Book Reviews : Philip Snow, The Star Raft: China's Encounter With Africa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), xxii, 250 pp. Illustrations, Maps. n.p
Abstract
Book ReviewsPhilip Snow, The Star Raft: China's Encounter With Africa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), xxii, 250 pp. Illustrations, Maps. n.p SAGE Publications, Inc.1990DOI: 10.1177/002190969002500315 Lawrence D. Kessler University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC The title of this work comes from the earliest, and easily the most spectacular, of China's encounters with the African continent. Eight decades before Columbus' more famous voyage of discovery, a Chinese admiral navigated through the Indian Ocean an immense armada of over 150 vessels carrying close to 30,000 men. This was not an isolated happenstance but part of a series of expeditions between 1404 and 1433 led by Zheng He, the Grand Eunuch of the Ming court in Beijing. The last three of the voyages reached the east coast of Africa. One chronicler of these grand tours-for that is what they were, launched primarily to garner prestige for a new Chinese dynasty-labelled the flagship a "Star Raft". The image intended, according to the author, was the dazzling brilliance of an imperial ambassador travelling among inferior peoples. Despite an attitude of cultural superiority, Zheng He and his entourage treated Africans with restraint. They neither plundered nor conquered any of the coastal states they