Sublime

K’ang-hsi had restored Peking’s authority in mainland East Asia. This great triumph, followed up by the Yung-cheng (r. 1723–35) and Ch’ien-lung (r. 1735–96) emperors, was the vital geopolitical precondition for the domestic achievements of Ch’ing rule and, in the longer term, for its tenacious resistance to European diplomatic and commercial demand

Ming rule represented a vehement reaction against what was seen by its original supporters as the corruption, oppression and overtaxation of the Mongol Yuan.

However, the most famous of the Ming’s public-relations voyages were the seven expeditions across the Indian Ocean, chiefly led by the admiral Zheng He (1371–1433). The Mongol era had left the Chinese more aware of the extent of the world that was not under direct suzerainty, and Zheng’s mission was to display Chinese pomp and military might as far

Later Ming rulers thus chose to uphold China’s place in East Asia by stressing its cultural unity and rejecting foreign commercial relations. That meant a deliberate withdrawal from Inner Asian politics, in which the Yuan had exerted a definite influence.

contemporaneous with the triumphs of Vasco da Gama or Albuquerque in the Indian Ocean, or of Cortés and Pizarro in the Americas, were the consolidation of Ming absolutism, the emergence of a new world power in the Ottoman Empire, the reunion of Iran under the Safavids, the rapid expansion of Islam into South East Asia, and the creation of a vast ne

the early fifteenth century, China’s navigational capacity was second to none in the world. The famed seven voyages of Admiral Zheng He during the early Ming Dynasty, in the first three decades of the fifteenth century, are justly remembered hundreds of years later as remarkable naval accomplishments of China.1 These voyages of enormous fleets sail

The Mongol Empire began to unravel in the fourteenth century from internal dissension, disintegrating into a number of separate khanates. Those, in turn, soon collapsed. China was recaptured by Han rulers in 1378, ending a century of Mongol rule and ushering in the Ming Dynasty. Other Mongol khanates lasted longer, but generally were overtaken by l