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Notably these are European world maps, translated into Chinese. This would seem to be a particularly petty / knitpicking observation except for the whole "Zhen

Notably these are European world maps, translated into Chinese. This would seem to be a particularly petty / knitpicking observation except for the whole "Zheng He Discovered America" bullshit[0] [0] https://www.1843magazine.com/travel/cartophilia/did-china-discover-america https://www.1843magazine.com/travel/cartophilia/did-china-di...

nathanyukai 7y ago
No one said Zheng He discovered America. He was mostly sailing south east asia, india etc. Possibly Australia.
- peteretep 7y ago
  > No one said The article literally opens with “DID CHINA DISCOVER AMERICA?”
  - avaku 7y ago
    I guess they deleted that part now :)
    - PavlovsCat 7y ago
      Nope, they didn't, it's still the headline of the article and the first thing on the page.
- slowenough 7y ago
  People did say Zheng He was a 7 foot tall Muslim eunuch from southwest China, with a sixty inch belly. That's not all: "The seven Treasure Fleets dispatched between 1405 and 1433 were the grandest projections of state power the world had seen. They did have to fight three times to secure the Straits of Malacca, then as now the world's busiest waterway...Chinese sailors walked the streets of Mogadishu, which did not seem to impress them ("if one's eyes wander one meets only sighs and sulky glances", one of Zheng's officers wrote)...and Mecca, which did. The Treasure Fleets had sailed south and west a good 9000 miles, but some researchers think this was just the beginning. With their compasses and charts, tankers full of drinking water, and huge stores of food, Zheng's ships could have gone anywhere they wanted; and that, the former submarine captain Gavin Menzies claims in this bestselling book 1421: The Year China Discovered America, is exactly what they did. ... Historians, however, remain unmoved. Menzies, they conceded is quite right that Zheng's logbooks are lost; but why, the historians ask, does the enormous mass of surviving Ming dynasty literature...never mention any of these discoveries?" - from, Why The West Rules For Now
Gravityloss 7y ago
Also, the Chinese sailed over the North Pole so global warming is a hoax.
- iknowalot 7y ago
  We are finding more and more proof the Chinese were trading with remote parts of Africa many centuries pre-rennaissance. Wouldn't be surprised if they got as far as North/South America. The last voyage before they turned inward was more than 30,000 people on 3-400 ships on a trading mission. At that scale, seems like enough nautical knowledge to travel most of the globe.
  - brokenkebab 7y ago
    >We are finding more and more proof the Chinese were trading with remote parts of Africa Like what?
slowenough 7y ago
From Why the West Rules for Now, "Some people think Chinese sailors even reached the Americas in the 15th C, but, as I will try to show in Chp 8, these claims are probably fanciful. The closest thing to evidence for these imaginary voyages is a map of the world exhibited in Beijing and London in 2006, purporting to be a 1763 copy of a Chinese original drawn in 1418. The map is not only wildly different from all genuine 15th C Chinese maps but is also strikingly like 18 C French world maps, down to details like showing CA as an island. Most likely an 18 C Chinese cartographer combined 15 C maps with newly available French maps. The mapmaker probably had no intention of deceiving anyone, but 21 C collectors, eager for sensational discoveries, have happily deceived themselves."
- slowenough 7y ago
  Further, "Ming dynasty ships could have sailed to America if their skippers had wanted to. A replica of the Zheng-era junk in fact managed the China-CA trip in 1955 (though it could not get back again)...If they could do it, why couldn't Zheng? The most popular answer is that things happened the way they did because in the 15 C Chinese emperors lost interest in sending ships overseas, while European kings (some, anyway) became very interested in it. When Yongle died in 1424 his successor's first act was to ban long-distance voyages...In 1436 the court refused repeated requests from the shipyards in Nanjing for more craftsmen, and over the next decade or two the great fleet rotted. By 1500 no emperor could have repeated Yongle's voyages even if he had wanted to. ... By Yongle's standards the Portuguese expeditions were laughably small (involving dozens of men, not dozens of thousands) and undignified (involving rabbits, sugar, and slaves, not gifts from great princes), but with the benefit of hindsight it is tempting to see the 1430s as a - perhaps the - decisive moment in world history, the point when Western rule became possible. At just the moment that maritime technology began to turn the oceans into highways linking the whole planet, Prince Henry grasped the possibilities and Emperor Zhengtong rejected them. ... As breathtaking as Zhengtong's error now seems, we should bear in mind that when he "decided" not to send shipwrights to Nanjing in 1436 he was only nine years old. His advisers made this choice for him, and their successors repeated it through the 15 C. According to one story, when courtiers revived the idea of Treasure Fleets in 1477, a cabal of civil servants destroyed the records of Zheng's voyages. The ringleader, Liu Daxia, we are told, explained to the minister of war, The voyages of Zheng to the Western Ocean wasted millions in money and grain, and moreover the people who met their deaths may be counted in the tens of thousands... This was merely an action of bad government of which ministers should severely disapprove. Even if the old archives were still preserved they should be destroyed. Grasping the point -- that Liu had deliberately "lost" the documents -- the minster rose from his chair. "Your hidden virtue, sir, " he exclaimed, "is not small. Surely this seat will soon be yours!"
joshuaheard 7y ago
"1421 The year the Chinese discovered America" is a fascinating book that lays out this theory based on ancient maps and other evidence. The author is a sailor that studied ancient china. Some of his evidence includes wind patterns, American fauna and flora described by the Chinese. Asians plants found in America, and other ancient Chinese artifacts found there. While none alone could prove the theory, the author puts them together in a compelling way.

nathanyukai 7y ago

No one said Zheng He discovered America. He was mostly sailing south east asia, india etc. Possibly Australia.

peteretep 7y ago
> No one said The article literally opens with “DID CHINA DISCOVER AMERICA?”
- avaku 7y ago
  I guess they deleted that part now :)
  - PavlovsCat 7y ago
    Nope, they didn't, it's still the headline of the article and the first thing on the page.
slowenough 7y ago
People did say Zheng He was a 7 foot tall Muslim eunuch from southwest China, with a sixty inch belly. That's not all: "The seven Treasure Fleets dispatched between 1405 and 1433 were the grandest projections of state power the world had seen. They did have to fight three times to secure the Straits of Malacca, then as now the world's busiest waterway...Chinese sailors walked the streets of Mogadishu, which did not seem to impress them ("if one's eyes wander one meets only sighs and sulky glances", one of Zheng's officers wrote)...and Mecca, which did. The Treasure Fleets had sailed south and west a good 9000 miles, but some researchers think this was just the beginning. With their compasses and charts, tankers full of drinking water, and huge stores of food, Zheng's ships could have gone anywhere they wanted; and that, the former submarine captain Gavin Menzies claims in this bestselling book 1421: The Year China Discovered America, is exactly what they did. ... Historians, however, remain unmoved. Menzies, they conceded is quite right that Zheng's logbooks are lost; but why, the historians ask, does the enormous mass of surviving Ming dynasty literature...never mention any of these discoveries?" - from, Why The West Rules For Now

Gravityloss 7y ago

Also, the Chinese sailed over the North Pole so global warming is a hoax.

iknowalot 7y ago
We are finding more and more proof the Chinese were trading with remote parts of Africa many centuries pre-rennaissance. Wouldn't be surprised if they got as far as North/South America. The last voyage before they turned inward was more than 30,000 people on 3-400 ships on a trading mission. At that scale, seems like enough nautical knowledge to travel most of the globe.
- brokenkebab 7y ago
  >We are finding more and more proof the Chinese were trading with remote parts of Africa Like what?

slowenough 7y ago

From Why the West Rules for Now, "Some people think Chinese sailors even reached the Americas in the 15th C, but, as I will try to show in Chp 8, these claims are probably fanciful. The closest thing to evidence for these imaginary voyages is a map of the world exhibited in Beijing and London in 2006, purporting to be a 1763 copy of a Chinese original drawn in 1418. The map is not only wildly different from all genuine 15th C Chinese maps but is also strikingly like 18 C French world maps, down to details like showing CA as an island. Most likely an 18 C Chinese cartographer combined 15 C maps with newly available French maps. The mapmaker probably had no intention of deceiving anyone, but 21 C collectors, eager for sensational discoveries, have happily deceived themselves."

slowenough 7y ago
Further, "Ming dynasty ships could have sailed to America if their skippers had wanted to. A replica of the Zheng-era junk in fact managed the China-CA trip in 1955 (though it could not get back again)...If they could do it, why couldn't Zheng? The most popular answer is that things happened the way they did because in the 15 C Chinese emperors lost interest in sending ships overseas, while European kings (some, anyway) became very interested in it. When Yongle died in 1424 his successor's first act was to ban long-distance voyages...In 1436 the court refused repeated requests from the shipyards in Nanjing for more craftsmen, and over the next decade or two the great fleet rotted. By 1500 no emperor could have repeated Yongle's voyages even if he had wanted to. ... By Yongle's standards the Portuguese expeditions were laughably small (involving dozens of men, not dozens of thousands) and undignified (involving rabbits, sugar, and slaves, not gifts from great princes), but with the benefit of hindsight it is tempting to see the 1430s as a - perhaps the - decisive moment in world history, the point when Western rule became possible. At just the moment that maritime technology began to turn the oceans into highways linking the whole planet, Prince Henry grasped the possibilities and Emperor Zhengtong rejected them. ... As breathtaking as Zhengtong's error now seems, we should bear in mind that when he "decided" not to send shipwrights to Nanjing in 1436 he was only nine years old. His advisers made this choice for him, and their successors repeated it through the 15 C. According to one story, when courtiers revived the idea of Treasure Fleets in 1477, a cabal of civil servants destroyed the records of Zheng's voyages. The ringleader, Liu Daxia, we are told, explained to the minister of war, The voyages of Zheng to the Western Ocean wasted millions in money and grain, and moreover the people who met their deaths may be counted in the tens of thousands... This was merely an action of bad government of which ministers should severely disapprove. Even if the old archives were still preserved they should be destroyed. Grasping the point -- that Liu had deliberately "lost" the documents -- the minster rose from his chair. "Your hidden virtue, sir, " he exclaimed, "is not small. Surely this seat will soon be yours!"

joshuaheard 7y ago

"1421 The year the Chinese discovered America" is a fascinating book that lays out this theory based on ancient maps and other evidence. The author is a sailor that studied ancient china. Some of his evidence includes wind patterns, American fauna and flora described by the Chinese. Asians plants found in America, and other ancient Chinese artifacts found there. While none alone could prove the theory, the author puts them together in a compelling way.