Dr. Sally Church lectured on ‘A Lion Presented as Tribute during Chen Cheng’s 陳誠 Diplomatic Expeditions to Herat (1413-1420)’
On the 25th of January, 2019, Dr. Sally Church lectured on the topic ‘A Lion Presented as Tribute during Chen Cheng’s 陳誠 Diplomatic Expeditions to Herat (1413-1420)’ to scholars, students and visitors of the University of Cambridge. Dr. Church was invited by the Cambridge Central Asia Forum in collaboration with the Centre of Development Studies. A brief summary of her presentation can be found below.
Abstract: In the very year when representatives of the Sultan of Bengal presented a giraffe as a tribute gift to the Chinese emperor during Zheng He’s 鄭和 maritime expeditions (1405-1433), Shāhrukh Bahadur (1377-1447), ruler of the Timurid empire from 1407 to 1447, sent his hunters out in the hinterland of his capital Herat (in present-day Afghanistan) to capture a lion as tribute for the same emperor. The year was 1414, and the emperor was Yongle 永樂 (r. 1403-1424). While the presentation of the giraffe from Bengal, which came to China by sea, is clearly documented in the Ming Shilu 明實錄 (Veritable Records of the Ming), there is no mention of a lion among the gifts from Herat in the entry for 30 November 1415, the date when the Shilu records the arrival of the envoys from that polity via the overland Silk Road. This talk examines the question of whether the lion survived the journey and explores why its arrival is not recorded on that day in the Shilu, one of the most detailed and reliable sources on Ming Dynasty foreign relations.
