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 hundred soldiers each per cross-Channel trip.) The Chinese governed almost all of Asia, and in the 13th century surged into Poland, Germany and Hungary, routed the Western knights and effectively destroyed European feudalism. Even in the seventh century, China exchanged embassies or trade representatives with 300 cities or states, including the Portuguese and Swedes. Kublai Khan was a relatively liberal ruler who tolerated all religious views in the times of pre-Inquisition Europe and reduced the imposition of the death penalty to a lower per capita frequency than in the United States today.
Zheng He as an Arab? The liberalism of Kublai Khan? Confusing the Chinese and the Mongols? Take your pick or add your own.
(By the way, the rest of the piece is worth a chuckle as well.)