alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

November 25, 2007

Zheng He the Sailor

by AltHippo @ 1:45 am. Filed under Life in D.C.

This entry is for those of you out there who like trivia of a historical nature. Of which I’m certainly one.

I was watching a show on the History Channel on the Seven Voyages of Zheng He. Apparently, He (the context mandates the capitalization, despite the entendre with the Divine “He”) was a larger than life explorer figure from the early 1400’s who commanded a sizable Chinese armada under the 3rd emperor of the Ming Dynasty (see this Wikipedia article for more details).

There’s a pretty decent argument that Zheng He, also known as Ma Sanbao, was the historical basis for Sinbad the Sailor from the Tales of the Arabian Nights.

There’s a controversial theory that Zheng He had made it to the America’s well before Columbus. And that he was a eunuch.

In retrospect that means we could have been known as the District of Sinbad. And that we could have no testicles.

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One Response to “Zheng He the Sailor”

  1. Anonymous Says:
    November 27th, 2007 at 2:14 pm

    The controversy is over. It is now a historical fact that the Chinese charted the world before the Europeans. In fact, Christopher Columbus and the like got to accomplish what they did because they got hold of Chinese world maps. All this is documented in a DVD titled “Pre-Columbian Chinese Exploration of the World”

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