1421: The year in which China discovered the world

1421: The year in which China discovered the world. Grijalbo. 2003

Being an interested person for the history and for China, I have approached the Menzies book with enormous interest. I must admit that I continued with big interest a few first pages in which we are raised by his hypothesis of which a series of ships of the fleet of admiral Zheng He had turned to the world provided to the later navigators round the necessary information to start the age of the big western discoveries.

The hypothesis is fascinating, and convinced how is life, of that in the history, even in the most recent, we still have left many facts for clarifying, I did not see beforehand any reason to push it back.

After reading the book I do not also see reasons to push it back, but unlike what it might wait after such a voluminous work, do not think that the author has contributed conclusive tests that corroborate this hypothesis. And the tests that the author presents, remain tarnished by the form in which it distorts facts or stretches possibilities to reach his targets.

Menzies mixes of random form different information levels, falling down in fragrant contradictions, which turn some chapters of the book into a thorny walk along running sands for everything the one that reads it attentively. They contrast with other chapters where a better built plot thread, he invites to raise the certainty of his hypothesis.

His attempts of making to square the whole possible world of relations, in fact, which has existed, and they have been studied by numerous academicians, in the adventures of the admirals who set off with Zheng He in 1421, they are absurd. The contacts of China with the Philippines go back according to all the students, at least a Xth century. It turns out to be absurd to make to believe the reader, as it does Menzies, that the maps of this archipelago realized by the Chinese, they have owed it of being precisely by the ships of the navy of Zheng He.

With Australia the same happens. The suspicions and the tests of Chinese's presence in Australia it is not a piece of news of any form, and the possibility that the fleet of Zheng He has stopped there it is contemplated in academic circles long ago years. But from there to realize the Menzies twirls, there is a big difference.

If inscriptions are discovered in Tamil language: Is not it possible to think that the Tamils also should come to Australia? If the oceans are big freeways of the seaworthy peoples from the remote antiquity. Why to deny to possibility of having traveled round them to other villages of seaworthy tradition? After three chapters dedicated to mixing information that they seem to demonstrate that the fleet of Zheng He covered and cartografió Australia, on having spoken about I Yu Thu Chih (not in pinyin of course) he says to us that it does not describe practically Australia because it was already extensively a well-known ground, since "there had already been many descriptions of fleets of reeds each one taking hundreds of persons in trips of China to Australia." If that is true, and we suppose that it refers to the times previous to 1421: How is it that it gives so much importance to the activities of the fleet of Zheng He? If it refers to these hundreds of persons, which were going in the fleet of Zheng He, which returned in 1423: how is it possible to think than in 7 years (less time that should be taken in writing the work), a continent has already turned into something extensively known?

On the Chinese and Asian influence in America, really there is a wide bibliography, and it is strange that the academic world does not put any more interest to announce it publicly, but nobody has had the bravery of playing with the dates, the probabilities, the influences to try to frame these contacts in a few months of the year 1423.

The book has caused a big polemic, with numerous followers and detractors. It is clear that the commercial interest has occupied first place on merely academic, and in a matter as thorny as that it presents, that thing about no form owe to have allowed. Possibly the Menzies thesis one might have developed perfectly in 150 ó 200 pages, exhibiting the reasons that they can induce to think that the fleet of Zheng He covered in fact five continents, and eliminating the digressions with which full big part of the book.

It is curious, on the other hand to verify how, not even in this China that one lives to sprout nationalist, the numerous books that have been published to commemorate the Sixth Anniversary of the beginning of the trips of Zheng He, they have dared to take seriously all the Menzies hypotheses.

Copyright © 2004 www.wuhancom.net