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How One Man Gave China The Opportunity To Rule The World
And why we’re speaking English and not Mandarin today.
Showing The Flag Of The Peacock Throne
For Westerners interested in naval history, one ship looms above all others: the HMS Victory, where Admiral Horatio Nelson gave his life in 1805 at the Battle of Trafalgar even as he dashed Napoleon’s dreams of invading the British Isles and sealed England’s supremacy of the seas for the next century.
To which any Chinese historian would say, “Here, hold my bottle of Tsingtao.”
Beginning in 1405 — nearly 400 years before the Battle of Trafalgar — the great Chinese Admiral Zheng He was sailing treasure fleets as far as the Middle East and Africa in ships over twice the length and nearly three times the displacement of Nelson’s flagship, and was doing so in armadas of as many as 317 vessels. The largest of the treasure ships were about 450 feet from stem to stern. The first western warship of such length was the HMS Dreadnought launched in 1905, exactly 500 years after the first great Chinese treasure fleet set sail.
To be sure, the enormous Chinese ships, being flat-bottomed, were not truly designed for transoceanic voyages, but every one of the great fleets still sailed at least ten thousand miles from start to finish…
