Talk:Zheng He

It is interesting that the Time magazine article compared Zheng He's voyages with other great western explorers. And Zheng came out on top by a great margin in almost all aspects, despite his name is not as well known as the others. It is a pity that politics stopped all those great adventures.

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Sindbad

Isn't Zheng He too late for Sindbad? Ulysses and the Arab sailors are the sources of Sindbad.

Someone added the following:

"Zheng He's feats may have inspired the fictional literary stories of Sindbad in later times, and some conjectures have noted the similarity between the name Sindbad and Sanbao."

This cannot be accurate. Sinbad adventures were known to exist about the 10th century, and Zeng He is 4 or more centuries after that. So this cannot be the case. -- KB 21:34, 2004 Jun 11 (UTC)

Need discussion

The big problem with this paragraph is that it completely ignores the fact that the ban on maritime commerce was temporary and largely lifted by the end of the Ming dynasty.

Also the late sentence is very controversial. It *was* the conventional wisdom in the 1950's and 1960's, but there are a number of authors (namely Kenneth Pommeranz) who would argue that it is total nonsense.

Although private networks of Chinese traders continued to be active in Southeast Asia the governmental ban on ocean going shipping had an incredibly large impact on the future development of China. The most immediate effect was to move all such trading underground, and effectively make all those engaged in such activity into smugglers. From there many smugglers morphed into piracy. Although many of these so-called Waku (wokou) pirates were Japanese, one of the most notorious of the Waku named Wang Chih was from Anhuei province in China. Directly demonstrating the link between banned trade, smuggling and piracy Wang Chih was also one of the largest traders in East Asia, moving goods between Japan, China and Siam. By the middle of the 16th century pirate raids on coastal cities were so widespread that the Ming passed an edict moving millions of people off the coast to inland regions depopulating the coast line from Shandong to Guangdong to a depth of 60 miles. Even that did not deter the pirates who then raided further inland. In the 1550's, the pirate raids were particularly severe culminating in the 1555 raid on Nanjing more than 200 miles inland on the Yangzi river. The Ming having disbanded the navy were simply powerless to stop the attacks. Not until the end of the 16th century was the military reorganized in a fashion sufficient to reduce the frequency of attacks to a manageable level. The long run reaction by both the Ming and later the Qing to these events was to further control and limit the spread of trade and contact with foreigners, which of course was to directly lead to the economic and political crises of the 19th century.