1421: The Year China Discovered the World

by Gavin Menzies

  We saw emptying into the river another very powerful and wider river on the right; so wide was it that at the place where it emptied in it formed three islands … At this junction there were numerous and very large settlements and very fruitful country and very fruitful land … There was a great deal of porcelain ware of various makes, both jars and pitchers, very large with a capacity of more than 25 arrovas [100 gallons] and other small pieces such as plates and bowls and candelabra of this porcelain of the best that has ever been seen for that of Malaga is not its equal for it is all glazed and embellished with all colours so bright that they astonish, and more than this, the drawings and paintings which they make on them are so accurately worked out … and the Indians have told us that as much as there was porcelain in this house, so much there was back in the country in gold and silver … From this village there went out many roads and fine highways inland … Cristobal Maldonado … and some other companions started to follow them and had not gone half a league when the roads became more like royal highways and wider … Countries very rich in silver … and plentifully supplied with all kinds of fruit, pineapples, pears, plums and custard apples.17

  After studying the rest of Friar Carvajal’s account, I was certain that the ‘very powerful and wider river on the right’ was the Tapajos and the three islands were those in the stream to the north of Santarém. The mention of large royal highways is very important, for today this area is jungle. The people who created the highways that astonished the Spanish must have had substantial surplus capacity and engineering skill. The excavation of the lost city reported by Dr Gomes will be of great interest.

  The Tapajos River splits into several tributaries further south, the southernmost of which rises in the Chapada Range in the Mato Grosso, north-east of Cuíaba.18 This small area is also where the Paraná rises – a mighty river that runs first west and then south-east to empty into the estuary of the River Plate. When the Portuguese reached this area a century after Friar Carvajal, they found a way of sailing with the wind from the coast against the current all the way up to Cuíaba. It is entirely possible that the Chinese had also done so: the first Europeans saw rice growing beside the Paraná, and the skin diseases of south-east Asia are endemic among the native population. There are substantial silver mines around the headwaters of these rivers. The Chapada Range is a far healthier environment than the marshy plains below and therefore would have been a sensible place to build a city. A map of lost cities of the Americas19 states that this is where Colonel Fawcett vanished in 1925 while searching for the legendary lost city of Moribeca.

  In 1743, a native of Minas Gerais made a search for Moribeca with a party of a few Portuguese, Indians and Negro slaves. After a fruitless ten-year search, they were scouting for food one day when the pursuit of a deer led them through a deep crevice in a precipice. Gaining the summit, they ‘stood dumb at the view spread before them’.

  In the immediate foreground lay extensive plains brilliantly green, with patches here and there of silver water, changing to yellowish brown and dull greens as they drew near the foothills. On this was a sight that made the adventurers gasp and hastily draw back behind the crest line. For at a distance of some three or four miles and so clear that buildings could be distinctly made out, was a huge city …

  The overwhelming dignity of the design, the awesome silence and mystery of an old abandoned city possessed them, rough men as they were. High above the crown of the central arch and deeply engraved into the weathered stone were characters of some sort. They knew enough to realize this was no familiar script. The arches were in a good state of preservation; the very few huge blocks had fallen from the summit, and portions had slipped somewhere out of plumb. Passing through the archway they found themselves in a wide street, littered with fallen masonry and broken pillars. They gazed in amazement. There was not a sign of human occupation. It was all incredibly old, and yet for its age amazingly perfect. Here were two storeyed houses on either side all built up of carefully squared blocks carved in elaborate time-worn designs. In many cases roofs had fallen in, in others great stone slabs still covered the dark interiors, and he who had the temerity to enter the windowless chambers through the vaulted doorways and to raise his voice, fled at the echoes hurled at him by the vaulted ceilings and solid walls …

  Dumb with amazement, the party, huddled together like a flock of scared sheep, passed down the street into a vast square or plaza … In the centre of the plaza, dominating its surroundings in sublime majesty, was a gigantic black stone column set upon a plinth of the same rock, and upon it the statue of a man, one hand on his hip, the other arm extended with the index finger pointing to the north … Magnificent in design, perfect in preservation. In each corner of the plaza had been great obelisks in black stone covered with carvings … The whole of the right-hand side of the plaza was occupied by a building so magnificent in its design as to have been obviously a palace, its square columns intact with walls and roof partly demolished. A vast entrance hall was approached by a broad flight of steps, much of which was displaced. The interior of this hall was rich in exquisite carving, and still showed signs of a brilliance of colouring comparable with some of the finest relics of Egypt …

  On the far side of the plaza the city was open to a river some thirty yards or so in width … evidently there had been a highly decorative terrace to this river, and most of it had been swallowed up or lay beneath the waters … About a quarter of a mile outside the city and standing by itself was a palatial building with a front of 250 paces approached by a broad flight of steps of many coloured stones. It was heavily columned all round, and the noble portico opened up upon a vast hall, with mural decorations and gorgeous colouring that still remained more or less intact. From this hall opened fifteen smaller chambers, in each of which was the carved head of a serpent; from his opened jaws poured a small stream of water …

  The leader decided to follow the river down on the chance of striking some civilized settlement … Soon after the departure of this party he found to the east of the fall unmistakable signs of mining. The shafts whose depths he had no means of plumbing excited his curiosity. On the surface of the ground were specimens of silver ore of great richness, presumably brought up from the shafts, encouraging him to believe he had really discovered the lost mines of Moribeca.20

  It is hoped that a fresh expedition will be mounted to find the lost city of Moribeca, following in the footsteps of Colonel Fawcett. We have enough clues of where to look!

  A third lost city, Quivira, another of the fabled ‘seven cities of Cibola’, was reputedly located in the area of modern Wichita. Coronado’s expedition set out from Compostela on the Pacific coast and marched northwards along the Gulf of California to what is now Sonora. Near Zuni, he turned eastwards towards what is now Albuquerque, and then made his way north-east from there to the Missouri. The land between the Rocky Mountains and the Missouri he named Tiguex, and there he encountered Chinese people. Coronado sent exploratory parties in all directions, one of which, under the command of Garcia Lopez de Cardeno, discovered the Grand Canyon of Colorado. In the spring of 1541, Coronado’s main party reached what is now Wichita, but though they found ‘ships with gilded sterns’ there, they did not discover the lost city of Quivira that they were seeking. Is that the end of the matter? I certainly do not think so. There are far too many carvings of foreign ships and horses in western Oklahoma filled with a wealth of ancient writing and related petroglyphs.

  Further up the Mississippi, in Wisconsin and Michigan, native American lore cites ‘ancient maritime foreigners who came to mine the “red rock”’, and Rock Lake, Wisconsin, holds in its depths a possible clue to these ‘ancient foreigners’. It is an area rich in copper, perhaps the ‘red rock’ of native lore. By AD 900 copper had become the coin of the Mayan realm. Mayan miners and astronomers knew of copper deposits in northern Michigan and sent expeditions to establish control of the area. They built a large settlement at ‘Aztalan’, which became the
centre of copper trading for several centuries, but in about 1300, copper deposits were found in Mexico itself and Aztalan was apparently abandoned.

  For five centuries, including the period of the great Chinese voyages of exploration, its history went unrecorded, but between 1830 and 1840 early settlers in the Rock Lake area saw strange protrusions sticking out of the water, described by the natives as the ‘rock tepees of the ancient foreigners’. Within twenty years, the sawmill dams built by the settlers led to a rise in the water level of Rock Lake and the structures were completely submerged. But after a prolonged drought in the autumn of 1900, two local residents out duck-shooting saw mysterious structures under the water. Dozens of local people converged on the lake, and several young boys dived down and touched the flat-topped pyramids, one of which was described as ‘a long tent-shaped structure’ approximately eight hundred feet in length. However, the very next day the drought broke, the water became murky and no more sightings were made.

  In the 1980s, a team led by local journalist and author Frank Joseph began sonar sweeps of the lake and photographed the underwater structures,21 and between 2000 and 2002 the Rock Lake Research Society carried out further sonar scans, attempting to fix the location of the structures using ground positioning systems. A diver recorded his impressions:

  I would say the first one is about eight feet high, twelve to fifteen feet wide, and more than a hundred feet long. The second is ten to twenty feet south of the first and about the same width, with a steeper slant to the sides, and is shorter in length. They look to be the same height and exactly north and south on a compass alignment … The area of rocks looks like a tent-shaped pyramid, collapsed … It is like a pile of rubble, large stones on the bottom and smaller ones on top … Some kind of plaster had been used on the sides. Slabs of fragments of cement or plaster, or at least something man-made, were on top of the large one.22

  Local historians developed a theory that these truncated pyramids of ‘Aztalan’ were used as observation points to record the movements of the sun and planets.

  The Louisiana Mounds Society refers to remains of horses in Wisconsin,23 and a horse’s skull was found with other Indian artefacts in a burial mound in Wisconsin, long before Columbus’ era. A vertebrate palaeontologist pronounced the bones to be ‘those of a horse and not petrified’.24 In addition, recent test results have shown that the Sioux and Cree Ojibwa people native to the region have ‘Chinese’ DNA (please refer to Synopsis of Evidence).

  Taken together, all this evidence makes it at least arguable that the Chinese came to mine copper at Aztalan. There is certainly enough cause to mount further explorations near there. Truth, after all, as I have found many times earlier in the course of my researches, really is far stranger than fiction.

  When I began my research years ago, all I had was a blank sheet of paper. As I write this in the late autumn of 2002, my book is soon to be published in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, China, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Finland, Holland, Scandinavia, West Germany, Japan and a host of other countries. Television rights have also been sold worldwide. A potential worldwide audience and readership of millions have the opportunity to join in the quest for further evidence of those great Chinese voyages of the early fifteenth century. A 1421 website (www.gavinmenzies.net) has been established, and I welcome all contributions and help, especially in the search for those fabled lost cities. The great adventure has only just begun.

  In the hectic months since I wrote this postscript for the American edition of 1421, a stream of invaluable evidence has poured into our website from 127 countries around the world. We now have very persuasive information, not least from DNA evidence, of where the Chinese fleets created settlements in the New World.

  In October 2002, my wife Marcella, four researchers and I set off for Nanjing, some two hundred miles up the Yangtze, the great river that enters the Yellow Sea near Shanghai. Every two years, the Association of Zheng He Studies holds a conference in Nanjing to which leading scholars of Zheng He are invited – about a hundred of them attended this one. Professor Yingsheng Liu of Nanjing University very kindly invited me to give the keynote address; afterwards, many learned professors who had spent their lives researching Zheng He were kind enough to share with me the fruits of their lifetime’s labours. Thus we returned home with an almost priceless cache of published and unpublished works about the great admiral and his voyages. I had dreaded this conference, fearing there might be some bombshell that would destroy my theory. However, it was not to be. Not only did the Nanjing conference enable me to have my book vetted by the world’s leading experts on Zheng He, it also gave me confidence in my overall argument. Indeed, the majority considered my central thesis to be essentially correct.

  At the end of the conference, the leader of Taicang’s Communist Party kindly invited me to stay in their sumptuous guest apartments. Taicang was the port which provisioned the treasure ships after they had sailed downriver from the shipyards at Nanjing. When I arrived, I found the committee, all twelve of them, standing on the step of the banqueting hall, each holding a large glass of water buffalo milk. The reason soon became apparent: local custom has it that during a banquet each person may propose one toast to the guest and a second to their particular friend – that meant twenty-four glasses of Mao Tai. That wonderful stuff was still coursing through my veins the following morning as we staggered around Taicang’s old harbour and into the temple dedicated to the Goddess of the Sea. This temple also serves as Admiral Chou Wen’s family mausoleum. Recently discovered family records confirm that he spent twelve years at sea with Admiral Zheng He. It appears Chou Wen was the one vice-admiral who was not a eunuch, for he had a wife and children.

  In December, Marcella and I returned to Yunnan in south-west China to honour the invitation of Professor Yao Jide and Professor Fayuan Gao to the Kunming Conference on Zheng He studies. This, too, is held biannually, and the emphasis is on Zheng He’s life, for Yunnan is where he was born. Once again, nearly a hundred distinguished professors attended the conference, their field of research China’s relations with overseas countries. Once again they very kindly offered me the keynote speech on the first day. Professor Bi Quanzhong followed me. His speech was enthralling.

  Some years ago, while researching into the prefecture of Fujian province, he had come across accounts of a Brazilian delegation that had landed in the Fujian province after leaving Brazil some ten years earlier, in 1501. They had found their way from Brazil to China by means of a map and had brought very valuable tribute in the form of six wooden boxes of emeralds. Their letters of credential were embossed in gold, so it was a very important delegation. Professor Bi Quanzhong realized that in 1501 Europeans had not yet reached Brazil and China and therefore could not have provided the maps on which the Brazilian delegation relied. Moreover, China was sealed in 1431; this led the professor to the conclusion that the Brazilian delegation must have used a map drawn by the Chinese before that date. He began to research Zheng He’s voyages but found, as I had done, that the records had been destroyed. He therefore decided to pursue research into the accounts of private individuals to see if there were any who had sailed with Zheng He. He found two separate accounts: the first told him that the Chinese fleets had reached Brazil, the second that they had reached North America.

  The professor decided to write a book in which he would claim that the Chinese had discovered the Americas before Europeans, and he was in negotiations with his publisher when he heard of the talk I gave at the Royal Geographical Society in March 2002. He therefore decided to postpone the publication of his book until he had read mine; I understand his will be published shortly. Professor Bi Quanzhong’s evidence, much more succinctly and elegantly presented than mine, stunned the Kunming Conference, for here was a wholly independent Chinese expert who had come to exactly the same conclusions as I had!

  Another bombshell followed. Admiral Zheng Ming, former comptroller of the Chinese Navy, described
an airport-runway-extension excavation in Fujian during which workmen had come across an underground palace. In the palace were statues of Zheng He and his vice-admirals shown planning the voyage – the first recorded description of Zheng He, faithfully depicting his immense height and his red uniform. This in itself was of great importance, for it enabled me to compare the Fujian statues with the descriptions, drawings and paintings I had found around the world – not least in terms of the colour and shape of the admiral’s robes and his strange cap. However, even more exciting was that standing next to Zheng He, and closer to him than his vice-admirals, was a small European with a bulbous nose and large ears. In his hand he clutched a bundle of documents or maps. He looked like the Venetian drawn in the Illustrated Record of Strange Countries. Obviously this European was of considerable importance to Admiral Zheng He – here, I realized, was Niccolò da Conti!

  Admiral Zheng Ming’s talk, following on from mine and Professor Bi Quanzhong’s, electrified the conference, which split into three groups to discuss the evidence. At the end of three days the conference unanimously voted to adopt my evidence. There was barely a voice against the motion.

  On the last day of the conference, we visited Zheng He’s family estate on the banks of a beautiful lake near the Burmese border. There, surrounded by pine trees and in the shadow of the statue of the great man, the proceedings were brought to a close. I was immensely honoured to be granted the keys – that is, the freedom – of the city of Kunming and to be elected a visiting professor of Yunnan University. The university has a great reputation, not least for its genetic studies into minority Chinese peoples. They kindly agreed to make available their resources to carry out DNA analysis of the peoples in the New World among whom, I believe, the Chinese settled on their great voyage. This was a significant breakthrough.