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the more unlikely figures to grace Chinese history. Strikingly tall and powerfully built, a Muslim from the backlands, he was captured as a child in 1381 during one of the Yuan dynasty’s last battles against the invading Ming. (For a synopsis of Chinese dynastic history, see the chart on this page.) Standard treatment by the Ming of enemy boys was castration. The emasculated Zheng was pressed into service at the Ming court and gained a reputation for shrewdness and competence. Displaying his eye for the main chance, he jumped to support a coup in which the monarch’s uncle seized power from his nephew. The usurper became the Yongle emperor.1 Zheng became one of his most trusted lieutenants. When the ambitious sovereign planned a series of sea expeditions, he put his favorite eunuch in charge.

To celebrate the 2010 Olympics, China displayed this exact copy of Zheng He’s flagship. Six centuries after the original was built, the ship still was large enough to dazzle crowds. (Photo credit 4.1)

The voyages began in 1405 and ended in 1433 and took Zheng across the Indian Ocean as far as southern Africa. The Yongle emperor viewed them as a way to throw his weight around, and they were powerfully effective. During these voyages Zheng’s fleet subjugated a misbehaving Chinese enclave in Sumatra; intervened in a civil war in Java; invaded Sri Lanka and took its captured ruler to China; and wiped out bandits in Sumatra. Even where no swords were unsheathed Zheng’s armadas were a political triumph, scaring the wits out of every foreign leader who saw them. But the voyages were not followed up. They had become a target in political infighting—one bureaucratic faction championing them, another trying to take down the first by decrying their expense. Yongle’s son and successor aligned with the faction that opposed his father’s policies. He canceled the grand naval adventures on the day he ascended to the throne. Ultimately almost all records of Zheng’s travels were suppressed. China didn’t again send ships so far outside its borders until the nineteenth century.

Many researchers have seen the failure to continue as emblematic of a fatal insularity in Chinese society. “Why did China not make that extra little effort that would have taken it around the southern end of Africa and up into the Atlantic?” asked Landes, the Harvard historian, in his Wealth and Poverty of Nations. Landes’s answer: “The Chinese lacked range, focus, and above all, curiosity.” Hobbled by Confucian ideology, arrogant and complacent, China was “a reluctant improver and a bad learner.” The European Miracle, University of Melbourne historian Eric Jones’s celebrated account of the West’s climb to political dominance, similarly attributes China’s rejection of foreign adventures to “empty cultural superiority” and “self-engrossment.” After Zheng He, the empire “retreated from the sea and became inward-looking.” China, the McGill University political scientist John A. Hall charged in Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West, “was stuck in the same stage for over two thousand years, while Europe, in comparison, progressed like a champion hurdler.” Bubbling with entrepreneurial vim, Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain, and Britain dragged sclerotic China into the rough-and-tumble of the outside world.

Other scholars disagree with this image of Chinese passivity. Nor do they believe the shutdown of Zheng He’s voyages exemplified a cultural lack of curiosity or drive. No matter how far the admiral traveled from home, these writers note, he never encountered a nation richer than his own. Technologically speaking, China was so far ahead of the rest of Eurasia that foreign lands had little to offer except raw materials, which could be obtained without going to the bother of dispatching gigantic flotillas on lengthy journeys. Beijing easily could have sent Zheng past Africa to Europe, observed the George Mason University political scientist Jack Goldstone. But the empire stopped long-range exploration “for the same reason the United States stopped