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 of chapters, in which each page evokes the richenss of faraway places and long-ago days, James Rumford traced 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.