The Last Journey Of The San Bao Eunuch, Admiral Zheng He
Sheng-Wei Wang
216 x 140 x 18 mm , 400pp ISBN / ISSN : 978-988-8491-66-7
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US$56.00
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Suggested navigational routes, timelines and evidence relating to the seventh (and last) voyage of Admiral Zheng He (鄭和) have been extracted for the first time, from a 1597 novel entitled An Account of the Western World Voyage of the San Bao Eunuch (《三寶太監西洋記》) by Luo Maodeng (羅懋登). The result, as Dr. Wang discusses, arguably shows that Zheng He’s seventh voyage reached the ancient American Indian city, Cahokia, in 1433, long before Christopher Columbus first reached the Americas.
From 1405, in
order to maintain and expand the Ming Dynasty’s tributary system, Yongle
Emperor Zhu Di (reigning 1402-1424) and Xuande Emperor Zhu Zhanji (reigning
1425-1435) ordered eunuch Zheng He to lead giant fleets across the seas. But
soon after Zheng He’s seventh and last voyage in the 1430s, the Ming emperors
put an end to this activity and ordered all records of previous voyages to be
destroyed. Chinese writer Luo Maodeng (羅懋登), knowing the history of some of these
voyages, wished to preserve a record of them, but, conscious of the possible
penalty, decided to record the facts “under a veil”, in his 1597 novel, An
Account of the Western World Voyage of the San Bao Eunuch (《三寶太監西洋記》). This is what
Dr. Sheng-Wei Wang has concluded after reading and analyzing Luo’s novel. Her
book, The last journey of the San Bao
Eunuch, Admiral Zheng He, shows the methodology and evidential arguments by
which she has sought to lift the veil and the conclusions she suggests,
including the derivation of the complete
trans-Atlantic navigational routes and timelines of that
last journey and the idea that Zheng He’s last expedition plausibly reached the
ancient American Indian city, Cahokia, in the U.S. central Mississippi Valley
in late autumn, 1433, long before Christopher Columbus set foot for the first
time in the Americas. She supports the hotly debated view that Ming Chinese
sailors and ships reached farther than previously accepted in modern times and
calls for further research. She hopes this book will become an important step
in bridging the gap in our understanding of ancient China-America history and
the era before the Age of Discovery and an interesting contribution to an
ongoing debate.
Sheng-Wei WANG is a Chinese American, currently based in Hong Kong. She has a B.S. from Tsing Hua University and a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. In her early career, she was a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 2006, as an independent scholar and freelance writer, she founded the China-U.S. Friendship Exchange, Inc. A year later, she launched an English-Chinese bi-lingual website to promote U.S.-China relations, <http://www.ChinaUSFriendship.com/>, which has attracted over a million viewers to date. She has also contributed many commentaries to the English-language newspaper, China Daily (Hong Kong). In 2013 she started research on Zheng He with Mark Nickless and Laurie Bonner-Nickless, and has since completed two related books: the already-published Chinese book, co-authored with the Nickless couple and the current English book by herself. She has given invited presentations on her Zheng He research at international conferences, universities, Zheng He Societies, the Executive Global Network (Hong Kong), the Clurr Club (Zürich, Switzerland), and the Straits Forum (Xiamen, China).
