[Marxism] Chinese seamen were first round the world

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

From The Economist Jan 12th 2006 print edition
Chinese cartography
China beat Columbus to it, perhaps

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 piece of historical
revisionism. But there is more to history than that. It is no less
interesting that the Chinese, having discovered the extent of the world,
did not exploit it, politically or commercially. After all, Columbus's
discovery of America led to exploitation and then development by Europeans
which, 500 years later, made the United States more powerful than China had
ever been.


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