They were rarely unified under a strong enough government, and the few times they were, they weren’t driven to explore and conquer because they had expansive territory and natural territorial barriers (mountains, deserts, etc…). The closest they may have been able to was around 1400 with the Ming dynasty and Zheng, but they focused on tributaries and inward because the massive size of the empire they thought expansion would destabilize them
Yep the Ming sailed to Africa with their blue water navy hundreds of years before the West achieved the same size of ships. They came back and burnt the ships - they could have expanded but they didn’t see the point.
It wasn’t that they didn’t see the point, they saw it as destabilizing. They had a massive expanse of land already, and history had shown that overreaching would cause fracturing of what they already had. Cb
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u/ReversedSandy 4d ago
They didn’t want to or I’m sure they could have.