China’s Forgotten Maritime Empire - Lost Futures
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China’s Forgotten Maritime Empire<br>Or, The Ocean Empire That Wasn't
Lost Futures<br>May 20, 2026
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The Return of Zheng He by Vladimir Kosov (Source: Wikimedia)<br>Two thousand Chinese soldiers crouch outside the walls of a foreign capital. It is night, somewhere in the southwest of Sri Lanka. The year is 14111. They are outnumbered, deep inland, and waiting for the signal.<br>Their commander is Zheng He, the Muslim eunuch admiral of the Ming dynasty, leading the third of seven2 great imperial voyages.<br>This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Then comes one shot from a huo-p’ao, a gunpowder signal gun.<br>The earliest known record of a gunshot on Sri Lankan soil.<br>The soldiers charge the walls. They break through. They reach the inner court and capture the man who rules there: Vīra Alakēśvara, a strongman who controls Kotte in practice, if not by uncontested royal right. They seize his wife, his children, and his officials. Then they turn around and fight their way back toward their fleet against a pursuing Sinhalese army.<br>The captives are loaded onto the fleet and carried to Nanjing, China’s capital at the time. There, the Yongle Emperor pardons Alakēśvara, chooses his replacement, and inserts the Ming court into Sri Lanka’s politics.<br>Today, this conflict is known as the Ming-Kotte War. Official Ming records presented it as unfortunate but unavoidable. Alakēśvara had been hostile to the imperial fleet since its first appearance on the Sinhalese coast in 1405. He had plotted against Zheng He’s soldiers. He had tried to extract gifts and tribute by force. He had to be removed. The emperor’s justice had been done.<br>Popular modern conceptions of Zheng He’s expeditions vary, but they tend to cluster around a few key ideas. His seven voyages between 1405 and 1433 were grand. He commanded one of the largest fleets in the medieval world, the treasure fleet, consisting of many large ships. He sailed across the Indian Ocean and back. He brought silk and porcelain. He exchanged imperial gifts. He did not conquer or colonize. He was an Asian counter-image to Columbus.<br>That story is not exactly false.<br>But it is incomplete.<br>Zheng He carried treasure. He also carried soldiers, guns, and the authority to remove rulers.<br>The Usurper
Emperor Hongwu, founder of the Ming Dynasty (Source: Wikimedia)<br>More than forty years before Zheng He’s signal gun fired in Sri Lanka, a former peasant rebel drove the Mongols out of China and founded a new dynasty.<br>His name was Zhu Yuanzhang. History remembers him as the Hongwu Emperor, founder of the Ming. Born into extreme poverty, he rose through rebellion and civil war to defeat the Yuan dynasty and proclaim the Ming in 1368. He built his new state around military discipline, agrarian recovery, strict law, suspicion of merchants, and tight control over the coast. Officially, he banned private Chinese overseas trade outright, in a policy called the haijin, the “sea ban.” Enforcement varied over time.<br>When Hongwu died in 1398, the throne was not passed to one of his sons, but instead to his grandson, the Jianwen Emperor. Jianwen was young and politically vulnerable. His scholar-advisors urged him to reduce the power of his uncles, the imperial princes who commanded major forces on the frontiers.
The unorthodox Zhu Di (Yongle Emperor) (Source: Wikimedia)<br>One of those uncles was Zhu Di, the Prince of Yan. Based in Beijing, Zhu Di was a frontier commander hardened by campaigns against the Mongols. In 1399, he rebelled. After three years of civil war, he seized Nanjing. The palace burned. Zhu Di became emperor under the reign name Yongle. Jianwen disappeared. Officially, he died in the fire. Unofficially, rumors that he had escaped in disguise haunted the Yongle emperor for the rest of his life.<br>He purged officials who had served Jianwen, rewrote the record to justify his accession, and began looking for ways to make his reign look not merely successful, but chosen.<br>For most of imperial Chinese history, that kind of legitimization campaign would have focused inward. China was a continental power after all. Its frontier was the steppe to the north. Its ceremonial axis ran between the imperial altars and the auspicious mountains of the interior. The sea was for fishermen and devious merchants and pirates.<br>But the capital of the early Ming was Nanjing, literally “Southern Capital”. For almost all of China’s history, political power remained in the north. However, Hongwu had broken that pattern, choosing Nanjing as the Ming’s first capital. Nanjing was a river city, perched on the lower Yangtze just before it opened toward the sea. And Hongwu had already constructed extensive shipyards. Southeast Asia looked closer to China than ever before.<br>And so the Yongle emperor’s eye drifted south.<br>Between 1403 and 1424, Yongle launched an...