older, he couldn’t quite tell. The young man looked as though he might have been Chinese, but Luke couldn’t be certain since the young man was wearing dark glasses and had his black hair tied in a ponytail. He wore crisp tailored jeans, penny loafers sans socks, and a T-shirt that sported the slogan “Will Think For Cold, Hard Cash.”
“Why, yes,” said Luke, “I’m looking for Dr. Wu. I have an appointment.”
The man lifted his dark glasses to the top of his head and smiled. “Well, you’ve found him. What can I do for you?”
Luke smiled. “I’m Charles Lucas. I wrote you last week asking for an appointment.”
“Well, well, so you’re Mr. Lucas.” He smiled again. “Should I address you as Mr. Lucas or Charles?”
“My friends all call me Luke. I hate Charles. My sister calls me Charles when she wants to tick me off.”
Both men laughed and shook hands, and Dr. Wu gestured for Luke to enter the office.
“I hope you’re not claustrophobic. I apologize for the mess, but I have a full plate at the moment. I’m up to my knees in travel nonsense, and I’m still getting ready to leave tomorrow morning. I have a tendency to procrastinate now and then. This time it caught me off my game.” Dr. Wu gestured for Luke to take a seat on an old metal folding chair. He continued. “This isn’t really my office, you understand, I’m just using it while Dr. Heinemann is on sabbatical in Turkey. I don’t know how he handles working here. I know I couldn’t take it for long if I wasn’t so pressed for space at home.” He smiled at a private joke. “So, what can I do for you, Luke?”
Luke reached into his jacket pocket and handed Dr. Wu a folded piece of paper. “Do you think you can translate this for me?” Luke grinned. “Unfortunately, I don’t read Chinese, and I think I need a hand up on this one.”
“I’ll do what I can.” Dr. Wu took the paper, opened it, turned it right-side up and looked more closely, and then he pulled a large magnifying glass from a cluttered desk drawer and looked again. After a few moments he whistled in surprise and looked up. His manner quickly altered from light and conversant to somber and serious. “Just where did you get this text?”
Luke kept as neutral an expression as he could muster. “I found it among some old papers in a steamer trunk. That’s just a copy, of course.”
“I surmised that, but do you have any idea what this says?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t be here. But certain other documents I’ve come across lead me to believe it has something to do with a fifteenth-century Chinese admiral named Zhou Man.”
“You can bet hard cash on that, Mr. Lucas. Some of the characters are a little obscure and arcane, to be sure, but in short this appears to be a formal declaration stating that Admiral Zhou Man takes under his protection the lands neighboring someplace called the Bay of Whales. He does so in the name of his Imperial Master, the Emperor Zhu Di.”
Dr. Wu looked up from his reading to explain. “Zhu Di was the third Ming emperor. It was he who commissioned the building of the great treasure fleets that were placed under the command of Admiral Zheng He. Zhou Man was his subordinate, and some say he explored the western coasts of the Americas. I’ve been told there seems to be some evidence for a claim of Chinese presence on the west coast of Mexico. But I wouldn’t know. That’s not in my field exactly. But either way it makes a whopping good story . . . Where did you say you found this again?”
“In an old trunk with some other papers.”
“Was there anything else in that trunk worth mentioning?”
Luke could feel his face redden. He wasn’t really very good at prevarication. “Just some odds and ends, nothing worth mentioning at the moment.”
Dr. Wu smiled. “Not worth mentioning, or not willing to mention? Remember, we Chinese invented inscrutability. But tell me, was there anything else on the same page that you haven’t shown me?”
Luke smiled. “Perhaps.”
“Perhaps yes, or perhaps no?”
“Just perhaps.”
Dr. Wu laughed. “Okay, we’ll do this your way and I’ll tell you what else was on that paper, and why.”
Luke grinned, but his expression signaled serious doubt. “Really. Do you think you can?”
Dr. Wu leaned back and nodded. “When the various admirals of the treasure fleet discovered something important, they’d mark it with a stone. They commissioned them in all sizes. Admirals like Hong Bao, Zhou Wen, and Zhou Man carried predressed stone plaques of different sizes in the holds of their ships. When they came upon a place of interest or profit, they’d land and explore the surrounding area and possibly set out a marker. Sometimes, on well-traveled routes, they set the larger stones where everyone could find them. Other explorers felt their plaques would be disturbed, so they did something quite unique and very Chinese. They would bury their markers on some prominent piece of ground easily seen from seaward. It’s said that sometimes they also interred an Imperial token of some kind to verify their claim. Then they’d plant and cultivate some long-lived vegetation, preferably cypress trees, over and around the sacred spot. These locations were generally established near the shore where their forestation efforts could be spotted from the sea years into the future.” Dr. Wu smiled with pride. “We Chinese not only invented the compass, the rudder, watertight bulkheads, and fully battened sails, but we also invented living navigational aids.”
Luke appeared slightly incredulous. “Really? How’d they manage that?”
“Simple. The trees and plants they used were all primarily indigenous to China, like the tuberose or the silver cypress, things like that.
“The marker stones were usually carved in three languages, primarily because there were three important elements of those cultures involved in Zheng He’s treasure fleets. The uppermost script was court Mandarin circa thirteen to fifteen hundred. The one below that would be Persian of the same period, and the last is Tamil.”
Luke was more than a little impressed, but he was also confused. “Why Persian? And what’s Tamil?”
Dr. Wu went on. “Ornate, scripted Persian of the period is simply a courtly written form of Arabic. Many of the fleet’s navigators were Arabic. And Tamil, in one form or another, was the common tongue for almost all the
