Recently a retired English naval officer published a book entitled 1421: The Year China Discovered the World innwhich this former sailor argues that Zheng _He the eunach of the Ming Emperor, Yong-Le was responsible for the discovery of North and South America, Australia and hold your breath, even Antartica. The run away success of this book means that many people who have had little, if any expoture to History, will learn about these remarkable events only from Menzies. That would be a real pity. I am not complaining that the book is wrong and muddle headed and thererfore needs to be corrected.If this interesting book makes people curious about the past in the same way that Dan Brown's book made people curious about the early history of Christianity, I would have no trouble with this work. However, given the hype and publicity surrounding this book it is likely that most readers will not make any attempt to go beyond this volume and hence my blog today.
Conspiracy theories make bad history. In fact historians are loathe to use conspiracy theories because it is so easy to writ history bacjkwards and make every bit of information fit on the procrustan bed of appriori notions and fancies. This is the same case with Menzies. He obviously has enjoyed writing this book, Who would not given the fantastic royalty he commends. In fact thie figure itself is encouraging that people are willing to spend tonnes of money on History. Now coming back to my blog: Whenever there is need for hard evidence the author falls back on the familiar ruse that the evidence once exixted but has now been destroyed a la Dan Brown.
The fact is that Zheng-he was accompanied by a Historian Ma Huan who wrote the history of at least 3 of the seven voyages of Zhenh-He. The book by Ma Huan is not only free from fanciful theorisis of the sort that afflicts Menzies, but also been corroborated bynfurther archaeological evidence.
The most striking case of such corroboration is the Tri lingual inscription left by Zhebh-He in Sri Lanka. This inscription was found in 1914 and is now preserved in the Museum at Colombo.At Mogadishu too Zheng He is known to have erected a steale but that has not been found. Nearly 100 years back a Dutch scholar , Dyvendak studied the inscritions and solved many tricky questions about the voyages. Menzies has made Zheng_he a Christopher Columbus, Captain Cook and Robert Falcon Scott all rolled into one.
