Word: zheng
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...Silence probably wasn't Zheng He's overriding memory of his voyages. Cuthbert had a crew of four. Zhang He commanded 1,000 men, and there was constant traffic between his ship and the rest of the fleet. "Zheng He had a different philosophy," says Cuthbert. "The Europeans viewed the sea as an obstacle, as something that stood in their way of riches and conquest." The Chinese took the Middle Kingdom out to sea with them. They had boats like floating farms, where they grew vegetables and raised pigs and chickens. Smaller sampans shuttled between the flotilla and the coastline...
...Even aboard his floating palace, Zheng He was often lashed by the elements. He lost many ships in raging tempests - some were reefed against the African shoreline and the survivors may have set up colonies there - and hundreds of men succumbed to disease. Zheng He, too, died on his final, seventh voyage and was buried at sea. Ma Huan, a translator on several of Zheng He's expeditions, recalls how Saint Elmo's fire once blazed atop the mast of the treasure ship, prompting a shaken Zheng He to offer more lavish sacrifices to Tianfei...
...After Cuthbert's success sailing the Precious Dragon to Britain, he received a phone call from a fellow Englishman, a maritime adventurer named Rex Warner, who wanted to borrow the ship to recreate one of Zheng He's trips. Cuthbert happily agreed. The Precious Dragon was loaded onto a freighter, shipped back to Hong Kong and prepared for its new journey. Warner was anxious to set off in the autumn, catching the strong west winds, as Zheng He had done...
...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...
...reaching Mecca a personal goal, a secret motivation driving Zheng He onward? In his various writings, left on stone stelae scattered about his travels, Zheng He makes clear that imperial hubris was best left ashore: the success of these voyages depended on knowing his place between heaven and earth, on paying homage to the many gods worshiped by people along the way, starting with the constantly burning incense to Chinese sea goddess Tianfei. I jot down a note to myself: when the next typhoon approaches, light incense for Tianfei aboard my junk - and be friendly to any woman...