Castrated As A Child, He Reached Africa Leading A Fleet Before Columbus — Zheng He

Chapter 1 of 6The River of a Thousand Hulls

In fourteen oh five, the Yangtze River, on the outskirts of Nanjing, stops looking like a river. Wooden hulls cover the water as far as the eye can see. At the head of all that timber there is no prince of imperial blood. Nor a general of illustrious lineage. His name is Zheng He, and he is a eunuch of the court of the Yongle Emperor. No one can yet explain why the empire has placed in his hands a naval undertaking of this size.

Six hundred years later, the sources still cannot agree on exactly how many ships there are. Some sources speak of sixty-two vessels and some twenty-seven thousand eight hundred men. Others raise the figure to three hundred seventeen ships: of these, sixty-two would be great treasure ships, with between twenty thousand and thirty-two thousand men aboard. The difference between one count and the other is, by itself, the size of an entire city.

The shipyard that has given birth to that fleet is called Longjiang. It is not a makeshift carpenters’ workshop, but a state factory that has been running since fourteen oh three, two whole years before this morning. Five hundred fifty-two years later, in nineteen fifty-seven, archaeologists would unearth on that very ground a wooden rudder eleven meters long. That single piece is enough to imagine the size of what it once steered.

Zheng He walks that deck. The family chronicles describe him as standing a little over two meters tall, with a waist more than a meter and a half around. These are not verified measurements, but tales of lineage. Even so, they draw a figure made, according to the legend of his own blood, to command a deck crowded with soldiers.

Decades before Christopher Columbus sets foot on the coast of Africa, this man will take his fleet there. And yet the same river that fills with wooden hulls this morning will, a generation later, stop building them. No one will be able to say with certainty why. Entire factions at court, Confucian doctrine, the fiscal cost of maintaining such a fleet, the death of a single man on the throne: every explanation historians have proposed is partial, and none is enough on its own.

Zheng He was not born an admiral. He was born with another name, in a remote province that the Ming empire would conquer while he was still a child. What happened to him there is the exact reason he can stand on this deck today. He has no descendants to mourn him. Who that child was, and what would lead, a generation after his death, to the records of his voyages disappearing —according to the only source that tells it— by the decision of a single official, is something that, this morning, on the river, no one can yet suspect.