Zheng He & Islam Is SouthEast Asia

In Malacca Zheng He built granaries, warehouses and a stockade, and most probably he left behind many of his Muslim crews. Much of the information on Zheng He's voyages was compiled by Ma Huan, also Muslim, who accompanied Zheng He on several of his inspection tours and served as his chronicler/interpreter. Zheng He had many Muslim Eunuchs as his companions. At the time when his fleet first arrived in Malacca, there were already Chinese of the 'Muslim' faith living there. At places they went, they frequented mosques, actively propagated the Islamic faith, established Chinese Muslim communities and built mosques.

Zheng He built Chinese Muslim communities first in Palembang, then in San Fa, subsequently he founded similar communities along the shores of Java, the Malay Peninsula and the Philippines.

In 1430, Zheng He had already successfully established the foundations of the Hui religion Islam. After his death in 1434, Hajji Yan Ying Yu became the force behind the Chinese Muslim community, and he delegated a few local Chinese as leaders, such as trader Sun Long from Semarang, Peng Rui He and Hajji Peng De Qin. Sun Long's adopted son Chen Wen, also named Radin Pada is the son of King Majapahit and his Chinese wife. After Zheng He's death, Chinese naval expeditions were suspended.

When Melaka was successively colonised by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and later the British, Chinese were discouraged from converting to Islam. Many of the Chinese Muslim mosques became San Bao Chinese temples commemorating Zheng He. After a lapse of 600 years, the influence of Chinese Muslims in Malacca declined to almost nil. In many ways, Zheng He can be considered a major founder of the present community of Chinese Indonesians.

According to the Malaysian history, Sultan Mansur Shah (ruled 1459–1477) dispatched Tun Perpatih Putih as his envoy to China and carried a letter from the Sultan to the Ming Emperor. Tun Perpatih succeeded in impressing the Emperor of Ming with the fame and grandeur of Sultan Mansur Shah. In the year 1459, a princess Hang Li Po (or Hang Liu), was sent by the emperor of Ming to marry Malacca Sultan Mansur Shah (ruled 1459–1477). The princess came with her entourage 500 male servants and a few hundred handmaidens. They eventually settled in Bukit Cina, Malacca. The descendants of these people, from mixed marriages with the local natives, are known today as Peranakan: Baba (the male title) and Nyonya(the female title).

In Malaysia today, many people believe it was Admiral Zheng He who sent princess Hang Li Po to Malacca in year 1459. However there is no record of Hang Li Po (or Hang Liu) in Ming documents, she is known only from Malacca folklore. Some of the Chinese Muslims were soldiers and so they served as warrior and bodyguard to protect the Sultanate of Malacca.

On his return trip from China, Parameswara was so impressed by Zheng He that he converted to Islam and adopted the name Sultan Iskandar Shah. Malacca prospered under his leadership and became the half-way house, an entreport, for trade between India and China.

His Expeditions

Between 1405 and 1433, the Ming government sponsored a series of seven naval expeditions. Emperor Yongle designed them to establish a Chinese presence, impose imperial control over trade, and impress foreign peoples in the Indian Ocean basin.

Zheng He was placed as the admiral in control of the huge fleet and armed forces that undertook these expeditions. Zheng He's first voyage consisted of a fleet of perhaps 300 ships, holding almost 28,000 crewmen. These were probably mainly large six-masted ships - it is now thought that the large and flat nine-masted "treasure ships" were probably river ships used by the Emperor.

On the first three voyages, Zheng He visited Southeast Asia, India, and Ceylon, today known as Sri Lanka. The fourth expedition went to the Persian Gulf and Arabia, and later expeditions ventured down the east African coast, as far as Malindi in what is now Kenya. Unspecified officials have reportedly endorsed the theory, so far unproven, that one of Zheng He's ships foundered on the rocks near Lamu island, off the coast of today's Kenya, with survivors swimming ashore, marrying locals and creating a family of Chinese-Africans that is now being reunited with the Chinese motherland.

Throughout his travels, Zheng He liberally dispensed Chinese gifts of silk, porcelain, and other goods. In return, he received presents from his hosts, including African zebras and giraffes that ended their days in the Ming imperial zoo. Zheng He and his company paid respects to local deities and customs.

Zheng He generally sought to attain his goals through diplomacy, and his large army awed most enemies into submission. He ruthlessly suppressed pirates who had long plagued Chinese and southeast Asian waters. From his fourth voyage, he brought envoys from thirty states who traveled to China and paid their respects at the Ming court.

In 1424, the Yongle Emperor died. His successor, the Hongxi Emperor, decided to curb the influence at court. Zheng He made one more voyage under the Xuande Emperor, but after that Chinese treasure ship fleets ended. Zheng He died during the treasure fleet's last voyage. Although he has a tomb in China, it is empty.

Zheng He, on his seven voyages, successfully relocated large numbers of Chinese Muslims to Malacca, Palembang, Surabaya and other places and Malacca became the center of Islamic learning and also a large international Islamic trade center of the southern seas.

His missions showed impressive demonstrations of organizational capability and technological might, but did not lead to significant trade, since Zheng He was an admiral and an official, not a merchant. Chinese merchants continued to trade in Japan and Southeast Asia, but Imperial officials gave up any plans to maintain a Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean and even destroyed most of the nautical charts that Zheng He had carefully prepared.

His Life

Zheng He was born in 1371 in the Hui ethnic group and the Muslim faith in modern-day Yunnan Province. He served as a close confidant of the Yongle Emperor of China, the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty. Zheng He's ancestors include a general for Genghis Khan.

In the History of Ming, Zheng He was originally named Ma Sanbao, and came from Kunyang, present day Jinning, Yunnan Province. Zheng He belonged to the Semu caste which practiced Islam and were comprised of diverse Turco-Persian groups who entered China. He was a sixth generation descendant of Sayyid Ajjal Shams al-Din Omar, a famous Khwarezmian Yuan governor of Yunnan Province from Bukhara in modern day Uzbekistan. His family name "Ma" came from Shams al-Din's fifth son Masuh. Both his father Mir Tekin and grandfather Charameddin had traveled on the hajj to Mecca. Their travels contributed much to the Zheng He’s education.

In 1381, following the fall of the Yuan Dynasty, a Mingyuo's fought Ma Sanboa army was dispatched to Yunnan to put down the Mongol rebel Basalawarmi. Zheng He, then only a young boy of eleven years, was taken captive by that army and castrated, thus becoming a eunuch. He became a servant at the Imperial court.

The name was given by the Yongle emperor for meritorious service in his coup against the Jianwen Emperor. He studied at Nanjing Taixue, The Imperial Central College. Zheng He travelled to Mecca but did not perform the pilgrimage itself.

At the beginning of the 1380s, his tomb was renovated in a more Islamic style, although he himself was buried at sea. The government of the People's Republic of China uses him as a model to integrate the Muslim minority into the Chinese nation.

Zheng He was a living example of religious tolerance. He set up the Galle Trilingual Inscription around 1410 in Sri Lanka and in around 1431, he set up a commemorative pillar at the temple of the Taoist goddess Tian Fei, the Celestial Spouse, in Fujian province, to whom he and his sailors prayed for safety at sea. Visitors to the Jinghaisi are reminded of the donations Zheng He made to this non-Muslim area.