Ming burned its treasure fleet — and handed the oceans to Europe

Between 1405 and 1433, Ming China launched seven naval expeditions under Admiral Zheng He that dwarfed anything Europe could build. The treasure fleet numbered up to 300 ships — some 120 metres long, four times the length of Columbus's Santa Maria — carrying 28,000 men. They reached Java, India, Hormuz, Mecca, and East Africa, collecting tribute and displaying Ming power across the Indian Ocean. No navy in the world could challenge them.

The voyages were championed by the Yongle Emperor, who saw them as projecting legitimacy after his usurpation of the throne. But the court's Confucian scholar-officials hated them. The Grand Secretariat, led by Yang Shiqi and others, argued that the fleets wasted tax revenue on foreign curiosities, corrupted the virtue of the state, and drew attention away from the northern frontier. Their criticism was ideological: maritime trade was beneath the dignity of a Confucian empire.

After Yongle died in 1424, the anti-fleet faction rapidly gained power. The Xuande Emperor launched one last voyage in 1431, but when it returned in 1433, the expeditions stopped forever. The new emperor Yingzong (ruling under regents) banned the construction of ocean-going ships. Zheng He's shipbuilding records and navigational charts were either destroyed or deliberately hidden. By 1500, it was a capital offence to build a vessel with more than two masts. The Chinese navy, once the mightiest in the world, declined into irrelevance within two generations.

The consequence was strategic abandonment. In 1498, Vasco da Gama reached India — exactly the route Zheng He had sailed eighty-five years earlier. The Portuguese found no Chinese presence, no Chinese ships, no Chinese competition. The Indian Ocean trade, which China had dominated, fell to European powers. The Ming had voluntarily surrendered a strategic position that no enemy could have taken from them by force.