In the autumn of the sixteenth year of the Zhengde reign, blood-red waves surged at the mouth of the Pearl River.
Portuguese warships smashed through the Ming dynasty’s maritime defenses. Their cannon fire shattered the fishing boats of the Tanka people, and infants’ cries vanished beneath the smoke. Lin Zhen, a company commander in the Guangdong navy, stepped over floating corpses, seized a foreign commander’s matchlock, pressed it to his forehead, and swore, “This thing is excellent. Tomorrow I’ll blow your head clean off!”
Yet at court, Deputy Maritime Commissioner Wang Bo championed appeasement and sought to sign the Sino-Portuguese Preliminary Agreement, ceding Tuen Mun. Lin Zhen tore up the treaty before everyone and stamped on the alliance, denouncing it: “Sign this paper today, and tomorrow their cannons will be aimed at the capital! This isn’t a trade agreement, it’s a death warrant for our country!” Impeachments from the censors poured in like snowflakes, accusing him of “recklessly provoking a border conflict.” The Veritable Records of the Ming state: “The Portuguese were savage and lawless, yet Zhen was even more brutal.”
Trapped on a desolate island, Lin Zhen and his shattered navy melted down their cooking pots to cast cannons, combining Zheng He’s surviving diagrams with the Tanka people’s hard-won wisdom and blood to reproduce Portuguese guns. The old craftsman Wu Tietou hammered the metal through tears: “Cast iron is brittle. It can’t withstand the force inside a Western gun barrel!” The young Tanka fisherman Ashui laid out an ancestral sea chart, baring his heart as he cried, “After Yashan, is there no China left?”
When Wang Bo colluded with the foreign commander to slaughter the naval stockade under the pretext of hunting “pirates”; when the court’s arresting envoy had already reached the camp gates; when all three cannons burst in the heat of battle...
Lin Zhen pointed a pair of guns at the sea and roared, invoking Chen Tang’s old words:
“Those who dare invade mighty Han, however far away, shall be executed! Those who destroy ships and burn the foreign invaders today, however lowly they may be, shall all be slain!”
The Records of the Grand Historian, in its “Biographies of the Xiongnu,” says: “The barbarians are like beasts. Their kind words are no cause for joy, and their harsh words no cause for anger.” Yet the furious seas of China will ultimately prove the Way with iron and blood: the first thunderclap of the Age of Exploration will be the Ming dragon banner cleaving the darkened sky!
