Zheng He's first fleet sailed in 1405, 93 years before Vasco da Gama reached India.
Later Chinese voyages went as far as East Africa.
The events
- Voyages of Zheng He1405–1433 · Nanjing. Admiral Zheng He's fleet of hundreds of ships made seven voyages across the Indian Ocean, reaching Arabia and the East African coast. The expeditions displayed Ming power, but the court halted them after 1433.
- Vasco da Gama reaches India1498 · Calicut. Vasco da Gama's Portuguese squadron sailed around Africa and reached Calicut on India's Malabar Coast. Opening the sea route to India launched direct European maritime trade with Asia and European colonial expansion.
More amazing facts
- 1347 · 1348 Ibn Battuta witnessed the Black Death: in 1348 he was in Damascus, where, he wrote, thousands were dying each day.
- 1377 · 1450 Korean monks printed the Jikji with movable metal type in 1377, some 70 years before Gutenberg's press.
- 1411 · 1429 Rublev's Trinity (1411 or 1425–1427) and Joan of Arc's relief of Orléans (1429) belong to the same generation.
- 1450 · 1564 Ivan Fyodorov's Apostol (1564), the first precisely dated Russian printed book, came out more than a century after Gutenberg's press.
- 1450 Machu Picchu and Gutenberg's press are the same age: around 1450 the Incas were building their mountain estate while Mainz printed its first books.
- 1450 · 1453 When Constantinople fell in 1453, Gutenberg was already printing in Mainz: the last Roman Empire vanished in the first years of the printed book.