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Gong Zhen
Nanjing soldier turned secretary who sailed on Zheng He's seventh voyage and in 1434 wrote the Record of the Barbarian Countries in the Western Ocean
On a coastal mountain path, a loaded camel walks toward a traveller in a wide hat with a staff farther along; a bamboo pack frame with two scrolls and a gourd leans on a rock in front, a sailing ship lies on the sea at the right, and constellations and a moon fill the sky.
Gong Zhen, styled Yangsusheng, came from Yingtian, the present-day Nanjing; he began as a soldier and rose to a secretarial post. When the Xuande emperor sent Zheng He on his seventh voyage to the Western Ocean, setting out in 1430, Gong went as a secretary on the commander's staff, and the fleet called at Champa, Java, Malacca, Ceylon, Calicut and other ports before returning in 1433. In 1434 he wrote the Record of the Barbarian Countries in the Western Ocean (Xiyang fanguo zhi), describing the geography, products and customs of twenty countries from what he had seen and from what the fleet's interpreters told him, and he copied the imperial edicts issued to the expedition at the head of the book. The work circulated only in manuscript for centuries and was first published in a critical edition by Xiang Da in 1961.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; sailed with Zheng He in the Xuande era