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Chapter 29 During the first half of the 15th century, the Ming imperial
household famously dispatched seven expeditions under the
Traces of the Zheng He command of the eunuch Zheng He鄭和 (1371–1433), as well as
many smaller maritime embassies under other command, to
Voyages in Late Ming the rulers of what we now call South and Southeast Asia. The
navigational knowledge and nautical lore these expeditions
Navigational Materials would have required to reach destinations around the Indian
Ocean – and having reached them, could have enlarged in
turn – must have been enormous. ‘Must have been’, because
almost nothing of this knowledge survived in the public
Timothy Brook record in China in later times. Whatever charts, route guides
(known to Elizabethan Englishmen as ‘rutters’) and voyage
diaries were produced in the course of engaging in this vast
diplomatic traffic were deposited with the imperial
household. There they were embargoed as state intelligence
to which only the court could be privy, and eventually
destroyed. Not a shred of primary documentation survives
from the Ming central administration, and yet traces are to
be found in certain late Ming sources.
Three well-known documents of the late Ming reveal,
however, that some of this knowledge escaped the centripetal
vortex of the political centre. One is the so-called ‘Laud
1
rutter’, named in honour of Archbishop William Laud
Plate 29.1 Laud rutter or Dispatched on Favourable Wind
(Shunfeng xiangsong 順風相送) in Chinese, 16th century. The
Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, MS.Laud Or.145
Traces of the Zheng He Voyages in Late Ming Navigational Materials | 253
