Naviget, Haec Summa Est, or the Last Quest of Admiral Zheng He

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to present a new general overview of the famous voyages of the Chinese Ming-era admiral of the Zheng He (1371–1433) both based on the main Chinese sources (Ming Shi, Taizong Shilu) and using the latest research materials. The author focuses in her study on several key questions that continue to occupy the academic community as well as the general public interested in the history of China and international relations. Among them is the question of the main goal of the seven unprecedented overseas expeditions, which break out from the generally recognized Chinese empires’ foreign policy paradigm, the problem of the recently discovered falsifications of the Zheng He fleet’s achievements, the question of the reason for the abrupt end of the unprecedented navigational activity of the Ming Dynasty, and some others. Based on a wide range of studies, the author concludes that the sea “power projection”, initiated by the Yongle Emperor (the patron of the Great Navigation Era in China), was conceived as an attempt to demonstrate the power of the young house of Ming in the widest possible range of the oikumene, but was curtailed due to the switching of the emperor’s attention to more closely related foreign policy tasks and as a result was forgotten as an outrageous and inappropriate precedent.