Zheng He: Inscription to the Goddess the Celestial Spouse

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The Goddess, or “Celestial Spouse,” to whom this stone is dedicated is obviously a Daoist deity to whom sustained prayers for good fortune had been addressed by Zheng He and his captains. We can only assume that the Celestial Spouse’s blessings had been efficacious in bringing about the success of the Ming fleets, as she seems to be receiving thanks for the entire thirty-year enterprise. She is referenced several times in the text, and each time her “miraculous” favors and powers are credited for felicitous outcomes in sailing, diplomacy, and military adventures. We might be tempted to regard this document as evidence of an “official” Ming religious policy, except for the fact that Zheng He himself was a Muslim by upbringing and served an empire that was self-consciously Confucian. The “prayer” to the Celestial Spouse might be better considered as a somewhat common expression of Chinese religious faith, which in the years following the Mongol Empire was an eclectic mixture of Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Considered in light of the bulk of this text, it is safe to conclude that this is not, in generic terms, a “sacred” document.

The main body of the text is a fairly detailed description of the Ming voyages, complete with force numbers, ports of call, highlights, and insights into the motivations behind the emperor and his admiral. We learn that the Ming emperor desired to “unify” seas and continents under his majesty and envisioned an empire more extensive and glorious than either the Han or Tang. We learn that “tens of thousands” of troops and “more than one hundred” great ships were enlisted to bring the “countries beyond the horizon” into the Ming imperial cosmos. We learn that these countries include, in addition to China’s neighbors in Southeast Asia, such far-flung locales as Java, India, Ceylon, Hormuz, and Mogadishu. This hard and reliable confirmation of the extent of the Ming voyages, nearly a century prior to the Portuguese and Spanish explorations of the Renaissance, has long intrigued historians, who have speculated on what might have happened to world history had China’s maritime explorations continued past 1433.

In this regard, what we do not discover from this Inscription is almost as instructive as the items that are clearly enumerated. We see no evidence of Chinese troops attempting to establish permanent military beachheads. We see no evidence of Chinese settlers trying to make inroads into the interiors of India or Africa to establish economic colonies. We find no priests, Daoist or otherwise, trying to convert massive numbers of Indonesians, Arabs, or Africans in a coordinated religious strategy to bring souls to the Celestial Spouse. In other words, the Inscription provides no proof whatsoever that the kind of colonial expansion and mercantile imperialism that western European powers brought to perfection in later centuries had any place in the thinking of Zheng He or his imperial patron.

Accordingly, Zheng He’s Inscription to the Goddess provides some the best verification available that the Ming maritime voyages and the Renaissance European explorations were motivated by entirely different sets of cultural concerns. In recent years, new interpretations of the Ming voyages—heavily influenced by the rise of China as an economic and diplomatic power—suggest that the Ming treasure fleets might have sailed well beyond Africa, into the Western Hemisphere and even the polar regions. Since no clear evidence exists for such claims, they remain in the domain of pure speculation. Documents such as the Inscription to the Goddess, while not as precise as many modern records, nevertheless offer convincing and reliable substantiation of events that can be verified with a much higher degree of certainty.