The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet sailed to Italy and ignited the Renaissance
By Gavin Menzies, Harper Collins
Reviewed: 6 September 2008
The publishing encourages readers to believe that there is a difference between Fiction and Non-Fiction.
In Gavin Menzies’ two works 1431 – The Year China Discovered America, and now 1434 – The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet sailed to Italy and ignited the Renaissance, readers are being sold, as non-fiction, works that mix facts and wild speculation with an abandon that would embarrass the better historical novelists.
A large Chinese merchant fleet visited India in 1433-34, and part of the fleet continued westward as far as the Persian Gulf trade terminus of Hormuz. It followed trade routes developed and maintained for centuries by Arab maritime trading societies.
The Chinese records tell us that the Admiral, Zheng He, died before reaching Hormuz and command passed to another admiral who completed the trade mission and returned to China with a rich fleet in 1434.
Gavin Menzies asserts that Zheng He’s commission from the Ming Emperor Yong Le was not merely to engage in trade, but rather to endow the Western barbarians with sufficient Chinese wisdom that they would flock to Beijing to recognize China’s global supremacy.
He suggests that Zheng He’s fleet carried copies of Yong Le’s state encyclopedia containing “more intellectual knowledge than any university in the world at that time”. Part of the fleet sailed up the Red Sea, through a canal to the Nile, and across the Mediterranean to Venice. His fleet bore encyclopedic gifts, ample translators, and apparently some thousands of slave girls who, on reaching the Adriatic Sea, would elope with sailors and populate Croatia.
Since there is absolutely no evidence of any magnificent Chinese fleet sailing to Italy and igniting the Renaissance, Menzies supports his thesis with attenuated chains of inference. On the slimmest of evidence or most unreliable documentation, he will say on one page that a certain connection with China “could” have happened. On the next page the link has become “would” have happened, and by the next chapter the far-fetched possibility is quoted as a factual assumption to underpin some even more far-fetched argument.
The sheer bulk of outright errors, misrepresentations and unsupported assertions is so great that it would be maddening to undertake a full refutation.
He refers frequently to a 1418 Chinese map, that he calls “Zheng He’s map”, showing most of the modern world, including the Americas, as evidence of Chinese pre-Columbian knowledge of the entire globe. Only by chasing up the source of this map in an external reference can one confirm that the map is a “copy” made in China no earlier than 1763 (by which time its contents were common knowledge to seafarers), and probably a twentieth century fake. There is no 1418 map.
It’s difficult to sort the wheat (and there is some) from so much chaff.
Richard Thwaites has been reading Chinese history for forty years.
No comments:
Post a Comment