1421: the year China Discovered the World

Apologies for the lack of embedded links, for some reason this doesn't work on the book reviews forum!)

In 2003 I bought a book which argued that China discovered the world - North America, South America, Australia and New Zealand - not Columbus, Cook and others as we are taught today - The Chinese did this with their junk-rigged sailing ships - http://ift.tt/1E1FMYz, still in use today. Since junks cannot sail into the wind, they were limited to using the trade winds to reach their main markets in India. Yet Menzies argues that they conducted world-wide exploration in the early 1400s, using large fleets of junks and taking advantage of the trade winds to do so (see http://ift.tt/1Lus2yM).

Gavin Menzies (http://ift.tt/1RSKCNN) came in for a lot of criticism, even on Wikipedia. Normally, Wikipedia is reliable but this time its critique was very one-sided. But at the time I read the book none of this criticism had yet materialised. I was impressed but put the book aside. At the time I had a strong interest in the portolan charts of Europe that appeared to be so modern. Charles Hapgood had got his school class to do a joint project on the Piri Reis map and published a book on "The Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings" (1966). I re-read 1421 this year, and while I was less impressed because it was vague on details, I still found it convincing. I searched for more critiques than the one in Wikipedia and found this website - http://ift.tt/1c2Jyc9. These must have been the same people who wrote the Wikipedia item above.

It seems that China underwent a period of outward expansion, of which the navy of 1421 and the explorations carried out under the 3rd Ming Emperor by Zhou Man, Zhou Wen, and Yang Qing. It was cut short by a period of withdrawal which China has gone through, even recently, though it is once again showing interest in the wider world as its economic expansion has encouraged the search for new markets.

Gavin Menzies continues to analyse data: see http://ift.tt/1RSKCNP.
1421

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1421: the year China Discovered the World