1421: The Year China Discovered the World

by Gavin Menzies

After parting company with Zheng He, the three Chinese fleets sailed for Calicut, the capital of Kerala in southern India and by far the most important port in the Indian Ocean. The Chinese had been trading with Calicut since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907). It was not only an important Chinese forward base but a great trading port, holding a huge stockpile of Indian cotton and textiles (calico), and the foremost centre for the trade in pepper. Its rulers, the Zamorins – Hindu kings – had built up an extensive network of trading relations throughout the Indian Ocean, East Africa and south-east Asia. Nearly all the celebrated travellers and explorers of the Middle Ages, such as Marco Polo (1254–1324), Ibn Battuta (1304–1368) and Abdul Razak (active 1349–1387), travelled to Calicut. In Zhu Di’s reign, the Chinese explicitly recognized Calicut, which they called Ku-Li, as the leading emporium of the Indian Ocean, describing it as ‘the most important harbour in the western ocean’ and ‘the meeting port of all foreign merchants’.4 Chinese sailing directions for the Indian Ocean specified distances to and from Calicut and gave courses to steer between Calicut, Malacca, northern India, the Gulf and Africa. For their part, Calicut’s rulers venerated China; between 1405 and 1419 they sent a series of diplomatic missions to Nanjing and Beijing, and a delegation attended the inauguration of the Forbidden City and presented Zhu Di with valuable horses.

  The official historian Ma Huan described the Chinese voyage from China via Malacca to Calicut in great detail: no fewer than nine pages of his account were devoted to the city. He gave an enthralling account of life in a medieval Indian city through Chinese eyes, noting the religious practices of the Zamorin king in contrast to those of his Muslim subjects, and bringing to life the habits of the people, their festivals, music and dancing, clothing and food: ‘The King of the country and the people of the country all refrain from eating the flesh of the ox. The great chiefs are Muslim people, they all refrain from eating the flesh of the pig.’5 Ma Huan went on to describe local crime and punishment, in particular how the guilt or innocence of a person was determined in a ‘trial by ordeal’ in which the accused’s fingers were held in boiling ghee, or clarified butter, before being wrapped in cotton. He also detailed the way in which goods from the treasure fleets were sold, and the form of contract used:

  If a treasure ship goes there, it is left entirely to the two men to superintend the buying and selling: the King sends a Chief and a Chei-Ti [a port customs official] to examine the account books in the official bureau; a broker comes and joins them [and] a high officer who commands the ships discusses the choice of a certain date for fixing prices. When the day arrives, they first of all take the silk embroideries and the open-work silks … when the price has been fixed, they write out an agreement …

  The Chief and the Chei-Ti with his excellency the Eunuch all join hands together and the broker then says: ‘In such and such a moon on such and such a day, we have all joined hands and sealed our agreement with a hand clasp. Whether [the price] be dear or cheap, we will never repudiate or change it.’6

  By an extraordinary coincidence, at the very time the treasure fleets were in the city in 1421, a young Venetian, Niccolò da Conti (c. 1395–1469), also arrived. A well-connected trader, da Conti had left Venice in 1414 for Alexandria. The Islamic rulers in Egypt, the Mamluk sultans from the steppes of Asia, did not then permit Christians to travel south of Cairo for they were determined that the Indian Ocean should remain an Islamic lake. While in Egypt, da Conti had learned Arabic, married a Muslim woman and converted to Islam. Now travelling as a Muslim merchant, he journeyed to the Euphrates delta (in modern Iraq) and on to India, arriving by late 1420. He made for Calicut, because at the time it was a centre for Nestorian Christians – a cult of followers of St Thomas, also known as ‘The Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East’, that had thrived in Syria in the sixth century and still exists in parts of western Asia – who were allowed to worship there by the tolerant Zamorins.

  Years later, as penance for da Conti’s renunciation of Christianity, Pope Eugenius IV made him relate the story of his journeys to the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini, who had them published.7 Da Conti described Calicut as ‘eight miles in circumference, a noble emporium for all India, abounding in pepper, lac [a kind of insect gum used in making lacquer] and ginger’. There can be no doubt that da Conti was in Calicut when the Chinese fleets passed through, nor that he had at the very least boarded a junk, for he later described them in conversation with his friend, the Castilian Pedro Tafur: ‘Ships [junks] like great houses and not fashioned at all like ours. They have ten or twelve sails and great cisterns of water within … the lower part is constructed with triple planks. But some ships are built in compartments, so that should one part be shattered, the other part remaining entire, they may accomplish the voyage.’8 The description could only refer to warships of Zheng He’s fleet; Chinese merchantmen did not have that type of construction, or that number of sails. I felt certain that da Conti also met Ma Huan in Calicut, for he described scenes almost identical to those Ma Huan recounted, as I discovered when comparing their two accounts. It was as if two different witnesses were describing the same things: the land surrounding Calicut, the trial by ordeal, capons and partridges kept in coops, the price and quality of ginger and pepper. Only in writing about sex did their emphases differ: da Conti described how women’s orgasms were heightened by the beads inserted in boys’ penises; the more fastidious Ma Huan mentioned only the tinkling noise the beads made.

  Chart of the Arabian Sea from the Mao Kun map in the Wu Pei Chi. At the top is the west coast of India and at the bottom the coast of Arabia.

  Having travelled through India and the Far East on many occasions over several decades, I can vouchsafe for the accuracy of da Conti’s descriptions – durians (a luscious but curious fruit) smelling of cheese in Malaysia, the musk of civet cats on the Malabar coast, the sweet smell of the scent used by Goanese women. He describes African ostriches and hippopotami, the rubies of Sri Lanka, Hindu women practising suttee (self-immolation on their husbands’ funeral pyres), vegetarian Brahmins (the priestly caste of Hindu India), the dusty smell of cinnamon. Da Conti’s descriptions of his subsequent travels in Chinese junks were to prove a vital link in solving the riddle of where the Chinese fleets had gone in the ‘lost’ years, for, as Ma Huan’s account makes clear, with his role as official chronicler apparently over, he left the treasure fleets at Calicut. His departure meant that one useful source of information had dried up, and I had to look for other sources to replace him. The importance of da Conti to the story of the Chinese voyages became increasingly clear. Someone must have brought back copies of maps showing the discoveries made by the Chinese fleets, for how else could this information have reached Europe and become incorporated in the charts that were later to guide the Portuguese explorers? If it turned out that da Conti had also conversed with the Chinese on their return journey, he would be a prime candidate. Those charts were now proving equally vital to me as I endeavoured to trace the routes the Chinese fleets had followed.

  The first task of the Chinese admirals after leaving Calicut was to return ambassadors to the coastal states of East Africa. Their passage plan was marked on the Chinese Mao Kun chart compiled after the sixth voyage. The Mao Kun forms part of the much larger Wu Pei Chi. That part of the Mao Kun that has survived – no-one knows how large it originally was – is in strip form, 21 feet long and plastered with hundreds of names of ports and prominent coastal features, and the courses to steer and distances between them. It is ‘believed to have been compiled in about 1422 from a mass of information brought back by Zheng He’s fleet or collected for their use’.9 Only a part of it has been translated to date, and as I write, scholars of medieval Chinese are working on the remainder. The translations of the Mao Kun and the Wu Pei Chi, and other documents of the period, will almost certainly produce further evidence of the great Chinese voyages. The quest to find further records was formally inaugurated at a conference in Nanjing on 18 October 2002.10r />
  The treasure fleets sailed from Calicut on the tail end of the north-east monsoon into the Indian Ocean, altering course to the south-west to make landings in Africa to return the ambassadors to their home ports – the route we followed over half a millennium later in HMS Newfoundland. It would have been uneconomical for all the fleets to have gone to each African state, so they would almost certainly have divided, with one returning ambassadors to Mogadishu (in modern Somalia) in the north, another to Zanzibar in the middle of the east coast, and a third to Kilwa (in modern Tanzania) further south. After all the ambassadors had been returned to their home countries, the Mao Kun indicates that the fleets rendezvoused off Sofala (near Maputo in modern Mozambique).

  The voyage to Sofala.

  Finding the rendezvous must have posed a major problem, for during a voyage from India to southern Africa, Polaris, the Chinese guiding star, would have sunk closer and closer to the horizon and become invisible at 3°40′N, north of Mogadishu in Somalia. Until they found another guiding star in the southern hemisphere to fulfil the same purpose as Polaris in the north, they were sailing into the unknown. They could use the Southern Cross for direction, for they knew that its leading stars, Crucis Alpha and Crucis Gamma, pointed to the South Pole, but as yet they had no star they could use to determine latitude. To locate one, they would have to sail far into the icy waters of the deep south. This was to be one of the most important aims of the expedition.

  Allowing for sailing a hundred nautical miles (115 statute miles) in a day (the average speed recorded in the surviving records of Chinese voyages in the Indian Ocean) and for remaining a maximum of one week in each port to re-provision (it usually took two to four days), all three fleets had probably completed the return of the envoys and ambassadors to their home ports by July 1421. By the time they had arrived at the rendezvous off Sofala, the admirals had already sailed some ten thousand miles since leaving China four months earlier. Some would not return for five years, but they did leave signposts of where they had sailed. The Chinese were rightly proud of their great voyages, and whenever they landed they usually carved stones in commemoration, like those erected by Zheng He in China. There are other similar stones near Cochin and Calicut in India, and near Galle in Sri Lanka. Some of the masons and stone-carvers who had worked on the Forbidden City had been brought with the fleets for precisely this purpose. The discovery of such stones was to prove one of the crucial links in the chain of evidence I was assembling. From the inscriptions on the carved stone erected by Zheng He in the Palace of the Celestial Spouse at Liu-Chia-Chang, I knew they had sailed forty thousand miles on their sixth voyage – almost twice around the globe.11 The Wu Pei Chi and the Mao Kun covered only the Chinese routes across the Indian and Southern Oceans. Without Chinese records to help me, how could I find out how far they had sailed, what new oceans they had traversed and what new lands they had discovered?

  My first recourse was to turn to the other great seafarers of the fifteenth century, the Arabs. My initial instinct has always been to look first for evidence in maps. The British Library holds copies of the great collection of early Arab maps assembled by Prince Youssuf Kamal, a wealthy Egyptian. These maps showed that the Arabs had certainly visited the east coast of Africa, and made regular voyages from the Gulf to collect slaves. However, dependent upon the prevailing winds, they had not ventured beyond the monsoon belt that spans the Indian Ocean but stops short of southern Africa. They set off from the Gulf on the north-east monsoon, sailed down to Zanzibar or sometimes further south to Kilwa and Sofala, then returned on the next south-west monsoon to the Gulf, laden with their tragic cargoes of slaves. I could not trace a single Arab chart that accurately depicted the east coast of Africa south of Sofala.

  I knew of, but at that stage had never seen, a planisphere – a map of the world – showing the Indian Ocean and southern Africa. It was drawn in 1459 by Fra Mauro, a cartographer based on the island of San Michele in the Venetian Lagoon but working for Dom Pedro of Portugal, Henry the Navigator’s brother and another leading light in the first wave of European journeys of exploration, who was then compiling a map of the world. I wondered if Fra Mauro’s map, now held by the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, could throw some light on the Chinese voyages.

  When I flew to Venice, the curator, Dr Piero Falchetta, took me into his office and proudly showed me Fra Mauro’s map, a grandiose undertaking: the first map of the entire world to be drawn since the days of the Roman Empire. It was to be the first, vital clue to the course taken by the Chinese fleets. Dr Falchetta pointed out that Fra Mauro had correctly drawn the Cape of Good Hope (which he had called Cap de Diab) with its easily identifiable triangular shape, and had done so thirty years before Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape. That this was no mistake was emphasized by Fra Mauro himself, for he had appended notes stating that a ship or junk had rounded the Cape:

  Around the year 1420, a ship or junk [coming] from India on a non-stop crossing of the Indian Ocean past ‘the Isles of Men and Women’ was driven beyond Cap de Diab [Cape of Good Hope] and through the Isole Verde and obscured islands [or darkness] towards the west and south-west for 40 days, found nothing but sea and sky. In their estimation, they ran for 2,000 miles and fortune deserted them. They made their return to the said Cap de Diab in 70 days.12

  Near the note, Fra Mauro had drawn a picture of a Chinese junk. It had the highly unusual broad, square bow, like a modern tank landing-craft, typical of Zheng He’s junks, and was shown much bigger than his depiction of European caravels. Another inscription, placed in the middle of the Indian Ocean, read: ‘The ships or junks that navigate these seas carry four masts or more, some of which can be raised or lowered, and have 40 to 60 cabins for the merchants.’13 A further note described the huge eggs the crew found when replenishing at Cap de Diab and the giant size of the birds that laid them. That description could only have applied to ostriches.

  Fra Mauro’s planisphere of 1459 showed the Cape of Good Hope correctly drawn, had an accurate depiction of Zheng He’s junks and described birds unique to southern Africa several decades before the first Europeans, Dias and da Gama, got to the Cape. The immediate and obvious question was, how did Fra Mauro get his information? How did he know the shape of a junk, and that the Cape was triangular? I found a partial answer in another fifteenth-century document describing the Portuguese conquest of Guinea: ‘Fra Mauro has himself spoken with “a trustworthy person” who said that he had sailed from India past Sofala to Garbin, a place located in the middle of the west coast of Africa.’14 There was no other clue to help identify the location of Garbin; the name does not correspond to that of any modern place. It is a bastardized version of the Arabic Al Gharb, meaning ‘a place in the West’. The identity of the ‘trustworthy person’ would vitally affect the provenance and credibility of the notes on Fra Mauro’s planisphere.

  I was convinced that the person could only have been Niccolò da Conti. He was in Calicut when the Chinese junks berthed to offload passengers and cargo and take on supplies on their way across the Indian Ocean. The notes on Fra Mauro’s map alluding to the voyage of the junk refer to ‘the Isles of Men and Women’, a peculiar name also used by da Conti in the account related to the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini. Da Conti (c. 1395–1469) was a contemporary of Fra Mauro (c. 1385–1459), both came from Venice, and both were engaged in exploration or documenting exploration. Fra Mauro was working for the Portuguese government, and as well as publishing da Conti’s stories, Poggio Bracciolini was also the intermediary between the Pope, Fra Mauro and the Portuguese government. There are no records of other Venetian merchants in India at the time, let alone in Calicut, when the Chinese passed through. It would be extraordinary if Fra Mauro’s ‘trustworthy person’ were not da Conti.15

  This was the crucial link in the chain connecting the maps drawn by the Chinese cartographers during the great voyages of exploration by the treasure fleets to the later Portuguese discoveries based on the mysterious maps they were soon
to obtain. Chinese knowledge and Chinese maps passed from da Conti to Fra Mauro, and from him to Dom Pedro of Portugal and Prince Henry the Navigator. The Papal Secretary, Poggio Bracciolini, was, as we shall see, a key intermediary.

  If Fra Mauro’s description did come courtesy of da Conti’s travels aboard a Chinese junk, it came from a reliable and accurate eyewitness, as I had already discovered. In those circumstances it seemed sensible to examine Fra Mauro/da Conti’s claim that a ship or junk had indeed rounded the Cape of Good Hope and then sailed into the South Atlantic. If so, it was a towering achievement, for Pedro Álvares Cabral (1467–1520) and Bartolomeu Dias (c. 1450–1500), the first Europeans to round the Cape and venture into the Indian Ocean, did not do so until 1488. To have drawn the Cape so accurately Fra Mauro must have had a copy of a chart showing the exact shape and location of the southern tip of Africa. Da Conti could have brought him such a map, obtained during his voyages aboard the Chinese fleet.

  As I know from my own naval career, rounding the Cape remains an emotional experience for sailors today. As the clouds peel off the strange flat mountain tops of the fabled Cape, another ocean and another world – the exotic East – beckons. To the Chinese in 1421, coming from the opposite direction, it must have seemed that at last they had reached the brink of the unknown – not even the great admirals of the Tang dynasty had sailed this far. As they saw the lengthening waves and deepening troughs, they must have prayed that their ships would prove equal to the colossal challenges the vast and stormy Atlantic Ocean would surely bring.

  I now had to discover where the mysterious ship described by Fra Mauro had sailed after rounding the Cape, and look for further independent evidence that it was a junk of one of the Chinese fleets. I started from the treasure fleets’ last recorded position, shown on the Mao Kun chart of 1422 as off Sofala, sailing southwards at 6.25 knots, a good speed explained by the Aghulas current that sweeps southwards along the east coast of South Africa down to the tip. At that speed, the Chinese would have rounded the Cape of Good Hope in approximately three weeks, by August 1421.