Exploration · 1405–1433 CE
Zheng He's treasure voyages
Nanjing (China)
Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming court eunuch Zheng He led seven great voyages into the Indian Ocean for the Yongle and Xuande emperors; the first had 317 ships and almost 28,000 men. Built largely at the Longjiang shipyard in Nanjing, the fleets called at Champa, Java, Malacca, Ceylon and Calicut, and later voyages reached Hormuz, Aden, Mogadishu and Malindi, returning with foreign envoys and gifts such as a giraffe.
Why it mattered
The voyages displayed Ming power and drew distant states into China's tributary system, but the court abandoned them after 1433 amid high costs and Mongol threats in the north, decades before Portuguese ships entered the Indian Ocean.
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