Yung-lo

5), Lin Yung-lo, Taiwan's ambassador to the UK, and Jason Lien Chien-Chen Lien, director general of the Taipei Representative Office in the U.K.'s Edinburgh Office, led the four performance groups through Edinburgh's boisterous Royal Mile.

To reciprocate, the Chinese sent a delegation to Luzon in "the tenth month of the third year of Yung-lo" or 1405.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century AD, the third Ming Emperor, Yung-lo created one of the most dazzling architectural masterpieces in the world.

He points out that after a century of Mongol rule, the Ming court, except during the Yung-lo period, restricted Chinese contacts with the foreigners to the north of China proper.

For a brief period under the Emperor Yung-lo of China (who reigned from 1402 to 1424), it seemed as though China might become a sea power.

A Muslim from Yunnan province, Cheng distinguished himself in the civil war that placed Yung-lo on the imperial throne (1403); serving afterward as Grand Eunuch of the imperial court, he undertook a series of seven great voyages into the Indian Ocean and adjacent areas (1405-1433); the first of these numbered sixty-two ships (the largest 517 feet long with four decks) carrying 26,000 men; the first three voyages visited India and Ceylon, the fifth called at Aden and Hormuz, and the seventh visited several East African ports; appointed commander in chief of forces at the alternate Ming capital of Nanking (Nanjing) (1425); died in 1451.

An able and vigorous monarch, he owed his place on the throne to his military skill during the civil war (1399-1402), but he probably did not take the field afterward; his reign saw the preparation of the Yung-lo ta-tien, a compendium of works on virtually all subjects (1403-1408), and the completion of the Imperial complex in Peking known as the Forbidden City (1422); his reign was the zenith of Ming power.