Kevin: Before the episode begins, a quick reminder. Control Z Rewritten has a Patreon. Paid subscribers get fun benefits like the full written script of every episode, a soon-to-launch bonus series where I talk about alternate history that other people have made, and a vote on which decision gets undone next. Go to patreon.com slash CtrlZ Rewritten, all one word. And if that's not for you, listening and telling your friends about the show does much more for it than you'd think. Thanks so much, and let's get started. July twenty seventh, fourteen thirty three. The palace in Beijing, in a courtyard where the emperor is handing robes and paper money to the officers of a fleet. They've been gone two and a half years. They sailed to Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, to Aden at the mouth of the Red Sea, and a party of seven went on to Mecca aboard a local ship and came back a year later. The man who commanded them for 28 years, an admiral named Jung Hu, is not among them. He died at Calicut on the coast of India in the spring. Emperor Shwendu is 34. He's the grandson of the man who built this fleet, and three years ago, he overruled his own ministers to send it out one last time. The fleet came home with 2,000 tons of pepper and sap and wood, and it all belongs to the emperor. The ministers who actually paid for the ships will get none of it. Three years from now, with the fleet gone, they'll go ahead and ask for the cargo. The ministers want the ships docked for good. The Emperor has two orders in front of him waiting for his signature. Send the fleet back out this winter as a permanent part of the government with its own budget, or send a few ships to carry the foreign envoys back to their own countries and leave the rest at anchor for the ministers to break up. He signs the second one. In 18 months, he'll be dead at 35, and within a year of that, The men running the government for his eight-year-old son will ban the building of seagoing ships. But what if he signs the first one? What if the biggest Navy on Earth becomes a permanent part of the Chinese government with the budget that no minister can cut? Let's hit Control Z. Welcome to Control Z Rewritten, the podcast where I take the biggest decisions in history, real 50 50 calls, and ask what happens if they go the other way. One decision you Try it the other way and see what changes. Zheng Hu is 10 years old in 1381 when a Ming army takes his home province of Yunnan in the far southwest of China. His family is Muslim. His father made the pilgrimage to Mecca. The soldiers castrate the boy and send him to serve a prince named Zhu Di. By his 30s, he's commanding troops in the civil war that puts that prince on the throne in 1402. Chinese emperors go by the name of their reign, so from here on Zhu Di is known as Emperor Yong Lu. The new emperor gives Hu a surname, Jung, in 1404 and puts him in charge of building a seagoing fleet. The dynasty's official history counts over 27,000 men and 62 treasure ships on the first voyage of 1405, in a fleet of about 250 vessels. Modern naval historians who've measured the excavated shipyard basin at Nanjing. Say some of the shipholes were as large as 250 feet, they were somewhere between 400 and 1200 tons, and most importantly, that nothing in Europe at the time comes close. For reference, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama's flagship 90 years later is 178 tons. So these are four times as big or even larger. The popular version of these voyages is peaceful. Silk and porcelain go out, and giraffes and ambassadors come back. But the records read differently. Historian Jeff Wade, who translated the court's own daily register, counts more than 20,000 soldiers on each voyage, armed with the best firearms then in existence. His word for the ships is gunboats. The initial fleet's first fight is with the Chinese pirate. A man named Chen Zu Yi runs a gang out of Sumatra, robbing the merchants who pass through the strait. When the fleet arrives, he offers to surrender and And then plans a night attack on the ships. Zheng Hu is ready for him. The fight ends with 10 pirate ships burned, more than 5,000 of Chen's men dead, and Chen himself sailing back to China in chains, where the emperor then has him beheaded in the Nanjing market. The next war comes four years later in Ceylon, where the king sends 50,000 men to rob the ships while the crews are ashore and has trees cut down across the road back to the harbor. Zhang Hu guesses that with the army out on the coast, the capital is empty. So he takes 2,000 men over a back road, storms the royal city, and captures the king and his whole family, who sail to China as prisoners. The emperor pardons them and then installs a new king. Then, back in Sumatra, a pretender named Sikandar, the dead king's younger brother, attacks the fleet because the envoys handed out gifts to everyone but him. Zheng Hu chases him across the island, catches him with his wife and children at Lambri, and ships him home to the capital, where the emperor has him executed. The fleet also turns a small port into a kingdom. Malacca, on the strait between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, is a young trading town ruled by a prince on the run when the Ming arrived, and Siam, the bigger power up the coast, treats it as property. Emperor Yung Liu names the prince a king. And when Siam seizes the seals of office that come with the title, the emperor writes to Siam's ruler directly and orders him to give them back and leave his neighbor alone. The king of Malacca answers the favor by sailing to China himself with five hundred and forty people, where the emperor throws him a banquet in person at the palace gate and sends him home with gold embroidered robes and silver tableware. The Chinese build a depot at Malacca, a warehouse with a garrison attached. And every fleet after that stops there on the way to India and beyond. Over seven voyages, the ships reach Hormuz, Aden, Mogadishu, and Malindi on the Kenyan coast. One of them comes home with a giraffe, which is walked through the palace gates in Beijing as a gift to the emperor. But back in China, there's a fight over the money. Yung Lu runs the fleet as his own business. The trade income goes to his private account, managed by Eunuchs. And the ministries pay for the timber and the shipyards on the Yangtze River. The Minister of Revenue, Xia Zhuenji, opposes both the voyages and the Mongol wars. So Yang Lu has him imprisoned in the early 1420s. Emperor Yung Liu dies in August of 1424 during a campaign against the Mongols. His son takes the throne on September 7th, releases Xia Zhuanji the next day. And in his first edict as emperor, he writes one line about the fleet. The treasure ship voyages to the various foreign countries are to cease. Any ships waiting at Fujin are to come home to Nanjing. That emperor lasts nine months. His son, Xuendu, revives the program in 1430 with an order telling the countries of the Western Ocean that a new emperor sits on the throne. The seventh voyage sails in January 1431 under Zheng Hu and a eunuch named Wang Jing Hong, his second in command on every expedition. This is the voyage from the beginning of the show. Zheng Hu dies at Calicut, and Wang Jing Hong brings the fleet home. Emperor Xuen Du sends him out once more in fourteen thirty four on a short run to Sumatra to return foreign envoys, but he drowns in a shipwreck on the way at the age of seventy eight. Schuendu dies on january thirty first, fourteen thirty five, and his heir is only eight years old. The ministers charged with running the government for the boy stop any new construction of sea going vessels. They also break up or refit the ones at anchor, dissolve the fleet's offices, and they tell foreign envoys who want to go home to change ships at Malacca. The next year, the same ministers put in their request for the pepper, all 2,000 tons of it. for the treasury in Beijing. When the Emperor turns 21, he leads the army against the Mongols in person. They march in August of 1449 and return within three weeks. On the way home, the Mongols catch them at a post station called Tumu, with no water and cavalry on every side. Roughly half the soldiers die there, but the emperor is taken alive. Back in the capital, a minister named Yu Chin puts the emperor's brother on the throne, And mans the walls of Beijing with 220,000 soldiers. The Mongol leader arrives with the captive emperor, discovers that he's worth nothing now that there's a new emperor, and then goes home within a few days. The captured emperor comes back a year later to a court that has no use for him anymore. And for the next 200 years, the empire spends its money on securing the northern frontier, specifically to fight back the Mongols. Sometime in the 1460s, An official at the Ministry of War named Liu Dashia pulls the fleet's records from the archive and physically destroys them. He writes that the expeditions wasted hundreds of thousands in money and grain. He laments that the dead numbered in the tens of thousands, and says that he destroyed the records so that nobody could ever try it again. And here is where we press Ctrl Z. It's January of 1434, and Emperor Xuindu signs the other order. The fleet becomes a permanent part of the government, sailing every three years, paid for by the pepper. The order splits every pound that comes off the ships between the palace and the ministry of revenue. In the real timeline, the ministers ended the voyages because they paid for them and the emperor kept the proceeds. Giving them a share makes the fleet an investment rather than a tax. The three grand secretaries, the senior officials who run the day-to-day government for the emperor, and all happen to be named Yang, read the order in the spring and begin implementation. By autumn, the Ministry of Revenue is counting pepper the way it counts the grain that comes in as tax. Wang Jinghong sails in December 1434 from Changlu, a harbor in Fujin, where the fleet waits for the winter wind that blows toward the south. There's a temple to the sea goddess above the anchorage. And inside it stands a stone tablet he and Zheng Hu set up three years earlier, listing every voyage and every country. He's seventy eight years old, with more than 100 ships and about 27,000 men, and he sailed on every one of the seven voyages before this one. One of his squadron commanders, Hong Bo, takes twenty ships west to Aden and up the Red Sea to Jeddah, the port of Mecca. where seven Chinese sailors had walked through the gates two years before as guests on a local vessel. Hang Bao arrives with a letter from the emperor announcing that Chinese ships will arrive every three years on schedule. Shuendu dies on January 31, 1435, at 35 years old, and his eight year old son takes the throne. The ministers who govern for the boy now have a reason to keep the fleet. The ministry's half of the pepper is paying salaries in Beijing, And repairs on the Grand Canal, the 1100-mile waterway that carries grain from the south up to the capital. The officials who would have broken up the ships are now the ones spending the money. So the fleet sails again every three years. The depots change first. At Malacca, the warehouse the fleet has used since the first voyages gets a wall and 2,000 soldiers on permanent station. It also gets a Chinese magistrate. An official with the power to judge cases and collect duties. The same happens at Semudera on the northern tip of Sumatra. New depots go up at Calicut and Hormuz, and a third at Aden. The Ming dynasty sends customs officers rather than settlers. The local rulers keep their thrones and their taxes, and every three years when the fleet comes through, they simply pay tribute to the emperor. The Sultan of Malacca gains the most. Under a Ming garrison, His port is the safest harbor between India and China, and by the fourteen sixties it's the largest in Asia. Ships from India unload at the same wharves as ships from Java to the south, the Ryuku Islands between China and Japan, and from Arabia. Every cargo that goes through the strait carries a Chinese magistrate's stamp. In the summer of fourteen forty nine, the young emperor rides out against the Mongols and comes back a prisoner, and Yu Qin holds Beijing with 220,000 men. In this timeline, he pays them partly out of the pepper account, and the court that installs the emperor's brother confirms in 1450 that the West Ocean fleet, the ships that sail to India and beyond, is permanent on the grounds that it's the one branch of government that comes home with money. By the time the Portuguese leave Lisbon, China has run the Indian Ocean from Malacca for sixty years. The Mamluk Sultans who rule Egypt buy their pepper from the Chinese trade agents at Jeddah. Venice buys it from the Mamluks at Alexandria and sells it to Europe at a price the Chinese set. Every ship between Africa and Sumatra sails on a Chinese pass, a paper permit stamped by a magistrate. And in the summer of 1497, four ships sail out of the Tagus River in Lisbon, with 170 men aboard to find exactly where the pepper comes from. Vashko da Gama drops anchor off Calicut on May 20, 1498, 10 months after leaving Lisbon. He found it by using a navigator he picked up on the coast of Kenya to show him the way across. Calicut belongs to a Hindu king the Portuguese call the Zamarin, and two of his officials run its pepper trade and set the prices. In this timeline, a third man sits with them at the customs house, a Chinese trade agent with an official seal. He has spent his entire career pricing pepper for the fleet, and he's there when the Portuguese carry their gifts up from the beach. He watches the Zamarin officials unwrap cloaks of scarlet cloth, hats, branches of coral, brass basins, sugar, oil, and even a cask of honey. The officials call the gifts trivial, and the agent writes down what the strangers brought, the price they offered for the pepper, and how many guns their ships carried. De Gama sails for home at the end of August with a small cargo of spices, but no treaty. Scurvy kills half his men on the way, and he burns one of his four ships because he can no longer crew it. He reaches Lisbon in the summer of 1499 with 55 of the 170 men who left with him, and the spices in his hold convince the king to send more ships. King Manuel Since 13 the next spring under Pedro Alvarez Cabral with 1,500 men and orders to open a trading post at Calicut. Cabral gets his post in September 1500 and it lasts about three months. In December, a crowd storms it and kills the Portuguese inside, somewhere between 53 and 70 men. And then Cabral turns his cannons on the town. He bombards the town for five days straight. About six hundred people die before he sails south to Cochin, a rival port, and buys his pepper there. The Chinese commander at Calicut watches the bombardment from the depot wall with his garrison drawn up behind him. When the guns stop, he puts the Zamarin envoy on the fastest ship in the harbor and sends him to Beijing. The envoy carries a list of the dead and one request that the Ming do for Calicut what they did for Malacca when Siam took its seals. The request takes months to reach the capital and years to get an answer, because the fleet only sails every three years. The envoy from Calicut spends two winters in Beijing. When the fleet finally sails, it carries him home along with a squadron under orders to find the Portuguese. They find them at Diu, a harbor on the coast of western India, on february third, fifteen ⁓ nine. Portugal's governor in the East, Francisco de La Meda. Has brought 18 ships to destroy a fleet the Sultan of Egypt sent to drive him out of India. Almeida is nearly 60, and his son is dead, killed by that same Egyptian fleet the year before. He has refused to hand his office to his successor until he has avenged him. When his ships close on the Egyptian line, forty Chinese warships come out from behind it with cannons along their rails and 8,000 soldiers aboard. And Almeida dies on the deck of his flagship before noon. His successor, Afonso de Albuquerque, takes command of what's left. Albuquerque has a plan for Asia. If he can hold three ports, Goa in India, Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, and Malacca, every ship in the Indian Ocean would need Portugal's permission to sail. He sails for Malacca in the summer of 1511 with 16 ships and 1,500 men. And he finds a Ming garrison of 2,000 men behind a wall, with the fleet home in India and anchored across the harbor. His ships burn in the strait. The garrison pulls forty-two men off the wrecks and executes twenty-three of them as pirates, the sentence given to any foreigner who fires on a port under their protection, and Albuquerque is among the dead. The news reaches Lisbon the next year. These are the days before the Internet. King Manuel has lost two governors and most of the men he sent east, and he only has a few cargoes of pepper to show for it. So he stops sending fleets. He spends the money on Brazil instead, where his crews are already cutting a red dye wood Cabral found along the coast, and on the fortresses Portugal already holds in Morocco. The pepper keeps coming to Europe up the Red Sea and through Cairo. When the Ottoman Turks under Sultan Salim conquer Egypt in 1517, they inherit that trade, and the Sultan's new governor at Jeddah walks across the harbor and signs a trade agreement with the Chinese agent there. Venice keeps its warehouses at Alexandria, Egypt's port on the Mediterranean, and goes on selling pepper to the rest of Europe at whatever price Malacca sets. Then, in 1522, a single battered Spanish ship crosses the Indian Ocean. From the east. She's the Victoria, the last of the five ships Ferdinand Magellan took west from Spain three years earlier, and she has eighteen starving men aboard and the first trip around the world almost complete. A Ming patrol stops them off Timor, an island at the eastern end of what is now Indonesia. The captain of the patrol goes through the ship's hold, finds clothes and not much else, writes the captain a pass, and lets them go. This is the last European warship the fleet will see for the rest of the century. Two years after Malacca, at the Emperor's Foundry, Chinese gunsmiths finished their first copies of the small Portuguese cannon that loads from the back instead of the muzzle, taken from Albuquerque's wrecks. From then on, the only Portuguese thing left in Asia is a gun design, and the Chinese are now casting it themselves. The Spanish come from the other direction. The man who finds his way across the Pacific is a monk. Andres de Urdaneta sailed to the Spice Islands in what is now Indonesia as a young soldier and spent years stranded there before coming home to take holy orders. When the Spanish crown decides to hold the Philippines, it needs someone who can get a ship back to Mexico because every crew that has tried has failed, so the king pulls the monk out of his monastery. Andres has a theory. The Philippines sit on the far side of the Pacific from Mexico. If you try to sail straight east from there, the wind pushes you back, because down near the equator, it blows from east to west. Farther north, it does the opposite. Up around the latitude of San Francisco, the wind blows west to east toward what is now the United States of America. So his plan is simple. Go north first, then let the wind do the rest. In the summer of 1565, he tries it on a ship called the San Pedro with 200 men. They sail north from the Philippines for weeks until they're as far north as San Francisco. Then they turn east and the wind carries them across the entire ocean. They reach land on the coast of Northern California in the autumn. And from there, they turn south and follow the coast all the way down to Acapulco and Mexico. And they arrive in October, four months after leaving, though only 18 men are still strong enough to do any work. For the next 250 years, every ship that follows that route will see California before it sees Mexico. Six years later, the Spanish build a walled town called Manila on a bay where Chinese trading ships have gone for generations. A few hundred Spaniards hold it. Three years after that, a Chinese pirate named Lima Hong comes for it with 62 ships and 3,000 men, including 400 Japanese mercenaries. He fails twice at the walls and retreats up the coast to dig in. The next spring, a Ming envoy named Wang Wang Gao, an official the court sends abroad, arrives in Manila hunting the pirate. The envoy brings the Ming's 120-ship Eastern Fleet with him. It takes Limahong out of his fort in about a week. Then Wang Wangao pays a visit to the Spanish governor, Francisco de Sande, and tells him some history. The rulers of these islands have sent tribute to the Ming since the reign of Yong Lu. The king of Sulu at the southern end of the Philippines died a guest of that court in fourteen seventeen and lies in a tomb that emperor built him. The fleet, he says, is in Manila to stay. Sunday looks at his few hundred soldiers and then at the ships in the bay. He makes the decision to withdraw to Cebu, an island in the middle of the Philippines, where With a Chinese pass that lets his ships trade at Manila under the magistrate's stamp. Spain keeps a presence in the islands, but it's reduced to that of a customer. The Ming wants silver, and silver is in Mexico. Roughly a third of all the silver mined in Mexico and Bolivia between 1500 and 1800 ends up in China. Fewer than a third of the men on a Spanish galleon are Spaniards, with the rest being Filipino and Chinese sailors. Who have made the crossing in both directions. Within three years, the Ming have bought Andrés Uraneta's route from them. A ship from the Ming's eastern fleet leaves Manila in July of 1584 with a Filipino sailor on board who's crossed to Mexico twice for the Spanish. The captain does what the Spanish do. He sails up the Pacific until he's as far north as San Francisco, then turns east and lets the wind push him across. Four months out, the lookout sees the coast of California. And the ship follows that shore south past the Channel Islands until it reaches Acapulco. The Viceroy, the King of Spain's governor in Mexico, sends officers down to the harbor with orders that nothing comes off that ship. The merchants of Mexico City have been buying Chinese silk from the Spanish for twenty years, and they know what's on board. So they make the decision to row out that night and buy the cargo anyway. The captain sails home with Mexican silver and a complaint. His crew spent four months at sea with nowhere to refill their drinking water before going south. So the fleet builds a place. Four years after that first crossing, a magistrate, an official who runs a port for the court, lands on Monterey Bay on the central California coast with 300 soldiers and a crew of carpenters. They put up a customs house where officials tax the goods coming through, and a yard to repair ships. The Ohlone villages around the bay are trading food and hides to the newcomers before the first winter even hits. Every autumn the ships coming down the coast from Monterey pass the Channel Islands and canoes come out to meet them. The people in the canoes are the Chumash, who live on those islands and on the coast around what will become Santa Barbara. There are ten to twenty thousand of them roughly. They cross open water and canoes called tomos, and they run their economy on shell bead money. Crews buy otter pelts and hides and pay in iron and porcelain. Within a few years, Chinese copper coins are turning up on strings beside the shell beads, and a Chumash chief on Santa Cruz Island keeps a Ming custom stamp in his house. The ships bring smallpox too. It reaches the Olone villages around the bay within a decade and decimates the population. But there's a difference in this timeline. A trading station wants its customers alive and in their own villages, while a Spanish mission, a church settlement built to convert the natives, wants them inside its walls. So the people on that coast keep their villages and their canoes, and they come down to the customs house to trade before going home. Spain is made aware 14 years after the customs house goes up from a captain named Sebastian Viscaino. The Viceroy sends him up from Acapulco with three ships and orders to find a harbor with fresh water, and Scurvy is killing his men by the time he gets that far north. In the middle of December, he comes aground abandoned the coast and sees a walled harbor with three Chinese ships in it. The magistrate gives his ships fresh water and feeds his crews. Then he sends Viscaino back to Mexico City with a letter claiming the coast north of San Diego as territory under Ming protection. The Viceroy sends the letter to Madrid. Madrid answers that a Spanish captain claimed this coast for the crown 60 years earlier, and that none of the king's ships may use the Chinese port. The Spanish captains stop there anyway, every year for the water. For 40 years, there are two empires on the Pacific, one at each end of the same route, and neither has the ships to remove the other. And then the Ming lose China. In 1644, Beijing falls, first to a peasant army, and then to the Manchus, a people from the northeast beyond the Great Wall, who set up a dynasty of their own called the Qing. The news reaches the fleet's admiral at sea. He's Zheng Zhulang, a man of forty with a Japanese wife and a twenty year old son the West calls Koksinga. He commands a fleet that has sailed for two centuries with supply bases from Aden to Monterey, and he has to decide. Whose it is now. He makes the decision to side with the Ming princes in the south and sails down to join them. The Manchu court chases the fleet for years but can't catch it, so it empties the southern coast instead, every village for miles inland to cut off the fleet's food. By then, the sun is in charge. Coxinga moves the fleet's capital to Manila and feeds it from the islands. The Manchus build a fleet of their own once. An admiral takes Taiwan with more than 200 ships, and then the court lets those ships rot because they were really only built for that one campaign. The seaming, as the fleet's government now calls itself, still hold Manila, Malacca, Palembang, Aiden, and Monterey, and no Manchu ship can reach any of them, partially because there are no Manchu ships. Forty years after Taiwan, the Emperor in Beijing settles the split on paper. He recognizes the government of Manila under the title King of the Southern Seas, the rank the Chinese court gives a foreign king who sends it gifts. It's the same title the Ming gave the King of Malacca and Japan's military ruler, the Shogun, back in Emperor Yong Lu's day. Two Chinas, one on the land and one on the water. The Dutch and the English have come around Africa by then, and they found the same rules waiting for them. A company gets a licensed trading post at one port and a paper pass for each ship. But the land stays with the local rulers. The Dutch settle for a post at Bantam in Java, and the English for one at Surat on India's west coast under the Mughal Emperors, the Muslim dynasty that rules most of India at this point. A century later, the richest province in India, Bengal, belongs to a prince who grew up in that empire, and the ships in Bengal's river are Chinese. On the California coast, the customs house keeps collecting. More than two hundred years after the magistrate put it up, a Russian fur company builds a post of its own on the Sonoma coast north of San Francisco and signs a treaty with the Kashe Pomo who live there for the land. It's the first treaty any foreign power makes with a native nation in California. The Russians and the Chinese share the otter trade under a written agreement, and both posts are still there when the United States goes to war with Mexico. Now, Mexico inherited its claim to California from Spain, which in this timeline never holds anything north of San Diego. So the peace treaty between the US and Mexico draws the new border at the Colorado River, where it separates California from Arizona. The end comes as a bill of sale. Seven years after that war, the government of Manila sells the Monterey station and every claim north of San Diego to the United States for two million dollars. Russia sells Alaska for about $7 million about a dozen years after that. The treaty guarantees the Chumash and the Olone their coastal lands in writing on the model of the Russian agreement with the Keshaya. By 1900, there are about 12,000 Chumash holding the Channel Islands and the Santa Barbara shore. And the oldest building in Monterey is that Chinese Customs House. In 2026, there are two Chinese states. A mainland republic in Beijing and a maritime one in Manila, and the sea power holds Malacca and Palembang and kept a piece of California for two hundred and sixty-seven years. Malacca is the busiest port on earth. The trade language of the Indian Ocean is a mix of Malay and Chinese. Mumbai and Jakarta are capitals of states that grew straight out of the Mughal and Javanese kingdoms. The Chumash are a nation of forty thousand with their capital at Santa Barbara. And Chinese is California's second language, by inheritance rather than immigration. China marks a maritime day every July 11th. The government created it in 2005, on the 600th anniversary of the day Zheng Hu's first fleet was ordered to sea. In October 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping stood in front of Indonesia's parliament and proposed a maritime silk road, a plan for Chinese-built ports and shipping lanes across the same water the treasure ship sailed. The story China tells about itself is that a great navy was scrapped by its own court 600 years ago and that the country is now buying it back. The men who scrapped it, though, were the men paying for it. Emperor Yong Liu kept the pepper in his own account and sent the bills to his ministries. His finance minister went to prison for opposing him. His son ended the voyages and the first order he signed as emperor. The ministers outlasted. Three successive emperors, and then they broke up the ships and literally burned the vials. The official history of the dynasty, written by the same class of men 300 years later, sums up the voyages in one sentence. The treasures they brought back were beyond counting, but so was what they cost. The alternate timeline fixes that with one line in an order. The ministry gets half. And half is what does it. A fleet that pays its own way. Outlives the man who built it, outlives his grandson, and even outlives the dynasty. The sailors keep sailing because the treasury keeps collecting. When the Manchus take Beijing in 1644, the fleet has two centuries of its own money, its own depots, and its own custom stamps. And when the government that founded it collapses, it just leaves. The real Ming actually had a small version of that story. When the dynasty fell, A family of sea captains named Zheng, the same surname as the Admiral, but no relation, held the coast against the Manchus for nearly 40 years, took Taiwan from the Dutch, and then ran it as a Ming state until 1683. And that was one family's ships. In the alternate timeline, it's the entire navy of the Empire, and it never comes back. The ministers of 1436 didn't want a navy whose money went to the eunuchs and not to them. In this timeline, they get their share, and 200 years later, that Navy answers to a government in Manila that takes no orders from Beijing. A fleet that doesn't have to answer to the Capitol is what those ministers were paying to prevent. The speeches in Jakarta tend to leave that part out. Decisions don't get do-overs, but on this show they do. If you like the show, please rate and subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. Until next time, I'm Kevin Perez Allen. Thanks for hitting Control Z with me. Control Z Rewritten is hosted, written, researched, edited, and produced by me, Kevin Perez Allen. If you've got a coin flip decision from history you want reversed on a future episode, find the show on YouTube. That's CTRLZ Rewritten, all one word, and leave it in the comments.