The great voyages of Zheng He

Zheng He, a Ming emperor's trusted attendant, planned and carried out a series of seven voyages to gather knowledge about other parts of the world and extend China's trade, prestige, and power among nations. Traveling in the early 1400s, before the European golden age of world exploration, Zheng's fleet sailed throughout south Asia and west to Mecca in the Middle East and Mogadishu in Africa. Song Nan Zhang's handsome, detailed paintings offer scenes in many different settings. Despite the highly illustrated format, long words and sentences may make reading difficult, even for older children. An occasional awkwardness in word usage or participle placement may bring a reader up short momentarily, though the meaning is generally clear from the context. This large-format book offers an interesting story and unusually good illustrations showing a part of Chinese history known to few American children. For older students, Val Ross' The Road to There: Mapmakers and Their Stories (2003) includes a chapter on Cheng Ho, the same intriguing figure (despite the variant spelling of his name).

Gr. 4-6.