IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 214

Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming dynasty sent seven great fleets from China into the Indian Ocean. They were commanded by Zheng He, a court official who had become one of the emperor's most trusted servants. The expeditions carried silk and porcelain as far as the ports of East Africa and brought back envoys, spices and exotic animals. They employed more men than any other maritime venture of the age, and the reasons for launching them, and for abandoning them, have been argued over ever since.

Zheng He was born in 1371 in Yunnan, in the south-west of China, into a Muslim family. His original name was Ma He, and his family claimed descent from a Central Asian official who had served the Mongol rulers. In 1381, when Ming armies conquered Yunnan, the boy was captured, taken north and placed in the household of the prince Zhu Di, who later became the Yongle Emperor.

Like many boys taken in war he had been castrated, and he grew up inside the palace rather than at sea. The surname Zheng was granted to him by the emperor in recognition of his service, and his Muslim background helps to explain the care with which the fleets treated the ports of the Indian Ocean.

Zhu Di took the throne in 1402 after a civil war against his own nephew, and the first fleet sailed only three years later. Several motives have been suggested. The most straightforward is that the emperor wanted his rule acknowledged abroad, and the envoys who returned to Nanjing with the fleet served that purpose. Trade was another, although the court presented the exchange of goods as tribute rather than commerce. A third possibility is that the emperor hoped for news of his nephew, who had vanished during the fighting and had never been confirmed dead. The fleets may also have been intended to secure sea routes that Chinese merchants already used.

The scale of the enterprise was remarkable. According to Chinese records, the first voyage of 1405 involved 62 large ships and 27,800 men, together with smaller craft carrying water, horses and provisions. The Ming navy had dockyards at Nanjing, where excavation has revealed the remains of a slipway. The largest vessels, known in Chinese as treasure ships, are the most disputed element of the story. A history compiled in 1739 gives a length of 44 zhang, well over 100 metres, but many historians regard this as implausible for a wooden hull. What is not disputed is that Chinese shipwrights divided hulls into compartments with watertight bulkheads, a technique that made the ships very hard to sink.

Navigation relied on methods long established in China. The magnetic compass had been used for steering since the eleventh century, and the crews also followed written sailing directions and watched the Pole Star. Pilots were recruited along the Fujian coast, where merchants had traded with South-East Asia for generations. One of the fleet's officers, Ma Huan, a Muslim interpreter, later wrote a detailed account of the countries visited. Other participants produced similar descriptions, and these texts remain among the most valuable sources for the history of the Indian Ocean.

The routes followed existing trade networks. The fleets called at Champa, Java, Palembang and Malacca, crossed the Indian Ocean to Ceylon and to Calicut on the Malabar coast, and reached Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. The later voyages continued along the Arabian peninsula and down the east coast of Africa, to Mogadishu, Mombasa and Malindi. Some of these places had never seen a Chinese fleet, and voyages of the 1420s may have taken ships into the Red Sea.

The expeditions were not entirely peaceful. In 1407 a Chinese force defeated the pirate chief Chen Zuyi, who controlled the approaches to Palembang, and carried him back to the capital for execution. In Ceylon the fleet became caught up in a local struggle and removed a ruler, taking him to China, where he was eventually released. Earlier, in 1409, the Chinese had set up an inscription at Galle, carved in Chinese, Tamil and Persian, which recorded gifts offered at a Buddhist shrine. The stone survives and is now kept in a museum in Colombo.

Outbound cargo included silk, porcelain, iron goods and tea; the fleets returned with pepper, spices, gems, pearls, timber and medicines. Envoys from many of the states visited travelled back to China to present gifts, and the imperial menagerie acquired animals that few Chinese had ever seen. A giraffe sent by the ruler of Bengal reached Nanjing in 1414 and was identified with the qilin, a legendary beast associated with good government. Zebras, ostriches and camels were also brought for the court.

The voyages did not long survive the Yongle Emperor, who died in 1424. His successor ordered a halt, and although a seventh fleet was sent in 1431, the enterprise then ended. Zheng He is believed to have died in 1433, on the return journey, near Calicut. Senior officials opposed further expeditions, arguing that the money would be better spent on canals, on famine relief and on the defence of the northern frontier. The records of the voyages were later allowed to decay, and the long-distance fleets were never revived. Within a century, European ships had entered the Indian Ocean.

Coins are the most abundant of all the objects that survive from the ancient and medieval world. They were produced in enormous quantities and made of metal that resists burial, and they were dropped in the street often enough to supply museums with thousands of examples. The first were struck in western Asia in the seventh century BC from electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver, and the practice spread across the Mediterranean. For historians this abundance is both a gift and a problem: coins are everywhere, but they were made for purposes that have little to do with the questions we want to ask.

Much of what we know comes from hoards. A hoard is a group of coins buried together, usually in a pot or a cloth bag, and never recovered by its owner. People buried money when they feared invasion, theft or disorder, and sometimes as an offering to a deity, never intending to dig it up again. Archaeologists have argued for decades about which explanation fits a particular find, because savings hidden in a crisis tell a different story from a temple deposit assembled over a century. A hoard also dates itself: the newest coin in the group cannot have been minted before its own issue date, so the burial must have happened after that year.

Single finds are more informative than they look. A coin lying in a layer of soil gives that layer a terminus post quem, a date after which it must have formed, and excavators rely on such coins to date walls and graves. The method has limits. Coins can stay in circulation for decades, and an old piece may be kept as a keepsake long after it has ceased to be money, so the gap between minting and loss can be very wide. A coin found in a ditch therefore sets only a boundary.

The metal itself is a record. Until modern times coins were struck from alloys whose composition was decided by the authority that issued them, and a government in financial difficulty could reduce the proportion of silver in its currency while leaving the face value unchanged. The Roman silver coinage of the third century shows the pattern clearly, its silver content falling sharply during a period of inflation. Analysis, however, is not simple. X-ray fluorescence, the most convenient technique, examines only the surface of a coin. Because many ancient pieces were deliberately treated to leave a thin skin of fine silver outside, such a measurement can overstate the purity of the whole; laboratories that need reliable figures remove a small sample from the edge instead.

Designs and inscriptions are the most eloquent part of a coin. A Roman piece might show the emperor's portrait, his titles, the year of his tribunician power, a building he had paid for or the standard of the army that supported him. All of these changed as his position changed. Coins were also the quickest way of announcing a new ruler to people who might never see him, which is why they carry so much official propaganda. Because they name consulships and other annual offices, many issues can be dated to the year, and they have been used to fix the dates of events described by ancient writers.

Coins were made by hand. A blank piece of metal was placed between two engraved dies and struck with a hammer, and each die lasted only until it cracked or wore smooth. Numismatists group coins that share the same die and so reconstruct the order in which an issue was produced. From the number of dies identified they can then estimate how many coins were originally made, since a single die could strike only a limited number of pieces. The estimate rests on assumptions about how long a die survived and what proportion of the original dies is represented among the coins that happen to survive.

Some coinages are unusually informative. Islamic coins of the classical period usually carry the name of the mint and the year of issue, which makes them a precise chronological tool for archaeologists working from Spain to Central Asia. Chinese coins were cast rather than struck, and they carry the reign title of the emperor in whose time they were made. A single find can therefore place a shipwreck or a hoard within a known reign.

Copies and forgeries are evidence in their own right. In the third century, when official coin was scarce in parts of the Roman empire, workshops produced imitations of imperial pieces that are now known as barbarous radiates. These were not necessarily the work of criminals; they were a response to a shortage of small change. Studying them shows how far the use of money reached, and how quickly inscriptions and designs were misunderstood far from the centre of power.

The limitations of the evidence are equally important. Coins record only those transactions in which money changed hands, so a society that did not use coinage leaves no such trace. Within monetary societies the pattern of survival is uneven. Small change was dropped and lost in large quantities, whereas gold and silver pieces were carefully hoarded and normally recovered by their owners, which makes the precious metals look rarer in the ground than they were. Museum collections, finally, have mostly been built from the gifts of wealthy collectors, and they reflect the tastes of those collectors at least as much as the daily life of a population.

National archives are among the least visible of a state's institutions and among the most important. They hold the minutes of governments, the records of courts and the papers of families who deposited them for safekeeping. Most of this material sits on shelves that few people visit, and a researcher who needs it may have to travel across the world. Digitisation appears to offer an obvious remedy, and campaigners increasingly demand that archives be fully digitised and free to use. The principle is sound, but the words 'fully' and 'free' each conceal a difficulty.

The achievements of the past twenty years should not be underestimated. Census returns, wills, passenger lists and military service records can now be searched by name from a kitchen table. An index lets a beginner find in minutes a document that once took days of work with a paper catalogue. Family historians, whose research has been transformed by searchable name indexes, are now the most numerous users of many archives. For academic researchers the change has been less uniform: some fields have been revolutionised, others barely touched.

The scale of what remains is the first difficulty. No national archive has digitised more than a small fraction of its holdings, and the fraction online is often far smaller than the public assumes. Scanning is the least of the costs: documents must be located, checked, described and indexed, and fragile items conserved before they can be handled. Most of the world's archival paper has never been photographed, and much of it never will be. A demand for complete digitisation is, in practice, a demand that no institution can meet.

The second difficulty concerns money. Public records were created by officials paid from taxation, and many people argue that citizens should not pay twice to read what their own money produced. An archive, on this view, resembles a public library, open without charge because an educated public is a public good. Free access also increases use, and use builds the political support on which archives depend. Set against this is an awkward fact: someone must pay for the scanners, the staff and the storage, and in most countries that money has not come from government.

Instead it has come from commerce. Several national archives have signed agreements with genealogy companies. The company digitises a series at its own expense and then sells access to it for a fixed term; after that the images usually appear free on the archive's own website. The arrangement has benefits, since records that would otherwise have waited decades are now indexed. But it shapes what is available. Companies concentrate on material that will attract subscribers, such as censuses, wills and service records, while routine departmental correspondence stays in its boxes. Officials who control public spending ask why taxpayers should subsidise the leisure of people tracing their ancestors.

The consequence is a quiet distortion of research. Academic historians have begun to warn that the questions their subject asks are increasingly shaped by what happens to be online. A topic that interests many people accumulates a rich digital record, while one that interests few does not. People who left wills, served in armies or owned property are documented in detail, whereas the poor appear mainly in registers of crime or poor relief.

Digitisation is often described as preservation, and up to a point it is. Every consultation of a fragile volume damages it slightly, and a reader who works from a screen does not turn its pages. But a digital copy is not a substitute for the object. Archivists point out that a scan cannot show the watermark that dates a sheet of paper, the way a volume was bound, or the holes left by an earlier stitching. Digital storage is not free either, since every file has to be duplicated, verified and moved to newer formats for as long as the collection is kept.

Disaster provides the strongest argument for copying. In 1922, during the civil war in Ireland, the Public Record Office in Dublin was destroyed by fire, and centuries of Irish administrative records went with it. In 1973 a fire at a military records centre in St Louis, Missouri, destroyed millions of United States service files. Copies held elsewhere reduce the risk, and digital copies can be duplicated at almost no cost. That insurance works only if the copies are genuinely dispersed.

Rights and privacy complicate the picture. Archives hold files about living people as well as the dead: medical records, criminal cases, adoption files, and the papers of donors who gave them on condition that access be restricted. Census returns are normally closed for many decades. A demand for immediate access to everything runs against obligations of confidentiality that no archive can simply abandon, and against the reasonable expectations of the families named in its files.

Where does that leave the argument? The case for public funding of digitisation seems to me strong, on the same grounds that justify free public libraries, and access to public records should be free at the point of use, with charges for copying rather than for looking. But 'fully digitised' is a slogan rather than a policy. Archives should set priorities: the documents most at risk, the series most used, and the records that would otherwise remain invisible. Commercial partners are acceptable if their licences are non-exclusive and their choices are balanced by publicly funded work. Archives should also be honest about what is not online.