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Ma Huan (ca. 1380-1460) Chinese historian Ma Huan was a chronicler of three expeditions that the Chinese undertook and were commanded by the Ming admiral Cheng Ho (ca. 1371-1433).
Historians in the west, including the vast majority of historians of the United States, tend to stress the significance of the efforts of Christopher Columbus and the role that he played in launching the so-called “age of discovery.” But more recently, scholars have questioned that age-old assumption. The historian James Axtell, for example, has noted that this was an age of mutual discovery, and the historian James Merrell has noted that Native Americans, too, inhabited a “New World” even though they did not sail across the Atlantic to find it. These forceful arguments make clear the simple fact that it is better to speak less of the European “discovery” of America and instead to look at the long 16th century as a period of multiple encounters, each of which altered the peoples involved.
But the significance of Columbus’s efforts can be cast into a more critical light through recognition of the earlier efforts by the Chinese, who had been engaged in long-distance explorations for almost a century before 1492. The Chinese sailed on vessels known as “junks,” which were up to five times larger than Columbus’s ships, and they sailed thousands of miles—into the Pacific, along the coasts of Southeast Asia, and eastward through the Indian Ocean at least as far as Africa.
Ma Huan chronicled these voyages and published a book entitled Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan (or The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores). The first edition appeared in 1451, but no copies survive. The modern text, which was translated and published in English in 1970, was reconstructed from three variant texts, one published in 1617, another published at some point before 1644, and a third edition of 1824. Apparently, none of these works was particularly well known, nor did Ma Huan become famous as a result of his writings. But knowledge of his writing—and his insights about places as distinct as central Vietnam, Calicut, and Mecca—survived and brought the information about these journeys to the modern world. As a result, it is impossible to think about the “age of discovery” without expanding the geographical boundaries and to recognize, as scholars now do, the extraordinary range of exploratory journeys that took place across the globe and not merely across the Atlantic.
World History
