Fleeting Glory--A Review of 1421: The Year China Discovered the World

The theory of Zheng He circling the globe surely is an intriguing one. But the first question one might ask of Gavin Menzies' 1421 is, "Why would they have done it?" What kinds of beliefs would have sustained Chinese sailors 600 years ago as they faced the daunting voyage across the Indian Ocean, through turbulent waters past the Cape of Good Hope, and toward the unknown New World? What mission would have carried them through the frigid passage between South America and Antarctica to Australia and New Zealand, and from there back to China, thereby completely circumnavigating the earth?

They were helping the emperor complete the great dream of the empire-"Spreading the benefits of Chinese culture and tradition to civilize faraway peoples"-says Menzies in the book, quoting an expression oft used in imperial China. Of course not everybody had such lofty ideals. The ministers and ranking officers who led the fleet were all dedicated and professional sailors. Most of the crewmembers, meanwhile, were convicts, who had chosen exploration at sea as an alternative to prison or exile. Though life at sea was perilous, there was meat and alcohol on board, and though only about one man in ten survived the duty, those who returned not only regained their freedom, they were richly rewarded as well.

Death or glory

The book in which Menzies advances his bold hypotheses, as well as his equally bold attempts to support them, is in fact the work of an amateur historian. But, helped by marketing and publicity by the publisher, it has become a sensation around the world. Though most Sinologists have more criticisms of the work than praise to offer about it, Menzies has nonetheless been invited to lecture or give seminars at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and other leading centers of intellectual life. Though he plans to revise the work before 2005, adding more evidence, he admits, "I don't know if I will be able to get enough time out of my busy schedule to finish the task."

The depth of the passions aroused and the general reception which Menzies has been accorded are no less than, and generally much greater than, those associated with many renowned professional historians. In this intellectual voyage, he has discovered both fame and fortune. Though critics on all sides are drilling holes in his framework, he himself remains much like the sailors he depicts-his own adventurous journey has much the same "death or glory" feel as theirs.

In the late 1980s, Menzies and his wife took a vacation to China, seeing the Great Wall, the Palace Museum, the Temple of Heaven... all the famous tourist attractions. They learned that these were all connected to the Chengzu Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, and were inspired to find out more about this great historical figure. Not long after getting into the subject, Menzies discovered an unusual map in the library of the University of Minnesota in the US, a world map drawn in 1424 by an Italian named Zuane Pizzigano. Finished more than 60 years before Columbus' supposed discovery of America, the map nonetheless depicts the Caribbean islands of Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe. Menzies surmised that the information for the map must have come from the experiences of Zheng He's fleet. He hypothesized that after Zheng's sixth voyage, the Chinese must have produced a world map, but it was probably destroyed when the emperor adopted an isolationist policy and sealed the country off from the outside world.

Inspired by this idea, Menzies spent 15 years studying historical records and old maps and visiting more than 120 countries and more than 900 museums to produce this book, named after the year in which Zheng's sixth voyage began.

Good Hope? Or around the bend?

The first thing that the reader learns in 1421 is how Zheng He's ships were built, which explains how they were able to handle long ocean voyages. Then, following Zheng on his sixth expedition, the reader passes through Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, and other areas. There is no dispute in the Sinological community that Zheng did indeed visit the Indian Ocean and East Africa on his many voyages, so the book is clear sailing up to this point.

But then storm clouds come up, as Menzies allows himself a speculative free rein, taking Zheng He's fleet-and the reader along with it-around the Cape of Good Hope and into the southern Atlantic Ocean. (Menzies' rather bold hypothesis is based on another old European map that depicts the geography of the Cape. The mapmaker very likely acquired the information for this map, says Menzies, from an unnamed European who could have been part of the Chinese expedition.)

After navigating past the Cape of Good Hope, Zheng He's fleet follows the Atlantic currents, and, traveling with the aid of astronomical charts and compasses, passes several mid-Atlantic islands, ultimately reaching the coast of Brazil. Waxing poetic, Menzies wonders what the Chinese would be thinking at this point. Pointing out that the plants of the Agavaceae family of Latin America look very similar to the fusang hibiscus plant of Asia, he asks whether the sailors might be concluding that they had amazingly reached the legendary "Fusang Kingdom" described in Chinese annals dating back to the Northern and Southern Dynasties' period.

Upon reaching the southern tip of the Americas, this fleet of Menzies' imagination then possibly divides into two groups, one heading back the way they came and the other rounding the Strait of Magellan to get back to China by way of Australia and New Zealand.

Along the way, Menzies says, this expedition left behind steles or stone markers on various islands and along the coast of the New World. (There are indeed such markers, but the writing on them, though indecipherable, is definitely not Chinese; Menzies suggests that they were inscribed by non-Chinese crewmembers in the fleet.) Also, he says, some Chinese sailors elected to stay in South America. (DNA similarities between Chinese and modern Native Americans could be indicators of the passage of the Chinese fleet.) Sailing in complete ignorance of the terrain, the fleet suffered many losses, leaving debris that appears to be from Chinese ships at various points in America, and even some corpses of Chinese. Another claim in the book is that the fleet brought Chinese rice to the New World, Latin American sugar cane to Australia and New Zealand, and American corn back to their homeland, where it made its way into the farms of the empire. (Corn was not native to China, and it is still uncertain how or when it got there.)

Such evidence, which is not widely recognized by the scholarly community, allows Menzies to suggest that "there is nothing unreasonable about" proposing that Zheng He's fleet circumnavigated the globe and discovered the New World.

Fact and reason

It must be said that with the broad range of materials that Menzies draws on and quotes from, the reader can easily be drawn into a maze of data, with reliable and unreliable information popping up at every turn, until Zheng He's voyage into the Atlantic becomes a kind of Treasure Island dressed up in a suit of historical fact.

For example, many people have noted that Menzies uses a scientific approach to tell us such things as how large Chinese sailing ships, relying on seasonal winds for power, could escape the limitations of the seasonal winds; or how Chinese sailors, upon reaching the Southern Hemisphere-where the Northern Hemisphere constellations on which they relied for navigation disappeared behind the horizon-could switch over to the star Canopus and the South Polar Star for navigation. He also tells the reader, when assessing an old map, how it is necessary to take into account the speed and course of the initial explorers to explain how the mapmaker could turn mountains into islands; why sandbars, coral reefs, and islands that we know today ended up depicted as landmasses; or why certain landmasses were drawn so excessively large.

It is because he has amassed such a huge volume of such information that Menzies, who is by no means the first person to advance the thesis that Zheng He circled the globe, has gotten unprecedented attention for his hypothesis.

But as Su Ming-yang, a lecturer at National Ocean University, reminds us, one cannot make up for a lack of core facts by piling up heavy loads of other data that can only be relevant if the core claims are already plausible. It is important to remember that of the types of evidence commonly used in historical research-documents, maps, archeological finds, anthropological tools (plant life, DNA), social structure and language-only documents and maps can be accurately dated and can be used to directly determine historical facts; the other types can only provide indirect data which, while decisive in supporting documents and maps, in itself can only suggest inferential conclusions.

Su, in pointing out some rather absurd errors committed by Menzies, stresses that Menzies did not discover any new documents or maps, but merely put a new interpretation on existing ones. Moreover, because Menzies cannot read Chinese, there are many mistaken interpretations of Chinese artifacts in the book, which have been pointed out one by one in the Chinese edition by translator Bao Jiaqing. As for the wealth of evidence such as archeological artifacts, plant species, and human DNA presented in the book, Su notes, "Quantity of information alone does not equal greater plausibility."

An open and open case

The book may be filled with dubious claims, and there may be heaps of critical articles about it, but then again, the most important thing about 1421: The Year China Discovered the World might have nothing to do with the plausibility of the author's main thesis.

Menzies, formerly a captain in the Royal Navy and therefore a defender of the territorial waters of the Queen, surprisingly takes the lash to the explorers and maritime achievements that have heretofore been seen as exemplary among Westerners. Da Gama is depicted as a cruel murderer, with the earliest European conquistadors to reach America seen as barbaric in the extreme. Menzies continually contrasts this with the civilizing mission-"spreading the benefits of Chinese culture and traditions to faraway peoples"- of the great empire that backed the fleet of Zheng He many decades before Columbus set sail. Today, on the eve of the 600th anniversary of Zheng He's voyages, the enthusiastic welcome that PRC scholars are giving Menzies's theory, ignoring the international tide of expert opinion, is pushing this politicization to new heights.

Leaving aside for the moment Menzies' high praise for imperial China's peaceful style in foreign policy, can we find any deeper significance in the discourse about Zheng He today? China has always been suspicious and fearful of the vast open oceans, indicating that it never learned from Zheng He's epic voyages how to broaden its horizons and become more accepting of differences. Today, it is Taiwan that is calling itself "a country based on maritime ideals." How can we open the vast lock of the oceans and turn them into a starting point to embrace the world?

Just as translator Bao Jiaqing says, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World by no means closes the book on the issue of Zheng He, and our own minds should remain equally open.