From The Wall Street Journal online:
DECEMBER 4, 2010
Recovering China's Past on Kenya's Coast
By Virginia Postrel
A team of Chinese archeologists arrived in Kenya last week, headed for waters surrounding the Lamu archipelago on the country's northern coast. They hadn't made the trip to study local history. They came to recover a lost Chinese past.
In the early 1400s, nearly a century before Vasco da Gama reached eastern Africa, Chinese records say that the great admiral Zheng He took his vast fleet of treasure ships as far as Kenya's northern Swahili coast. Zheng visited the Sultan of Malindi, the most powerful local ruler, and brought back exotic gifts, including a giraffe. "Africa was China's El Dorado—the land of rare and precious things, mysterious and unfathomable," writes Louise Levathes in her 1994 history of Zheng's voyages, "When China Ruled the Seas."
Now the Chinese government is funding a three-year, $3 million project, in cooperation with the National Museums of Kenya, to find and analyze evidence of Zheng's visits. The underwater search for shipwrecks follows a dig last summer in the village of Mambrui that unearthed a rare coin carried only by emissaries of the Chinese emperor, as well as a large fragment of a green-glazed porcelain bowl whose fine workmanship befits an imperial envoy. Although Ming-era porcelains are nothing new in Mambrui—Chinese porcelains fill the local museum and decorate a centuries-old tomb—the latest finds suggest that the wares came not through Arab merchants but directly from China.
For a resurgent China with often-controversial business ventures in Africa, Zheng's voyages epitomize what the 20th-century literary critic Van Wyck Brooks called a "usable past"—a historical tradition that serves present needs. Falling somewhere between history and myth, a usable past selects and emphasizes what is relevant and resonant for the present and omits the contradictory or distracting. It both shapes and communicates identity, whether national, ethnic, artistic, religious, institutional or personal.
—Virginia Postrel is the author of "The Future and Its Enemies" and "The Substance of Style." She is writing a book on glamour.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page C12
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2 comments:
I'm glad you liked my article, but when you lift the whole thing rather than a selection plus a link you not only violate the legal copyright--even I don't own the right to do that--but deprive the WSJ and, hence, me of the source of income that makes such articles possible.
Ms. Postrel, I have deleted most of the article. It has been my experience over the years that the article link will probably disappear and then the rest of the article will be lost forever to readers. That will be extremely unfortunate. I do not agree that what I do here is a violation of copyright law, but reasonable people will have vehement disagreement on what constitutes copyright violation and what falls under fair usage.
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