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Ying-Yai Sheng-Lang: Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores [1433]

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Over the last 600 years, much has been written about Zheng He's voyages to the Indian Ocean. Among the recent issues Louise Levathes' When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433 is probably the best-known journalistic-type account, although for someone with a more serious interest in these events I'd rather recommend the more scholarly book by Edward L. Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405-1433. And I am not even talking about Gavin Menzies' embarrassment of a book (1421).

As good as Dreyer's book is, and as entertaining as Levathes' book may be, they both make clear that they are just a summary of a rather more extensive material that exists. And much of that material can be found in this edition of "Ying-yai Sheng-lan: Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores ", produced by J.V.G.Mills in 1970.

This volume is, actually, is a "two in one" product, as it includes annotated translation of two important primary sources.

The first one is the actual "Ying-yai Sheng-lan", which is one of the very few known books written by an actual participant of Zheng He's voyages. Its author, Ma Huan, was an Arabic (or Persian?) translator (and/or interpreter?) on several of Zhen He's expeditions, and he gave a first-hand account of what the Chinese mariners saw in the countries of Indian Ocean, from Thailand to Arabia. Although apparently never well known in either Ming or Qing China, several editions of his work, corrupted in various ways, survived to the present day. Feng Chengjun produced a "restored" text based on three of them, and J.V.G. Mills prepared an English translation, with a lot of introductory and annotating material.

The second source is so called "Mao Kun map", which is so called because it is thought by some researchers to have been passed by the 16th-century bibliophile Mao Kun to his grandson, Mao Yuanyi, who later included it into a Chinese military encyclopedia, "Wubei Zhi". The map is absolutely unique in that it is apparently the only known Chinese map that shows the sea routes from Nanjing to today's Indonesia and then all the way to Africa, which match pretty well to what we know about Zheng He's expeditions from Ma Huan and other sources. Since hardly any Chinese ships travelled west of Malacca after the Zheng He's era, it stands to reason that Mao Kun map indeed dates from the Zheng He era.

From my point of view, the main shortcoming of J.V.G. Mills' book is that he does not reproduce the entire Mao Kun map (which, incidentally, was over 5 m long originally, and takes some 40 pages in "Wubei Zhi"). But he shows some samples, and he gives a summary of the content of each of its page. A major part of his work is an index in which he has 500+ place names, both from Mao Kun map and from Ma Huan's book (and perhaps from other Zheng He era sources), interpreted, as much as it is possible, in terms of modern geography; he also shows all those places on a modern map. In a sense, much of his book is dedicated to arguing what actual modern place name corresponds to one or another name from the Mao Kun map or Ma Huan; e.g., he argues that the map's "Malindi" (which would be in today's Kenya) may actually be the Mozambique Island, in the country of the same name. I have to admit that reading all this text straight would be rather boring (I certainly have not tried), but it is quite useful as a resource in trying to better understand one point or another in Dreyer or Levathes.

Mills was 83 when this book appeared. However, he lived to be 100, and he managed to also prepare a draft translation of the book by another Zheng He's crew member, Fei Xin. That was finalized by Roderich Ptak, and appeared in 1996 as "Hsing-ch'a-sheng-lan: the overall survey of the star raft".