It’s Sunday in the hutong, and at this time of the year that means college football and paper grading. But I took some time out to have a laugh at this atrociously hysterical piece by publishing magnate Conrad Black on Stephen Harper’s recent visit to Beijing. The whole thing is pretty funny, but fellow fans of Chinese history will be particularly tickled by this section, in which Black waxes historical:
Educated Chinese never forget that China was the most powerful and advanced empire in the world in the seventh and eighth centuries (Tang Dynasty), the 13th century (under the Mongols), and the fifteenth century (Ming Dynasty), and feel their turn is coming again. At the time of Columbus’s discovery of the New World, China had hundreds of nine-masted “treasure ships,” (whose rudders were longer than Columbus’s flagship, the Nina), which carried huge iron cannons and up to 3,000 tons of cargo. They were 10 times the size of analogous Western vessels, the Queen Mary or Normandie compared to the Noronic.
The Chinese navy contained over 4,000 ships, commanded by Muslim Arab eunuch-admirals, and was vastly greater than Western navies. (Henry V invaded France with four fishing ships, which carried a