This book I'm reading, 1421: The Year China Discovered America, is absolutely fascinating!
The author, Gavin Menzies, is a retired retired Royal Navy guy. He was visiting the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, when found a chart dated 1424 signed by a Venetian cartographer by the name of Zuane Pizzagano. What struck Menzies about the map was that the coastlines of Europe had been drawn with a great degree of accuracy. When he started looking more closely he found that the cartographer had included a group of islands out in the western Atlantic as well. After further research, he came to the conclusion that the islands were those of Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe. This would mean that someone had surveyed the islands some seventy years before Columbus reached the Caribbean.
This started a ball rolling that ended up in the writing of this book. Here is a summary of the story:
The Venetians were in no shape to send explorers out to find these island at that time. This meant that the information must have been given to the cartographer by someone else. At the time, China was the really the only country that had the wherewithall to undertake such an ambitious voyage.
Emperor Zhu Di of China had an enormous program of rebuilding the Great Wall, which had crumbled considerably over the course of the 1600 years since he had been built. Zhu Di also moved the capital of Nanjing to Beijing and built the Forbidden City. He wanted the Forbidden City to dazzle his people and intimidate his enemies. He also repaired and rebuilt the Grand Canal in an attempt to provide a way to carry shipments of grain northwards to the workers
Beijing, China was the intellectual capital of the world, with encyclopedias and libraries covering every subject then known to man. Zhu Di placed great emphasis on scholarship, and hired scholars of every subject to preserve all known literature and knowledge. He hired 2180 scholars to take charge of a project to amass this materials.
Zhu Di's foreign policy was a tribute system. He would curry favor with the countries of the world by pursuing trade, influence and bribery. He would send out these "treasure ships" full of all kinds of exotic items, like incense, animals, gold cloth, and trade goods. The ships also had a massive amount of guns and a travelling army of soldiers to remind others of his imperial power. Countries would accept the gifts, trade with the Chinese and Zhu Di's overlordship. They would be rewarded with imperial titles, protection and trade missions.
After Zhu Di had gotten most of the countries known to him and nearby under his control, he decided to send out ships to collect tribute from "barbarians" beyond the known borders of the sea. He also wanted the ships to perfect a method of accurate navigation. They were pretty good at calculating lattitude using the Polaris Star north of the equator, but they had to find a southern equivalent. Zhu Di sent ship captain Zheng He.
So they take off in 1421 and are expected back in a year or so. But right after they leave, the Forbidden City is struck by lightning and virtually all of it burns down. This pretty much spells the end of Zhu Di. Since emperors were supposedly ordained by the gods and since the gods apparently sent lightning that destroyed one of this guy's greatest achievements, support for him fails and he himself pretty much lost all his desire to go on.
After some time, he kicks the bucket. Enter son Zhu Gaozhi, who basically stops all trade and recalls the ships. The country is in economic disarray and he decides the expeditions wasted too much money and the goods that were brought home were useless. He burns all the records of these expeditions. The colonies they had established in Africa, Australia and North and South America were abandoned and left to their fate. China retreated into a long, self-imposed isolation from the world.
Hm.
Gotta Get This Book!
7:58:46 AM 
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