Eighty years before Columbus, China sent ships to explore the world.
The Chinese discovered many marvelous things, but one discovery stood out above the others: the chee-lin.
This chee-lin was just a giraffe, but to the Chinese it was an omen of good fortune so rare that it had appeared only once before—at the birth of Confucius.
In a storybook in which each page evokes the richness of faraway places and long-ago days, James Rumford traces the chee-lin’s journey from Africa to Bengal to China, weaving a tale not just of a giraffe but of the people he meets along the way. Chee-lin is a story for all time: of captivity and struggle, friendship and respect.