came themselves to China or Chinese merchants travelled at their own risk. (2) The moral success of the naval enterprises was assured.  China was recognized as a power throughout southern Asia, and Annam had been reconquered. (3) After the collapse of the Mongol emperor Timur, who died in 1406, there no longer existed any great power in Central Asia, so that trade missions from the kingdom of the Shahruk in North Persia were able to make their way to China, including the famous mission of 1409-1411. (4) Finally, the fleet would have had to be permanently guarded against the Japanese, as it had been stationed not in South China but in the Yangtze region.  As early as 1411 the canals had been repaired, and from 1415 onward all the traffic of the country went by the canals, so evading the Japanese peril.  This ended the short chapter of Chinese naval history.

These travels of Cheng Ho seem to have had one more cultural result:  a large number of fairy-tales from the Middle East were brought to China, or at all events reached China at that time.  The Chinese, being a realistically-minded people, have produced few fairy-tales of their own.  The bulk of their finest fairy-tales were brought by Buddhist monks, in the course of the first millennium A.D., from India by way of Central Asia.  The Buddhists made use of them to render their sermons more interesting and impressive.  As time went on, these stories spread all over China, modified in harmony with the spirit of the people and adapted to the Chinese environment.  Only the fables failed to strike root in China:  the matter-of-fact Chinese was not interested in animals that talked and behaved to each other like human beings.  In addition, however, to these early fairy-tales, there was another group of stories that did not spread throughout China, but were found only in the south-eastern coastal provinces.  These came from the Middle East, especially from Persia.  The fairy-tales of Indian origin spread not only to Central Asia but at the same time to Persia, where they found a very congenial soil.  The Persians made radical changes in the stories and gave them the form in which they came to Europe by various routes—­through North Africa to Spain and France; through Constantinople, Venice, or Genoa to France; through Russian Turkestan to Russia, Finland, and Sweden; through Turkey and the Balkans to Hungary and Germany.  Thus the stories found a European home.  And this same Persian form was carried by sea in Cheng Ho’s time to South China.  Thus we have the strange experience of finding some of our own finest fairy-tales in almost the same form in South China.

10 Struggles between cliques