Posted on 01/11/2003 2:01:33 PM PST by vannrox
Book claims Chinese discovered America By FREDERICK M. WINSHIP 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
Great...next thing you know they'll try to re-unite us with the mainland.
Yeah, when they sailed into the Panama Canal and claimed it.
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?)
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.
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!
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!
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.
Knowledge circulated differently in the old days.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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