The Eunuch Admiral (2011)

All seven of their vessels would have fit easily on the 80,000-square-foot main deck of Zheng He's flagship; the Europeans' combined crews of 260 amount to less than 1 percent of Zheng He's 30,000. Although Zheng's story had been suppressed for centuries in China, he was a godlike presence in Southeast Asia and beyond. The paper's subject: Zheng He. Fred's observations to his fellow historians offered an exacting chronicle of the Ming voyages. More important to me, Fred's paper described a tremendous clash in 1406 between Zheng's warships and Cantonese pirates in the Malacca Strait. In 1431, the fifth Ming emperor had a temporary change of heart, and sent Zheng He on what proved to be his and the fleet's final voyage. Zheng is believed to have died in 1432 or early 1433, before the fleet's return to China, and been buried at sea off India. Fred Wakeman, who did as much as any scholar in our time to rehabilitate Zheng, would have begged to differ.