SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST - Saturday, 20 August, 2016
Near my childhood home in Kunming (昆明), Yunnan (雲南)
province, is a park dedicated to its most famous son: Admiral Zheng He.
Our teacher would take us to pay tribute to the great eunuch of the
Ming dynasty, recounting his legendary seven expeditions that brought
glory to the motherland.
The marble bust of Zheng He shows the face of a
typical Chinese, with a square chin, brushy eyebrows and a flat nose. My
father joked it more resembled comrade Lei Feng than the admiral. Not
until years later did I realise how true this was. The statue was
erected in 1979 – a year after Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平)
launched his open-door policy. Zheng, barely mentioned during the
Cultural Revolution, was plucked from obscurity and hailed as a national
hero who embodied China’s open spirit. A park near his ancestral home
was dedicated to him. The same craftsmen who churned out revolutionary
statues were employed to build his. In real life, Zheng probably looked very different. My school textbook
mentioned only that he was a Hui minority (Muslim Chinese). In fact, the
admiral was a descendent of a powerful Persian family. Records
discovered in 1913 trace his lineage to Sayyid Ajall, who was sent by
Kublai Khan to conquer Yunnan and became its first governor. In 2014,
Chinese scientists at Fudan University in Shanghai put the theory to
test. They examined DNA samples collected from descendents of the
admiral’s close kin and found they originated from Persia, modern-day
Iran. In addition to Zheng He, most senior officers of the storied Ming
armada were also Muslims.
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