瀛涯胜览

Around 1405, the waters off Liujia Port in Taicang, Jiangsu, went dark under a forest of masts. Sixty-two great ships and more than twenty thousand men set out into a sea most Chinese of the time knew only as rumor: the Indian Ocean. The man standing on the flagship's deck was not a captain but a Hui Muslim scholar named Ma Huan. He was a tongshi, an interpreter, chosen for the voyage because he read and spoke Arabic. This book is the notebook he kept, country by country, day by day, across the several expeditions he made with Zheng He to the Western Ocean.

The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores was completed in the mid-fifteenth century, and of all the Chinese accounts left by Zheng He's seven voyages, it is the fullest and the richest in human detail. Part maritime record, part ethnography, it was written from an interpreter's vantage rather than a commander's, setting down the positions and distances of more than twenty countries along the route, their dress, weddings and funerals, produce, tribute trade, and religions, all turned into a readable, seagoing Classic of Mountains and Seas. Later generations remember Zheng He mostly for the size of his fleet. Open this book, and you can feel the Indian Ocean's actual temperature.

China had its own age of exploration. While Portugal's Prince Henry was still plotting his African routes from Sagres, Zheng He's treasure ships had already passed through Malacca seven times, reached Malindi on the East African coast, and sailed on west to Mecca at the mouth of the Red Sea. Vasco da Gama would not round the Cape of Good Hope and reach India's west coast for nearly another century. Yet the popular story has long left this out. Mention sea exploration and readers think of Magellan, of Columbus, of Marco Polo. Zheng He's name carries weight, but it sits in a display case of history rather than living in most readers' memory as an actual navigator.

The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores fills that gap precisely because of its vantage point: it does not write the commander, it writes the interpreter. Ma Huan made no decisions; he listened, watched, and wrote down what he saw. He gives us glimpses of the fleet's grandeur (the bulk of the treasure ships, sails blotting out the sky), but far more of the noise of harbor markets, the calls to prayer at mosques, the dress of tribute envoys, the shine of pearls piled on shop counters. In his hands, the Indian Ocean is not a sea being conquered but a string of harbor towns, each one breathing, each with its own beliefs and its own rules.

The Indian Ocean of the Yongle reign was already a genuinely global sea. Nearly every port Ma Huan visited held three or four religions and several merchant peoples at once. Champa, around present-day Quy Nhon in Vietnam, was Buddhist and humid, its trade built on rice and aloeswood. Java had settled Chinese communities, mostly migrants from Fujian and Guangdong. Malacca held the throat of its strait, where cargo ships from the South China Sea and the Western Ocean converged. Ceylon was a mountain kingdom of gemstones and the Temple of the Tooth. Calicut, on India's west coast, dealt heavily in pepper and cotton cloth, with Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism running side by side.

Further west, Hormuz guarded the mouth of the Persian Gulf, its pearls and gems piled like hills, its heat leaving men gasping. Beyond it lay Aden in Yemen and Dhofar in Oman, and finally Mecca, the holy mosque of Tianfang. Turning south brought the fleet to Mogadishu, Zhubu, and Malindi on the East African coast, where dark-skinned locals, camels, and frankincense filled the markets, and where a giraffe traveled east as tribute, presented as a qilin. The route was never a straight line. It was a string of pearls made of islands and harbor towns, and every knot in the string had its own god, its own scale, its own language.

The fleet weighed anchor at Liujia Port in Taicang, Jiangsu, then sailed south to Wuhumen in Changle, Fujian, to wait for the right wind before heading out to sea. The reason Ma Huan came aboard was simple and specific: he spoke Arabic, and he was a Muslim. Those two facts made him an indispensable bridge, and they made him, almost inevitably, the voyage's chronicler. He could understand, and he could be understood.

The first stop was Champa. Rain arrived without warning, and the sun left men dazed. Trade took place in the square outside the royal palace, aloeswood, rice, ivory, and rhinoceros horn laid out in rows. The people were Buddhist; monks in yellow robes, heads shaved, greeted the Chinese delegation with courtesy. What Ma Huan wrote down was not the list of gifts exchanged but the noise of the market: weights striking bronze pans, the dull thud of coconuts falling from palms, a temple bell at dawn sounding over the tide. That choice sets the tone for the whole book.

Further south lay Java and Palembang. The Chinese settlement at Palembang, on Sumatra in present-day Indonesia, was already well established, and its harbor master, Shi Jinqing, was himself a Chinese émigré whom Zheng He petitioned the court to appoint as pacification commissioner. Ma Huan took care to record the businesses, homes, weddings, and funerals of the Fujian and Guangdong migrants there. He clearly understood that these overseas Chinese, rooted abroad, were the most active middlemen of the maritime silk road.

Ceylon, present-day Sri Lanka, provides one of the voyage's most harrowing episodes. Ma Huan describes an island devoted to Buddhism, its Temple of the Tooth gleaming with gold, its mountains yielding gems, its hillsides thick with spices. The island's king, Alagakkonara, treated the delegation with contempt and even set an ambush against the treasure ships. Zheng He, learning of the plot, struck first with his elite troops, seized the king and his family, and brought them back to Nanjing as prisoners presented to the court.

Ma Huan's account of the clash stays level, with none of the exaggeration of a heroic tale. He records Ceylon's climate, the monks' robes, the prices gemstones fetched, but also the king's arrogance and the fleet's vigilance. The reader can sense that he takes neither Zheng He's side nor Alagakkonara's. He stands where an interpreter stands, watching two systems of manners collide, each one certain the other is rude.

Calicut, known to Ma Huan as Guli, sits on India's west coast and gets the fullest chapter in the whole book. It produced pepper and cotton cloth in quantity and stood as one of the busiest spice hubs on the Indian Ocean. Here Zheng He did something with lasting consequences: he raised a stele with an inscription formally bringing the port into the tribute trade system, and he installed a qadi to settle disputes among the Muslim merchants.

Ma Huan's restraint here is remarkable. Hindu temples, mosques, and Buddhist shrines stood in the same port; pepper was heaped into small hills on shop counters; bolts of cotton cloth were unrolled to dry in the sun. He lays out this multi-religious harbor life passage by passage in plain strokes, with no wonder, no exoticizing, just one concrete sentence after another. The record holds up because Ma Huan takes no side. He lets the facts speak.

Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf in present-day Iran, marked one of the voyage's western extremes. The heat left men gasping, yet the markets were so full they left men speechless, pearls, gems, and spices piled so high there was barely room to stand. Ma Huan records, as an eyewitness, how pearls were weighed and priced, along with the local dress, the calls to prayer, the sounds of the market.

Further west lay Tianfang: Mecca. Zheng He's seventh voyage reached Mecca on pilgrimage, a rare event in both the history of navigation and the history of Islam. Ma Huan went along as a Muslim himself, and his account of the rites at the holy mosque, the pilgrimage to the Kaaba, and the spice trade in the markets is more detailed and more personal than anywhere else in the book. This passage is the book's spiritual high point for a reason beyond simply reaching Mecca: for once, the narrator understood everything and was understood by everyone in turn. His two identities, interpreter and believer, become one.

Before turning back, the treasure ships sailed south along the East African coast. Mogadishu, in present-day Somalia; Zhubu, near the mouth of the Juba River; Malindi, in present-day Kenya: this stretch marks the farthest point Zheng He's fleet ever reached. Ma Huan records dark-skinned locals trading mainly in camel's milk, spices, and ivory, but what stunned him and the crew most was a qilin that arrived among the tribute goods.

What was called a qilin was, in fact, a giraffe. The Chinese court took it for an auspicious beast, and when the delegation brought it back to Nanjing, the whole court is said to have been in an uproar. Ma Huan writes it plainly: how the animal looked aboard ship, what it ate, how the crowd reacted when it was led through a market. He never turns it into a miracle. He turns it into a living creature everyone was simply curious about, and that restraint is the most moving thing about this book.

The fleet sailed home laden with tribute envoys from every country and cargoes of rare goods. Ma Huan, drawing on his access as an interpreter, gathered his observations of more than twenty countries into a single volume: The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores. Accounts left by other writers on the same voyages have mostly been lost; this one survives because it is the richest in detail and the most readable. The Ming-dynasty Shuoji edition and the annotated Commercial Press edition edited by Feng Chengjun are the two versions modern readers most often turn to.

What it leaves behind is not just a route but the actual texture of life around the fifteenth-century Indian Ocean. Xu Xiake's contemporaries were writing the mountains and rivers of the land; Ma Huan was writing the harbor towns of the sea. Together, the two strokes complete a Chinese map of the wider world. Marco Polo saw the East from the overland routes; Ma Huan saw the southern seas from the water. Each is the other's mirror, and the other's completion.

You might think that knowing where Ma Huan went and what he wrote is enough. But the strength of The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores has nothing to do with plot; it has no plot in any dramatic sense. Its strength is the pen itself: plain strokes, no dressing up, no looking down on the subject. There are no memorable lines in this book, no maxims, no lyricism. It simply sets down, honestly, the thud of a coconut hitting the ground, the yellow of a monk's robe, the arc a pearl traces rolling across a scale. No amount of secondhand summary can give a reader back that feeling.

And the people who fill these harbors, the monks of Champa, the qadi of Calicut, the pearl merchants of Hormuz, the handlers who led a giraffe through Malindi, are individuals, not types. Read the text itself, and you notice how different they are from the colonial imagery of the European age of exploration. These are people who were actually looked at, actually recorded, actually written down with care. Knowing the plot beforehand is, if anything, a gift: it frees you from the route itself, so you can move straight into the warmth of the pen that wrote it.