Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [27]
This mass of ships was led by Admiral Zheng He, one of the more intriguing men to take to sea at the dawn of the age of exploration. To begin with, he carried his penis in a box. And not just his penis, but his cojones too. His dismemberment had been particularly thorough. A Muslim, Zheng He had been captured as a boy of eleven by the Ming Army in distant Yunnan Province. Deprived of water, Zheng He was then castrated, and once the threat of infection subsided, he was given gallons of water to drink, until finally his urethra burst and a tube was inserted. (The author is wincing; he can barely go on.) Few people survived the procedure, and yet an imperial decree was needed to prevent men from self-castration (the author doesn’t know what to say), but such, apparently, was the lure of the power held by the imperial eunuchs that men were willing to take the knife to their own manhood (completely inexplicable).
Zheng He went on to become a servant of the Ming emperor, and soon he had acquired a nickname, San Bao, which—unsurprising, really—means the Three Jewels. With his special box beside him, Zheng He moved on to become possibly the best-traveled man of his era. Eighty years before Columbus set forth in the Santa Maria, a pitifully small boat compared to one of Zhu Di’s treasure ships, Zheng He roamed the seas during the seven grand expeditions he undertook between 1405 and 1433. He crossed the Indian Ocean, alighted upon India and Sri Lanka, visited the Arabian Peninsula, moseyed down the coast of Africa, picked up a few giraffes to stock the zoo in Beijing, and brought back local envoys and ambassadors so they could kowtow before the emperor. Some, like Menzies, even speculate that Zheng He was the first foreigner to discover North America. In any event, China stood on the cusp of ruling the world. No nation had a fleet that could match that of the eunuch from Yunnan.
And then China disappeared behind its walls. Its fleet of treasure ships was left to rot. The Middle Kingdom would become peripheral as Europe arose from its long slumber. How can this be, you wonder? China was at the very edge of global domination, something every nation wants, no? And yet they turned back.
Apparently, Heaven had become unhappy with the Son of Heaven. Heaven went so far as to hurl a lightning bolt at the Forbidden City, burning most of it to the barest embers. Crushed by this display of celestial approbation, Zhu Di was no longer a match for the imperial mandarins, who had become appalled at the expense of money and resources that Zhu Di’s ambitions cost. Conscious that the dynasty was at stake, Zhu Di began the retreat inward that culminated with his successor. And the eunuch admiral died at sea on the last great voyage of the treasure ships.
The Forbidden City would be rebuilt. But global dominance would have to wait. As I wandered through the resplendent halls of the Forbidden City—noting, as I watched a group of small boys, that while smoking was clearly advertised as forbidden, peeing on walls was apparently okay—I couldn’t help but wonder about what a fickle thing fate can be.
“Imagine,” I said to Dan, “if lightning hadn’t struck that day. The Chinese Empire could have swallowed the world.”
“Oh,” said Dan cheerily. “There’s still time for that.”
5
It is remarkable how quickly a country like China can reduce a foreigner—this foreigner, in any case—to a state of childlike powerlessness. True, I had traveled to places where people could still recall what a human being tastes like (it tastes like pork). I had visited islands where the inhabitants had not seen more than a dozen foreigners in their lives. I had wandered in Russia when the country seemed