• ISMAEL MARINERO

    Madrid

Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - 23:22

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For a thousand and one nights, Sherezade managed to bewitch King Shahriar with his voice. Her narratives sought to circumvent the horrible fate to which she seemed condemned. The ugly custom of the Sultan was to marry and lie with a virgin every night to order her to be executed the next morning. The only guarantee to survive depended on his stories, and for that the vizier's daughter needed characters as fascinating as Sinbad the sailor and his seven great voyages, in which he faced as many shipwrecks and giant chickens, cannibal tribes and menacing men- bird. Beyond the similarities with the journey of Ulysses and other fables and legends of Arab origin, one of the most relevant influences to give life to Sinbad was the Chinese Zheng He, an adventurer whose traveling feats they compete with those of Marco Polo, Magallanes or Vasco Núñez de Balboa.

This intrepid explorer was born in 1371 under the name of Ma He in Yunnan province, southwest China, and Mongolian blood ran through his veins : one of his ancestors was a commander of the hordes of Genghis Khan. His father and grandfather professed Islam and had carried out the pilgrimage to Mecca, more than 6,000 kilometers of crossing by land and sea that served for little He to hear stories and anecdotes of that journey to distant lands since he was a child. While dreaming of emulating his progenitor, Yunnan fell into the hands of the Ming Dynasty army and He was captured and castrated. Your destiny? Serve as a eunuch in the emperor's court.

Ma He was chosen as the servant of Zhu Di, the most ambitious of the princes who lived in the imperial palace. Educated in the arts of war and looking imposing (according to a description of the time, in addition to being over six feet tall, "his eyebrows were like swords and his forehead broad like that of a tiger"), He became a one of the most prominent officers in the Chinese army .

After successive campaigns against the Mongols, who continued to threaten the borders to the north and east of the country, he was given the name Zheng He for his heroism in the Battle of Zhenglunba. His rise through the military ranks paralleled that of Prince Zhu Di, who in 1402 was enthroned as the Yongle Emperor.

And this is where the adventures that made Zheng He one of the greatest travelers the world has known begin. Yongle, who could give any twentieth-century dictator some classes in advanced megalomania, ordered the capital to be moved to Beijing and the Forbidden City built there , for which he mobilized more than a million people as labor. His desire to show the world how powerful the Ming Dynasty was materialized in seven great sea expeditions, with Zheng He as Grand Admiral of what became known as the Treasury Fleet - the most imposing naval armada ever seen over the oceans to the which launched Great Britain during the First World War. In total, hundreds of ships were used , 62 of them with more than 120 meters in length, and around 28,000 people participated in each trip, including soldiers, builders, diplomats and scholars.

Successive voyages, carried out from 1405 to 1422, led Zheng He from mainland China to the paradisiacal beaches of Lamu Island in Kenya, passing through all of South Asia and North and East Africa. Thanks to such a deployment, Yongle was able to establish diplomatic and commercial ties with about 30 countries, a sort of maritime Silk Road that served to circumvent the commercial blockade that Tamerlane the Great had imposed on the land.

Facing typhoons and pirates , the fleet managed to bring to Chinese lands all kinds of gifts for the emperor, in addition to spices from Sumatra and Java, sulfur and tin from Vietnam, a sacred tooth of the Buddha from Sri Lanka and even a live giraffe that embarked in Kenya.

On the true motives and methods of the army commanded by He, there is still a division of opinion among historians today. For Daniel J. Boorstin, author of The Discoverers (Ed. Planeta), “the purpose of the vast, costly and extensive expeditions was not to collect treasure, trade, conquer or gather scientific information. The trips became an institution unto themselves, designed to showcase the splendor and power of the new Ming dynasty , and demonstrated that non-violent persuasion techniques could be used to draw tribute from remote states.

In contrast, the Australian Geoff Wade considers the expeditions a violent form of "maritime protocolonialism." Zheng He's travels "involved the use of enormous military force to invade peoples who were ethnically different from the Chinese, to occupy their territory, divide it into smaller administrative units, appoint puppet rulers, and exploit the regions thus occupied." Xi Jingpin's China now flies the so-called peaceful, diplomatic and commercial flag of He's, but we already know how the heroes of the past can become hostages to the politics of the present.

After the death of the Yongle Emperor, his grandson inherited the throne and ordered the last expedition of Zheng He's. With more than a hundred ships he reached the Strait of Hormuz, but on the return trip, the old eunuch died of unknown causes and his body was thrown into the sea. His figure, in addition to China, is revered in many countries of Southeast Asia, where several temples and statues are preserved in his honor . There, six centuries later, the man who inspired the figure of Sinbad is still celebrated and revered as a god.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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