I bought this book December 2006 on Indonesia Book Fair. The real prize was IDR75000, but I got it for only IDR49000 (still one of expensive books I've ever bought).

The book's content amazed me. It's a kind of re-writing world history that attempted to tell us that Magellan, Columbus and other Western discoverers were only followers of a path built by Chinese sailors under the command of Zheng-He (or Cheng-Ho, his popular name in Indonesia) on Emperor Zhu-Di era.

I like Menzies' style in writing. Seemed that he's trying to be honest, because the greatest part he did for the book was arranging other people's work ; he wondered everytime he found a match in his research; he wanted to make sure that the proof are not coincidences. He showed that he's only a writer for things that alresdy exist, for history that never be written in decent manner.

You may find many discussion and critics about the book when you surf on internet. Americans (or Europeans), many of them, don't feel comfortable about replacing their superior Columbus with Chinese wanderers they never heard before. As for me, I do not have enough scientific authority to judge whether all the writer said in the book are true or not, but I really respect all research he's done for the book. He said it took him forty years of research; here, there and everywhere. He went to many parts of the world in finding and matching the proof to support his theory. It inspired me, at least to think that when there's a will, there's a way, especially when I get stuck in finishing one of my writing work.

For me, it's still a book on my priority list to be read again and again

This book is very interesting and gives insight that the Chinese were the first people to sail the world.

Lies and distortions, through and through. Glad I didn't pay more than $1 for this trash.

If Menzies hadn't made so much money off of this "book" and its subsequent TV specials, I would have thought he was paid by the Confucius Institute to promote mainland China's ridiculous line of nationalist history.

Trained sea otters? ARCTIC voyages? Ahem, the "Bimini Road?" ...seriously, need I say more?

I'm disappointed as I really wanted a scholarly look at Zheng He's fleet, the circumstances that created it and what exactly happened that prevented further fleets. Will now look elsewhere.

What a story this is! Do you remember Erich von Daniken? He had quite a story to tell, too.

Menzies writes that the Chinese, during the reign of a single emperor at a time over five decades before the voyages of Columbus, spared no expense building treasure fleets with the centerpieces being huge flat bottomed square bowed junks 180 by 450 feet flying bright red silk sails on up to nine masts surrounded with lesser support ships that carried everything from food to horses in a quest to discover the world and plant colonies in the process. To this extent, it's all true. But then, Gavin Menzies runs with the ball.

1421 tells of of the voyages these fleets undertook that reached and accurately mapped, within the limits of the technologies of the time, the coasts of much of North and South America, Australia and Antarctica. Page after page of revelations kept me eagerly reading. I thought it would be interesting to use the Internet to look up some of the artifacts, standing stones, and buildings that Menzies mentions.

I went online only to discover that though the items mentioned do exist (check out the Newport Round Tower and the Bimini Road, for examples) there is no evidence for the claims Menzies makes and very good evidence for their existence that has nothing to do with any Chinese visitors. At this encounter with real science I had read past the middle of the book but, feeling duped, stopped reading.

My suspicion had been aroused even before I did my online checking. Menzies doesn't write with the care and deliberation of a historian. He follows a pattern. He looks at an ancient map, puts his experience as a navigator in the Royal Navy to use, comes up with a hunch about a Chinese visit to some point on the globe, visits the location and discovers that, sure enough, there is strong evidence for exactly what his hunch had told him might be the case. The Chinese visited! Move on to the next place. Thus does he move along around the world revealing what he would have us believe are facts. From time to time he admits there might be other reasons for something he finds, but little time is spent bothering with them because his view is obviously correct.

Chinese treasure fleets did sail starting in 1421, reaching as far as the east coast of Africa, long before the famous voyages made by the Portuguese around Africa and into the Indian Ocean. It's a fact that the Chinese were all over the waters off Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, India and the Persian Gulf long before Europeans arrived over the waves. That is no little thing, reason for admiration, proof that Chinese civilization and technology was second to none at the time. It is also a fascinating fact that this expansive effort was stopped abruptly, leaving the world to be "discovered" by the Europeans as China turned inward.

The real story of the Chinese treasure fleets is remarkable. This account from a man with a very active imagination and a publisher willing to put it in print wasted my precious reading time. Don't waste yours.

This is a completely enthralling book dedicated to a really ballsy thesis--that the treasure fleets of the Ming Dynasty charted most of the world, including North and South America as well as Siberia and Antarctica, in 1421. According to Menzies, European explorers including Columbus, Magellan, and Cook were working off of already existing charts that had been essentially stolen from the Chinese when they made their own voyages of exploration.

There is an overwhelming amount of evidence presented--everything from ancient maps to European ship logs to shipwrecks to lingual analysis to plant migrations to DNA. Some of the declarations are fairly easy to believe, such as the notion that the Chinese were well aware of the location of Australia. Others seem awfully far-fetched, like the declaration that Chinese sailors built the Bimini Road to repair reef-savaged junks.

Taken as a whole and in isolation, this is an incredibly compelling and fascinating argument. Menzies claims the support of an armada of Chinese scholars--this isn't merely one guy out on a mission of his own. And he has plausible-sounding explanations for most possible objections.

Is it true? I'll admit I have no idea. A part of me wants it to be--it's just such a cool idea. But I'll freely admit I don't have nearly the background required to evaluate this. There are dozens of websites that seem devoted to proving him wrong--although there are also dozens of websites devoted to proving the moon landing wrong, too, so that doesn't necessarily mean much. I'd be very much interested in reading a rebuttal by a group of qualified historians. But again, my own lack of knowledge hampers me here--I don't actually know who is considered a respected authority, who is a crank, and who is just inflexible and has an axe to grind. It's certain that there's a lot of "established" history that we're aware is not actually true. But at the same time, this just seems too good to be true. And there's definitely a bunch of places where I think he's making unjustified leaps of logic.

But it certainly is interesting.

Sure 1421 has plenty of hearsay and conjecture, and some entertaining theories put forth by Menzies, most of which can't be backed up with factual evidence at this time. Obviously by reading the subtitle ...The Year China Discovered America you get the gist that Menzies asserts a China-first-to-the-Americas hypothesis.

China was on the forefront of invention once upon a time. Gunpowder is one example. But shifting firmly entrenched belief that old European explorers were first to the Americas takes some imaginative thinking. We know that the impressive China fleet of the 1400s sailed to the Middle East and Africa, but did they turn around and hit up the Americas at some point? Certainly the natives (Inuit all the way down to South America) have a certain Asian look to them, but the Bering Strait land-bridge theory already covers that. There's just not enough evidence to prove otherwise.

I don't care who gets credit in the history books for discovering this, that or the other thing. I would like to see us humans get it right though, and unfortunately Menzies can't prove his theories. Aside from that though, his book is an intriguing good read filled with fun ideas and adventure.

Do you like pseudo-history from rank amateurs that draw wild conclusions from scant evidence while discounting, in almost all situations, the simplest explanation in favor of conspiracy theory level conclusions?

Then this is for you.

Just horrid.

I suppose I should feel bad that I gave up on this book, but I don't. It seemed like an interesting concept: China sent out huge ships to bring back treasure and knowledge, and just happened to find America 70 years before Christopher Columbus. Too bad there's so much evidence pointing against this being the case. I was about two chapters in when I really started to think about the logic of this and decided to do a little research. Turns out there are very few people that agree with this book. Most scholars agree that the logic is flawed. I gave up and gave it back to the guy who loaned it to me.

I have to say that I enjoyed reading this book, if only because it made me so angry at the gross inaccuracies and completely imaginary scenarios that the author made up. He claims to have information from anthropology, archaeology, geology, geography, history, etc, but what he really has exists only in his own mind. Read on, intrepid reader, and be amazed as the author sidesteps issues which threatens his ideas, or completely ignores them!

There is absolutely no traceable path for his research, so scholars cannot even see how he came to his conclusions. Even better, some of his citations are inaccurately recorded to the point that one wonders if he's even read them!

He claims in interviews to have been ousted by the scientific establishment - in reality, if you read the scientific reviews of his work, scholars simply subjected his work to the same standards to which they subject their own work. If the author wishes to play in the big-boy sandbox of academia, he should be prepared to get a little dirty! Stop whining and do some decent scholarship for a change!

650 pages of wishful thinking, skewed facts and pseudo-history.

I started this book very excited about the whole idea that indeed the Chinese did circumnavigate the world and chart almost every land mass they encountered decades and even centuries before the Europeans did. However, the "facts" as presented were often not quite facts that could be proven. At least one instance occurred in my home state and I KNOW that if this was proven to be true, I would have heard about it! But, alas, no. So, save your money, time and effort and read something of real value.

So much for all that crap they taught us in school about who discovered America! The Chinese did it first. All the European explorers were following charts that the Chinese had created in the early 1420s. Its fascinating to see how the revelation of what "really" happened developes for the author as he travels all over the world finding evidence in shipwrecks, artifacts and structures, plants and animals, languages and customs, and genetic markers in the indigenous peoples of Africa, the New World, and Australia and New Zealand. This book, and its accompanying website that is constantly being updated with new evidence from around the world, are going to change how we teach history.

Columbus and his brother were frauds--literally! They stole maps from the Portuguese (a capitol crime at the time), and then altered the maps to fool the Spanish into thinking the Western route to the Spice Islands was shorter so they would finance Christopher's expeditions. Part of the reason he thought he was in Asia when he landed in the Caribbean was because his crew encountered "light skinned" Asians that were the descendants of Chinese who'd been shipwrecked there 70 years before.

This is my sixth or seventh time attempting to read this stream of consciousness fiction of a pseudo-history, and it just makes me sad.
What I was hoping was for another straight shot of the madness that made his equally baffling 1434 an entertaining impossibility, but here Menzies demonstrates a complete lack of coherency. Granted, Menzies (as always) demonstrates that he is in far over his head, but this volume --which is treated with an odd degree of respect for being utter bosh-- is simply unreadable.
My suspicion is that the success of this volume convinced Menzies that the public was with him, so he pulled out all the stops for 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, and no longer feeling the need to even present that pretense of a scholarly work, he just lied happily about the evidence and sources. That chutzpah is what I enjoyed. By comparison, this 1421 is weirdly constrained by Menzies being tethered to the pretense of making an actual case that any of what he is claiming is true.
None of this is true or possible. I think by now, nearly two decades past the publication and three decades into a resurgent China as a player on the world stage, that not only would there be evidence of all these massive treasure ship fleets sprawling out across the globe, but also that China as a nation would be happily promoting its early lead in sciences and exploration.
To be clear, Menzies mania for discovering the Chinese everywhere, and his perfectly irrelevant but also unconvincing digressions relating his adventures finding the 'one map that explained everything', or his adventures on a submarine where he knew some later important personage, these are present in both of his books that I have read, but here it is totally irrelevant. His being a passenger on a submarine (a powered vessel) that followed the well-described and recorded voyage of a sailing junk (wind driven and without a keel) as far as Mozambique, Africa, is entirely irrelevant. I've been to Mount Vernon, it doesn't make me an expert on slave management or leading a colonial revolt against the oppressive British Crown. And see, here is a major point against Menzies, a junk has no keel, so his pretense that it was even possible for these ships to sail into the wind AS A FLEET is simply insane. One ship might make it through the cross currents of the Cape of Good Hope, or against winds of the roaring 40s, but the majority would be wrecks.
Then there is the matter of these maps for which Menzies has so much affinity. None of them are as described, and that is obvious in the carefully added illustration Menzies allows. His misrepresentation of what these maps depict, and what convulsions he makes to to get us to agree with his peculiar sense of what he is seeing in them is a warning of how irresponsible he is. I remember the election of 2012, where idiots of a particular stripe 'corrected' polls of the Romney/Obama contest and determined that all the pollsters were in the bag for Obama. Maybe, but Obama actually won by the predicted margins. Reality trumped delusion, and that happens in 1421. Menzies does that same manipulation with maps. In one egregious example he is "longitudinally correcting" one Korean map so that Europe and Africa resemble what we know of the current configurations, while clipping out the parts of the map that show Korea the size of China, and Japan a small fringe island. Even more, he ignores the evidence that this map was drawn from sources in the Mongol Empire, one that explored right up to the limits where this map becomes oddly unreliable.

Nah, done with this twaddle. Bye Menzies