Indeed I recall reading somewhere that there was some marine achaeological evidence that the Chinese did discover Australia (or at least, that ships of Chinese origin visited the place). However, this essentially amounted to nothing.
Why? Most Chinese are peasants, always have been. Australia had (at that time) plenty of unused land good for farming.
So? What good does it do?
It takes a large amount of time, effort and money to transport colonists. It then takes a large amount of time and labor to transform the land for agriculture. And the bottom line is that you need some return on your investment and a market for the goods derived thereby. It does no good to transport thousands of peasants thousands of miles to a distant land just to farm it.
The Spaniards ‘colonised’ (read: conquered) the New World in the name of Gold. Without that strong financial incentive, they would have had no reason for assuming control of the territory. Spice (read: the profits derived from spice) was the entire reason for the voyages of exploration and the subsequent Euro power rivalries. It is only after such travel became widespread that other colonies became important as projections of geopolitical power.
Had the Chinese reached as far as Mexico and South America, they might have become interested in the Jade, Gold and foodstuffs they could find there. Heck, if the Inca had stronger metallurgy skills and were able to work the Silver that the Conquistadors later exploited, the Chinese may have been very interested in that. But the distance and difficulty generally preclude much in the way of trade for all but nations bent on conquest and world domination. (Read: Nations looking outward, which does not describe the China of the time.)
All of which totally ignores the fact that the Chinese were aware of the East Coast of Africa, where there was plenty of gold, etc. to exploit, if they had desired to do so. Perhaps not so easily as the Inca were exploited by the Spanish, for example, but still there.
A partial answer to that may be that the conditions and locals of the east coast of Africa was evidently harsh enough to repel European colonization until the relatively modern era. Indeed, the Italians were being thrashed by the Ethiopians in the 19th century.
I think some areas are simply easier to colonize than others. Africa in particular was bad for colonization because its diseases made life difficult for would-be colonizers (except in the very south).
One thing to remember is that the Eastern cultures didn’t really have a history of Colonization. The Chinese were not at any point looking for new lands to settle and dominate.
In the West, the high prices of spices, silks and other Eastern goods eventually became a motive for people with a history of travel and conquest to seek out and subjugate those lands for their own wealth. The history of Europe was the history of people moving from one land to another, conquering it and making it their own.
China was a monolithic culture that viewed itsef as the Center of the Universe. The Middle (of everything) Kingdom. They “united” China, but they didn’t seek out other lands and people to conquer (local minorities and smaller cultures notwithstanding). They didn’t have the historical and cultural basis to set off to conquer far off places like the Europeans, or even the Mongols.
I find it interesting in a historical manner how they settle and absorb neighboring regions. We’re seeing the same thing today with land “rented” from neighboring countries (Laos, Kyrgyzstan) in small quantities and the Chinese eyeing the Amur river region just over the border in Russia. Those areas are not ‘China’ today, but if large numbers of Chinese settle these lands, there may well come a day when they are viewed as being part of China.
Neither had the Western cultures, before Prince Henry the Navigator. (The Crusader States were a different matter, culturally, than the later colonies in America, Africa and Asia.)
Oh sure, freaking bloody hamsters ate my post!
Western Civ had an extensive history of Colonization. The Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians and others extensively colonized other areas as a means of controlling them and/or the trade derived thereby. Those civilizations are the foundation of Western Civ.
The Norse/Vikings had a long history of travel and colonization, leading to their descendants, the Norman Conquest of England, which was for all practical purposes, a form of colonization.
For that matter, the entire history of England is a history of successive waves of colonization, from the Celts to the Romans, Angles, Saxons and Normans.
How many times was Sicily taken over by different waves of people? How about Turkey?
I agree with your second paragraph and note that it is somewhat incorrect to view the Chinese as having no interest in seeking out new lands to take over … the Han Chinese emerged from the north of China and in effect invaded and “colonized” the south, whose aboriginal inhabitants were not Chinese. I read somewhere that the south Chinese used to call themselves the “men of T’ang” (after the dynasty during which South China was colonized) as opposed to the north Chinese, the “men of Han”.
Indeed, the Vietnamese have a long history of fighting off Chinese attempts to do the same to them.
It is true that the Chinese have no history of attempting to colonize distant places (indeed, the odd part about SE Asia is how much the area was “colonized”, at least culturally, from India - that is, from the other direction).