We mapped Zheng He's route on ExploreMap, stop by stop. He commanded the Ming dynasty's treasure fleet — hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of crew — on seven expeditions across the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1433, projecting Ming power and opening trade from China to East Africa a lifetime before Europe's own age of oceanic exploration.
The first voyage sets the pattern: the fleet organizes at Nanjing in July 1405, stages down the Yangtze at Liujiagang, and takes on coastal crew and supplies at Changle in Fujian before striking out across the South China Sea. From Champa on the Vietnamese coast the route runs through Java and Palembang, threads the Strait of Malacca, and calls at Samudera-Pasai on Sumatra's northern tip before crossing the open Indian Ocean to Sri Lanka. Up the Malabar Coast the fleet works port to port — Kollam, Kochi, Calicut — reaching, on this first voyage, its farthest point west before turning home to Nanjing in 1407.
Later voyages push further. The fourth reaches past the Maldives to Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, then down the Arabian coast through Muscat and Aden to Jeddah, gateway to the holy cities, before returning in 1415. The fifth carries the fleet down the Swahili Coast — Mogadishu, Barawa, Malindi — among the farthest confirmed reaches of the treasure ships, home to Nanjing by 1419. Every stop carries its own date and a note on what happened there, the same way a real trip does in ExploreMap — a fifteenth-century itinerary spanning three continents, plotted like any modern trip: a line of places, in order, each with something that happened there.
You can explore the full route, in order, here: Zheng He's Voyages .
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