The incredible true story of the discovery of America before Columbus was
even born. Gavin Menzies's extraordinary findings rewrite history.
On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world
had ever seen sailed from its base in China. The ships, huge junks nearly
five hundred feet long and built from the finest teak, were under the
command of Emperor Zhu Di's loyal eunuch admirals.
Their mission was "to proceed all the way
to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the
seas" and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony. Their journey
would last more than two years and circle the globe.
When they returned in October 1423, the
emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The
great ships, now considered frivolous, were left to rot at their moorings
and the records of their journeys were destroyed.
Lost in China's long, self-imposed isolation
that followed was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America
seventy years before Columbus and circumnavigated the globe a century
before Magellan.
Also concealed were how the Chinese colonized
America before the Europeans and transplanted to America, Australia, New
Zealand and South America the principal economic crops that have fed and
clothed the world.
Now, in a landmark historical journey, Gavin
Menzies, who spent fifteen years tracing the astonishing voyages of the
Chinese fleet, shares the remarkable account of his discoveries and the
incontrovertible evidence to support them.
His compelling narrative pulls together
ancient maps, precise navigational knowledge, astronomy and the surviving
accounts of Chinese explorers and the later European navigators to prove
that the Chinese had also discovered Antarctica, reached Australia three
hundred and fifty years before Cook and solved the problem of longitude
three hundred years ahead of the Europeans.
1421 describes the artifacts and inscribed
stones left behind by the emperor's fleet, the evidence of wrecked junks
along its route -- discovered in locations ranging from the middle of the
Mississippi River to tributaries of the Amazon -- and the ornate votive
offerings left by the Chinese sailors wherever they landed, in honor of
Shao Lin, goddess of the sea.
1421: The Year China Discovered America
is the story of a remarkable journey of discovery that rewrites our
understanding of history. Our knowledge of world exploration as it has
been commonly accepted for centuries must now be reconceived due to this
classic work of historical detection.
