How the Ming fleets missed Manhattan

Gavin Menzies declares, he does not claim, that between 1421 and 1423 the Chinese discovered Australia, South and North America, and nearly reached the North Pole – in short, the world. He is ‘certain’ that if there hadn’t been a disastrous fire in Peking’s Forbidden City, killing the favourite imperial concubine and causing the emperor to lose interest in long-range exploration, ‘China, not Europe, would have become the mistress of the world’. Furthermore, Mr Menzies suggests, had there been no fire New York might now be called New Beijing, and Buddhism not Christianity might ‘have become the religion of the New World’. The great seafarers you learned about in school, Vasco da Gama, Magellan and Columbus, Menzies writes, used maps which showed places the Chinese had long since reached; far from intrepidly sailing into the unknown, the European pioneer mariners knew where they were going and were confident they would not fall off the edge of the world.

Menzies doesn’t allow his certainty to unfold: he seizes our mental lapels. In his first sentence he tells us, ‘Over ten years ago I stumbled on an incredible discovery, which suggested that the history of the world as it has been known and handed down for centuries would have to be radically altered.’ He describes other ‘bombshells’, which meant he was ‘looking at a series of the most incredible journeys in the history of mankind, but one that had been completely expunged from human memory’.

The words ‘expunged from memory’ set off an alarm bell in my mind and three pages later I reread several times these words: ‘My research confirmed that several Chinese fleets had indeed made voyages of exploration in the early years of the 15th century.’

His research confirmed? In fact the Ming voyages, in the biggest ships the world had ever seen, almost 400 feet long, carrying thousands of crew, animals, concubines and ambassadors from much of the known world, and commanded by ambitious and capable eunuch admirals, have for decades been well known, in English, to first-year students of Chinese history.