Admiral Zheng He and Chinese Explorers in the 1420s

Did Chinese explorers discover America in the 1420s? This theory was advances in the 2002 book by Gavin Menzies, 1421:  The Year China Discovered America. Here, Capers Jones looks at some of the evidence for this.

Editor’s Note: Many of the claims in the book 1421:  The Year China Discovered America have been challenged as being speculative and many claims have little evidence.

A Chinese woodblock print, that is said to represent Zheng He's ships.

Introduction

In the year 2002 a retired British submarine commander named Gavin Menzies published a controversial book entitled “1421:  The Year China Discovered America.”  The book put forth a speculation that a Chinese Admiral named Zheng had taken a fleet around the world and made landfall in America in the year 1421.

Thirty years before Menzies book, a Baptist missionary in China named Dr. Herndon Harris purchased a map at a shop in Taiwan.   This map now known as the Harris Map was supposedly published in 1418 or 74 years before Columbus took his first voyage.  The map clearly shows both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of America and also much of the continent of South America.  This kind of geographical knowledge should not have been possible in 1418 and probably not until over 300 years later after the voyages of Captain Cook.

The map clearly shows both the north and south poles, both North and South America, Panama, Australia, and all of Africa and Europe.    A world map with this kind of accuracy should not exist in 1418.

This map is apparently based on the world voyages of Admiral Zheng he and shows knowledge of both coasts of North America as well as South America.  Assuming that the reported 1418 date is valid and the map is authentic, it shows that China did indeed have a blue-water fleet that carried out very extensive voyages of exploration prior to Columbus.  In fact it has been suggested that Portuguese spies in China had brought such maps back to Portugal and that Columbus may have seen the Chinese maps prior to his departure.

Chinese ship-building

What may surprise readers is that the Chinese sailing ships circa 1400 were much larger and more sea-worthy than European ships of the same era.

Chinese sailing ships towered over European ships.  Americans and Europeans are not taught much about early Chinese history.

The authenticity of the 1418 map has been challenged on several grounds, and there are claims that it may either be a recent map constructed to prove theories of Chinese nautical prowess or at any rate a recent map pieced together in perhaps the 1700’s from other recent maps.   

Until the 1418 map is authenticated it is premature to judge its accuracy circa 1418.  However in theory no map circa 1418 should be able to show both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of the Americas and also Canada and the Isthmus of Panama, all of which appear on the Ming map.

Admiral Zheng He was born in 1371 and died around 1433.  He was an actual Chinese admiral and it is known that he did sail a large fleet on seven voyages of exploration.

Chinese maps showing the routes of Admiral Zheng He’s seven voyages do not go as far as the Americas but legends show additional voyages that do arrive in the Americas.

The authenticity of the 1418 map is questionable as of 2022.  However Admiral Zheng He was an actual historical personage and it is known that he was a master mariner who carried out seven voyages of exploration.

Historical data confirms that Admiral Zheng He did command a large fleet of blue-water sailing ships in the early 1400’s.  Whether or not Admiral Zheng He’s fleet reached America is unclear as of 2022.

Surprisingly there is evidence of even earlier visits to America by Chinese navigators.  The evidence is based on American corn, which is a native American crop and should not be found in China before the 1700s.

There are several recognizable images of corn from China, including from the Hongshan culture.  Incidentally the known dates of the Hongshan culture are from 4700 to 2900 BC which is actually older than the use of corn in the Americas.

Earlier visits?

There are even older records of possible visits from China that date back to 450 AD.  Hui Shen is a Buddhist monk who reportedly visited Mexico and Central America circa 458 AD.  He is not reported to have visited North America or the Narragansett Bay, and his legend is included just to show that Chinese court records did indicate some trans-Pacific travel at an early date.  Hui Shen was not a native Chinese but apparently a Buddhist monk from the area of Kabul in modern Afghanistan.

As background, the historical Buddha, Sakyamuni, was born in Northern India in 563 BC and lived to be about 80 years of age.  During his lifetime Buddha formed an order of monks and gave them instructions to travel and spread Buddhism widely.  Thus Buddhism, like Christianity, had a long tradition of missionary travel.

Chinese court records show that Hui Shen and four other monks spent almost 40 years in Central America.  Apparently Hui Shen was presented at court in 502 AD to the emperor Wu Ti of the Liang Dynasty.  The emperor had Hui Shen’s story recorded for court records.  Because Hui Shen did not speak Chinese very well, he apparently was regarded by the Chinese as an ambassador from Central America.

Reportedly Hui Shen and his party traveled by boat along the Aleutian Island chain in a Chinese junk and arrived near Vancouver.  Then the party went down the West Coast of North America and Central America.  It is not clear why they went all the way to Central America, except that perhaps they were aware of the major civilizations to the south.

Although Hui Shen and his party only passed along the West Coast of North America, other Chinese court records indicate some knowledge of the interior.  A description of what might be the Grand Canyon occurs. (Incidentally Hui Shen’s route down the Aleutians might possibly have been used by Paleo-Indians many thousands of years ago.)

Do you think Chinese explorers visited America in the 1420s? Let us know below.

Editor’s Note: You can read more about 1421:  The Year China Discovered America in a book review here and by an archaeologist here.

Copyright © 2022 by Capers Jones.  All rights reserved. Article published on History is Now with the permission of Capers Jones.

References

Gavin Menzies’ book about 1421:  The Year China Discovered America is the prime reference.  Also Google searches on “Admiral Zheng He” or “Ancient Chinese voyages” will turn up additional citations.

The Super-Powers – Countries on heat

Super-powers stopped the enslavement of the planet and a return to a new Dark Age. They are no more or less important than that.

What a dramatic way to start the post. Let me explain.

The leaders of the super-powers at the Yalta Conference

When I say super-power, I’m not talking about the type of super-powers that Spiderman or Batman have. I’m talking about countries. And the two super-powers that saved the world were the USSR and the USA. Their combined might, aligned with the British Empire (the third super-power) and a few others, allowed the world to be saved from much darker forces by 1945.

Having spent much of 2012 reading about the Cold War, it’s strange for me to think that the USSR and USA were ever friends, let alone countries that actually coordinated their efforts to overcome the Axis Powers.  But, over the course of several conferences during the World War 2, the powers discussed strategy, even if the conferences saw the powers turn against each other as Allied victory seemed increasingly likely. There were some particularly cozy moments in the relationships between the super-powers though. For example, at one stage Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin met in Moscow and made the ‘Percentages Agreement’, an agreement in which the relative influence of the powers was agreed. The two leaders agreed the percentage of influence they would have in several countries in Europe, Churchill write it down, and then Stalin ticked the agreement (this incident is mentioned in the Origins of the Cold War by Martin McCauley Amazon US | Amazon UK).

What is a super-power?

Super-powers are more powerful than Great Powers. In fact, they are countries so powerful that they have the ability to project influence and change events on a global scale. They are a new form of world power. New technology has transformed the ability of countries to exert political and economic force around the world and launch wars in far-flung corners of the globe. It allows them to move planes and destroyers and troops to wherever they want very quickly. And nuclear weapons have changed the game even more. Now powers can annihilate others in minutes with the press of a button.

In the way that I am using it, the term ‘super-power’ was coined about 70 years ago in the final years of World War 2 to refer to the British Empire, the USA, and the USSR. The British Empire soon collapsed and nobody called Britain a super-power after that time.

But, after the term was coined, there were debates on which countries in history can rightfully be called super-powers aside from the USA and USSR. The Roman Empire and Mongol Empire have been among those mentioned as super-powers, but the problem with saying that they were super-powers is that they did not have a truly global reach. Even if we exclude the ‘undiscovered’ Americas (and thus consider only the known world), we cannot really argue that either empire had a global reach. There are two countries that I think we could consider though...

A cartoon depicting the British threatening Emperor Tewodros II

Pax Britannica

The obvious one is Britain or the British Empire from the 19th Century. Britain had a vast land Empire that included colonies across all the continents of the world, and it could influence events more or less anywhere that it wanted with the support of its all-conquering navy. Now, rather than put forward a detailed argument on why I think that Britain was a super-power (that’s for another day!), I’m going to illustrate it with one example.

It was 1868. The British Empire was at its peak. And Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia (or Abyssinia) had insulted the British. He had imprisoned several British subjects, and then rebuffed attempts to try to get them released. Instead, he imprisoned the people that the British had sent to negotiate the others release. The British were not happy.

So Queen Victoria announced that the hostages would be rescued with force. And soon enough, Indian-based British forces were prepared and sent to Abyssinia. They landed and undertook a massive construction effort, including the building of a port. Under General Napier, the troops marched over hundreds of miles of mountainous terrain in order to battle Tewodros’s forces. They eventually got to his admittedly weak forces and trounced them in a battle. The hostages were released and the British left. On a sadder note, Tewodros II then committed suicide.

Hardly Britain’s finest hour, but it illustrates my point. That’s what a super-power can do.

But there is one other super-power contender...

To the East

A friend of mine works in an art gallery in Shanghai, China. She recently told me that Westerners that visit the gallery sometimes ask about the voyages that the Chinese undertook in the early 15th Century. At the time China was the world’s most powerful country and the country undertook voyages in which they (apparently) discovered the world. In the book 1421 by Gavin Menzies (Amazon US | Amazon UK), the author asserts that under Admiral Zheng He, China launched voyages in which it discovered the Americas and circumnavigated the world. And they did so some 70 years before Columbus made his discovery of the Americas. Menzies’s book has come in for strong criticism from various quarters (although it is still an interesting read), but what is undisputed is that around this time China sent massive fleets to the coasts of Africa as well as much of Asia.

Whether China discovered the Americas or not, my point is that China could have had a global reach if it wanted at the time. It would not have been able to move as quickly as the US can today or even the British in the 19th Century; however, the power and wealth of China combined with the size of the Chinese fleets in its accepted voyages indicates that China had the resources to reach and attack all countries in the known world if it wanted to.

And that, my friends, is a super-power.

Was China really a super-power? Or conversely, do you think that I have been too conservative in only classing a few countries as super-powers?

Let me know what you think. After all, history is here to be debated...

George Levrier-Jones

This post was written as part of a regular series of (sometimes) humorous introductions to topics in history as part of ‘117-second History’.

We discuss how the USA and USSR emerged as  super-powers, in our book, “Cold War History - To the brink of nuclear destruction - From World War 2 to the Cuban Missile Crisis - Part 1: 1945-1962 (Required History)” – available by clicking here.