Eighty-seven years before Christopher Columbus founded a New World, the Chinese Empire sent Admiral Zheng He on a publicity trip across the Indian Ocean.
The trip was not done by halves. When the fleet left on 11 July 1405, it comprised 317 ships and 28,000 crewmen.
Zheng He has long been venerated in the Chinese – and Muslim – diaspora along the coast and islands of southern Asia. But and of course, his achievements – at a time when western navigation was the work of explorers in much smaller fleets – have a symbolic part to play in the shifting geopolitics of the 21st century.
Since 2005, 600 years after the fact, the People’s Republic of China has marked 11 July as Maritime Day. The training vessel PLANS AX-81 Zheng He has visited the US on a goodwill mission and has circumnavigated the globe.
Cheng Ho is another rendering of the admiral’s name, and so Taiwan’s navy has ROCS Cheng Ho.
Naval terms litter space exploration, and so the PRC has named its asteroid sample-return and comet exploration mission ZhengHe [one word]. There is also a USS Zheng He, but its only appearance to date is in Star Trek.
