The Admiral and the Unicorn

Between 1405 and 1433, the eunuch admiral Zheng He commanded seven voyages across the Indian Ocean for the Yongle Emperor of Ming China. His first fleet carried 317 ships and 27,800 men. The largest of his treasure ships ran to at least 60 meters, possibly twice that, with nine masts, bamboo-inspired watertight bulkheads, 180 physicians, and mung beans sprouting on deck for vitamin C. Eighty-seven years later, Columbus crossed the Atlantic with three ships and ninety men.

Zheng He brought back a giraffe.

He brought back lions, leopards, ostriches, and zebras too, but the giraffe is the one that mattered. It arrived in 1414 from Malindi, by way of the Sultan of Bengal, and the Confucian court took one look at the long neck and the cloven hooves and declared it a qilin: a unicorn-like beast that appears only during the reign of a perfect sage-king. Yongle, who had taken the throne from his nephew twelve years earlier in a civil war, accepted this reading without visible difficulty. One imagines the giraffe accepted it too.

The fleets sailed for nineteen more years. Then a Ming bureaucrat named Liu Daxia found the voyage archives in 1477 and had them burned, to prevent future emperors from repeating the folly.

Somewhere off Calicut, Zheng He was buried at sea. His tomb in Nanjing holds only his hat.