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H-ASIA
August 26, 2003
From: Donald Clarke <dclarke@u.washington.edu>
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Transatlantic Voyages to America (Reply)
Menzies' book was entertainingly panned by Ed Gargan in the Jan. 19th,
2003 issue of _Newsday_. Fair use copy excerpts follow:
"There are people who swear they've seen clouds form in the exact image
of Elvis. There are those who see the future in the scatterings of tea
leaves on the bottom of a china cup. And there are those who believe that
little green men laid out the pyramids in Egypt and built cities for the
Incas in Machu Picchu. They truly believe this. Marching proudly in this
tradition comes Gavin Menzies, a former British Navy submariner turned
amateur historian who is convinced that fleets of Chinese ships crossed
both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to the Americas, that their crews
established colonies here, erected lighthouses, built factories, swam in
the Caribbean and captured long-extinct animals, all in the year 1421.
Wonderful stuff, except it never happened.
"Blessed with a complete ignorance of history, Chinese or other, Menzies
has assembled a 552-page Tinkertoy assemblage of map-readings, snippets
of medieval travel accounts, canned notions of history, and buckets of
fantasy, wild guesses and wishful thinking that purports to show that the
great seagoing fleets of the Ming Dynasty dispatched by the Yongle
emperor visited the New World long before Columbus."
<omitted>
"Unlike India, Indonesia, the east coast of Africa and the Philippines,
where an abundance of archaeological evidence of Zheng He's voyages has
been found, the Americas do not have a single shard of pottery, stone
stele or shipwreck to suggest the distant presence of Ming Dynasty
sailors, an absence that fails to trouble Menzies. And unlike the
animals, fruits, artifacts and ambassadors Zheng He brought back to
Beijing from his voyages and of which there are detailed records, there
are no accounts of a single nut, a lowly brick or an elegant gold vessel
returned to the emperor from the Americas, something inconceivable to a
Ming mariner. But Menzies cruises along, chapter after chapter, painting
pictures of what the Chinese, in his words, 'must' have done.
"In the absence of genuine evidence, Menzies relies endlessly on
constructions like 'it is safe to estimate,' 'I felt certain,' 'I
surmise,' 'it certainly seems,' 'the most plausible explanation' and 'it
could only have been the Chinese.' Hobbled by an inability to read
either classical or modern Chinese or any European language, Menzies is
chained to sparse translations while remaining oblivious to the sources
that could have shed light on his task.
"With such a cavalier disregard for the wealth of resources on Zheng He
and the early Ming, it is not surprising that Menzies' book is replete
with factual errors, both large and small. A well-known work on military
technology published in 1621, the 'Wu Bei Zhi,' is mischaracterized as a
manual on seamanship; a stone stele erected in 1432 near Changle in
Fujian Province expressing sailors' thanks to a Daoist deity is
misquoted and misdated; the spectacular 1402 Korean map of the world, the
Hon-il Kangni Yoktae Kukto chi To, is misdescribed as 'a Chinese/Korean
chart'; Zheng He's sailors are said to have captured a mylodon, a giant
tree sloth, that had been extinct for thousands of years, and Hong Kong
and Macau are described as busy trading ports in the early 15th century -
they were not.
"As the distinguished Ming historian Hok-Lam Chan has noted, the Yongle
emperor undertook seagoing expeditions 'to display his power and wealth,
to learn about the plans of Timur and other Mongols in western Asia, to
extend the tributary system, to satisfy his vanity and greed for glory,
and to make use of his eunuch staff.' What the expeditions were not were
missions of conquest and colonization, everything that later Western
voyages were. Understanding this entails an understanding of the Yongle
period, the nature of early Ming perceptions of the world, and a sense of
imperial ambitions and challenges; Menzies fails this test.
"There does remain to be written an account of Zheng He's voyages,
voyages of epic breadth, adventure and accomplishment. Menzies has not
done that."
Don Clarke
University of Washington School of Law
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NB. Edward A. Gargan, Newsday's Asia correspondent, attended graduate
school in medieval Chinese history at the University of California,
Berkeley.
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