X-Nico

3 unusual facts about Zheng He


Coast Province

Malindi is where Vasco da Gama picked up his pilot to navigate with the monsoon winds to India; Mambrui appears to be the site where contact occurred with the Chinese during the era of the Yongle Emperor and the expeditions of Zheng He.

Zhang Da

Zhang Da (eunuch), one of the chief officers under the Ming Dynasty admiral Zheng He.

Zhenghe

Zheng He (1371–1433), Chinese mariner, explorer, diplomat and fleet admiral


Basalawarmi

Zheng He, the renowned Ming eunuch admiral and head of the Ming "treasure fleet", would rise to his position indirectly because of Basalawarmi's resistance to the Ming.

Great Lady of Gresik

After her father died, admiral Hajji Mahmud (admiral Zheng He) of Ming China decided to make her brother the new chieftain of Palembang, so she left Palembang and went to Gresik in east Java to preach her religion to the natives.

Liuhe, Taicang

the explorer Zheng He in the Ming Dynasty set off from Liuhe to explore the seas of the world.

Zouyu

The zouyu sightings were mentioned by contemporaneous authors as good omens, along with the Yellow River running clear and the delivery of a qilin (i.e., an African giraffe) by a Bengal delegation that arrived to China aboard Zheng He's fleet.


see also

Selden Map of China

The routes and locations on the map have parallels with but do not match two famous accounts of navigation from the early seventeenth century, notably the Shunfeng Xiangsong (順風相送) owned by William Laud and now also in the Bodleian, the maps of Zheng He's voyages in the Wubei Zhi (ca. 1628) and Zhang Xie's (張燮) Dongxi Yangkao (東西洋考, 1617).