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Abstract The Malacca Strait used to be unknown in history. Internationally, it was used to call the strait in Malacca, which was named after the famous international port of Malacca. Malacca derived from Melaka(满剌加), which is a transliteration. The strait got a special name in the early 15th century with the rise of the Melaka Kingdom (满剌加王国). The rise of the Strait was inseparable from the rise of the Melaka Kingdom and Zheng He’s seven voyages to the West Seas. This article provides a further analysis of Zheng He’s seven voyages, in which Melaka was visited each time. Presently, it’s commonly acknowledged that Zheng He had been to Melaka for five times. Zheng He’s first voyages to Southeast Asia and onward had eliminated the piracy problem in the Strait, ensuring the security of the Strait, which played a vital role in the rise of the strait. From the perspective of global history, our research on Zheng He’s voyages not only explores the trajectory of how China has unveiled the great voyage of mankind in the Ming dynasty but also probes into major issues of how to view and understand global history. An exploration of the rise of the Malacca Strait could provide an insight into how Zheng He’s voyages have changed the world. The rise of the Strait was the result of the heyday of the maritime Silk Road in the early 15th century and was a successful example of cooperation and win-win international relations in history. The farreaching significance was to become an inflection point of global history and profoundly affect the progress of human history. It means that the center of human interaction had turned from the Eurasian continent to the sea, symbolizes the irreversible trend of building a community with a shared future for mankind towards the ocean, and indicates that the transition to the Pacific era based on the rise of the Strait depends not on the Westerners’ voyages to the east after nearly a century.
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2020, Vol. 28 
