Word: eunuchism
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...19th and 20th centuries. When outsiders with advanced technologies, big guns and missionary zeal began prying the country open, China could do little to repel the onslaught. The 21st century might well turn out to be China's, but hundreds of years were lost when the Confucians trumped the eunuch-explorers. "If the foreign expeditions had been sustained, the world would be very different now," says Kong Lingren, a 69-year-old former civil servant who is secretary-general of a quiet little outfit known as the Zheng He Research Association. "We could have conquered the world...
...China has struggled to find its proper place in the world. The pendulum has shifted back and forth between openness and insularity, between the spirit embodied in Zheng He and that of, say, Yang Rong, the Confucian tutor to the Emperor who argued for rolling back the power of eunuch adventurers like Zheng He. The Confucians won; China wouldn't emerge again as a naval force until the past decade or so, as it began to build up a sizable fleet, probe disputed islands like the Spratlys and project a presence in Asia's sea-lanes...
...wipe out the last vestiges of Mongol influence, 11-year-old Ma gained the attention of a conquering general. He was taken back to Nanjing, where he became a page to a young prince, known as Zhu Di. He was castrated and destined for a life serving with other eunuchs in the imperial household, guarding the harem and offering wisdom to the dynastic clan. Somehow the prince and the castrate became friends and when Zhu Di launched a coup d'Etat in 1402, Ma was at his side. The prince, who became the Yongle Emperor, awarded Ma an honorific surname...
...same, only his imperial fleet was sailing to a mighty sultanate, at the peak of its power, not a faded port crumbling into the sea. Yet, despite the paint peeling from its once majestic, oceanfront villas, Mombasa and the surrounding strip of coastline still lure descendants of the seafaring eunuch with promises of unlimited possibility. It's in search of these latter-day adventurers that I, too, have arrived in Africa...
...first, Warner was searching for a connection between the present and China's brief but glorious seafaring past. In Nanjing he found it: a direct, 19th-generation descendant of the Grand Eunuch's favorite adopted nephew, named Zheng Zhihai (which means from the sea). This modest 53-year-old, dressed in a rumpled suit, hasn't exactly followed in his ancestor's glorious naval tradition; Zheng works as a toilet engineer in a Nanjing factory. Still, while China had largely forgotten his heroic ancestor, Zheng says family legends kept his exploits very much alive. Tales of his voyages were passed...