Arriving back in Nanjing in 1407, accompanied by a pirate king ready to be beheaded and tribute-bearing envoys from south-east Asia and India, Zheng was commissioned to set off on two more expeditions. On the third, a Sri Lankan king challenged him. Zheng He attacked his capital and captured the king, replacing him with a Chinese nominee. States in Luzon and Sulu (Philippines), Sumatra and Brunei* exchanged envoys and sent tribute to the Yongle Emperor. ‘From the edge of the sky to the ends of the earth,’ Zheng boasted, ‘there are no peoples who have not become subjects and slaves.’ His mission was most clearly stated in his inscription in Malacca, which declared that ‘its righteous king, paying his respects to imperial suzerainty, wishes his country to be treated as one of our imperial domains and follow the Chinese way’. On 19 December 1416, Yongle celebrated Zheng’s return by receiving eighteen ambassadors of south Asian monarchs who recognized his power. The emperor then commissioned a fifth voyage, to take these envoys home to their kings, and to go much further than before: to Arabia and Africa.
Yongle was tireless, fighting six Mongol and one Vietnamese wars, restoring the Grand Canal and building a new city, Beijing – meaning Northern Capital – where a million labourers, many enslaved, toiled (and many perished) in the construction of vast palaces in the 180 acres of his inner sanctuary, the Forbidden City. Privately Confucian scholar-officials regarded the voyages and palaces as megalomaniacally extravagant. Yongle became addicted to Taoist elixirs containing arsenic, lead and mercury that were slowly poisoning him.
Just as he unveiled his new capital, he was undermined by a humiliating sex scandal that raised an awkward question: Could the greatest warrior emperor on earth be cuckolded by a man without testicles?
MASSACRE OF THE CONCUBINES
Not all eunuchs had suffered amputation of their penises as well as their testicles: sexual liaisons – known as vegetable relationships – with concubines were possible but forbidden. The girls belonged to the emperor. Many concubines enjoyed emotional attachments to eunuchs, some of which led to discreet romances. But courtiers were spied on by the eunuchs of the Eastern Depot secret police.
In 1421, after Yongle had moved into the Forbidden City, a concubine committed suicide after an affair with a eunuch. Yongle, humiliated by being cuckolded by a half-man, ordered the instant slaughter by slicing of 2,800 girls, some as young as twelve, and their eunuchs. The girls were ‘rent, split, ripped and torn to shreds’. A young Korean-born concubine, Lady Cui, survived because she was recovering from illness in Nanjing, and wrote an account that was preserved. She returned to find that her world had been liquidated. ‘There was such deep sorrow in the palace that thunder shook the three great halls,’ she recalled. ‘Lightning struck them and, after all those years of toil, they all burned to the ground.’ The fire chastened the declining emperor.
In 1424, the sixty-four-year-old Yongle dispatched Zheng on a small expedition and then proceeded to the Mongolian front. There he had a stroke caused by overdosing on his immortality elixirs.
Lady Cui, only thirty, and fifteen of his other girls were strangled by white silk nooses then buried with Yongle in his tomb. Yongle’s ultimate successor, his grandson Xuande, diverted his admiral to other tasks, appointing him to run Nanjing and to the post of Grand Director of the Buddhist Three Treasures – though he allowed him a seventh and final voyage. The last voyages connected many worlds – none more different than that of the Ming of Beijing and the Swahili sultans of east Africa.
THE LEOPARD KING AND JOãO THE BASTARD
In January 1419, Zheng He, the eunuch admiral, after receiving the submission of Hormuz (Iran), landed in Aden (Arabia) where the local sultans, keen to avoid the power of the Mamluks of Cairo, submitted to Yongle and exchanged gifts before the Chinese fleet sailed on to Malindi in Africa, collecting a menagerie of leopards, lions, camels, rhinos and giraffes for the emperor. The sensation created in Beijing by these beasts encouraged further voyages to Africa.
China and Africa had long been connected: Chinese, Malay and Arab merchants traded porcelain and silk for ivory, ebony and gold; thousands of Chinese coins and much porcelain have been found on Zanzibar. On Zheng’s sixth voyage, which sailed in November 1421, the treasure fleet visited Barawa and Mogadishu, ports of the Somalian kingdom of Ajura that stretched as far as the Ogaden on the borders with Ethiopia.*
