It's never hard finding adventure in China. By driving just half an hour outside of Nanjing, the former Ming dynasty capital that today is a metropolis of 4.5 million, we have slipped back into a China not exactly of imperial times but one that modernity has scarcely touched. The rice stalks, newly planted, undulate in the breeze as they stretch toward the sun. Children of the local soil, their skin darkened from long days helping seed the paddies, splash around in muddy watering holes. Traffic comes to a stop whenever a water buffalo chances onto the road.
We are on a quest to retrace the route of the man who ranks as perhaps China's greatest adventurer, the 15th century admiral, Zheng He. A Muslim, a eunuch, a warrior, Zheng He vastly outdid his approximate contemporaries, the Western naval heroes who helped define the global Age of Exploration. His armada of giant junks was several times bigger than any of the fleets Columbus commanded nearly a century later. And his ships were five times longer than those of the celebrated Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama. With more than 300 oceangoing vessels and a crew of nearly 30,000 men, Zheng He helped transform China into the region's, and perhaps the world's, 15th century superpower. He exacted tribute, brought Sultans to their knees and opened up trade routes that helped develop the enduring taste abroad for Chinese porcelain and silk. He brought home quirky items, too, including the first giraffe China had seen — initially misidentified as the qilin, the unicorn central to Chinese mythology.
Explorer, conqueror, diplomat, trader — and yet Zheng He is largely unknown outside of China. In fact, he attracts only limited attention within the Middle Kingdom. Sure, schoolkids read of his exploits. But in a country perpetually obsessed with both its history and its contributions to world culture and knowledge, there is surprisingly little to remind today's citizens of Zheng He's remarkable achievements. And that's partly why, driving through the back roads outside of Nanjing, we're having far more of an adventure than we had bargained for.
We are barreling around Jiangning county, in the west of Jiangsu province; our vessel is a Volkswagen Santana, made in China. The target is Zheng He's tomb, and we are lost. There are no markings for the site along the road, no signposts or souvenir shops selling Zheng He memorabilia. The peasants we ask, while voluble and certain, send us on a 21st century odyssey, mostly around in circles. There is one sign pointing the way to the enticingly translated City of the Dead, which turns out to be an unrelated catacomb. There are no markers for Zheng He's final resting place.
Still, we persevere and finally our crew of four arrives at a dirt path that leads to the tomb that is China's grandest memorial to the man who once led the "treasure fleet" of the dragon throne that dominated the Asian seas. We twist past a few small homes and scoot past great quantities of ducks, chickens and goats. One imagines Zheng He had an easier time finding his way to Melaka, Sri Lanka, Aden, Mogadishu.
There is a museum at the site, but it's closed. It was also shuttered several years ago when another Western journalist came to visit. Apparently, it never opens. A caretaker sleeps in a back room, but on this day even he isn't to be found. A nearby stela outlines Zheng He's story, how he led seven expeditions on behalf of the Emperor, journeys that established China as the world's top naval power. The inscriptions are covered by a graffiti overlay: "I am here" reads one entry. And there is the tomb, set into Bull's Head Hill and surrounded by overgrown weeds; other than the graffiti, there is no evidence that anyone else has made the pilgrimage. (Zheng He probably isn't even in the tomb. He died in 1433 on his fleet's seventh voyage and, given the hygienic concerns of the day, it's virtually certain he was tossed overboard.) This, then, is an empty tomb visited by no one.
How does a country forget its greatest adventurer-hero? How does a man who ruled the seas for China and projected the Emperor's power become consigned to a neglected burial spot and a perpetually shuttered museum? One explanation, surely, is that the Chinese typically do not revere adventurers. This is a society that for centuries was dominated by a Confucian ideology that ascribed overwhelming virtue to orderliness. Everyone had a prescribed role to play according to his social status; everything fit into its rightful place. Only then was civilization thought to thrive. Even Chairman Mao, the peasant rebel who would become the Great Helmsman of the modern era, is admired not so much for leading revolutionary upheaval but for restoring stability to China after the tumult — dynastic collapse, civil war, Japanese invasion — of the first half of the 20th century. "Fear of change is an enduring legacy of Confucianism," says Henry Tsai Shih-shan, a University of Arkansas history professor who has written several books on the Ming dynasty. "Chinese continually fail to appreciate that expansion can create power and wealth, not chaos."