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When China Ruled the Seas The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne 1405–1433 eBook Louise Levathes

Download As PDF : When China Ruled the Seas The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne 1405–1433 eBook Louise Levathes

One hundred years before Columbus and his fellow Europeans began their voyages of discovery, fleets of giant junks commanded by the eunuch admiral Zheng He and filled with the empire’s finest porcelains, lacquerware, and silk ventured to the world’s “four corners.” Seven epic expeditions brought China’s treasure ships across the China Seas and Indian Ocean, from Japan to the spice island of Indonesia and the Malabar Coast of India, on to the rich ports of the Persian Gulf and down the East African coast, to China’s “El Dorado,” and perhaps even to Australia, three hundred years before Captain Cook’s landing. It was a time of exploration and expansion, but it ended in a retrenchment so complete that less than a century later, it was a crime to go to sea in a multimasted ship. In When China Ruled the Seas, Louise Levathes takes a fascinating and unprecedented look at this dynamic period in China’s enigmatic history, focusing on the country’s rise as a naval power that briefly brought half the world under its nominal authority.
 
Drawing on eyewitness accounts, official Ming histories, and African, Arab, and Indian sources, many translated for the first time, Levathes brings readers inside China’s most illustrious scientific and technological era. She sheds new light on the historical and cultural context in which this great civilization thrived, as well as the perception of China by other contemporary cultures.
 
Beautifully illustrated and engagingly written, When China Ruled the Seas is the fullest picture yet of the early Ming dynasty—the last flowering of Chinese culture before the Manchu invasion.

When China Ruled the Seas The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne 1405–1433 eBook Louise Levathes

Tells the little known story of when China was a world power with ships that were more developed than those of other nations. Husband really liked the book.

Product details File Size 3674 KB Print Length 256 pages Publisher Open Road Distribution (December 2, 2014) Publication Date December 2, 2014 Sold by  Digital Services LLC Language English ASIN B00PA3VX26

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When China Ruled the Seas The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne 1405–1433 eBook Louise Levathes Reviews

A friend thought "1421 The Year China Discovered America" was among the most significant books he'd recently read. So I read it, partly intrigued but mostly flinching. An search turned up "When China Ruled the Seas" as a more scholarly examination of the same period.

It is. A highly readable one. This book focuses uses recent and older discoveries of maps, artifacts, documents to tell the story without breathless egotism or those wince-inducing leaps from the "It possibly indicates" to "This shows" almost in the same chapter that so mars "1421." Rather, this book explores in a scholarly way the almost timeless political pull and tug between the eunuchs aligned with an empire-building, trade-controlling younger king and the traditionalist Confuscians, inward-looking and agriculturally focused.

Against this larger picture, we are immersed in the construction, the nautical characteristics, the policy purposes of the extensive voyages, and above all, the larger-than-life Admiral of the seas. The nautical detail will please the sailor (holes in the bows to take on water in high seas and add ballast that drained out when calmer weather returned---fascinating!) and the lover of history is made by personages as the Admiral and Emperor come alive.

All this, and fascinating, thorough references unobtrusively in the back. As a crisp crust is to bread, so are readable, erudite annotations to a book!

Any issues? Being a paperback, the illustrations come through as OK but not as great as if I'd gotten hard-cover. Auwe as we say in Hawaii (not on the route of the treasure fleets), this is minini (min-nee-nee) compared to what's pono (right, proper, good) in this excellent read.
After much sensationalist drivel had been written about the "Treasure fleet" it was a genuine pleasure to read an account of this piece of history by a genuine scholar. History often enough has its evidence gaps. Scholarship means that existing evidence is assembled, presented, weighted, and subsequent conjectures identified as such and ranked commensurately. And yet, Mme Levathes presents all this in such a fluid, readable style that the book makes for excellent recreational literature, without any recourse to "mysteries", "secrets of the far east" or other stupid glitter. After having read the book I felt I understood. And that's what I was looking for.
For those interested in why China viewed itself in the past and still views today itself as the center of the world, this book offers fascinating insights. I found it well-written and enjoyable to read. The footnotes include extensive annotations and bibliography. The expeditions of Admiral Zheng He make fascinating reading.
This book raises the counterfactual "What if the Ming had continued Zheng He's stunning beginning and utilized its incredible shipbuilding skills to become a maritime power just at the time the Europeans had unlocked their own isolation in the West. Confronted by massive Chinese fleets of heavily armored ships would they have so easily dominated the East?
The book is an interesting one, compact but full of information. The first few chapters are actually dedicated to a brief overview of early Chinese political history. It discusses the ethnic mix of the country, the rise of a centralized state, the struggle among early dynasts for control of power, and ultimately the central characters involved in overseas exploration.

Unlike Menzies' 1421 A. D., Levathes' book focuses on China's rapport with countries closer at hand, concentrating on routes between China and SE Asia, India, and Africa. There is no attempt to integrate archaeological finds throughout the world with what is known of Chinese exploration activities, which leaves the author on much firmer ground from a historical standpoint. For most of her documentation she relies on government records, family histories, historical romances, and poetry, and these are outlined and discussed in some detail in the notes to the chapters. Although she speculates about early contact with North and South America, she does not make this the central focus of the book. In fact her primary theme seems to be the social and political causes of the sudden interest in the outside world and its equally sudden reversal.

While Menzies' book is more intriguing and examines the Chinese experiment with overseas exploration from the standpoint of a seaman and navigator, Levathes approaches it as a historian. 1421 A. D. gives one a sense of the wonder of exploration and its possibilities; When China Ruled the Seas makes sense of both its occurrence and its cessation. I'd recommend reading both.
The history of the treasure fleet (1405-1433) during the Ming Dynasty is an amazing description of Chinese naval power at the time. There was no power on earth at the time that could compare to that of the Chinese navy. It is a story that is not well known but definitely one worth reading about.
Tells the little known story of when China was a world power with ships that were more developed than those of other nations. Husband really liked the book.