1421: El año en que China descubrió el mundo

Honestly a frustrating read. Presents as conclusive supposition and solid guesswork, without even hinting until very late in the tome that the legitimacy of one of its key pieces of evidence is contested as a possible forgery.

It’s very clear the author feels the world maybe was - and maybe is - “truly China’s” but at the end of it you have to ask, “so what?” He’s not arguing an academic point so much as an assertion that every advance through key points in history were done well after the Chinese accomplished them as (in his words) the “barbaric” Europeans availed themselves knowingly and unknowingly of Chinese achievement.

He even disparages Nordic accomplishment to suggest the Vikings never knew Greenland as well as the Chinese explorers did.

Again, that’s fine. It may even be true. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as parallel advancements or that the indigenous tribes of the Americas couldn’t have figured out things like lacquer or intricate carving on their own.

And to insist on one hand that currents couldn’t possibly carry artifacts across the seas and then use those currents as evidence that the Chinese must have made those same distant shores is a great example of arguing both sides of something without feeling the need to reconcile them.

Are there people that might get more out of this book than me? Sure. But I understand why I never heard of it til I paid $1 for it on the Goodwill bookshelf.

This author is terrible. TERRIBLE! He is not a real historian. His research is full of giant, gaping holes. And he makes WILD assumptions with his so-called evidence, when his own research does not unequivocally support his theory. He takes every presumption and assumes fact just because one can't disprove his theory.

He's absolutely terrible and apparently has written multiple books. I never finished this book, I just simply stopped reading because I couldn't take it any more.

This book discusses Chinese voyages that reached the North American continent years before Columbus did. I was unaware that voyages such as these had taken place, probably due to my lacking American education that only focuses on Christopher Columbus, but it seems very reasonable that many other peoples could have voyaged that distance if Scandinavians also did. This book had a lot of information about the fall of the Chinese empire during this time, and it would have been a good book to read when I was in my Modern China class last term.

Got the book as a gift and it took me 3 years to finish it just to call it: "pseudo-history".

Poorly researched. Highly speculative. A little condescending.

I found myself wondering throughout this book, how the hell this guy made the conclusions he did. After about 150 pages into it, I started noticing he wasn't making as many citations as he should be. A lot of his research comes from his own experience as a submarine captain, which he thinks puts him in a better position than other scholars before him.

He also makes excuses for the Chinese for basic mistakes, "the land was connected by ice, so they figured it was the same island" or "they could have passed by this at night so they might not have seen this". Further, when there's some completely inexplicable conclusion, he reminds the reader, "the Chinese had expert carpenters, stone masons, cartographers, astronomers, etc., so they could have figured this out, I believe they did." When they make a basic mistake, he chalks it up to mere oversight, but yet when the impossible is accomplished the Chinese were able to do it because they were experts?

The book does have an interesting premise, which is why I give it one star. Ultimately, I feel he rushed to judgment. He went about the book as a mystery, not as historical fact. I found it frustrating when he'd say "check the website for further information" or "negotiations are underway for the release of these documents".

Anyway, I stopped reading because I found the book less and less convincing. After 325 pages, I was no longer believing a word he said. After wondering if this guy was a fraud, I checked out the reviews on here and found many people wondering the same thing I was. After some research, the map that gave this guy the original idea turned out to be a fake. I found no reason to continue reading.

If you're looking for a history book, look away. Unfortunately, this is on the same level as the History Channel specials obsessed with aliens. Just replace "aliens!" with "the Chinese!" and you've got the gist of everything this author has written.

I naively started an audio version of the book and found the narrative enthralling... that is until I decided to actually fact-check something before reading the rest. There's a reason it's nominated as one of the least historically accurate books on the market, and responding to criticism with "You're just jealous you're not a commercial success!" does little to dispel what historians, archaeologists, linguists, sinologists, and various other experts, have been debunking from this book. There's more than enough detail provided in other reviews.

1421 is wildly inaccurate, fanciful, and frankly a bit insulting to the entire field of History. I'm convinced that the author was well aware he was spinning a tall tale to milk a money cow for years to come. Add to that very clear claim that the Native people of North and Central America couldn't possibly have created the various artefacts found in those regions which share some resemblance to Chinese craftwork, and you have an old-timey racist layer I don't care to unpack further.

That being said, if you're looking for inspiration, rather than a serious book about Chinese history and exploration, you're in luck.

I think the author knows just enough about the topic to pique a beginner's interest in either seafaring or sinology and while some of the questionable narratives are historically improbable, I think they can easily be borrowed for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign or something of the sort. It's definitely an adventurous story but it's closer to a fairy tale than a history book.

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

We Westerners are of course familiar with the historical period known as the Renaissance; taking place between the 1300s and 1600s, it's the period when Europeans finally crawled out of their Dark-Age hole, rediscovered such ancient Greek concepts as science and philosophy, and started doing such things for the first time as sailing to the far corners of the planet. But did you know that China as well went through its own brief Renaissance at the same time, actually sailing around the planet on a regular basis a full 50 years before the Europeans started doing so, and that it was the maps and tips these Chinese gave to the Europeans that allowed the great figures from the "Age of Discovery" to make their voyages in the first place? Well, okay, so not everyone completely agrees with this theory; but it's the surprisingly strong one being espoused in the books 1421: The Year China Discovered America and 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, both of them by a retired British naval commander named Gavin Menzies, a hobbyist scholar who just happened to start stumbling across more and more evidence during his studies to support the theory mentioned above. See, the whole thing is problematic, because the Chinese actually went through a major period of isolationism right after this brief period of world-traveling, specifically as a overreaction to Ghengis Khan and his Mongol Hoard Horde(!), which had actually held and ruled China all the way up to the beginning of the 1400s, or in other words the beginning of the Ming Dynasty in that country.

According to well-known history, the Chinese were so set on turning inwards at this point, they actually destroyed most of their own records regarding their globetrotting sea voyages from this period, just so no one else would be tempted to make such trips again; according to Menzies, he has slowly been putting the pieces back together through shreds of evidence in other countries, stone markers and rescued scrolls and the like, revealing that the Ming Dynasty's own period of global seafaring was actually much larger than any of us have ever realized, a systematic series of successes that would've virtually guaranteed China's eventual world domination, if they had simply stuck with it instead of embarking on a four-hundred-year period of profound isolationism like they actually did. It's certainly an intriguing theory, and Menzies does a pretty credible job backing it up; these are giant thick books we're talking about (over a thousand pages altogether), just chock-full of evidence both direct and circumstantial. Combine this, then, with Menzies' tech-savvy prose concerning the problems of map-drawing and chart-creating in that period, which is why certain documents from that period need to be widened or narrowed in Photoshop before they'll actually line up with real coastlines; it's just one of the dozens of little issues and problems with all this old evidence, he argues, that prevented it from being all added together by anyone else before now. (See, one of the things Menzies did while in the navy was actually sail the ancient Chinese routes talked about in these books; he therefore has an expert's understanding on what these routes must've been like for the original Chinese sailors, and can thus explain the inconsistencies in the maps and charts they left behind.)

These were great reads, books that really crank the gears of the mind into action (why, just the descriptions of a glittering, wealthy Southeast Asia in the 1400s is worth the cover price alone); I'll warn you, though, that these are denser books than the usual airport and beach reads, not exactly academic in complexity but definitely stories you need to pay careful attention to while reading. That said, they both get a big recommendation from me, especially for the growing amount of people in the western half of the world who are becoming more and more curious these days about the mysterious history of the eastern half.

Out of 10: 9.3

The Strait of Magellan should be called the Strait of Hong Bao. Really? Why?

Because when Magellan traversed that homicidal passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific he had a chart to show him the way, a chart made by Chinese Admiral Hong Bao, one of the captains of the great Chinese treasure fleet that not only got to America 70 years before Columbus, but to Australia and Alaska 370 years before Cook.  This is history stood on its ear, backed by indigenous oral legends, physical artifacts, believe it or not the weather, and DNA.

Author and retired British submariner Gavin Menzies has sailed all of the waters he writes about, which makes for a you-are-there read.