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Book claims Chinese discovered America
UPI ^ | Published 1/7/2003 11:49 AM | By FREDERICK M. WINSHIP

Posted on 01/11/2003 2:01:33 PM PST by vannrox

Book claims Chinese discovered America

By FREDERICK M. WINSHIP

From the

Life & Mind

Desk

Published 1/7/2003 11:49 AM

NEW YORK, Jan. 7 (UPI) -- Scattered evidence that Chinese explorers "discovered" America 71 years before Christopher Columbus and circumnavigated the earth 60 years before Ferdinand Magellan was born has been brought into convincing focus by a book published Tuesday that is expected to rewrite history.

British author Gavin Menzies first aired his theory of pre-Columbian visits by the Chinese to both North and South America in a lecture before the Royal Geographic Society in London last March, resulting in a bidding war for the book he spent 15 years writing to back up his claim. Publishing rights sold for $780,000, a phenomenal sum for a non-fiction book by an unknown author.

The book was published in England in November under the title "1421: The Year China Discovered America" and is now available in an augmented American edition published by William Morrow. A 16-page postscript in the new edition offers evidence that the body of a Chinese official was found buried at Teotihuacan, the pre-Aztec ceremonial site near Mexico City.

The Chinese-style tomb with Chinese inscriptions found by archaeologist William Niven at the base of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan in 1911 contained a body identified as a Chinese or Mongolian wearing a necklace of jade, unknown in Mexico.

Menzies, who portions of the body were split between Swiss and Swedish collections, and he hopes to get permission to take DNA samples from the remains.

The author, a 65-year-old retired Royal Navy officer and navigation expert, began formulating his theory when he was shown a map of the world dated 1459 while doing research in Venice. The map clearly showed Southern Africa and the Cape of Good Hope, though Vasco da Gama did not "discover" the cape as a sea route to Asia until 1497. The map noted that a voyage had been made around the cape in 1420.

The map also bore a picture of a Chinese junk. Menzies believes the map was based on Chinese charts taken to Venice by a merchant traveler, Niccolo da Conti, who claimed in a book he wrote in 1434 that he joined a Chinese treasure fleet in India and sailed to China via Australia, 350 years before Captain Cook's expedition reached the Antipodes. There is no evidence of these Chinese charts, but Menzies presumes they existed.

His findings in Venice led Menzies to research existing Chinese documents describing the outfitting of a great treasure fleet by the Yongle Emperor, Zhui Di, under the command of his eunuch admiral Zheng Hi. The fleet of many-masted junks that were five times the size of European caravels and carried 1,000 men each made seven great voyages from 1405 to 1423 when the ships were mothballed as the result of an expensive land campaign against the invading Mongols.

It had long been known that Zheng Hi's ships sailed around Southeast Asia, crossing the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, but Menzies is convinced they also sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to Western Africa and across the Atlantic to the Eastern coast of North America, from Florida to Rhode Island, and parts of the South American coast. Other Chinese ships cleared Cape Horn and explored the Western coast of both South and North America, he claims.

Zheng Hi was also known by the name of Sin Bao, hence the legend that arose in Europe of the fabulous voyages of Sinbad the Sailor.

Menzies writes that after his lecture before the Royal Geographic Society, "new evidence began to pour in from all over the world, all of which had to be evaluated and checked for accuracy by experts." He said he has been notified of new discoveries from Vancouver Island to Chile that lend credence to his claim that Chinese fleets visited the Americas, leaving bloodline traces that only recently have been found in the DNA of Indians living in Northern Brazil, Venezuela, Surinam and Guyana.

In the United States, the accumulation of evidence of a pre-Columbian Chinese presence is strongest in California, around San Francisco, the Mississippi River area west of Kansas City, and Florida, the book says. Other American areas probably visited or even settled by Chinese are said to be Mexico between the Pacific coast and Mexico City, the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, Colombia, and Guyana, and the Amazon Basin.

Menzies reports 50 ancient stone carvings of ships believed to be Chinese and 40 of horses -- extinct in America after 10,000 B.C. -- from the floodplains of he Mississippi. He quotes 16th century Spanish historian Pedro de Castaneda as saying he met people resembling Chinese living along the Arkansas River and his contemporary, Pedro Menendez, as saying he saw the wrecks of gilded Chinese vessels on the banks of the Missouri River.

Menendez's report no longer seems incredible in light of the discovery 20 years ago of a medieval Chinese-style junk buried under a sandbank in the Sacramento River off the northeast corner of San Francisco Bay, Menzies says. Fragments of wood taken from the ship have been carbon-dated to 1410 and identified as cut from Keteleria, a Chinese evergreen tree unknown in America.

The author offers long lists of plants, animals, and birds that were carried to the Americas, probably by foreign visitors, in the pre-Columbian era. The first European explorers found fields of rice -- a crop foreign to the Americas but common in Asia -- in Mexico and Brazil and Chinese root crops in the Amazon basin. The list goes on and on.

This book is likely to be the most fascinating read of 2003.

("1421, The Year China Discovered America," by Gavin Menzies, William Morrow, 576 pages, $27.95.)

Copyright © 2001-2003 United Press International
 


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; Extended News; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: 1421; america; archaeology; boat; china; chinese; dig; discovery; gavinmenzies; ggg; godsgravesglyphs; history; navigation; past; wood
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To: vannrox
Book claims Chinese discovered America

Great...next thing you know they'll try to re-unite us with the mainland.

41 posted on 01/11/2003 9:36:20 PM PST by BureaucratusMaximus (...what would Chinese restaurants be then?)
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To: No Truce With Kings
Excellent post!
The "sea-friendly" Ming emperor-- and usurper-- was Emperor Yung-Lo who ruled in the first half of the 15th c. Some speculate that he commissioned these voyages b/c he was a usurper and so felt the need to bolster his reputation and power at home. Almost everyone disapproved of these "missions" as a waste of money, as a misdirection of money, and the fact that it gave extraordinary power to the already powerful upper ranks of palace eunuchs.
The emperors in the later half of the century were Ying Tsung, 1457A.D.(a spend-thrift playboy) and Cheng-hua, 1465A.D.(who stuttered so badly that he effectly withdrew from court/political life, turning over darn near everything to the court eunuchs). Neither had any interest in the "barbarians" outside the border of China.
42 posted on 01/11/2003 9:53:20 PM PST by yankeedame
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To: vannrox
Chinese Discovered America

Yeah, when they sailed into the Panama Canal and claimed it.

43 posted on 01/11/2003 9:56:01 PM PST by Slyfox
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To: No Truce With Kings
"Then a bunch of horse barbarians from the north, the Manchu, started moving into China. "

When did this occur, who were these folks and where were they from. Your estimates of those questions is okay, I'm not expecting exactness. (I'm interested in this area...could they have been Hakka? Xiongnu?)

44 posted on 01/11/2003 10:19:35 PM PST by blam
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To: Destro
There is very little doubt that the Chinese were around America at least 70 years before Columbus. One has to wonder if the change in leadership back in China....mandating no travel and closing off the country...had kept the course instead....China would have been the most dominate country on Earth by the 1600s. The use and further development of new technology is obvious. The world today would be a much different place had the no closure occurred.

As for the Chinese who landed in America. One must wonder if they brought disease...as did the Spaniards...and if the Indians eventually decided the only good Chinese were dead Chinese. There is little written about gold-obcessed Chinese explorers...unlike the Spaniards.

As for how history changes once this is proven....and I think we are talking about just six months of research to prove DNA on this item...history is a ever-changing thing. The Vikings and their travel have been a constant argument for years....and most people are finally willing to accept that Vikings did come to America. We will likely see other developments which challenge our high school text books.
45 posted on 01/11/2003 10:31:14 PM PST by pepsionice
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To: pepsionice
100% of scholars agree that the Vikings were living on the North American coast in at least one long term settlement.

Like I said if any people got to the Americans before 1492 AD they had no idea where they were, were lucky to get back alive and once home had no idea how to retrace their voayge.

I think the issue here is what historians call "diffusion" in other words contacts maintained long enough with the Americas and the old world for culture and technology to be diffused back and forth. This I think never happened.

46 posted on 01/11/2003 10:46:21 PM PST by Destro
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To: Destro
How do we know they were "Greek"? Certainly there is a suspicion that the maps came from Byzantine sources, but when Columbus received them, Byzantium had been in the hands of the Turks for a number of decades.

Once the Turks took over, their established lines of communication to their linguistic cohorts in the East would have served to provide them with the Chinese discoveries.

One poster noted that the Ming (Mongol) dynastic elements were being kicked out of China during that period by the Manchu. Valuable exploratory maps undoubtedly financed peace and security for more than one Ming noble!

47 posted on 01/12/2003 5:51:55 AM PST by muawiyah
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To: Destro
Don't fool yoursel, the Europeans of Marco Polo's age (especialy North Western Europeans) with the exception of the Byzantines were unbathing moronons.

They knew more about the calendar then the Chinese did!

It was the west who sorted out the Chinese calendar problems-- a fact you seem to ignore!

48 posted on 01/12/2003 5:56:50 AM PST by MrsEmmaPeel (My cat is smarter than this idiot)
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To: MrsEmmaPeel
That's a pretty good rendition of Chinese history. Marco Polo met the "Chinese" during the initial period of the Mongol Conquest - the Ming Dynasty.

Along the way, during a period of weakness (political stupidity at the top and an economic recession affecting everybody), the Manchu conquered China. That's when everything went down hill.

Then, it got worse - the West discovered China. The West also discovered Chinese people liked to smoke opium.

This period culminated in the period of Mao Tse Tung. Things have been getting better lately, but the Chinese have atom bombs with which to hold the barbarians and the West at bay.

Possibly they will remember all the other things they forgot.

49 posted on 01/12/2003 6:02:18 AM PST by muawiyah
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To: PatrickHenry
The most backward country in Western Europe in terms of.....? It all depends on your criteria. At the moment I'd say the most backward place was the Nederlands. Their mortuary practices are not much advanced beyond that of the Innuit in the old times who used to leave the old folks out on the iceflow for the polar bears.
50 posted on 01/12/2003 6:08:23 AM PST by muawiyah
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To: MrsEmmaPeel
Ah, ha, but the West's recomputation of the Chinese calendar was done using Hindu numerals (received through the Moslems), and trigonometric concepts copied down from books in the great library of Toledo which was also obtained from the Moslems during the latter stages of the Reconquista.

Knowledge circulated differently in the old days.

51 posted on 01/12/2003 6:15:24 AM PST by muawiyah
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To: MrsEmmaPeel
Those Chinee can deep fry a cat with the fur on!

They know everything about human-wave attacks.

They will sell you anything if you show them money.

Right now they're pimping NK. Hey Joe... you wanna buy?

52 posted on 01/12/2003 6:16:54 AM PST by johnny7 (This is Seoul... signing off. Bup...bupbupbupbup... bupbupbupbupbupbup...)
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To: MrsEmmaPeel
You don't need a calendar to explore the World. Man would have never populated the World if that was true. The Polynesians explored everything from Madagascar to Easter island. Their are stories they reached the Americas and skirted Anarctica. They had no calendar.
53 posted on 01/12/2003 6:31:17 AM PST by Eternal_Bear
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To: Eternal_Bear
You don't need a calendar to explore the World

You might be correct. However, if you ever want to get back home, you'll need that calendar. Its one thing to jump in your boat and hug the coast and say: "Land -ho" after a couple of months, quite another to jump in a boat and navigate in open seas with only the stars above as positional indicators. You need advanced knowledge of the stars, astronomy. You need good working theories on the size of the earth, too. Preferably you need to know longitude. Its only been in modern times that the world has settled on the standard 24 hour clock with time zones. (The old west didn't have such a concept). So how would handle time versus distance in your open boat, particular without a good time piece?

The only way to really do this, is advanced knowledge of astronomy. If you could do this, you could be a Viking or a Mayan. The Greeks and Romans hugged the coast. (The Chinese needed advice from Johannes Kepler.)

If you all you want is to just conquer your neighbors land, then all you need to do is jump on your horse, and like any Mongul or Vandal, march as far as the land will take you.

Those societies that had a good working calendars and understood astronomy were the true explorers.

One could argue whether or not if you were a successful explorer if you couldn't get home to tell anyone about it.

54 posted on 01/12/2003 7:04:15 AM PST by MrsEmmaPeel (My cat is smarter than this idiot)
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To: spetznaz
Jean-Luc Picard was here before the Indians.

related thread

55 posted on 01/12/2003 7:14:39 AM PST by ASA Vet ("The job of the military is to kill people and break things.")
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To: Eternal_Bear
More things to cogitate upon:

If you were an explorer of the 1400s, how would you determine your day-length? Remember a 24 hour day was the invention of modern times, as is the "International Date Line" .. presumably, your day length would be from sun-up to sun-down. In other words, it would be variable. So, how would you figure it out? At what point does the daylength get longer and longer? At what point does it recede? Assuming you understood basic astronomy in your home town and could predict when the sun would come up and when it would set, knew all there was to know about solstices and equinoxes and could predict them with ease, how would you do it in a moving boat?

How would you get back?

PS -- sending as letter to Johannes Kepler is cheating (there was no mail delivery in the middle of the ocean, besides he's outside our period.)

56 posted on 01/12/2003 7:24:49 AM PST by MrsEmmaPeel (My cat is smarter than this idiot)
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To: blam
Several weeks ago I was in a Hopi village when a little girl of about three (could have been Hopi or Zuni) came in the room. Her facial features were exquisitly Japanese.
I have been around Indians all my life but I have never before seen such purely oriental features, a tiny sculpted geisha. I had heard the Japanese/Zuni theories before but that clinched it for me. It was jawdropping. It was like looking back hundreds or thousands of years into history.
57 posted on 01/12/2003 7:32:47 AM PST by MARTIAL MONK
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To: MrsEmmaPeel
Consider the Cinnamon trade in Roman times. Traders crossed from the East Indies to Madagascar and hugged the coastline to Egypt. The Cinnamon trade flourished for several hundred years so the traders had figured out how to traverse the vastness of the Indian Ocean.

Columbus did not have an accurate calendar either but he crossed the Atlantic successfully several times. The Manilla Galleons of the 16th Century didn't have calendars either but they knew that land lay to the East of them. So they would bear due East. Yes, their landfall was often unpredictable and they often made land in Oregon or even British Columbia. They could tell by the flora that Mexico lay South of them so they would hug the coast southward. Magellan and Drake circumnavigated the Globe. When they returned home, their dates were askew but they still made it.

I once viewed a show on Micronesian navigation. Since they used small boats and all the islands were tiny, it was vital that they hit the island they were going to, dead on. The old time navigators were able to do this by learning the signatures of the currents. The navigators claimed they could sense how the current was being affected by the nearness to land and that every part of the ocean had different signatures of currents and countercurrents. The ability to read them took years and is now a defunct art.

The Chinese probably used the same methods that the early Spanish employed. They may have also employed methods developed by people like the Micronesians. It looks like some Chinese didn't make it back. When the fleet was disbanded, some of the colonies just withered away.

58 posted on 01/12/2003 10:17:19 AM PST by Eternal_Bear
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To: pepsionice
This guy, Christy Turner, has done some good work identifying who's who by looking at their teeth. There are some suprises from his work.
59 posted on 01/12/2003 10:20:12 AM PST by blam
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To: spetznaz
There is alot of evidence that the what you are referring to as "Native Americans" were not the first inhabitants of this country, either. The Kennewick Man and a few other remains in other areas seem to indicate that the first inhabitants bore no relation to the modern day, "Native Americans".
60 posted on 01/12/2003 10:24:46 AM PST by Eva
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