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Jan. 22nd, 2003 10:04 amI suppose most people don't get excited over postcards of eunuchs.
I recently bought a set of postcards from a gentleman on eBay - his eBay ID is garrycam@gate.net and he's a marvellous seller. It was a set of postcards issued by the PRC the way the American post office issues stamps on specially designed envelopes. They happened to be postcards of Zheng He, the admiral who in the early 1400's led some of the greatest naval exploratory missions the world has ever seen; he was taken as a prisoner of war by a general when he was a young boy, and underwent castration a few years later with the intention of gaining employment in the Imperial palace. It worked. The Yongle emperor eventually gave him charge of fleets of ships so huge (400 feet long!) that no one would build anything of that size again for hundreds of years, and the fleets sailed at least as far as Mogadishu in modern Somalia, demanding (and getting) tribute from the rulers and potentates they encountered along the way. There's some evidence (in the form of a wrecked ship and a mostly illegible carved stone) that they may have gotten as far as the North American continent's west coast, and some other evidence - admittedly, a hell of a lot sketchier - that they might have gotten even further; you'd be best off reading Gavin Menzies' book 1421 for that. When the ships returned to China in 1423, the Yongle emperor was off the throne and his son, a dedicated Confucian, had decided China was going to rely on an agrarian economy and not go abroad any more. Most of the sailors were disgraced, but the admiral himself was permitted to retire and build himself a nice home and a mosque (not only was he a prisoner of war and most likely Annamese or Mongol in ancestry, but he was also a Moslem - albeit a Moslem who seemed to have no problem with praying to the goddess of the sea when the ships were in trouble). These postcards are commemorative issues, like I said, and they and the stamps are in absolutely fantastic shape. I've got to get an album or something; between these, the Mongolian hologram stamps, and the Irish Ice Age animal stamps I got a while back, they need to be stored somewhere.
But it only just occurred to me last night as I was starting to get ready for bed (I'd gotten the stamps at lunchtime) that I really don't think most people, in this country or any other, get quite this excited over postcards of eunuchs. Or, hell, of postcards of things that happened nearly six hundred years ago in another country about which they were taught next to nothing in school.
Not like the other children. Not like the other children who aren't like the other children. I swear, I really am going to get to the entrance to the Christian Heaven only to have the gatekeeper look down and say 'there's a note on your record...'
I recently bought a set of postcards from a gentleman on eBay - his eBay ID is garrycam@gate.net and he's a marvellous seller. It was a set of postcards issued by the PRC the way the American post office issues stamps on specially designed envelopes. They happened to be postcards of Zheng He, the admiral who in the early 1400's led some of the greatest naval exploratory missions the world has ever seen; he was taken as a prisoner of war by a general when he was a young boy, and underwent castration a few years later with the intention of gaining employment in the Imperial palace. It worked. The Yongle emperor eventually gave him charge of fleets of ships so huge (400 feet long!) that no one would build anything of that size again for hundreds of years, and the fleets sailed at least as far as Mogadishu in modern Somalia, demanding (and getting) tribute from the rulers and potentates they encountered along the way. There's some evidence (in the form of a wrecked ship and a mostly illegible carved stone) that they may have gotten as far as the North American continent's west coast, and some other evidence - admittedly, a hell of a lot sketchier - that they might have gotten even further; you'd be best off reading Gavin Menzies' book 1421 for that. When the ships returned to China in 1423, the Yongle emperor was off the throne and his son, a dedicated Confucian, had decided China was going to rely on an agrarian economy and not go abroad any more. Most of the sailors were disgraced, but the admiral himself was permitted to retire and build himself a nice home and a mosque (not only was he a prisoner of war and most likely Annamese or Mongol in ancestry, but he was also a Moslem - albeit a Moslem who seemed to have no problem with praying to the goddess of the sea when the ships were in trouble). These postcards are commemorative issues, like I said, and they and the stamps are in absolutely fantastic shape. I've got to get an album or something; between these, the Mongolian hologram stamps, and the Irish Ice Age animal stamps I got a while back, they need to be stored somewhere.
But it only just occurred to me last night as I was starting to get ready for bed (I'd gotten the stamps at lunchtime) that I really don't think most people, in this country or any other, get quite this excited over postcards of eunuchs. Or, hell, of postcards of things that happened nearly six hundred years ago in another country about which they were taught next to nothing in school.
Not like the other children. Not like the other children who aren't like the other children. I swear, I really am going to get to the entrance to the Christian Heaven only to have the gatekeeper look down and say 'there's a note on your record...'
