In the first half of the fifteenth century, the Ming dynasty decided to project Chinese naval power all over the Indian Ocean. The Yongle emperor (1403-1424) appointed Zheng He as the Chief Admiral of a large fleet the Treasure Fleet. The latter organized a total of seven expeditions, from 1405 to 1433, generally known as 'Zheng He's voyages' (Deng, 2005; Dreyer, 2006; Ferrand, 1919, 1922; Filesi, 1970; Levathes, 1997; Viviano, 2005). The Treasure Fleet sailed to the coast of East Africa on the fourth (1413-1415), fifth (1416-1419) and sixth (1421-1422) voyages, docking in Mogadishu, present-day Somalia, as well as Malindi and Mombasa, present-day Kenya. They exchanged Chinese goods for African ones, including live animals such as zebras and giraffes. Chinese celadon pottery of the kind produced in Longquan, found in the Limpopo valley on Mapungubwe Hill in the 1930s, is now firmly dated to the late Yuan (1279-1368) and early Ming (1368-1644) dynasties (Prinsloo et al., 2005). Such evidence is distributed over a large geographic zone in Eastern Africa, including Great Zimbabwe, the Swahili city-states, the Comoros and Madagascar (Beaujard, 2007). In addition, some of the descendants of Chinese sailors from Admiral Zheng He's fleet living on the small island of Pate were interviewed by Nicholas Kristof (1999) for The New York Times. In summary, there is scattered but significant evidence of the presence of Chinese goods and people in Africa's past. This interaction peaked in the fifteenth century and was cut short by the succeeding dynasty's imperial ban on foreign trade and naval expeditions.