Word: zheng
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...took a good five minutes for Li Changcheng and his wife to 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...
Chinese may go to New Jersey to wash dishes or New England to earn a degree, but they come to Africa to make fortunes and garner respect. Zheng He did as well. It was from Malindi, now a sleepy resort town a two-hour drive up the coast from Mombasa, that he received his most precious tributes: a qilin (or unicorn), a celestial stag and a celestial horse - now identified more prosaically as a giraffe, an oryx and a zebra. Since moving sight unseen to Mombasa in 1992, Li and his family have also taken Africa's natural riches - especially...
...build roads, stadiums and hospitals. As I barrel down the smoothest stretch of tarmac (which was built by a Chinese firm) connecting the Kenyan capital Nairobi to Mombasa, village children greet me, with my half-Asian features, by cheering: "China road, China road." In Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, where Zheng He's ships once landed, the city's biggest sports facility is called the Chinese stadium. "It is very simple," says Zhu Xiaochuan, China's economic and commercial counselor in Nairobi, as he sips imported jasmine tea. "Africa needs China economically, and we benefit from them politically...
Still, Mombasa seems an unlikely place to settle. For me, its charms are antique: here the ruins of a once-mighty fort, there the shards of porcelain, reputedly from Zheng He's ships, that I find hidden in a dilapidated museum. As recently as the 1950s, seagoing freighters thronged to East Africa's largest port, off-loading boozy Western seamen and picking up African treasures. Today, as I stroll along the harbor, stevedores off-load shipments slowly - a languor born of chronic underemployment. Still, the Chinese come. "We Chinese can find business opportunities everywhere," grins Cen Haokun, one of three...
...doled out 600 visas to 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...