envoys who oversaw the presentation of gaudy treasures to the emperor and his court while also profiting through commerce outside the court.
Nearly sixty years after the last of these fleets returned to port in Nanjing, Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain, leading a brave expedition that, in a disoriented search for the oriental Old World, would accidentally stumble onto an occidental New World. Columbus’s three-ship expedition included a crew of about 120 men; his flagship, the four-masted Santa Maria, was approximately 80 feet long. By contrast, Emperor Yongle’s first maritime expedition (commanded by Zheng He, a thirty-four-year-old Muslim eunuch who had previously served as Grand Director of the Imperial Harem) carried a crew and army of around 28,000 men aboard 62 nine-masted ships and an additional 255 five-masted vessels. The larger ships, known as “treasure ships,” were nearly 450 feet long and 190 feet wide.
Tribute Giraffe with Attendant. Chinese, Ming Dynasty, Yongle Period (1403–1424). Philadelphia Museum of Art.
So the full imperial fleet would have been a stirring or an alarming sight when it appeared on the horizon before the ports of various settlements and kingdoms in the Indonesian archipelago during the year 1405 and, from there, west as far as the southwestern coast of India. That first expedition returned in 1407 carrying several foreign emissaries along with their goods and treasures.
The fourth expedition left China in the fall of 1413 and sailed farther west than ever before, eventually reaching Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and Aden, on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula at the mouth of the Red Sea. A subsidiary fleet from this expedition also sailed along the eastern coast of India to Bengal, where the sailors were greeted by a newly ascended Islamic king. It happened that envoys from the Islamic coastal settlement of Malindi, East Africa (in an area claimed by today’s Kenya), were in the Bengal court at the time, having traveled there to offer their own tribute—some live giraffes—to the new king.
The Chinese visitors were clearly fascinated by those tribute giraffes. They encouraged the Bengali king to give them one, and they persuaded an envoy from Malindi to accompany that particular animal on one of their treasure ships that was returning to China before the rest of the fleet. China’s first giraffe thus weakly wobbled onto stable land on September 20, 1414. Within the year, at least one more giraffe was brought by sea from Milandi to Bengal and, from there, to the imperial capital at Nanjing, where it was presented to Emperor Yongle at some time before the full fleet returned home in August of 1415.2
The giraffes were introduced to the emperor and his imperial court as unicorns.
Ch’i-lin—the name given to the unicorn described in ancient Confucian texts—was what the mariners called the tall animals they brought back home, possibly because, one author speculates, they originally heard them described in the Somali language as girin, which may have sounded like ch’i-lin.3
It is also possible that Zheng He, the eunuch admiral of the fleet, firmly believed that the extraordinary animals he delivered to the emperor were actual ch’i-lin, actual unicorns as traditionally understood.
According to Confucian tradition, a ch’i-lin male, aside from his many other wondrous qualities, would be marked by a flesh-covered horn rising from the forehead. Giraffes have skin-covered horns, and some giraffe males develop a skin-covered median horn, a decisive knob or bump that appears at mid-forehead. Ch’i-lin could alternatively have two or three horns, as can giraffes. Confucian tradition also held that ch’i-lin had a deer’s body and cloven hooves, as well as the tail of an ox and, sometimes, the scales of a fish. A giraffe would probably pass that test as well, aside from the fish scales—or might a giraffe’s markings actually resemble scales from a distance? Ch’i-lin were usually imagined to be white; but they could be gaily colored in red, yellow, blue, white, and black—not entirely unlike a giraffe. Ch’i-lin were associated with gentleness and goodness, qualities that would be at least superficially apparent in a giraffe; finally, ch’i-lin were revered as portents of good fortune brought about by a wise and benevolent ruler.4
The last imagined quality of a ch’i-lin suggests a third possible reason the giraffes brought back to China were presented as the miraculous unicorns of Confucian tradition: They could be used as propaganda bolstering the Yongle emperor’s precarious claims to legitimacy.
Yongle was the Ming dynasty’s third emperor. Or was he the second?
Yongle succeeded to the imperial throne in 1403 by raiding Nanjing at the head of an army of a few hundred thousand men, massing outside the city until one of his many brothers opened a city gate at night, whereupon his troops entered and overwhelmed the imperial defenses, setting fire to the palace and government buildings. The second Ming emperor, Jianwen, was (according to the claims circulated by Yongle) unfortunately and accidentally consumed in the flames.
Yongle moved to consolidate his own position as the new emperor, and his early acts included the usual—sorting friends from enemies, elevating the former, executing the latter—as well as arranging for an important recalibration of Ming history. This proved to be a major enterprise requiring that a select group of dedicated historians destroy all earlier records and accounts of the dynasty and then create a full replacement set of new records and accounts. Ultimately, Jianwen was expunged from the list of emperors altogether, which left the first and founding Ming emperor reigning for about four years past his own death. Yongle was then able to claim his honorable position as the second Ming emperor.
Jianwen had been the oldest surviving son of the founding emperor’s first son. The founding emperor chose him based on the principle of primogeniture as described in the official Ancestral Injunctions. Yongle was merely a fourth son—and not even the child of his father’s first consort, the empress Ma. Nevertheless, once he became emperor, Yongle made sure the official genealogy was rewritten, making him the son of Ma to fix the mother problem. And although he had not been the first of the founder’s twenty-six sons, Yongle would argue that the Confucian principle of filial piety, along with the full legal code prescribed in the Ancestral Injunctions, allowed for a prince to intercede when an emperor was corrupted or overwhelmed by nefarious advisors. Yongle had been a prince. Yongle had interceded. Once he became emperor, his scholars would write the history that justified that intercession.5
In such a manner, Yongle became the most powerful man on earth: the civil, military, political, and spiritual head of an empire covering a stretch of real estate the size of Western Europe and containing a growing population of perhaps 90 million people.6 Yongle was among the most dynamic and influential rulers in Ming history, an era covering nearly three centuries. He was also a pretender to the imperial throne, an illegitimate usurper who would be concerned about the security of his position. Indeed, as the unhappy fate of his immediate predecessor starkly demonstrated, great power required great control. As the compelling example of his father more happily added, though, great control could sometimes be achieved through stimulating the emotions of hope, fear, and reverence.
Hope included the promise of advancement in the vast civil service bureaucracy and in the enormous military hierarchy. Fear was insured by an emperor’s willingness to torture and execute anyone at court found wanting. Yongle’s father had been responsible for the deaths of approximately 100,000 people who may not have seemed trustworthy enough. The founder also used his palace guard to create an infamous secret police with unchecked powers to arrest, torture, and execute.7 Yongle was approximately as despotic as his father, and his palace guard was reinforced by a major spy network organized and conducted by the palace eunuchs, who by 1420 were organized into another extrajudicial secret police called the Eastern Depot.8 Finally, and again like his father, Yongle would never forget the immense importance of reverence, an emotion he routinely evoked with publications and pronouncements, symbols and rituals, continuously dramatizing his
