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As the Ottomans grew in power in the Middle East, China missed its opportunity to become the major global power. The Chinese had never accepted their Mongolian Yuan overlords and their treatment under them had led to growing discontent; the people had been taxed heavily to pay for expensive projects, including the building of roads, and many military campaigns undertaken by the Yuan, which ultimately failed. Widespread crop failure in the north and the resulting famine in the 1340s only served to break the back of an already fragile system.
Hungry and homeless, the peasants united and rebelled. In the 1360s, one such peasant, a former Buddhist monk called Zhu Yuanzhang, was successful in extending his power throughout the Yangtze Valley. He seized Beijing in 1368, forced the Mongols to withdraw to Mongolia, took the title Hongwu, and declared himself the founder of a new Chinese dynasty: the Ming Dynasty.50
The new dynasty was initially open to the world and encouraged trade. Under the reign of the second Ming emperor, the Chinese even embarked on a series of major naval expeditions. Between 1405 and 1433, many decades before Columbus or Magellan, several expeditions under the leadership of Admiral ZhengHe set sail on journeys of geographical exploration and diplomacy around the Indian Ocean, going as far as Africa.51 These expeditions are said to have included up to 28,000 men on ships up to 300 feet long.
The potential of China at this time seemed almost limitless; had it continued to look outwards, it may well have been the Chinese who discovered America, not the Europeans.52 Unfortunately for China, however, this was not to be. With the Mongols expelled, Confucian ministers gained power at the court of the Emperor. Confucians were hostile to commerce and – understandably, following the recent Mongol occupation – to all things foreign. They also had an unhealthy veneration for the past. ‘Preserving the glories of the past seemed more important in China than addressing the kind of questions that global expansion was forcing onto Westerners’ attention.’53 There was plenty to keep the Chinese occupied at home, particularly finding the resources to repel continuous and aggressive raids on their borders by the Mongols. Developing into a great maritime trading power was simply not one of their objectives.
Under the influence of Confucian ministers, the government ended its sponsorship of naval expeditions, dismantled shipyards, and forbade the construction of multi-masted ships. In the 1470s ZhengHe’s records were destroyed and by 1525 it was an offence to build any ocean-going vessel.54So ended the great age of Chinese exploration and the development of world maritime trade was left to the Europeans, who were just beginning to embark on their voyages of discovery.
Without doubt this had significant detrimental impact on the subsequent development of the country. Up until this time, China had been one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, inventing paper, gunpowder, porcelain and the magnetic compass amongst other things. However, the strength of its emperors meant that a decision by one person could – and did – halt innovation, and the country’s strong veneration for the past eventually began to act as a disadvantage in a world where innovation and invention gave countries a competitive edge. Families tended ‘to preserve what was ancient and hallowed at the expense of what was new but potentially disruptive’.55
Nor did China’s relative isolation from other countries encourage it to look outwards. Perhaps no greater example of this exists than the construction of the Great Wall of China, which was built to keep foreigners out.
Europe, on the other hand, was a collection of small and competing states with multiple cultures and languages and this unsuspectingly served as an advantage to its inventors and explorers; if one party failed to sponsor them, they could always turn to another. Either way, it was in a country’s best interests to keep up with the latest technologies in order to keep the balance of power. As a result, European inventors were encouraged rather than discouraged.
‘In the end it was precisely the instability which Europeans had been trying unsuccessfully to evade for so long which had turned out to be their greatest strength. Their wars, their incessant internal struggles, their religious quarrels, all these had been the unfortunate, but necessary condition, of the intellectual growth which had led them, unlike their Asiatic neighbours, to develop the metaphysical and inquiring attitudes towards nature which, in turn, had given them the power to transform and control the worlds in which they lived.’56