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The Economist - China beat Columbus to it, perhaps
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PresIke
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1/16/2006  10:27 PM
I know scholars have already aknowledged this, especially in nations of Chinese culture and some other scholars have, as I'm sure people here know, have also pointed to other evidence that Africans had travelled around the world, but as we know most Americans and Europeans have not been taught this point, with some exceptions (like those that have read, 'Lies My Teacher Taught Me').

In that sense, this article is a bit of good news about getting history right...for a change.

Peace,

Ike

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http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5381851


Chinese cartography



Jan 12th 2006

From The Economist print edition


An ancient map that strongly suggests Chinese seamen were first round the world




THE brave seamen whose great voyages of exploration opened up the world are iconic figures in European history. Columbus found the New World in 1492; Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; and Magellan set off to circumnavigate the world in 1519. However, there is one difficulty with this confident assertion of European mastery: it may not be true.

It seems more likely that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called “The Marvellous Visions of the Star Raft”.

Next week, in Beijing and London, fresh and dramatic evidence is to be revealed to bolster Zheng He's case. It is a copy, made in 1763, of a map, dated 1418, which contains notes that substantially match the descriptions in the book. “It will revolutionise our thinking about 15th-century world history,” says Gunnar Thompson, a student of ancient maps and early explorers.

The map (shown above) will be unveiled in Beijing on January 16th and at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich a day later. Six Chinese characters in the upper right-hand corner of the map say this is a “general chart of the integrated world”. In the lower left-hand corner is a note that says the chart was drawn by Mo Yi Tong, imitating a world chart made in 1418 which showed the barbarians paying tribute to the Ming emperor, Zhu Di. The copyist distinguishes what he took from the original from what he added himself.

The map was bought for about $500 from a small Shanghai dealer in 2001 by Liu Gang, one of the most eminent commercial lawyers in China, who collects maps and paintings. Mr Liu says he knew it was significant, but thought it might be a modern fake. He showed his acquisition to five experienced collectors, who agreed that the traces of vermin on the bamboo paper it is written on, and the de-pigmentation of ink and colours, indicated that the map was more than 100 years old.

Mr Liu was unsure of its meaning, and asked specialists in ancient Chinese history for their advice, but none, he says, was forthcoming. Then, last autumn, he read “1421: The Year China Discovered the World”, a book written in 2003 by Gavin Menzies, in which the author makes the controversial claim that Zheng He circumnavigated the world, discovering America on the way. Mr Menzies, who is a former submariner in the Royal Navy and a merchant banker, is an amateur historian and his theory met with little approval from professionals. But it struck a chord: his book became a bestseller and his 1421 website is very popular. In any event, his arguments convinced Mr Liu that his map was a relic of Zheng He's earlier voyages.

The detail on the copy of the map is remarkable. The outlines of Africa, Europe and the Americas are instantly recognisable. It shows the Nile with two sources. The north-west passage appears to be free of ice. But the inaccuracies, also, are glaring. California is shown as an island; the British Isles do not appear at all. The distance from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean is ten times greater than it ought to be. Australia is in the wrong place (though cartographers no longer doubt that Australia and New Zealand were discovered by Chinese seamen centuries before Captain Cook arrived on the scene).

The commentary on the map, which seems to have been drawn from the original, is written in clear Chinese characters which can still be easily read. Of the west coast of America, the map says: “The skin of the race in this area is black-red, and feathers are wrapped around their heads and waists.” Of the Australians, it reports: “The skin of the aborigine is also black. All of them are naked and wearing bone articles around their waists.”

But this remarkable precision, rather than the errors, is what critics of the Menzies theory are likely to use to question the authenticity of the 1418 map. Mr Menzies and his followers are naturally extremely keen to establish that the 1763 copy is not a forgery and that it faithfully represents the 1418 original. This would lend weighty support to their thesis: that China had indeed discovered America by (if not actually in) 1421. Mass spectrography analysis to date the copied map is under way at Waikato University in New Zealand, and the results will be announced in February. But even if affirmative, this analysis is of limited importance since it can do no more than date the copyist's paper and inks.

Five academic experts on ancient charts note that the 1418 map puts together information that was available piecemeal in China from earlier nautical maps, going back to the 13th century and Kublai Khan, who was no mean explorer himself. They believe it is authentic.

The map makes good estimates of the latitude and longitude of much of the world, and recognises that the earth is round. “The Chinese were almost certainly aware of longitude before Zheng He set sail,” says Robert Cribbs of California State University. They certainly assumed the world was round. “The format of the map is totally consistent with the level of knowledge that we should expect of royal Chinese geographers following the voyages of Zheng He,” says Mr Thompson.

Moreover, some of the errors in the 1418 map soon turned up in European maps, the most striking being California drawn as an island. The Portuguese are aware of a world map drawn before 1420 by a cartographer named Albertin di Virga, which showed Africa and the Americas. Since no Portuguese seamen had yet discovered those places, the most obvious source for the information seems to be European copies of Chinese maps.

But this is certainly not a unanimous view among the experts, with many of the fiercest critics in China itself. Wang Tai-Peng, a scholarly journalist in Vancouver who does not doubt that the Chinese explored the world early in the 15th century (he has written about a visit by Chinese ambassadors to Florence in 1433), doubts whether Zheng He's ships landed in North America. Mr Wang also claims that Zheng He's navigation maps were drawn in a totally different Chinese map-making tradition. “Until the 1418 map is scientifically authenticated, we still have to take it with a grain of salt,” he says.

Most forgeries are driven by a commercial imperative, especially when the market for ancient maps is booming, as it is now. The Library of Congress recently paid $10m for a copy of a 1507 world map by Martin Waldseemuller, a German cartographer. But Mr Liu says he is not a seller: “The map is part of my life,” he claims.

The consequences of the discovery of this map could be considerable. If it does indeed prove to be the first map of the world, “the history of New World discovery will have to be rewritten,” claims Mr Menzies. How much does this matter? Showing that the world was first explored by Chinese rather than European seamen would be a major
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bigpimpin
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1/16/2006  11:13 PM
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Marv
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1/17/2006  6:53 AM
That is a real interesting story. It's going to be an amazing quest to provide enough evidence that the map is truly a copy of one from 1418.

Here's some more on it from today's Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/international/asia/17map.html

Who Discovered America? Zheng Who?

By JOSEPH KAHN
Published: January 17, 2006
BEIJING, Jan. 16 - A prominent Chinese lawyer and collector unveiled an old map on Monday that he and some supporters say should topple one of the central tenets of Western civilization: that Europeans were the first to sail around the world and discover America.


Jason Lee/Reuters
Liu Gang in Beijing Monday before a slide of a map he says suggests a Chinese fleet first sailed to America.
The Chinese map, which was drawn in 1763 but has a note on it saying it is a reproduction of a map dated 1418, presents the world as a globe with all the major continents rendered with an exactitude that European maps did not have for at least another century, after Columbus, Da Gama, Magellan, Dias and others had completed their renowned explorations.

But the map got a cool reception from some Chinese scholars and seems unlikely to persuade skeptics that Chinese seamen were the first to round the world.

Liu Gang, a partner in a well-known Beijing law firm and an amateur historian, said Monday that he bought the map for $500 in a Shanghai book store in 2001 and only subsequently discovered its value. He said he had consulted scholars in the field and had done extensive research of his own before deciding to present his findings to the public.

"The main issue is not the map itself," he said at a news conference. "It is the potential of the information in the map to change history."

At issue are the seven voyages of Zheng He, whose ships sailed the Pacific and Indian Oceans from 1405 to 1433. Historical records show that he explored Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf and the east coast of Africa, using navigational techniques and ships that were far ahead of their time.

But a small group of scholars and hobbyists, led by Gavin Menzies, a former British Navy submarine commander, argue that Zheng He traveled much farther than most Chinese and Western scholars say. Notably, Mr. Menzies claims that Zheng He visited America in 1421, 71 years before Columbus arrived there.

His 2003 book, entitled "1421: The Year China Discovered America" (William Morrow/HarperCollins), laid out extensive but widely disputed evidence that Zheng He sailed to the east coast of today's United States in 1421 and may have left settlements in South America.

Mr. Menzies has welcomed Mr. Liu's map as evidence that his theory is correct, and the two have cooperated in efforts to demonstrate its authenticity. Strictly speaking, Mr. Liu credits Zheng He with having navigated and charted the Americas at least several years before Mr. Menzies says he sailed there, though both say that is a minor contradiction.

Zheng He's achievements have been the subject of speculation for years, partly because much of the historical record was destroyed when later Chinese emperors changed their minds about the wisdom of connecting with the outside world. Last year, China's Communist government commemorated the 600th anniversary of Zheng He's better known voyages, but Beijing has not actively promoted the idea that he sailed far beyond Asian and African shores.

If the map genuinely dates to 1418, it reveals knowledge of longitude and latitude and the basic shape of the world, including the fact that it is round, that could not have come from European sources and could have been derived only from Zheng He's voyages, Mr. Liu says.

He referred to 15th-century books and memorial inscriptions and 16th-century maps that credit earlier Chinese discoveries among a variety of indirect evidence to support his thesis.

But Mr. Liu acknowledged that he had no hard evidence of the existence of a 1418 map beyond the word of the mapmaker who said he made the copy in the late 18th century, a time when all of its cartographical achievements would have been commonplace.

Gong Yingyan, a historian at Zhejiang University and a leading map expert, argues that the map is too full of anachronisms to date from the 15th century.

He said, for example, that Chinese cartographers did not use the style of projection seen in Mr. Liu's map - the rendering of a three-dimensional globe on a flat sheet - until after Europeans introduced that technique to the Chinese much later.

The map's Chinese notes about the cultures, religious and racial features of people in the continents of the world also contain vocabulary that would have been unfamiliar to a reader in the early 15th century, he said. He cited the term the map uses for the Western God, which he said was not used until after the Jesuits arrived in China in the 16th century.

"I had high hopes when I first heard about the existence of such a map," Mr. Gong said. "But I can see now that it is an entirely ordinary map that proves nothing."

The Economist - China beat Columbus to it, perhaps

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