People did say Zheng He was a 7 foot tall Muslim eunuch from southwest China, with a sixty inch belly. That's not all:
"The seven Treasure Fleets dispatched between 1405 and 1433 were the grandest projections of state power the world had seen. They did have to fight three times to secure the Straits of Malacca, then as now the world's busiest waterway...Chinese sailors walked the streets of Mogadishu, which did not seem to impress them ("if one's eyes wander one meets only sighs and sulky glances", one of Zheng's officers wrote)...and Mecca, which did.
The Treasure Fleets had sailed south and west a good 9000 miles, but some researchers think this was just the beginning. With their compasses and charts, tankers full of drinking water, and huge stores of food, Zheng's ships could have gone anywhere they wanted; and that, the former submarine captain Gavin Menzies claims in this bestselling book 1421: The Year China Discovered America, is exactly what they did.
...
Historians, however, remain unmoved. Menzies, they conceded is quite right that Zheng's logbooks are lost; but why, the historians ask, does the enormous mass of surviving Ming dynasty literature...never mention any of these discoveries?"
"The seven Treasure Fleets dispatched between 1405 and 1433 were the grandest projections of state power the world had seen. They did have to fight three times to secure the Straits of Malacca, then as now the world's busiest waterway...Chinese sailors walked the streets of Mogadishu, which did not seem to impress them ("if one's eyes wander one meets only sighs and sulky glances", one of Zheng's officers wrote)...and Mecca, which did.
The Treasure Fleets had sailed south and west a good 9000 miles, but some researchers think this was just the beginning. With their compasses and charts, tankers full of drinking water, and huge stores of food, Zheng's ships could have gone anywhere they wanted; and that, the former submarine captain Gavin Menzies claims in this bestselling book 1421: The Year China Discovered America, is exactly what they did.
...
Historians, however, remain unmoved. Menzies, they conceded is quite right that Zheng's logbooks are lost; but why, the historians ask, does the enormous mass of surviving Ming dynasty literature...never mention any of these discoveries?"
- from, Why The West Rules For Now