SOUTH-EAST ASIAN EXPLORATION
Ming China's brief flirtation with overseas expansion provides
unequivocal evidence of the remarkable competence of Chinese shipwrights, navigators and
sailors. Chinese mariners had long traded in the same waters without official sanction,
but seafarers ranked low in the Confucian social heirarchy and received little attention
from court historians and chroniclers. The inset shows an early sixteenth-century
Portuguese nao silhouetted against a nine-masted Ming treasure ship. |