Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (9 page)

There are some 9,000 rooms in the Forbidden City, which makes you wonder who could possibly need 9,000 rooms in a place where, technically speaking, most people were forbidden from entering. And who would build such a palace in the first place?

I had read the book
1421—The Year China Discovered the World
by Gavin Menzies and become intrigued by his perspective on the era. Menzies, of course, had made the provocative claim that in all likelihood it was the Chinese who were the first foreigners to stumble upon the New World. Most scholars dispute this, but there’s no arguing that, at the time, China was a power to be reckoned with.

In the early fifteenth century, when Imperial China was near its apex, the country was ruled by one of the more extraordinary emperors to ever put his derriere on the throne inside the Hall of Preserving Harmony. Indeed, Emperor Zhu Di was the very Son of Heaven who originally built the Forbidden City. The fourth son of the first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, Zhu Di was not chosen for succession upon the death of his father. This was not good for Zhu Di. As was the custom, the new emperor, Zhu Di’s nephew, set about killing possible rivals to his succession. Zhu Di promptly gave up the good life of being part of the imperial household in Nanjing (then the imperial capital) and escaped to Beijing, where he became a homeless vagrant. Apparently, he must have been a very charismatic drifter, for he was soon able to raise an army that he marched down to Nanjing, where he was enthusiastically greeted by the city’s eunuchs.

Eunuchs! And you wonder where Chinese cinema comes from. Within the Imperial Court, it was typically the eunuchs who controlled the levers of power. This is because, severed from their manhood, they could be trusted to wander among the hundreds of comely concubines that resided with the emperor. The new emperor, however, had fallen under the sway of the mandarins, the well-educated bureaucrats who managed the empire’s day-to-day affairs. This did not please the eunuchs. They’d been castrated, after all, and while being able to hit the high notes in the imperial karaoke bar had its benefits, it did little to alleviate this sudden fall from favor. And so when Zhu Di arrived in Nanjing with his army, the eunuchs flung open the gates.
We welcome Zhu Di!
they squeaked.

Zhu Di claimed the Dragon Throne for himself, changed his name to Yongle, and set about killing any possible rivals to his reign. The old emperor, Zhu Di’s nephew, Zhu Yunwen, was never found. Some suggest that he may have died in the fire that consumed his palace. Others that he escaped by disguising himself as a monk. In any event, Zhu Di issued a decree ordering the extermination of the ten agnates. Traditionally in China, when killing political opponents, it was acceptable to exterminate the three agnates—the father, son, and grandson of the doomed opponent. Zhu Di extended this to the tenth degree to include pretty much anyone remotely related to the former emperor, excepting of course himself. Some 8,000 family and friends of Zhu Yunwen were killed, often in a gruesome, highly creative manner.

Zhu Di then moved the capital to Beijing, which had once been the imperial capital of the Yuan Dynasty, which is the polite term for describing the Mongol hordes who ruled China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The dynastic capital was an itinerant place, having been located as far west as Xian during much of the first millennium, and emperors saw it as their privilege as Sons of Heaven to move the capital according to their whims and needs. The Mongol leader Kublai Khan had made his capital in present-day Beijing, then called Dadu. It was Zhu Di’s father, the peasant Zhu Yuanzhang, who had led an uprising that dislodged the Mongols from Beijing, a feat that enabled him to call himself the Son of Heaven, founder of the Ming Dynasty, without anybody calling him out on it.

When Zhu Di came to power, trouble still lurked on the northern border. Tamerlane, a Mongol leader who had a notable penchant for stacking the skulls of his slain enemies in enormous pyramids, was threatening to invade China, returning the country to Mongol rule. Zhu Di didn’t much like the sound of that; thus he moved his capital and his million-man army north to Beijing, where he could counter the threat. Fortunately, Tamerlane soon died, and as his descendants began the squabbling that would eventually doom the Mongol Empire, Zhu Di found himself with some idle time on his hands. And so he began to build.

The scale of building can only be described as epic. Hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly uprooted from towns and villages around the country and sent to Beijing, where they were guarded by the army, since without Mongols to fight they didn’t have anything else to do. The challenge, of course, was feeding such a multitude of people in a region where winters were long and bleak and the growing season was short. Zhu Di’s solution was to enlarge the Grand Canal, which had first been constructed during the Wu Dynasty, way back in the late fifth century. At that point, Europe had descended into the Dark Ages and men like Conan the Barbarian roamed the earth, smiting enemies while reveling in the lamentations of their women, whereas China was already building a canal that would eventually link Beijing with Hangzhou, more than a thousand miles away.

With the canal enlarged, Zhu Di ordered thousands of barges to deliver the enormous amount of grain needed to feed this city of soldiers and workers. Elsewhere in China people starved, but Zhu Di pushed relentlessly on. He had aspirations. Forests were denuded of wood to build not only the Forbidden City, but the vast number of barges plying up and down the Grand Canal. And then, once the scope of his ambition was realized, he began emptying forests as far away as Vietnam. This was because Zhu Di wanted a navy.

Not just any navy, but the most powerful and immense navy the world had ever seen. Enormous treasure ships were constructed, each requiring the wood of roughly 300 acres of hardwood forest. Said to be more than 400 feet long, a treasure ship was capable of carrying upward of 500 people. Zhu Di built a fleet around his sixty-two treasure ships, and by the time this armada was put to water there were more than 300 ships capable of carrying 28,000 people.

This mass of ships was led by Admiral Zheng He, one of the more intriguing men to take to sea at the dawn of the age of exploration. To begin with, he carried his penis in a box. And not just his penis, but his
cojones
too. His dismemberment had been particularly thorough. A Muslim, Zheng He had been captured as a boy of eleven by the Ming Army in distant Yunnan Province. Deprived of water, Zheng He was then castrated, and once the threat of infection subsided, he was given gallons of water to drink, until finally his urethra burst and a tube was inserted. (The author is wincing; he can barely go on.) Few people survived the procedure, and yet an imperial decree was needed to prevent men from self-castration (the author doesn’t know what to say), but such, apparently, was the lure of the power held by the imperial eunuchs that men were willing to take the knife to their own manhood (completely inexplicable).

Zheng He went on to become a servant of the Ming emperor, and soon he had acquired a nickname, San Bao, which—unsurprising, really—means the Three Jewels. With his special box beside him, Zheng He moved on to become possibly the best-traveled man of his era. Eighty years before Columbus set forth in the
Santa Maria,
a pitifully small boat compared to one of Zhu Di’s treasure ships, Zheng He roamed the seas during the seven grand expeditions he undertook between 1405 and 1433. He crossed the Indian Ocean, alighted upon India and Sri Lanka, visited the Arabian Peninsula, moseyed down the coast of Africa, picked up a few giraffes to stock the zoo in Beijing, and brought back local envoys and ambassadors so they could kowtow before the emperor. Some, like Menzies, even speculate that Zheng He was the first foreigner to discover North America. In any event, China stood on the cusp of ruling the world. No nation had a fleet that could match that of the eunuch from Yunnan.

And then China disappeared behind its walls. Its fleet of treasure ships was left to rot. The Middle Kingdom would become peripheral as Europe arose from its long slumber. How can this be, you wonder? China was at the very edge of global domination, something every nation wants, no? And yet they turned back.

Apparently, Heaven had become unhappy with the Son of Heaven. Heaven went so far as to hurl a lightning bolt at the Forbidden City, burning most of it to the barest embers. Crushed by this display of celestial approbation, Zhu Di was no longer a match for the imperial mandarins, who had become appalled at the expense of money and resources that Zhu Di’s ambitions cost. Conscious that the dynasty was at stake, Zhu Di began the retreat inward that culminated with his successor. And the eunuch admiral died at sea on the last great voyage of the treasure ships.

The Forbidden City would be rebuilt. But global dominance would have to wait. As I wandered through the resplendent halls of the Forbidden City—noting, as I watched a group of small boys, that while smoking was clearly advertised as forbidden, peeing on walls was apparently okay—I couldn’t help but wonder about what a fickle thing fate can be.

“Imagine,” I said to Dan, “if lightning hadn’t struck that day. The Chinese Empire could have swallowed the world.”

“Oh,” said Dan cheerily. “There’s still time for that.”

5

I
t is remarkable how quickly a country like China can reduce a foreigner—this foreigner, in any case—to a state of childlike powerlessness. True, I had traveled to places where people could still recall what a human being tastes like (it tastes like pork). I had visited islands where the inhabitants had not seen more than a dozen foreigners in their lives. I had wandered in Russia when the country seemed on the cusp of civil war, and, for one particularly memorable week, I had found myself in the midst of an actual civil war in Bosnia after making my way to a Muslim enclave that was presently being obliterated by Serbian shelling. Perhaps more important, I had made my way out of that war zone. And yet in Beijing, as a traveler, I felt like a quivering cupcake.

No doubt this was partly the result of my incomprehension of the language. In China, if you don’t speak Chinese, and even more important, if you can’t read Chinese, you are essentially helpless. When an elderly man began to speak with me as I wandered through one of Beijing’s
hutongs,
the rapidly dwindling labyrinths of traditional neighborhoods in Beijing, I had absolutely no idea what he was saying. Perhaps he was encouraging me to have a savory dumpling. It would make me feel harmonious inside. Or perhaps he was expressing some indelicate thought about the barbarian wandering around his neighborhood. You just don’t know, and all you can muster is a shrug and a big dopey grin, causing your counterpart to offer a contemptuous wave because, clearly, you are an imbecile.

It was the same when trying to get myself from point A to point B with a minimum of drama. While Beijing has gone to some lengths to make things easier for the Chinese-impaired, including offering some signs with the street names translated into Roman letters (or pinyin, as the Chinese call the Romanized version of their language), the fact remains that the vast majority of signs offer nothing more than Chinese characters, which makes things just a trifle problematic for those with a predilection for getting lost. I might set forth for what my map confidently informed me was the broad avenue known as Dongzhimenwai Daijie. Invariably, I’d soon find myself wandering around, hopelessly lost, staring at a sign in Chinese that did nothing to alleviate the complete and total befuddlement I felt.

Even Dan, who had lived in China for years now, periodically had difficulty getting himself from one place to another. Aware of how utterly incapable I was, he had taken to escorting me back to my hotel whenever we parted ways. One evening, after he had given directions to the cabdriver, the driver apologized and explained that he was new to the job, had just arrived in Beijing from his village, and could he please repeat the street name.

“Dengshikou Xijie,” Dan repeated.

“Dengshikou Xijie?” said the driver.

“Dui, Dengshikou Xijie.”

They spent a minute going back and forth, repeating the street name, which was apparently the name of a well-known avenue in central Beijing that every cabdriver surely knows.

“Just explain that it’s near the Crowne Plaza,” I offered helpfully.

“I can’t,” Dan said. “I don’t know the character for Crowne Plaza.”

“Do you mean to tell me that you can’t just say Crowne Plaza or Holiday Inn and have the taxi driver take you there?”

“No. You need to say it in Chinese.”