1421: The Year China Discovered America (Paperback)

~ (Author) "OVER TEN YEARS AGO I STUMBLED UPON AN INCREDIBLE discovery, a clue hidden in an ancient map which, though it did not lead to buried..." (more)
Key Phrases: tokelau disease, stone observation platforms, frizzle fowl, Zhu Di, Zheng He, South America (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A former submarine commander in Britain's Royal Navy, Menzies must enjoy doing battle. The amateur historian's lightly footnoted, heavily speculative re-creation of little-known voyages made by Chinese ships in the early 1400s goes far beyond what most experts in and outside of China are willing to assert and will surely set tongues wagging. According to Menzies's brazen but dull account of the Middle Kingdom's exploits at sea, Magellan, Dias, da Gama, Cabral and Cook only "discovered" lands the Chinese had already visited, and they sailed with maps drawn from Chinese charts. Menzies alleges that the Chinese not only discovered America, but also established colonies here long before Columbus set out to sea. Because China burned the records of its historic expeditions led by Zheng He, the famed eunuch admiral and the focus of this account, Menzies is forced to defend his argument by compiling a tedious package of circumstantial evidence that ranges from reasonable to ridiculous. While the book does contain some compelling claims-for example, that the Chinese were able to calculate longitude long before Western explorers-drawn from Menzies's experiences at sea, his overall credibility is undermined by dubious research methods. In just one instance, when confounded by the derivation of cryptic words on a Venetian map, Menzies first consults an expert at crossword puzzles rather than an etymologist. Such an approach to scholarship, along with a promise of more proof to come in the paperback edition, casts a shadow of doubt over Menzies's discoveries. 32 pages of color illus., 27 maps and diagrams. Book-of-the-Month Club alternate.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Menzies makes the fascinating argument that the Chinese discovered the Americas a full 70 years before Columbus. Not only did the Chinese discover America first, but they also, according to the author, established a number of subsequently lost colonies in the Caribbean. Furthermore, he asserts that the Chinese circumnavigated the globe, desalinated water, and perfected the art of cartography. In fact, he believes that most of the renowned European explorers actually sailed with maps charted by the Chinese. Though most historical records were destroyed during centuries of turmoil in the Far East, he manages to cobble together some feasible evidence supporting his controversial conclusions. Sure to cause a stir among historians, this questionable tale of adventure on the high seas will be hotly debated in academic circles. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 656 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (January 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006054094X
• ISBN-13: 978-0060540944
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (268 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #196,157 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

151 of 170 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A big hoax by a charming liar, March 21, 2004

By	Diogenes (long beach, wa United States) - See all my reviews

Gavin Menzies is a charming, seductive, inventive story teller, but his book is just an elaborate literary hoax, and belongs on the fiction list.

Gavin claims he has real, tangible evidence. Not true. Just check out for yourself some of the sources he cites. His own sources do not support the claims he makes.

For example, at pp 201-2(hardcover) Gavin writes of a pulley "for hoisting sails" found on the beach at Neahkahnie, Oregon, about 60 miles south of me. I drove down there and spoke with the curator of the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum. He had talked with Gavin in 2002 and Wayne told Gavin the pulley had already been carbon dated (in 1993) to 1590; and, the wax was beeswax for candles, prized and common cargo for the Spanish trade galleons that traveled between the Philippines and the west coast of North America, on a regular basis, between 1564 and 1815. The pulley was from one of those Manila galleons. In his book (page520) Gavin lists as a source "Tales of the Neahkahnie Treasure", prepared by the Nehalem Valley Historical Society Treasure Committee, 1991, published by the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum. It clearly states (p5) the beeswax, not as Gavin states "paraffin wax" a hydrocarbon product, had been carbon dated to 1681. Further, a pollen study of the beeswax had revealed its source was northern Luzon in the Philippines where there was a certain variety of shrub the bees visited for pollen.

Gavin ignores the inconvenient facts, hides them from the reader, and writes as if he is just waiting for the lab to confirm the finding of some possible real Chinese evidence. It's not possible, as Gavin well knows, the lab work has long since been done and it does not fit his time frame.

For another example consider the Bimini road story. Gavin devotes a short chapter to this (pp265-277). The Bimini road is a long standing hoax in its own right. Gavin claims all the experts agree it is man made. Not true. He only cites one "expert", David D. Zink, who was not a scientist, rather a former English teacher, a Cayce discple, intrigued with megalithic (big rock) structures and with the origins of myths. All the real experts know it is a natural geologic formation. Just by coincidence I noticed a timely article by Dr. Eugene A. Shinn, a geologist with USGS, in the Jan/Feb 2004 Skeptical Inquirer, pp38-44; "Natural submerged beachrock off the island of Bimini in the Bahamas has been deemed a remmant of Atlantis by the faithful since the 1960s. In spite of geological research demonstrating the stones are natural, 'true believers' continue to be drawn by the strong 'force field'." Take a look at that article and see if you can still believe the nonsense Gavin writes.

I could go on and on. Open any page and you will encounter nonsense. Gavin cites sources to be sure, but, if you take the time to read the claimed source material, you will invariably find it doesn't support what he writes. Gavin is desperate for some real, tangible evidence, and he simply ignores or misstates his own source material, and writes whatever he wishes, whatever he thinks may convince the reader his grand fantasy is true.

The book is a hoax and belongs on the fiction list.

58 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars He Really Believes It..., September 7, 2005

By	doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

This review is from: 1421: The Year China Discovered America (Hardcover)

I was not expecting to believe all the claims in this book, though I was intrigued by the possibility of unexpected new findings about the age of exploration. The Europeans were clearly not the first to sail great distances and discover new lands. You would have once been dismissed as a crackpot for claiming that the Vikings reached the Americas 500 years before Columbus, but that's now accepted history. There's also plenty of proof that the Chinese were regularly sailing to the Middle East and East Africa centuries before Europeans could even leave their own shores. But this book, claiming that the Chinese momentously and influentially circumnavigated the globe in 1421-1423, is a disaster of hyperbolic claims and selective interpretation of historical evidence. That's because Gavin Menzies started with an idea, compiled evidence that seemed to point in the right direction, and convinced himself that he was finding mindboggling breakthroughs. But there is little reason for us to be as convinced as he is.

You can see plenty of other reviews (here and elsewhere) debunking the many, many research errors committed by Menzies. Most of these criticisms are more believable to me than Menzies' assertions. On a higher level I'll add that Menzies is an unabashed member of the "incredible coincidence" school of history. In just a couple of examples, among multitudes, he claims that the presence of Asiatic birds in South America means "the conclusion is inescapable" of visiting Chinese sailors; or an ice-free depiction of Antarctica on a map "confirm[s]" that the Chinese were there during a January. Menzies also unquestioningly accepts Chinese court histories as accurate, without considering the possibility that they may be distorted by embellishments or state propaganda. The same goes for his faithful belief in the accuracy of folklore and oral histories. An especially damaging methodological error is that Menzies doesn't question the alleged years of origin of any of the maps he examines, which are of course mindblowingly and impossibly old. The Piri Reis map is the most important example, as there is much scholarly dispute (unacknowledged by Menzies) over whether this map really dates from 1513.

There are surely many mysteries about the age of exploration, as compelling pieces of physical and anecdotal evidence give us plenty of reason to doubt accepted histories. But what makes this book such a failure is that Menzies has one grand answer for all unsolved mysteries - a single momentous Chinese expedition. Some other reviewers have made telling comparisons to the farcical "Chariots of the Gods" which does the same thing, except with spaceships and aliens.

177 of 219 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating, thought-provoking premise, January 10, 2003

By	Bruce Trinque (Amston, CT United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: 1421: The Year China Discovered America (Hardcover)

Gavin Menzies' "1421: The Year China Discovered America" presents a fascinating premise: in the year 1421 a huge armada set forth from China to explore the oceans of the world, visiting not only India and East Africa, already known to the Chinese from previous expeditions, but also West Africa, the American continents, Australia, and even Antarctica decades or centuries before European explorers reached those same shores. But when the survivors of this great endeavor returned to China a profound change at the highest levels of the government had taken place, a change that ruptured contact with the outside world. China withdrew within itself, destroyed the records of the expedition, and the great adventure was forgotten. Nonetheless, critical information about their discoveries was conveyed to the West, sparking the European age of exploration.

It is tempting to dismiss Menzies as being simply yet another in a long line of authors who have proposed extremely ambitious revisions to traditional history based upon much speculation and little solid evidence. We have all seen books that offer the true stories behind the Pyramids and Great Sphinx of Egypt, the Holy Grail, King Arthur, Atlantis, and a host of similar topics - books that promise much but soon fade from sight. Yet, Menzies does outline a large body of evidence in support of his theory. Perhaps most crucial are old maps dating from the 15th and early 16th Centuries which appear to show in persuasive detail coastlines of the Americas, Australia, and Antarctica long before European ships reached those shores. Menzies believes that these maps originated in the Chinese explorations, the information passed on to foreign contacts even while it was being obliterated at home. (Other amateur revisionist historians have sought to explain such maps by resorting to ancient sea-kings in a pre-Ice Age world or even to extraterrestrial visitors; Menizies' theory seems almost sedate in comparison.) In support of this idea, he quotes from contemporary accounts that European explorers finding "new" lands admitted that they were guided by existing maps. Menzies' partiality towards maps and questions of navigation is undoubtedly grounded in his background as a former commander of a Royal Navy nuclear submarine. The experience gave him, as he describes it, a "periscope's eye" view of lands seen from the sea, valuable in interpreting what might be shown on a centuries-old chart.

There is a broad array of other evidence mentioned by Menzies: inscribed stones at numerous locations around the world, the supposed presence of Asiatic chickens and African coffee in the Americas before Columbus, the reported growth of American maize in southeast Asia before Europeans provided a link across the Pacific, Chinese-style structures in various places, mysterious old shipwrecks which seem to be Chinese junks (including one in a sandbar along California's Sacramento River), possible Chinese colonies in New England and Portugese colonies in Puerto Rico well before Columbus ... The list of presumed evidence appears endless.

However - there is always a "however" in these things - can we be confident that Menzies has properly evaluated and presented this seemingly overwhelming body of information? Footnotes are rather sparse, something which must make the careful reader cautious. By Menzies' own acknowledgement, the validity of some pieces of his evidence has already been strongly challenged in the past: the stone tower of Newport in Narragansett Bay, the controversial Vinland Map, and the mysterious underwater "roads" of Bimini. Menzies has stated that additional detailed supporting material will appear on his Internet website, but as yet I have seen little there of this promised data.

Given the bold nature of Menzies' proposal and the broad scope of information presented, it seems inevitable that at least some of Menzies' evidence will be shown to be in error. But might enough of it eventually be proven correct to validate his ideas? There are a number of paths of research suggested by Menzies for further pursuit, including archaeological excavation of the Sacramento River wreck and of mounds on the beaches of Bimini, DNA analysis of plants, animals, and peoples in many places ordinarily presumed isolated from one another, caron-14 dating of artifacts sitting on museum shelves, and so forth. Perhaps, the thesis of the great expedition of 1421 will be found to be too narrowly phrased, while the broader matter of pre-Columbian contact with the Americas will be buttressed. Quite possibly some of the more ambitious Chinese exploits described by Menzies, such as a voyage around the north of Greenland and the exploration of the north coast of Siberia, will be pruned away, leaving a more solid central core intact. Or maybe in the end the whole thesis will be discarded. But before that happens, I would hope that a serious look be given to Menzies' ideas and the underlying evidence. The Chinese of the 15th Century, we now understand, certainly did have vessels capable of long ocean voyages, and we should not be so Eurocentric to preclude the notion that East Asian explorers could have made their own wide-ranging explorations. And that detailed information on those old maps had to come from somewhere, after all. Was it more than only imagination and luck?

"1421: The Year China Discovered America" makes for a fascinating reading experience with much in it worthy of further thought, but I would also recommend to the prospective reader that caution be exercised against taking everything at face value. At the same time, the reader would be well-advised to keep an open mind to the possibility that the ancient Chinese at least briefly knew far more of the external world than we had ever realized and that this information helped kindle the flames of European exploration.