Word: fleetly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...China that sought to dominate the region. On one journey, as recounted in Louise Levathes' 1994 book When China Ruled the Seas, Zheng He put down an uprising in Sumatra and brought the rebel chief back to Nanjing for confinement; the Emperor had the man executed. On another, the fleet landed in Sri Lanka and captured the Sinhalese King - punishment, according to one version of events, for his refusal to hand over to the Chinese Emperor a sacred tooth of the Buddha. He and his family were taken to China and imprisoned. Impressed by such power, rulers throughout the region...
...China's age of exploration began to come to a close, however, when Zheng He died in 1433 during a stopover in the once great Indian port city of Calicut. The fleet returned to China and was soon disbanded. Zheng He himself suffered an ignoble end. Normally, significant eunuchs were reunited at death with their genitals, which were kept in sealed jars. That way the body could move on intact to the afterlife. Zheng He had no such luck...
...bombed by U.S. warplanes, My Son is now abandoned, one of the few vestiges of an empire all but forgotten. When Zheng He's ships first called on Champa, the powerful Hindu kingdom had dominated central Vietnam for more than 1,000 years. The haven described by the fleet's Chinese chronicler Ma Huan was the rough port town of Qui Nhon, where sarong-wearing, wiry-haired Cham ivory merchants and slave traders plied their wares. Yet in 1471, less than 70 years later, the northern Annam kingdom of ethnic Vietnamese conquered the Chams, driving them south and scattering them...
...locate Mombasa in an atlas. Once they found it, the pair stared at the unprepossessing dot, trying to imagine the riches that lay on Africa's east coast. Six centuries earlier, Admiral Zheng He, with only the barest outline as a guide, did the 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...
...Chinese workers who construct everything from new roads to button-down shirts. Chinese factory owners prefer to ship in their own countrymen because, as one boss put it: "They work harder for less money." Miss Xu hails from Nanjing, the river port from which Zheng He launched his fleet. She signed up for a three-year stint in Madagascar without knowing a thing about the Indian Ocean island. After toiling in a sweater factory for the full three years, she doesn't know much more. The 22-year-old lived with dozens of other Chinese laborers in a cramped dormitory...