5 Australia as surveyed by Zheng He fleet voyagers before 1433 -paper delivered in Brisbane, August 2006

Australia as surveyed by Zheng He fleet voyagers before 1433 -paper delivered in Brisbane, August 2006

Australia as surveyed by Zheng He fleet voyagers before 1433
 
 
Wang Tai Peng
 
In this Conference jointly held by the Fig Institution for the History of Surveying and Measurement and the Department of N& R, Queensland marking the 400th anniversary of the first charting of Australia, I would like to take up the story of Zheng He fleet voyagers surveying and charting Australia. That is, indeed, two centuries long before any Europeans voyaged to Australia. The story of Australia and its maritime discovery by the outside world, of course, begins with the name of Australia. As we all know, it is derived from the ancient western notion of “Terra Australis” or “Terra Australis Incognita”(unknown land in the south covering the pole and reaching the southern tips of Africa and Asia), indeed an nonexistent land often found in the 16th century European world maps.(1) Yet it remained a myth like the Garden of Eden until such time Australia began to have been found by Zheng He fleet voyagers first time ever in history as a huge continent, far removed from the civilization. The Chinese at that time, of course, must have circumnavigated Australia to know it and survey it. So the Chinese were the first ever world explorers in history that had really surveyed the whole of Australia as a continent.
(1) Chinese knowledge of Australia before Zheng He
The Chinese knowledge of Australia, as author Gavin Menzies points out, traces back to the period of Sui Dynasty (589-618). By then, they already knew of a great landmass peopled by men who threw boomerang, one hundred days sailing south of Asia. They also learnt of an animal Shan Hai Jing, with head of a deer, that hopped on its hind legs and had a second head in the middle of its body – the baby in the pouch.(2) Up to the time of Zhao Ruqua, who gets his information from the Arab sources in Quanzhou, the Chinese still didn’t have first hand knowledge about Australia. Much of their knowledge about Australia remained mostly hearsay from the Arab sojourners in China. Indeed, Australia was very likely forming an interesting part of Indonesia’s story in the entry of Su Ji Dan. In his 1225 Zhu Fanzhi[A record of countries barbarian], Zhao Ruqua portrays Australia’s closest neighboring islands such as Sunda islands or Sun Ta, Moluccas islands or Hu Nu Gu, Timor or Di Hu, Bali or Pa Li, all as subsidiary states of Java enjoined with Su Ji Dan, also a subsidiary country of Java. Su Ji Dan is, according to a study by Professor Han Zhenghua, an derivative name from Sanskrit words Sukatana, with Cuka[parrots] and dana[gifts] meaning gifts of parrots.(3) The kingdom of Sukatana was a Javanese kingdom thriving on the international trade in pepper with China, India and Arabic countries. The western most of the kingdom Sukatana started from Sunda islands and its eastern most reached Da Ban[Hitting on board] or Kupang of Timor island.(4). Clearly, territorially speaking, the kingdom of Sukatana in the 12th and 13th centuries included central Java, Sunda islands, Moluccas islands and Timor. 
 
The first Chinese travel writer who had personally visited this part of the world in history was Wang Da Yuan. In the entry of Guli Dimeng or Timor in his 1349 Daoyi Zhilue[ A Brief Record of islands Barbarians], he points out that there were twelve ports in Timor emerged from the thriving sandalwood trade. But Wang Da Yuan had, according to a study by Professor Han Zhenghua, sailed 400 miles across the Timor sea to reach Australia at the seacoast of North Australia at Malizhi and its southeast neighboring areas called Manali and Lo Posi east of today Darwin.(5) While there maybe quite a few Chinese scholars accepted this as truth, it’s nevertheless certain that Wang Da Yuan didn’t circumnavigate Australia and leave us any
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impression of Australia as a vast continent. And we must also bear in mind that across the Timor sea, the primitive Australia or Lo Po Si or Lousasi or Nusasu, in Indonesian meaning the last island in the known world at that time, had little or nothing to offer to Chinese mariners. The natives of Manali were leading a primitive life without housing and clothing.(6) By contrast, Timor was offering endless streams of visiting Chinese mariners, at least a few hundreds a ship, a paradise not only to make thousand times of profits in sandalwood trade, but also to indulge themselves freely in local wines and women, sexually red hot and uninhibited by custom, according to Wang Da Yuan’s own narrative of Timor.(7)
Yet the lure of Australia was that “of a land to the south of Java, which Marco Polo called Lochac or Beach, “the islands of gold”. Indeed, after the Polos travels in Asia between 1271 and 1295, charts appeared which showed some of the places they have visited, with their elephants and gold in incredible quantities” in place of Ptolemy’s terra incognita. Historians are divided about the trustworthiness of the tales told by Marco Polo. Doubters, like Derek Nelson, still consider Beach, Luchach(Locac), and Maletur(Marco’s Malaiur) as three nonexistent land named by Marco Polo in the vicinity of Australia. Yet, other historians, like John Larner, strongly believe they were real and the Dutch seamen discovered in July 1619 the southland of Beach in 32* 20”, just south of today’s Perth in Western Australia. As early as 1664, Th’evenot, the French publicist was already arguing for the existence of this great southern world, Australia on the grounds that Marco Polo had learnt of it from the Chinese. And in the 1680s, Vitale Terrarossa even declared that it was Marco Polo, ‘the Venetian patrician’ who had discovered Australia. (8)
Still, if compared to the Chinese, the Europeans were latecomers to this part of the world, at least one and half century late. The Portuguese only begun to have reached Java in 1511 and Timor 1515 and probably the northern coast of Australia as well. (9) While Zheng He’s circumnavigation and charting of Australia isn’t in the European textbooks, it is clearly in the Chinese historical data and records. Clearly, this new perspective of the last 700 years or so of the Chinese marine history throws doubts on the outdated history textbooks that say Australia was first charted and discovered by the European explorers.
(2) Australia’s stories told by Zheng He Navigation Chart
Among the Chinese scholarship on Zheng He history in the 1980s, a groundbreaking study by Professor Zheng Yijun dares blazing the unbeaten path. It boldly suggests that during the 1421 western voyage, Zheng He fleets took the old sea route of Sukatana to reach Australia and then across the Pacific Ocean to Madagascar. According to him, in the sixth expedition there were three southeast sea routes from Malacca. One of which was setting out from Malacca to Medan and then Java and Timor. According to him, the direction of the good wind changed from Northeast to Northwest after Zheng He fleets sailed across the tropics. As soon as the fleets arrived in Tuban of east Java, they can catch the Northwest wind to sail to the islands of Timor and New Guinea. At this time, in the tropical south it was when the season of Southeast monsoon began. Catching the trade winds, the fleets can sail passed Solomon Islands and enter the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, during the Southeast monsoon season, they can also sail back to Java from Solomon Islands and New Guinea. During their route of return, they crossed the Coral Sea, passing the Arafura Sea and Timor Sea north of Australia to return to Java. And then from Java, they got out from the Sunda Strait heading west straight to Madagascar. (10)
Professor Zheng also thinks Zheng He Navigation Charts show a sea route from Java and Gillimum that can be extended to Australia and Madagascar. This sea route reflected the fact that during the sixth mission, a division of Zheng He fleets from Malacca was coasting along Java
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across southeast of the tropics to explore Timor Sea and Arafura Sea. (11) In addition, Zheng Yi Jun also cites a Ming author, Sheng Mao Sheng’s Haiguo Guangji [Notes on marine countries] as evidence. According to an old man with the surname Zhou, who joined Zheng He naval expedition during the reign of Xuande Emperor, they had visited Xiwen Dala or Sumatra, Su Ji Dan or Sukatana, Manali or Maraje meaning the kingdom of the queen in the East Coast of today Darwin. (12) Needless to say, here the vast regions of subsidiary states under the entry of Sukatana, like I said before, started from Sunda Islands in the western most to Timor Island in the eastern most. It was the same seas route from Java that took Wang Da Yuan to Timor, New Guinea and Australia in the late Yuan times. Moreover, based on the surviving document of
Zheng Wei Pian[compass bearings sea chart book] from the early Ming dated at 1411, Professor Zhang even speculates about Yang Ming division of Zheng He fleets making a global circumnavigation during the period of 4 years when they were reportedly blown off the course in a gusty storm at the ocean named as the Tortoise Ocean and sailing across the uncharted seas. From 1421 to 1425, they had set sail crossing the Indian Ocean to the south of the tropics, entered deep into the Atlantic Ocean and coasted along Southwest Africa, and then turned east into the Pacific Ocean and eventually arriving at the coasts of Australia.(13)
But there’s yet another story of early Ming Chinese charting of Australia in Zheng He Navigation Chart remains to be told. However, of all the historians in the world only Professor Zhang Zhijiang gets to tell it by decoding the secrets of the early Ming Chinese Sea chart in the People Daily on October 24 2003. In concert with one another, on the same day, visiting Chinese President Hu Jintao announced proudly in Australia’s Parliament: “Back in 1420s, the expeditionary fleets of China’s Ming dynasty reached Australia’s shores.” Professor Zhang has found out in Zheng He Navigation Charts that the unnamed continent that appeared at the same latitude of Malindi of east Africa is, indeed, Australia. According to him, the Zheng He Chart indicates Australia as a great continent.(14) But Australia didn’t get the entire continent shown up in the charts. Only the northern tip of the continent is symbolically mapped. Along the coast, however, there are many mountains ranging side by side along the coast without being named. But on the upper left corner of this continent, i.e. Northwest of Australia, the map remarks: “There are people living here. ” Not far away from the written remark, there is an island called “ Tiger Tail Reef” a little down west, which I think is what today called Ashmore Reef. And at the north of the continent is Sumatra. On the upper right corner of the continent, the map also remarks: “there are people living here.” Again, at the east of this written remark, there, lays an island named as “the Mountain of Rock Walls.” Which, I think is today the Magnetic Island, a large continent island lying eight miles off Townsville of Queensland. Roughly triangular in shape, the island rises to 497 meters at Mt. Cook and extends 11 km at its widest points. And about half of the island is a now the national park’s thickly forested slope punctuated with granite outcrops. Mt. Cook in the island must have named as Shi Cheng Shan or “The Mountain of Rock Walls” instead by Zheng He voyagers then for the topography feature. And indeed, the rock wallabies and koalas that are common there today must have been no less common and impressive 600 years ago to Zheng He and his voyagers when they first visited what today called the Magnetic Island!
Although the continent only takes up a very small space at the bottom of each page, yet the breadth of the continent consecutively spans three pages that long. And several of the islands situated in the Pacific Ocean on its right also span two pages in space. Altogether, the continent and its neighboring islands take up a total of five pages in space (15). Also, by drawing inference from Zheng He Navigation Charts, according to Professor Zhang, there were two sea routes Zheng He could take in his return journey to China from Australia. One is the eastern route sailing up North from the west of Tiger Tail Reef through the Selat Sunda between Sumatra and
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Java. And then it went past South Sea and East Sea returning to Nanjing. The other is the western route. Setting out from the west of Tiger Tail Reef, they could sail round the northern tip of Sumatra and passed the Straits of Malacca to the South Sea and East Sea returning to Nanjing. Professor Zheng also points out that east of Australia, other than the island of Stone Wall Mountain, there’re also several islands named as Liang Shan Yu[the island of cool umbrella],Nan Fu Shan[South Master island], Cheng Jiao[Sunken Reef], Jin Yu[Islet of Gold], Shuang Yu[Twin islands], Jiu Yu[Nine islets], Sha Tang Yu[Islet of Brown Sugar], Bai Sha[Island of white Sands] etc.(16) Of them, the white sands island could perhaps be identified as today Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world as it was formerly called the Great Sandy Island. Apart from a
few volcanic outcrops, the island is completely composed of sand. Thus, it is only too fitting for Zheng He voyagers who were struck by this largest sand island in the world and one of the world’s longest beach to name what today is Fraser Island as the Island of White Sands. The identification of the Sunken Reef Island could very well be Lady Musgrave Island. This 20 hectare coral cay “is a small part of massive lagoon, protected from the surrounding ocean by a platform reef exposed only at low tide.”(17) The Chinese seemed to have named this land as the “Sunken Reef Island” according to its topography features. The rest of the Chinese named islets such as Cool Umbrella Island, Sunken Reef Island, Islet of Gold, Islet of Brown Sugar etc. are those islands somewhere in and around the Great Barrier Reef and Coral Sea yet to be identified.
Now, we may ask the central question did they have surveyed and charted the whole of Australia then? Not only the Chinese scholarship thinks so, best selling author of 1421 The Year China Discovered The World, Gavin Menzies also provides further proof to the notion of Zheng He
mariners charting Australia in entirety. First, he uses the Chinese original sources, the Dictionary
of Ming Biography records, which says: “some of the Zheng He ships reached as far as a place called Ha-bu-er which may be identified as Kerguelen Island in the Antarctic Ocean.” The island of Ha-bu-er is also shown on the Zheng He Navigation Charts, alongside a note stating that “storm prevented the fleet sailing further south.”(18). All these Chinese original sources of Zheng He history convinced him of a Chinese chart of the continent that had been surveyed and drawn before the first European discovered Australia. However, at the time of his writing, a map on porcelain dated 1447 showed the coastlines of New Guinea, the east coast of Australia as far south as Victoria, and the north-east coast of Tasmania, that could be seen at Taiwan University was lost. Although the smoking gun was lost, he has intuitively discovered the missing link between what the Chinese known as Little Java and the island of Lesser Java drawn by Jean Rotz in his detailed map of Australia presented to Henry III of England. His intuition tells him that Lesser Java on Rotz chart is Arnhem Land, part of the mainland of Australia. However, without knowing each other’s works, Menzies’ 2002 identification of the Little Java on Rotz chart as Arnhem Land coincides completely with Professor Han Zheng Hua’s 1982 identification of Wang Da Yuan’s Lo Sha Si (lusa-su) as Arnhem Land. (19)
But this is clearly no accident at all for them to come to the same conclusion. Because, as Menzies brilliantly argues, the west coast of Arnhem Land is drawn with great fidelity by Rotz, showing not only the coastal features at their correct latitude but also a mass of fishing stakes straddling Trepang Bay, the center of sea-slug fishing. “All this remarkable precise information predates the arrival of the first Europeans by over two centuries”, argues Menzies.(20) Of course, he has nailed it. As Australian writer Emen K Patterson points out, several centuries before European arrivals in Australia, Chinese fishing boats were already there in Northern Australia for fishing sea slugs every year. As early as the 15th century, these fishing boats were already frequently visiting there. Most recently, an ancient map of Northern Australia was discovered in Beijing. In this map, Australia is called “Southern Continent”. This ancient map was drawn by the ship-captain of a Chinese sea-slugging ship in 1426.”(21) The year 1426 was the first year of the
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reign of Xuan De emperor. But it was also two or three years after the return of Zhou Man’s fleet to China in October 1423 from Australia with only a tenth of the original nine thousand men remained alive. The heavy toll on Zhou Man’s fleet was due to the passage through the near razor-sharp coral reefs of 1500 miles from Hickson Bay, south of Brisbane to Cape York in the north. Here, as a seasoned mariner, Gavin Menzies has made his major breakthrough contribution to the conventional history of European discovery of Australia. “I remember very well how my submarine was hemmed in by the reef, and the relief I felt as I escaped from the straitjacket where the reef end off Brisbane. The wealth of detail on the Rotz chart indicates that several Chinese ships must have been charting the coast, reef and islands. They would have been more or less in line abreast, as they would sail north, some inside the reef and others in the ocean outside it,”(22) writes a very inspired Menzies at his best. And now, we have the evidence of Zheng He Navigation Charts on the islands such as Rock Wall Mountain Island, Sunken Reef Island, Gold Island, Twin Islands,… in and around the Barrier Reef that fully attests to Menzies’s tale about Zheng He fleet voyagers charting Australia. Despite the wide gaps of different cultures and times in existence between the ancient Chinese charts and Gavin Menzies, both of them are weaving more or less the same tales of how did the early Ming mariners chart the passage through the Great Barrier Reef and Australia in entirety.
(3) Australia as surveyed in entirety by the 1418 Zheng He’s world map
 
Also, new evidence of Zheng He fleets charting the whole of Australia came to light from China early this year. It is shedding new light on Australia’s history. This new evidence is a world chart made in 1418, which showed the barbarians paying tribute the Ming emperor, Zhu Di. But it was an imitated and reworked world map drawn by a Qing official named Mo Yi Tong in 1763. Indeed, the more I study the map, the more I believe it is authentic. Not that I don’t have any serious reservation about the map anymore. I still do. Clearly, the name of Dong Yang or the Eastern Ocean, in the Ming referring to the Pacific Ocean shouldn’t be called Da Qing Hai or the sea of the Qing dynasty in the 1418 map. Having all that said, the fact remains that the 1418 map entitled “general chart of the integrated world” is undoubtedly an incredibly valuable and accurate source of historical information unknown to us for centuries.
Even the map’s compromised integrity out of fearing offending the political correctness of the
Qianlung emperor is, ironically, a clear proof that it was undoubtedly a 1763 map reworked from a 1418 copy done and submitted to the politically repressive Qing Court in 1763. Although Australia and New Zealand seem in the wrong place in the 1418 map, the outlines of
both countries are indeed unmistakably fairly realistic representation of their geographical shapes.
Above all, the map is a schematic map without lines of longitude and latitude. What actually
concerned the mapmakers is only where they stand in the geographical relationship between one another countries or places, like in the east or west, north or south of one another. As it is not used for the purpose of navigation but only that of demonstrating how far reaching the Chinese
influences were spread to the rest of the world, accuracy in longitude or latitude is simply of little or no concern to them at all. In the 1418 map, however, political symbolism takes precedence
over geographical accuracy. Thus, Borneo, Sumatra and Java all symbolically appear roughly on the same latitudes as Australia and New Zealand in the map. The commentary on the map supposedly drawn from the 1418 source maps in origin has this to say about Australia: “The skin of the aborigine is also black. All of them are naked and wearing bone articles around their waists. Among them there are also tribes of cannibals.”(23) This 1418 map’s remark about cannibalism among some tribes of Australia’s aborigines then is most startling of all because little do we know of this bit of untold Australian history from all historical sources available, Chinese or otherwise. But was it true then?
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According to Brett Green, an Aboriginal Histories Research Officer at Dharmurian Research
Society, the Australian Aboriginal did in fact practice cannibalism. But this was restricted to
spiritual beliefs relating to their five world of existence and that one would assume the best
attributes the person so consumed (other tribal warriors from a battle, women or relatives of good
standing). As a matter of survival in the harsh Australian landscape and its lack of natural food sources for daily mineral requirement etc, they also consumed (excess to tribal number controls),
captured young boys and girls.(24) His description of Australian aboriginal cannibalism is found an exact match of Marco Polo’s hair-raising portrayal of the horrible cannibalism practiced by the inhabitants of Dragonian, “ a kingdom governed by its own prince, and having its peculiar language,” belongs to Minor Java,. According to Marco Polo, the inhabitants killed and cut into pieces their sick relatives whom the magicians diagnosed as incurable and then cooked and consumed it together as a shared meal. And, “if they have it in their power to seize any person who does not belong to their own district, and who can not pay for his ransom, they put him to death and devour him,” says Marco Polo.(25)
It is indeed very doubtful that Marco Polo’s Dragonian is meant to be somewhere in today Sumatra. Because he has emphatically pointed out in his tales that “it is proper to observe that the island (Java the Lesser that is reached by keeping a southerly course 1300 miles away from the island of Java) lies so far to the southward as to render the North Star invisible.” (26). And Samara, where Marco Polo was detained for five months by contrary winds, is also somewhere “the North Star is not visible here, not even the stars that are in the wain.”(27) Even here in the “kingdom” of Samara next to the “kingdom” of Dragonian, he had to build fortification against the attack from the savage natives, “who seek for opportunities of seizing stragglers, putting them to death and eating them.”(28) Clearly, this so-called “kingdom” of cannibals simply can’t be in Sumatra but Australia, because more than half of Sumatra is lying well above the Equator. At the northern tip of Sumatra, Pulau Rondo, for example, the North Star is clearly visible even as high as three fingers and used for guiding Zheng He voyagers heading for Sri Lanka, according to Zheng He Navigation Charts.(29) . Interestingly, the SYQ map, a Chinese pre-Ming bi-hemisphere world atlas in origin indeed, also agrees with Marco Polo in lumping largely the whole of today Indonesia into Major Java and Australia and New Zealand into Minor Java. Thus Marco Polo’s Dragonian can only be situated in somewhere northeast of Australia. However, it has been identified by the British scholar, Phillips G. as the greater Hua Mian or Tattooed Faces Island north of Sumatra in the Zheng He Navigation Charts. But instead, the French scholar P. Pelloit identified the place as Na Gu Er or Nagur. Ever since then, much of the academic community on Zheng He studies has been woefully misled by P. Pelliot to identify the Hua Mian Islands or Tattooed Faces Island as Nagur at today Pedir northeast of Sumatra. (30) But fact is, both Ma Huan and Ming Shi have clearly said that Na Gu Er [that orphan] kingdom is situated west of Sumatra and lands with the mainland join its territory. It is not an island in the sea but “only a mountainous village.” “The land isn’t vast with only a population of no more than a thousand households.”(31) Although the people there also tattooed their faces but its location at the west Sumatra is poles apart from the northeast of Sumatra where the Major and Minor Tattooed Faces Islands are supposed to be by the Zheng He Navigation Charts. Without a doubt, here P. Pelloit has totally mistaken the exact location of the Tattooed Faces Island.
 
(4) Conclusion: the 1418 map charted Australia with the Antarctic
 
Australia is only 400 miles away from Timor after all. So, it came as no surprise that in the 13th and 14th centuries, Australia was already in contacts with the civilizations of Indonesia and China and that Marco Polo (1254-1324) and Wang Da Yuan (1310-?) were already setting foot in and around Darwin and Anthem land of North Australia. Evidence even suggests that there were Arab
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explorations off northern Australia took place long before them. The map of the Sea of Java of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizni 820 CE shows Cape Yorke Peninsula, a “V” shaped Gulf of Carpentaria and a curved Arnhem Land. A later map, that of Abu Isak Al-Farisi Istakhari 934 CE, also includes an outline of the northern coast of Australia.(33) While the Arab Muslims may have charted Northern Australia earlier than the Chinese, they have never charted Australia in entirety, The fact remains that as early as in the early 15th century Zheng He fleets had charted the whole of Australia and New Zealand in the 1418 map and those surviving Zheng He Navigation Charts. While throughout the 15th century Terra Australis remained a concept dominated by speculation based on little more than ancient theories, and the undying, mystic words of Marco Polo (34), the continent was a living reality to the Chinese mariners who must have circumnavigated and charted it in entirety before 1418. It was not until 1642 when a Dutch, Abel Tasman, sailed south of Tasmania and New Holland (Now Australia) that Australia was no longer seen by Europeans as the mystic Southern Continent but really a large island.(35)
But in light of the 1418 map and the existing Zheng He Navigation Charts, the Zheng He mariners, including Arab and Persian descendants must have had circumnavigated and charted the whole of Australia,. Australia was then already mapped as a great continent by their own exploration more than two centuries ahead of Abel Tasman, indeed. Still, before Zheng He Navigation Charts, China knew Australia as Java the Lesser, as did Marco Polo. Even up to the early Ming before Zheng He’s charting of Australia, Australia was already charted as Xiao Chaowa or Java the Minor in Wang Pan’s 1584 first published pre-Ming Chinese world map entitled: Shanhai Yudi Quantu or A General World Map With Foreign mountains and sea

View the maps:

Zheng He’s integrated map of the world, 1418 map

The Jean Rotz map

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