If China Kept Her Treasure Fleets: Effects on East Africa?

And supporting the usurper/rightful rulers who get kicked out of Kingdoms that decide to break ties with China such as Ceylon (I do believe).

Yep, the more pragmatic way to deal with rulers of these troublesome states is to pick and support an opposite party backed with as much legitimacy as possible.

It's definitely not a good idea to directly attack these states since it does not guarantee cooperation from the locals and will be seen as foreign intervention.
 
African trade goods to China would include vast quantities of ivory, rhino horn, exotic woods & animals, (castrated) slaves, and very little else. Return goods would be what was already available through existing channels: spices, silk and some porcelain.

Disagree. If that's all they trade there, then it will be a massive money sink and they'll abandon it as in OTL. As was mentioned upthread.

Zheng He's mission was almost certainly more exploration & diplomacy, ie: extracting tribute with a hint of "find out if these stories are true", than trade. That already existed, mainly via Arab & Indian intermediaries. He would also have had the job of 'reminding' the Chinese diaspora that they still owed allegiance to the Emperor.

Direct contact with the West was something China had sought for centuries, & vice versa, so a meeting between the Chinese and Portuguese in East Africa would have been just dandy for them. The Arabs & Indians..... not so much. Once that initial contact was made, there would be very little they could do to stop the Portuguese & Chinese establishing a joint trading colony on , say, Madagascar. A nautical halfway point, so to speak.

I agree for the most part, though I honestly doubt the Chinese would be much interested in founding a colony. Intimidating existing kings is much more their style.
 
Oh YES! I love this subject!

Getting rid of paper currency was a bad idea, but at the time they didn't really know anything about the New World and therefore couldn't predict crazy inflation.

I think if the Ming did start a maritime trade that profited the nation, then we could see Portuguese coming in to the Indian Ocean and meeting the Ming first, thinking everyone was that rich, and either crapping their pants an heading back to Brazil or seeing that as a reason on conquer everything. Also it would expose China to more technologies, and likely stop the isolationism that persisted for centuries.

Imagine, an trading China in the 1400s colonizing Africa after the Portuguese threaten their sources of income!

I forget to add that China will use definitely attacks/encroachment by foreign powers against her vassals as a legitimate reason to attack the foreign powers back; as in OTL.

This will also be a very good incentive for the Ming in this ATL to keep a powerful navy to protect her (overseas) vassals, unlike what happened in OTL when the Ming abandoning/scrapping not only expedition fleets but also her navy.
 
I'm thinking about the commodities that could drive this trade network. It's easy enough to see how Chinese merchants would found the Indian Ocean trade very profitable. They could control the spice trade from Indonesia to the Islamic world. Also if the Yuan era water wheel spinning machines were adapted to spin cotton instead of hemp, there could be a massive rise in cotton demand that can only be met by imports from India.

African commodities beyond ivory, rhino horns and gold are more challenging. Did the Chinese have any demand for diamonds? If not as jewlery, then perhaps for drill bits and saw blades.
 
I'm thinking about the commodities that could drive this trade network. It's easy enough to see how Chinese merchants would found the Indian Ocean trade very profitable. They could control the spice trade from Indonesia to the Islamic world. Also if the Yuan era water wheel spinning machines were adapted to spin cotton instead of hemp, there could be a massive rise in cotton demand that can only be met by imports from India.

African commodities beyond ivory, rhino horns and gold are more challenging. Did the Chinese have any demand for diamonds? If not as jewlery, then perhaps for drill bits and saw blades.

If my ships had remained off East Africa through the late 15th Century, I imagine the Portuguese would have wet their pants when they showed up in those piddly little caravels.
 
After bit of cursory reading I found there's plenty of Kaolin clay in Eritrea, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. The Chinese could build a colony in East Africa to make porcelain for export to the Islamic world and Europe. It would save transport cost shipping it from China. Building such an industry would make the most sense in Eritrea, perhaps with cooperation from the Ethiopians. I could imagine Ming procelain with lion and giraffe motifs.
 
I have a hunch that such expeditions won't necessarily be the work of the Chinese state, but by private trading guilds. The Ming Dynasty was rather close to a laissez-faire free market (save for the salt monopoly), and would be disinclined to overseas empire building.

The guilds would effectively become pirates, and commanding vast resources, could easily match the naval prowess of Portugal or the Netherlands.

It's plausible they would even discover Australia, and convince the Emperor to send all his criminals and undesirables to the faraway desolate land full of savage beasts and hostile barbarians (as they will put it). They would, in time, become spectacularly wealthy by sugar plantations in OTL Queensland.
 
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