In 1405 the Chinese admiral Zheng He led a fleet of nearly 300 vessels and 27,000 sailors from Nanjing to Sri Lanka. In other voyages, Zheng He reached the Malacca Strait, East Africa and Java. The contrast between the size of the Chinese admiral’s expeditions and the early voyages of Christopher Columbus is striking. When Columbus set sail from Cadiz in 1492, ‘he led just ninety men in three ships’.
