# The persevering presence  
Prior to its entrance into the early modern age, the African presence in China underwent a period of dormancy. For the less than a century of duration of the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), for reasons such as the reopening of the overland Silk Roads as conduits of trade, there are lacunae especially in our knowledge of the extent to which Africans may have been imported into China by sea. For their part, the Mongol interest in seafaring focused more on the expansion of their empire, which was not advanced, than on mercantilism, which could have been advanced more so than it was (Wilkinson, 2015, pp. 777-78).  
Nevertheless, once introduced into the Chinese context, the African presence would endure and, at times, quite vibrantly so. With the advent of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the African presence was reinforced in Chinese consciousness through the seven remarkable maritime voyages that the imperial grand eunuch commander Zheng He (1371-1435) undertook between the years 1405 and 1433. Being unprecedented in terms of size and scope, these expeditions - specifically the three latter ones conducted in 1417 and after brought Chinese ships to African shores and African envoys as free men to China, both for the first time (Dreyer, 2006, pp. 82-91, 99-134).  
In the tow of the Portuguese merchant-mariners at the turn of the sixteenth century, those Africans who did arrive in China came again as slaves. Like their Portuguese masters themselves, these Africans found their niche and lived out their days on the tiny peninsular outpost opposite Guangzhou known then as now as Macau (also Macao; in Chinese, Aomen). To slavery again they had indeed been consigned. Still, let us also be sure to note that, by the middle of the seventeenth century (1640), these Africans in China - 'number[ing] about five thousand' (Boxer, 1960, p. 143) - were more populous and therefore present than they had ever been.