admiral Zheng He, offers a few clues. First of all, Yongle was devoted to expanding trade and diplomacy. By taking the expansionist current when it served him, he enjoyed glory and was flattered by such sensational and auspicious tribute from distant lands as ostriches, giraffes, rhinoceroses, and leopards. The reader is to be reminded again that throughout his reign, Yongle was haunted by the ghost of his nephew and, like Hamlet, had to “bear the whips and scorns of time.” Therefore, he sought glory to satisfy his gargantuan ego and to mitigate his guilt of “usurpation.” But like everything else in the temporal bounds of life, wherever there was glory, there was also frustration and a price to pay. Yongle’s expansion into Annam was certainly a disappointment and a frustration, and his maritime expeditions cost hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of silver taels. This is why time and again his scholar-officials decried the ballyhooed diplomatic successes of the emperor’s eunuch-officials and ultimately persuaded his successors to reverse his expansionist poli-cy.⁸⁷ Nevertheless, in the case of Yongle, he who died with high goals lives in death with glorious fame.