1421:The Year China Discovered America

Gavin Menzies, the author of the book is a retired British submarine captain who believes the Chinese reached and even colonized America around 1421 before Columbus did. He reaches this conclusion due to evidence such as many pre-Columbian maps he found which chart places like the Caribbean, North and South America, Antarctica, Greenland and Australia. his story is that the Ming Dynasty Emperor, Zhu Di set a huge armada, approx. 800 ships, out around the world to explore and chart. The problem is Mr. Menzies has no academic evidence to support this because supposedly while the fleet was out, the Emperor died, and the people were annoyed because the Emperor did things like wiped out whole forests of teak in Vietnam, and let certain areas go hungry in order to build this fleet. As a result the next Emperor wiped out all records of this expedition and instead of looking to explore the Chinese became xenophobic.
While Mr. Menzies has little in the way of academic evidence. He has a great deal in the way of physical evidence. Wrecked Chinese junks (ships) have been found that carbon date to this time period in many places including Australia, Sacramento the East Coast. Evidence of small Chinese villages in places like Rhode Island. Many Mezo-American, South and North American Indians speak dialects very similar to Chinese, and in many cases can understand Chinese. Their is DNA evidence to show that many of these people have Chinese DNA from the time period. Much of the art that is practiced such as lacquering, which is long. drawn out multi-step process was found to be practiced in only China and in South and Central America. Much of the plant life, such as coconuts, mangoes, bananas, sweet potatoes are not native to the New World, but to Asia.
My Thoughts
First of all the idea that the Chinese reached the Caribbean or North America is not great shock or surprise. Those of us of Caribbean descent know Asian culture has an extremely strong influence in this area of the world, granted it may be more recent than 1421, it is not like any big surprise or big deal. It more or less makes sense. The problem is Mr. Menzies is a one note Charlie, and more than his point that the Chinese were ever there, he wants to make a point that they were there before Columbus and that changes history around. But the fact is, we know the Vikings reached New Founland before Columbus, and maybe even St. Brendan before them. There were Taino (Arawacks) Indians, Caribe Indians and even evidence of Portuguese settlements in Ponce, Puerto Rico before Columbus, so people were there prior to Columbus. What is special about Columbus is it was because of his journey that we are all here today, that I the way it went. History is not changed.
I think in Mr. Menzies mission to discredit Columbus he spends too much focusing on this 1421 mission and the the places Columbus went. There is tons of compelling physical evidence that people such as the Incas (for example) are Chinese immigrants of a sort. This to me personally is fascinating and I personally would find it interesting to see this elaborated on much more.
He also spends way too much time talking about how barbaric the Christian cultures/Europeans are and how enlightened, civilized and educated the Chinese were, and hence the mezo-American Indians. Give me a break. as you know I tire of this type of racism. There are few perfect cultures because there are no perfect people. Granted the Chinese had beautiful art, were technologically advanced, but they certainly had their streak of barbarism. Before the Ming Dynasty China was ruled by the Mongols. The Chinese reclaimed China and for punishment, made eunuchs out of every Mongol male child. He speaks about how enlightened (unhindered) the Chinese were sexually because the ships were populated with Concubines educated in sex. These poor women were slaves. Good grief. Do we need to get into the sophistication of the Indians in Mexico? Yes, they built great structures, made porcelain plates as thin as egg shells, and they also offered human sacrifices. Of course I am not arguing the europeans were perfect, they didn’t believe in bathing for crying out loud, but you are going on a wild goose chase looking for the perfect culture, many have there good and there bad, some worse or better than others. America, my home which I love with all our luxuries does not hold the record for being civilized with capital punishment, abortion, racism and let’s nt forget this country was built on chattel slavery. But it is my home and the best I got. But I digress. I have to admit, when Columbus first came into the Caribbean, one of the first islands he went to was an island he named Guadeloupe (the significance to this was totally lost on Mr. Menzies which also makes me doubt bits and pieces of his other research) and it was populated by cannibals. I do not think it gets much grosser that that.
He just missed some obvious points as well. there is evidence of a Chinese colony in the Boston area, and he the author said he questioned modern Bostonians for Chinese like traits such as Mongolian blue spots. Mongolian blue spots are a pigment trait, not necessarily an Asian trait. My brothers had them as babies and when my parents asked if it was a genetic marker of their Chinese blood (my great grandfather was from China), the doctor said more likely from the southern Italian blood. the other things is Mr. Menzies mentions a great deal about many Indian groups speaking “Chinese”. Chinese is actually 6 distinct languages, some of which are dissimilar (my cousins used to say that knowing Mandarin gave you more fore-knowledge of knowing Cantonese for example), so it is hard to see what he is talking about when he refers to dialects having many cognates to “Chinese”, so again, I wish I had a just a little bit more to go one to believe him besides just his word.
All in all I think the book is a fascinating read and I think he really is on to something, but his theory has holes and I think think because his motive is simply anti Christianity. If his motive was simply knowledge for knowledge’s sake with more of an open mind, I bet he would uncover a great deal more fascinating info.