This was no war fleet, but it was designed for shock and awe. At its heart were the biggest wooden ships of all time, perhaps 250 feet long and displacing two thousand tons of ocean; and at its head was history's biggest admiral, the Muslim eunuch Zheng He, said to have been seven feet tall and sixty inches around the belly (in some accounts, nine feet tall and ninety inches in girth).*
*Zheng was from the far southwest of China, where Arab merchants had converted many people to Islam. Captured as a boy in 1381 during the Ming dynasty's wars to pacify the region, he was enlisted in the emperor's service and castrated. He seems to have taken all this in his enormous stride.
"Why the West Rules – For Now: The patterns of history and what they reveal about the future" - Ian Morris
