The third group of foods carried by the Chinese were taros, yams and sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) thrive in the hot, moist climate of South America where they originated, and they have subsequently become an important root crop in warm, sub-tropical countries. By the time Captain Cook arrived in New Zealand, sweet potatoes had become the principal food of the Maori. Their name for them, kumara, is almost identical to the name kumar still used in the Lima region of coastal Peru. True yams (the Dioscorea species) originated in Africa and south-east Asia, yet they were growing in Hawaii when the first Europeans landed there. Taros originated in south-east Asia but had also reached Hawaii before the Europeans. They are members of the Arum family (Aracheae) and, like potatoes, are rich in starch. Taros are widely cultivated throughout the Pacific from Tahiti in the south – taro ponds greet the visitor leaving Tahiti’s airport – to Hawaii in the north.
It can be said that rice, maize, sweet potatoes, taros and yams, originating in entirely different parts of the world, provided the essential food for those living in the tropics and sub-tropics. Their transportation was of incalculable benefit to mankind, for man now had the capacity to grow and harvest crops in almost every soil and climatic condition.
Apart from its role as the world’s leading producer and exporter of silk, China also led the way in other fabrics. First used in the Indus valley several millennia ago, cotton is probably the world’s most important cash crop, accounting for 5 per cent of the world’s agricultural output. Scientists and scholars were initially baffled by the chromosomal structure of South American cotton, but after a series of painstaking experiments experts have now agreed that one parent of American cotton undoubtedly came from Asia. The wild American cotton the first Europeans found in the Americas had one gene that came from India. Cotton had been brought from India to Canton, where it was cultivated by the eighth century. It was widely grown during the Mongol Yuan dynasty that preceded the Ming, and Ming fleets carried huge amounts of cotton on their voyages.5 The King of Cochin was rightly grateful to Emperor Zhu Di: ‘How fortunate we are that the teachings of the sages of China have benefited us. For several years now, we have had abundant harvests in our country and our people have had houses to live in, have had the bounty of the sea to eat their fill of, and enough fabrics for clothes.’6
Coconut is far and away the most important nut crop in the world. Its native home was in the islands of Indonesia, yet coconuts were found by the first Europeans when they arrived in the Caribbean and on the Pacific coast of Central America, and there are now about 3.5 million hectares of coconut plantations in the Philippines, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Caribbean. Coconuts grow within the tropics, yet can withstand slight frost. Besides providing delicious meat and coconut milk, oil extracted from the dried white meat has been used for centuries for cooking and frying and in the manufacture of soaps, cosmetics and lubricants. After extracting the oil, dried copra cake can be ground to a meal high in protein, used for cattle and chicken feed. The trunk provides roof beams, and the fibres of the husk (coir) can be used to make ropes. Ming fleets traded coir extensively.
Bananas originated in south-east Asia, but were also found in Hawaii by the early European explorers and have subsequently spread to India, Africa and tropical America. Along with grapes, oranges and apples, bananas are the world’s most important fruit crop; their cousins, starchy plantains, are eaten as a vegetable throughout the tropics. Pineapples originated on the hot, steamy Atlantic coast of South America, yet Columbus noted pineapples on his second voyage to the West Indies in 1493. The evidence of the great voyages by the Chinese treasure fleets is literally growing all around us today.
At the start of my long journey in the tracks of the great fifteenth-century Chinese explorers, I had learned of a monument, a carved stone erected by Zheng He overlooking a bay in the Yangtze estuary in China, and read the inscription incised on its surface. It was almost the only surviving physical evidence on the whole Chinese mainland of that epic sixth voyage of the treasure fleets. Little else had survived the purges of the mandarins. Translated, it read:
The emperor … has ordered us [Zheng He] and others [Zhou Man, Hong Bao, Zhou Wen and Yang Qing] at the head of several tens of thousands of officers and imperial troops to journey in more than a hundred ships … to treat distant people with kindness … We have gone to the western regions … altogether more than three thousand countries large and small. We have traversed more than a hundred thousand li [forty thousand nautical miles] of immense water spaces.
I had puzzled over this inscription as I began the voyage of discovery that was to consume me for years. Now at the conclusion of my journey, I returned, believing that I had found the evidence to overturn the long-accepted history of the Western world. I had found a wealth of evidence that the Chinese fleets commanded by Admirals Zheng He, Yang Qing, Zhou Man, Hong Bao and Zhou Wen on that epic sixth expedition had surveyed every continent in the world. They had sailed through sixty-two island archipelagos comprising more than seventeen thousand islands and charted tens of thousands of miles of coastline. Admiral Zheng He’s claim to have visited three thousand countries large and small appeared to be true. The Chinese fleets had voyaged across the Indian Ocean to East Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope to the Cape Verde Islands, through the Caribbean to North America and the Arctic, down to Cape Horn, the Antarctic, Australia, New Zealand and across the Pacific. Throughout the entire hundred thousand li, only in the Antarctic would the treasure ships have had to sail into the wind or an opposing current.
Before that great voyage of 1421 to 1423, Zhu Di had already brought all of south-east Asia, including Manchuria, Korea and Japan, into China’s tribute system. The eastern end of the Silk Road had been reopened from China as far as Persia (modern Iran). Central Asia was in thrall to China, and the Indian Ocean was dominated by Chinese shipping. The treasure fleets of 1421 to 1423 added to this already vast trading empire. They created permanent colonies along the Pacific coast of North and South America, from California to Peru. Settlements were also initiated in Australia and New Zealand and throughout the Indian Ocean as far as East Africa. Supply bases were established right across the Pacific to link first the Americas with China, and then Australia and New Zealand with China. Vast distances were covered: there were bases from Easter Island to Pitcairn Island, through the Marquesas and the Tuamotu Archipelago, at Tahiti, Sarai in Western Samoa, Tonga, San Christobal in the Solomons, Nan Madol, Yap and Tobi in the Carolines, and Saipan in the Marianas. The remains of stone barracks, quays, houses, reservoirs and observation platforms may be seen on many of these islands to this day. Zheng He’s great fleets and their supply trains were to link all these settlements and supply bases.
My claims about the Chinese voyages in the ‘missing years’ from 1421 to 1423 rest on the authenticity of the Kangnido, Piri Reis, Jean Rotz, Cantino, Waldseemüller and Pizzigano charts. No-one has ever questioned their veracity. The Vinland map has been questioned in the past, but as I have demonstrated (see chapter 14 and postscript), I believe it passes the authenticity test. The Piri Reis, Jean Rotz and Cantino charts depict the whole of the southern hemisphere, covering tens of millions of square miles of ocean, thousands of islands, and tens of thousands of miles of coastline from the Antarctic to the equator. The lands they show can only have been surveyed by fleets that had sailed the southern hemisphere before the European voyages of discovery, and those fleets can only have been Chinese.
There is also a wealth of physical evidence for these great Chinese voyages. The Pandanan junk in the Philippines vividly demonstrates the extent of Chinese trade with the states of the Indian Ocean, the Americas and south-east Asia. Ming porcelain has been found down the East African coast, in the Persian Gulf and Australia, Ming silk as far north as Cairo. The wrecks of treasure ships lie off New Zealand and southern Australia, and there is also a wealth of other evidence of a Chinese presence in those countries. Carved stones were erected across the I
ndian Ocean, in the Cape Verde Islands, New Zealand and South America. Chinese chickens were carried to South America, maize brought from the Americas to China. Votive offerings have been found in the Lamu archipelago, at Darwin and on Ruapuke beach in New Zealand.
It is the spread, depth and variety of the evidence that makes the great Chinese voyages of 1421–3 so credible. One mahogany wreck in Australia may be explained away as an Indian merchantman blown far off course, but several wrecks, accompanied by Chinese votive offerings, ceramics and adze anchors, tell an entirely different story, one corroborated by Aboriginal folklore and cave paintings and clearly recognizable charts of the Barrier Reef drawn hundreds of years before the first Europeans reached Australia. The Chinese porcelain dating from the Ming era found throughout the Indian Ocean might have come from the cargoes of shipwrecked Portuguese caravels, but again, the evidence does not exist in isolation. There are the accounts of yellow-skinned people, the Chinese votive offerings, and silk found by the first Portuguese explorers. There is also a detailed chart of millions of square miles of ocean that was drawn before the Portuguese could have surveyed the Indian Ocean in such detail. The only explanations to date of how Antarctica could have appeared on a chart four hundred years before Europeans reached those parts have come from the pens of Erik von Daniken (aliens from outer space) and Charles Hapgood (Egyptian civilization before the Pharaohs).
Chinese bases across the Pacific Ocean.
Magellan saw the ‘Strait of Magellan’ and the Pacific depicted on a chart before he set sail; that can only mean that someone had passed through the strait and crossed the Pacific before he did, and had drawn animals native to Patagonia before any European knew of them. That the ‘someone’ was Chinese is confirmed by the pictures of animals (published 1430) and the Chinese artefacts along the route they followed, and the continents shown on the Chinese charts that have survived. That the Chinese had the ships, the expertise, the funds and the time to make such an extraordinary circumnavigation of the world is beyond question, just as it is beyond doubt that no-one else in that era could have done it.
These claims will doubtless be greeted with astonishment, yet if one takes a dispassionate view, there is nothing illogical about them. The Chinese enjoyed a far older and richer maritime tradition than the Europeans. When Zhu Di’s fleets set sail in 1421, they had at least six centuries of ocean exploration and astro-navigation behind them; when Dias and Magellan set sail, the Portuguese had no means of accurately navigating south of the equator. Zheng He’s fleets of treasure ships with their attendant supply ships were the products of a massive shipbuilding programme made possible by the economic strength of China; the tiny caravels of Cabral, Dias and Magellan would have looked like dinghies alongside the Chinese craft. Until the French built the Dauphin Royale – later renamed L’Oriente when Napoleon came to power – almost four centuries later, no wooden ship had ever approached the size of the giant treasure ships that epitomized Chinese naval supremacy and domination of the oceans. Even the European warships at Trafalgar could barely match the Chinese junks in size, range or firepower. Nelson’s fleet of, at best, thirty ships carrying eighteen thousand men would have been dwarfed by Zheng He’s armada of more than a hundred ships carrying twenty-eight thousand men. His treasure ships were twice the length and three times the beam of HMS Victory. They had far better damage control and logistical support, and could remain at sea far longer, for months on end if necessary.
The Chinese fleets had charted the world, they could determine longitude by means of lunar eclipses, and by comparing charts they were able to resolve any remaining longitudinal differences and complete the first map of the world as we know it today. But that knowledge was bought at a terrible cost. Only four of Hong Bao’s ships and just one of Zhou Man’s returned to China – a loss of at least fifty ships in those two fleets alone. The human toll was equally high: a mere nine hundred of the nine thousand men in Zhou Man’s fleet were still with their admiral come October 1423. Up to three-quarters of the fleets’ original complement must have died or been abandoned in the scattered settlements around the globe.
Twenty-four wrecks have already been located around the world; many more, carrying thousands of tons of treasure, remain to be found. The oceans will inevitably release more and more evidence as time goes by. The costs in both human and financial terms remain unparalleled – even the mightiest empire the world had ever seen was unable to sustain them – but the tasks Zhu Di had set his admirals had been achieved. It was a towering achievement, unequalled in the annals of mankind.
Zhu Di’s master plan to discover and chart the entire world, and bring it into Confucian harmony through trade and foreign policy, could have succeeded, for the whole world now lay at China’s feet – or so it must have seemed to his admirals when the handful of surviving ships of the treasure fleets limped home during the autumn of 1423, only to find that China, and the world, had changed for ever. Zhu Di was dying, a broken man, and the mandarins were dismantling the apparatus of the worldwide empire he had so nearly created. There would be no more tribute system, no more great scientific experiments, no more epic voyages of trade and discovery. China was entering its long night of isolation from the outside world. The eunuch admirals were dismissed, their ships broken up or left to rot at their moorings, the maps and charts and thousands of precious documents recording their exploits destroyed. Zhu Di’s great achievements were disowned, ignored and, in time, forgotten.
One of the fascinating ‘what ifs’ of history is what would have happened had lightning not struck the Forbidden City on 9 May 1421, had fire not roared down the Imperial Way and turned the emperor’s palaces and throne to cinders. Would the emperor’s favourite concubine have survived? Would the emperor have kept his nerve? Would he have ordered Admiral Zheng He’s squadrons to continue their voyages? Would they have carried on establishing permanent colonies in Africa, the Americas and Australia? Would New York now be called New Beijing? Would Sydney have an ‘English’ rather than a ‘Chinese’ quarter? Would Buddhism rather than Christianity have become the religion of the New World?
Instead of the cultured Chinese, instructed to ‘treat distant people with kindness’, it was the cruel, almost barbaric Christians who were the colonizers. Francisco Pizarro gained Peru from the Incas by massacring five thousand Indians in cold blood. Today he would be considered a war criminal.
In effect the Portuguese used Chinese cartography to show them the way to the East. Then they stole the spice trade, which the Indians and Chinese had spent centuries building. Anyone who might stop them was mown down. When da Gama reached Calicut he told his men to parade Indian prisoners, then to hack off their hands, ears and noses. All the amputated pieces were piled up in a small boat. The historian Gaspar Correa describes da Gama’s next move:
When all the Indians had been thus executed [sic], he ordered their feet to be tied together, as they had no hands with which to untie them: and in order that they should not untie them with their teeth, he ordered them to strike upon their teeth with staves, and they knocked them down their throats …7
Then a Brahmin was sent from Calicut to plead for peace. The ‘brave’ da Gama had his lips and ears cut off and the ears of a dog sewn on instead.
It seems certain that a further voyage by Zheng He’s fleets would have included the one section of the globe they had not yet reached and charted – Europe. The upheavals in Beijing ended any possibility of that, but who can say what the subsequent history of the world would have been had the Chinese treasure ships appeared over the European horizon in the 1420s? One thing seems certain: had the emperors who followed Zhu Di not retreated into xenophobia and isolation, China, not Europe, would have become the mistress of the world.
The Forbidden City still stands as a monument to the vision of the great Zhu Di, but what more fitting epitaph could there be to the ‘Emperor on Horseback’ than the valiant horseman mounted on the tip of Corvo’s volcano in the Azores, high above t
he Atlantic rollers crashing onto the cliffs far below? He pointed dramatically to the west, towards Fusang, the Americas, the land his brave and skilful mariners had discovered. As China began to draw in on itself, abandoning Zhu Di’s great ambitions, others, notably the Portuguese and Spanish, began to fill the vacuum they had left. For centuries they have basked in the glory that rightfully belonged to others; it is now time, at last, for us to redress the balance of history and give credit where it is due.
To assert the primacy of the Chinese exploration of the New World and of Australia is not to denigrate the achievements and memories of Dias, Columbus, Magellan and Cook. The exploits of these brave and skilful men will never be forgotten, but it is now time to honour other men who have been allowed to languish in obscurity for too long. These remarkable Chinese admirals rounded the Cape of Good Hope sixty-six years before Dias, passed through the Strait of Magellan ninety-eight years before Magellan, surveyed Australia three centuries before Captain Cook, Antarctica and the Arctic four centuries before the first Europeans, and America seventy years before Columbus. The great admirals Zheng He, Hong Bao, Zhou Man, Zhou Wen and Yang Qing deserve to be remembered and celebrated too, for they were the first, the bravest and most daring of all. Those who followed them, no matter how great their achievements, were sailing in their wake.
POSTSCRIPT
BY GREAT GOOD luck, the talk I gave at The Royal Geographical Society in London in March 2002 was broadcast around the world, and a subsequent article in the Daily Telegraph was also published in seventy-four other newspapers and magazines. As a result, new evidence began to pour in from all over the world, all of which had to be evaluated and checked for accuracy by experts in each different field. The text was continually expanded and rewritten to incorporate this new material, but eventually a line had to be drawn for publication. However, emails, faxes and letters about exciting new discoveries have continued to arrive almost every day, and as the book goes to press, this postscript allows me a final opportunity to summarize the very latest evidence available.
1421: The Year China Discovered the World Page 34
