Did Chinese beat out Columbus? By Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, Saturday, June 25, 2005
SINGAPORE — Did Chinese sailors really discover America before Columbus? A new exhibition sets the
scene, presenting new evidence that lends support to the assumptions made in "1421: The Year China
Discovered America" by Gavin Menzies.
"1421: The Year China Sailed the World," in Singapore in a special tent near the Esplanade (until Sept. 11),
is primarily a celebration of Admiral Zheng He's seven maritime expeditions between 1405 and 1423. With a
fleet of 317 ships and 28,000 men, Zheng He is generally acknowledged as one of the great naval explorers,
but how far he actually went remains a matter of dispute. With original artifacts, videos and interactive
exhibits, "1421" aims to take visitors through Zheng He's life story, setting the historical and economic
context of his voyages. Against this factual background, Menzies's theories are presented, along with new
evidence, mainly maps, backing his claims.
The exhibition starts in Hunnan (China) in 1382, with a narrative space giving some background on Zheng
He's youth. Zheng, a Chinese Muslim, was captured as a child in wartime by the Ming army and made a
eunuch to serve at court. He became a scholar and a trusted adviser to the third Ming emperor, Zhu Di, who
sent him on a mission to "proceed all the way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians
beyond the seas."
When the giant fleet returned in 1423, however, the emperor had fallen. With that change of leadership,
China began a policy of isolationism that would last hundreds of years. The large ships were left to rot at
their moorings, and most of the records of the great journeys were destroyed (though some argue the records
still exist).
A lattice maze in the exhibition takes visitors through the internal turmoil dominating the early part of the
Ming dynasty. In the main room, five giant masts and sails mark the admiral's first five voyages, each
depicting the destination while highlighting important historical facts such as the trade of spices and teas and
life on board the ships. With 600 years of sailing experience, the Chinese had already developed many tools
useful to sailing over great distances - like magnetized compasses and watertight bulkhead compartments of
a kind the West would have to wait hundreds of years for. Importantly, Zheng He's ships, known as junks,
included on-board vegetable patches, growing soybeans in tubes all year to provide protein and vitamin C,
guarding sailors against scurvy.
Along with examples of spices and other goods that the fleet would have brought back to China, the visitors
can find ancient artifacts like unusual animal-shaped money from Malacca (Malaysia) made of tin, which the
Chinese produced as currency when their copper coins ran out. Shaped in the form of animals like
crocodiles, turtles and chickens, these coins were exclusive to Malacca but have been found in shipwrecks
throughout Asia.
Arguing that the Chinese had reached America 70 years before Columbus, Menzies's book caused a stir
when it was published in 2002. "Columbus had a map of America, de Gama had a map showing India and
Captain Cook had a map showing Australia, and it's not my saying; it's the explorers saying it," the retired
British Royal Navy submarine commanding officer said in an interview. "None of the great European
explorers actually discovered anything new. The whole world was charted before they set sail. So somebody
before them had done it, and that was the basis of the book," he said.
Since then, the Web site he created to centralize evidence to substantiate his book has received more than
100,000 e-mails from people across the globe coming forward with "massive evidence" corroborating his
claims, Menzies said. "It's no longer about my book. It's really a collective work."
Menzies, who is planning to revise his book by 2007 in light of the latest evidence, now believes that Zheng
He was not the first to sail to America. "One of the mistakes I made in my book was to say that Zheng He
did everything. He had a legacy. Most of the world had already been mapped by Kublai Khan's fleet," he
said.
The exhibition shows copies of Kublai Khan's maps, recently found at the U.S. Library of Congress by an
academic. The documents clearly show North America. Menzies said he believes the maps, which are
currently being carbon-dated, are from the late 13th century.
The exhibition also presents copies of Korean maps from the collection of Charlotte Rees, which she
inherited from her father, a third-generation missionary born in China. Rees's maps date from the 16th
century, but they are believed to be replicas of Chinese maps dating to 2200 B.C. Menzies believes Zheng
would have known of these maps and hence how to reach the Americas - although he had to improve the
charts, which contained longitudinal errors.
According to Menzies, recent evidence has been found of what are believed to be wrecked Chinese junks in
Florida, South Carolina, New York and Canada. More compellingly, Menzies says, a new archaeological site
in Nova Scotia at Cape Dauphin, discovered by the Canadian architect Paul Chiasson and represented by
photos at the exhibition, indicates an early Chinese settlement. Chiasson, in an e-mail interview, said, "The
position of the wall on the side of the hill (not the summit), the layout of the wall across the hilly topography
and the relationship of a small settlement located within the wall to the overall enclosure all point away from
a European origin and appeared to point to a Chinese origin."
While some archaeologists argue that the settlement could be Viking, Chiasson disagrees, pointing out that
the nearest and largest evidence of any Viking settlement in the area is more than 700 kilometers to the north
and that the Vikings were building much smaller outposts than the one discovered. The site has just been
surveyed by Cedric Bells, who has also worked on a New Zealand site believed to have Chinese junks. Bells
has found canals, smelters, mines, Buddhist tombs, Islamic graves, barracks, all pointing to a very large
settlement, Menzies said. "This site is unquestionably Chinese and unquestionably pre-European. I actually
believe it's quite possible it was started by Kublai Khan and then further developed by Zheng He."
Carbon extracted from one of the mines is now being carbon-dated, and there are plans to request permission
from the Canadian government for DNA testing and carbon-dating to be made on the bones found in graves.
The new evidence is likely to generate as much controversy as the book. Tan Ta Sen, president of the
International Zhen He Society, believes the evidence shown in the exhibition is "opening doors" but needs to
be further substantiated. "The book is very interesting, but you still need more evidence," Tan argued. "We
[the society] don't regard it as an historical book, but as a narrative one. I want to see more proof. But at least
Menzies has started something, and people could find more evidence."
Who Discovered America? Zheng Who? – By Joseph Kahn, January 17, 2006
BEIJING, Jan. 16 - A prominent Chinese lawyer and collector unveiled an old map on Monday that he and
some supporters say should topple one of the central tenets of Western civilization: that Europeans were the
first to sail around the world and discover America.
The Chinese map, which was drawn in 1763 but has a note on it saying it is a reproduction of a map dated
1418, presents the world as a globe with all the major continents rendered with an exactitude that European
maps did not have for at least another century, after Columbus, Da Gama, Magellan, Dias and others had
completed their renowned explorations. But the map got a cool reception from some Chinese scholars and
seems unlikely to persuade skeptics that Chinese seamen were the first to round the world.
Liu Gang, a partner in a well-known Beijing law firm and an amateur historian, said Monday that he bought
the map for $500 in a Shanghai book store in 2001 and only subsequently discovered its value. He said he
had consulted scholars in the field and had done extensive research of his own before deciding to present his
findings to the public. "The main issue is not the map itself," he said at a news conference. "It is the
potential of the information in the map to change history."
At issue are the seven voyages of Zheng He, whose ships sailed the Pacific and Indian Oceans from 1405 to
1433. Historical records show that he explored Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf and the east coast of
Africa, using navigational techniques and ships that were far ahead of their time.
But a small group of scholars and hobbyists, led by Gavin Menzies, a former British Navy submarine
commander, argue that Zheng He traveled much farther than most Chinese and Western scholars say.
Notably, Mr. Menzies claims that Zheng He visited America in 1421, 71 years before Columbus arrived
there.
His 2003 book, entitled "1421: The Year China Discovered America" (William Morrow/HarperCollins), laid
out extensive but widely disputed evidence that Zheng He sailed to the east coast of today's United States in
1421 and may have left settlements in South America.
Mr. Menzies has welcomed Mr. Liu's map as evidence that his theory is correct, and the two have cooperated
in efforts to demonstrate its authenticity. Strictly speaking, Mr. Liu credits Zheng He with having navigated
and charted the Americas at least several years before Mr. Menzies says he sailed there, though both say that
is a minor contradiction.
Zheng He's achievements have been the subject of speculation for years, partly because much of the
historical record was destroyed when later Chinese emperors changed their minds about the wisdom of
connecting with the outside world. Last year, China's Communist government commemorated the 600th
anniversary of Zheng He's better known voyages, but Beijing has not actively promoted the idea that he
sailed far beyond Asian and African shores.
If the map genuinely dates to 1418, it reveals knowledge of longitude and latitude and the basic shape of the
world, including the fact that it is round, that could not have come from European sources and could have
been derived only from Zheng He's voyages, Mr. Liu says. He referred to 15th-century books and memorial
inscriptions and 16th-century maps that credit earlier Chinese discoveries among a variety of indirect
evidence to support his thesis. But Mr. Liu acknowledged that he had no hard evidence of the existence of a
1418 map beyond the word of the mapmaker who said he made the copy in the late 18th century, a time
when all of its cartographical achievements would have been commonplace.
Gong Yingyan, a historian at Zhejiang University and a leading map expert, argues that the map has too
much of a western view point from the 15th century to be authentic. He said, for example, that Chinese
cartographers did not use the style of projection seen in Mr. Liu's map - the rendering of a three-dimensional
globe on a flat sheet - until after Europeans introduced that technique to the Chinese much later.
The map's Chinese notes about the cultures, religious and racial features of people in the continents of the
world also contain vocabulary that would have been unfamiliar to a reader in the early 15th century, he said.
He cited the term the map uses for the Western God, which he said was not used until after the Jesuits
arrived in China in the 16th century. "I had high hopes when I first heard about the existence of such a map,"
Mr. Gong said. "But I can see now that it is an entirely ordinary map that proves nothing."
"Chinese Columbus" Map Likely Fake, Experts Say – By Stefan Lovgren, National
Geographic, January 23, 2006
A recently unveiled map purporting to show that a Chinese explorer discovered America in 1418 has been
met with skepticism from cartographers and historians alike.
The map depicts all of the continents, including Australia, North America, and Antarctica, in rough outline.
An inscription identifies the map as a copy made in 1763 of an original drawn in 1418.
Antiquities collector Liu Gang, who unveiled the map in Beijing last week, says it proves that Chinese
seafarer Zheng He discovered America more than 70 years before Christopher Columbus set foot in the New
World.
But experts have dismissed the map as a fake. They say the map resembles a French 17th-century world map
with its depiction of California as an island.
That China is not shown in the center also suggests the Chinese did not make the map, one expert says.
Historians, meanwhile, dismiss the idea that Zheng He, an admiral in the Ming dynasty's imperial navy,
sailed to America. (See National Geographic magazine feature: "China's Great Armada.") "There's
absolutely no evidence that Zheng He's voyages went anywhere past the east coast of Africa," said ShihShan Henry Tsai, a history professor at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
Records Burned
Liu Gang, a Chinese lawyer, says he bought the map from a Shanghai dealer in 2001 for U.S. $500.
"This map embodies information I believe will help us understand Zheng He's seventh voyage," Liu
reportedly told a news conference in Beijing last Monday. "The map shows us the Chinese explorer has
been to America years before Columbus," Liu added. "The map also shows us the Chinese understanding of
the entire world." Yet, Liu said he realized the significance of the map after reading a book by retired British
naval officer Gavin Menzies.
The book, 1421: the Year China Discovered America, argues that Zheng led a fleet of 300 ships to America
in the early 15th century to expand Ming China's influence. Menzies also asserts that Zheng was the first
person to circumnavigate the globe and that Chinese settlers established now-vanished colonies throughout
the Americas.
What really happened is difficult to prove, because China burned the records of Zheng's expeditions,
scholars say. But academics overwhelmingly dismiss Menzies's claims. Historical records show that from
1405 to 1433, Zheng led China's imperial Star Fleet on seven epic voyages, but he only reached as far as the
southern coast of Africa.
Out of Style
The map, which is reportedly titled a "general chart of the integrated world," is dated 1763 and inscribed
with the name Mo Yi-tong. A lab in New Zealand is radiocarbon-dating a scrap of the map's bamboo paper
to determine its age. But even if the map is shown to be from the 18th century, it would be difficult to
verify that it is a copy of an original map produced more than 300 years earlier.
One U.S. map expert says the map does not fit the style of Ming China. "If this is a 1418 map, it's a whole
style very much different than any 1418 map that I've seen," said John Hébert, the chief of the Geography
and Map Division at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Hébert, who has only viewed a small reproduction of the map online, says the map's depiction of the Earth
with China not at the center raises a red flag. "I don't know of any entity at any time, Chinese or otherwise,
that did not usually center their cartographic pieces with them[selves] in the middle," he said.
The map's depiction of California as an island also suggests that it could be a copy of a French 17th-century
map, Hébert said. "The other thing that's troubling is the shape of California as an island. That is too much,
taken out of what I've seen by French mapping for that [17th] century … [It] almost begs as if we're looking
at a 17th-century French world map that had been converted."
Did the Chinese discover America?
By Adam Dunn, Monday, January 13, 2003
Needless to say, his assertion has raised an international flurry of debate.
The book has already garnered mixed reviews from the British media, as well as skeptical articles from The
New York Times Magazine and Salon.com.
Menzies is unfazed by the reviews. Indeed, even he was surprised at the results of his research, he said in an
interview in the New York offices of his American publisher, Morrow.
"It was a complete freak," the author said. Menzies, a former Royal Navy submarine commander, is a softspoken and diminutive presence, not at all the obsessive eccentric he's been painted in the press.
While on an anniversary trip to China with his wife, Menzies recalled, he became fascinated with the history
of the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, coincidentally completed in 1421. Delving further, Menzies found
himself enmeshed in a 10-year research project on the instigators of the two monumental constructions, the
Chinese emperor Zhu Di and his nemesis, the Mongol Tamerlane.
Then, while vetting the manuscript (which would have been titled "Two Emperors on Horseback") among
historians, Menzies learned of a Portuguese chart, dating from 1424, depicting islands in the Caribbean.
"So here was a Portuguese claim that the whole world had been charted 70 years before Columbus. By
whom?" Menzies said. He matter-of-factly presents the answer. "I looked at other charts, and found it was
the Chinese. So I abandoned my book, and started this one.
"At the time," he added, "I was really brassed off (angry) about it."
Challenging the consensus
The book draws on Menzie's navigational experience, as well as the findings of a team of experts he
assembled to collate and decipher an ever-growing body of multilingual, cartographic, and biological
evidence.
As with any epic, "1421" begins with a history lesson. In the year of the title, the emperor Zhu Di ordered the
dispatch of a fleet of treasure ships to bring back tribute to his kingdom. According to Menzies' findings, an
armada of 800 massive junks set sail in the spring to return delegates who had attended the Forbidden City's
inauguration to their nations, and to explore, map and bring tribute from the uncharted reaches beyond the
horizons.
Menzies focuses on a fortuitous synchronicity: the presence of a Venetian trader named Niccolo da Conti,
who met with the Chinese in the southwest Indian trading hub of Calicut. Da Conti made detailed records of
his contact. By Menzies' reckoning, it was da Conti who corroborated the thesis that Chinese junks rounded
the Cape of Good Hope, westward bound for points unknown.
Such synchronicity followed Menzies as his research took him deeper along the Chinese trade routes. He
retraced the junks' routes around the globe and found shoreside marker stones, carved in a host of Asian
languages, all over the world.
Other discoveries convinced him he was on the right track: Sunken junks provided evidence of Chinesespeaking peoples in the pre-Columbian New World (backed, the author claims, by anthropological evidence
supported by carbon-dating and DNA analysis). So did the presence of Chinese-introduced species.
"I started off with all sorts of peripheral information," he recalled. "The first Europeans who came to the
Americas found Chinese chickens, rice, Chinese porcelain and jade, they found Chinese-speaking peoples. I
put all that information on a map, and then I decided to look at the accounts of the first European explorers.
... Now, I put this team together, and they have been translating into English, for the first time, the complete
accounts of these European explorers. They found Chinese people everywhere. California, Mexico,
Arkansas, Florida and so on. And they found not only Chinese people, but Chinese junks. So I say, that's it.
Game, set and match for me." (A complete collation of these accounts can be viewed on the book's website,
www.1421.tv.)
Questions
Historians range from dismissive to troubled regarding Menzies' determinations.
"He has not, unfortunately, discovered anything new," Chinese historian Louise Levathes told Salon.com.
"What he's done is to present it in a jumbled manner so you have no idea what's going on and what the time
frames are."
Other experts were taking a wait-and-see attitude. "There's a definite logic to his analysis," Phillip Sadler, a
celestial navigation expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Space.com.
Menzies presented his findings in a talk at the Royal Geographical Society in London roughly 18 months ago
(which an article in Salon.com cites as an affair rented by the author himself). By coincidence, Menzies said,
a Chinese TV crew was in London and beamed the talk to China. Reaction was then picked up by CBS and
ABC, he said.
"So, by a complete freak of luck, I had a worldwide audience for my talk. This resulted in a torrent of
information which helped me enormously," he said. "I got literally thousands of letters asking, did I know
about this or that. For instance, a walnut farmer from around Sacramento [California] rang me up and said,
'I've got a Chinese junk in my backyard which predated Columbus, and my family's known about it for 50
years.' It was subsequently investigated and it turns out it is a junk. That's happened all over the world."
Indeed, after giving lectures in China, he was shocked to have his findings corroborated by two Chinese
professors who had had no prior contact with him, and whose research provided hard evidence supporting a
Chinese-Brazil connection dating from 1511 and earlier. One of the conferences sifted through the additional
material.
"The conference was stumped," Menzies said. 'The conference split into three groups, each taking a third of
my evidence and trawled through it, and after three days they said, 'If only half of your evidence is true, it's
unarguable that China got to the Americas before the Europeans did.' "
At the least, Menzies' work will prompt new research of his findings, whether they're corroborated or
debunked. And he's not finished yet, he said -- especially with the response he's gotten to his book, already
topping best-seller lists in the UK and U.S.
"I've got a team that does nothing else but analyze this incoming stream," he said.