Yongle Emperor

The Yongle Emperor (also romanised in Wade–Giles as Yong-lo Emperor; 2 May 1360 – 12 August 1424), personal name Zhu Di, was the third emperor of the Ming dynasty in China, reigning from 1402 to 1424.

Zhu Di was the fourth son of the Hongwu Emperor, the founder of the Ming dynasty. He was originally enfeoffed as the Prince of Yan (燕王) in May 1370, with the capital of his princedom at Beiping (modern Beijing). Amid the continuing struggle against the Mongols of the Northern Yuan dynasty, Zhu Di consolidated his own power and eliminated rivals such as the general Lan Yu. He initially accepted his father's appointment of his eldest brother Zhu Biao and then his nephew Zhu Yunwen as crown prince, but when Zhu Yunwen ascended the throne as the Jianwen Emperor and began executing and demoting his powerful uncles, Zhu Di found pretext for rising in rebellion against his nephew. Assisted in large part by eunuchs mistreated by the Hongwu and Jianwen Emperors, who both favored the Confucian scholar-bureaucrats, Zhu Di survived the initial attacks on his princedom and drove south to launch the Jingnan Campaign against the Jianwen Emperor in Nanjing. In 1402, he successfully overthrew his nephew and occupied the imperial capital, Nanjing, after which he was proclaimed Emperor and adopted the era name Yongle, which means "perpetual happiness".

Zheng He

Zheng He (1371–1433 or 1435), originally named Ma He, was a Hui court eunuch, mariner, explorer, diplomat, and fleet admiral during China's early Ming dynasty. Zheng commanded expeditionary voyages to Southeast Asia, South Asia, Western Asia, and East Africa from 1405 to 1433. His larger ships stretched 400 feet in length (Columbus's Santa Maria, for comparison, was 85 feet). These carried hundreds of sailors on four tiers of decks.

As a favorite of the Yongle Emperor, whose usurpation he assisted, he rose to the top of the imperial hierarchy and served as commander of the southern capital Nanjing (the capital was later moved to Beijing by the Yongle Emperor). These voyages were long neglected in official Chinese histories but have become well known in China and abroad since the publication of Liang Qichao's Biography of Our Homeland's Great Navigator, Zheng He in 1904. A trilingual stele left by the navigator was discovered on the island of Sri Lanka shortly thereafter.

Family

Zheng He was the second son of a family from Kunyang,Yunnan. He was originally born with the name Ma He. His family were Hui people. He had four sisters and one older brother.

National Geographic

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Michael Yamashita

Michael Yamashita is an American photographer who was born in 1949 in San Francisco, California, but grew up in Montclair, New Jersey. In 1971 he graduated from Wesleyan University with a degree in Asian studies and later went to Japan for seven years. He began working for the National Geographic in 1979 and since then traveled to places as diverse as Somalia, Sudan, England, Ireland, and Papua New Guinea. For the past ten years he has specialized in Asia, including China and Tibet. He is also an author of more than nine photographic books, including "Shangri-La [along the tea road to lhasa]", Zheng He: Tracing the Epic Voyages of China’s Greatest Explorer, Japan: The Soul of a Nation, Marco Polo, A Photographer’s Journey, and many others. He has won numerous awards from the National Press Photographers Association and the Asian American Journalists Association. He is also a frequent lecturer and conducts workshops across Asia and the United States.

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