An article in the Economist three weeks ago attracted my attention--it seems likely now, or at least possible, that the Chinese civilisation possessed a complete map of the world as early as 1418. The article is really a discussion of the likelihood that the seventeenth century map found recently is a copy of a 1418 original.
The map is supposed to originate from the travels of Zheng He, a well known Chinese explorer. At the peak of his power between 1405 and 1433, he commanded a fleet of at least 317 ships and 37,000 men, more than the combined navel power of Europe at that stage. His flagship was a nine-masted vessel measuring 150m in length.
But the accompanying claim, made by Gavin Menzies, that the history of New World discovery will have to be rewritten considerably, is more doubtful in my opinion. The discovery is relevant not so much because it prompts us to reconsider the history of Western discovery, but because of what happened nex. Two comments.
Firstly, the significance of Columus' discovery of the Americas in 1492 and Magellaen's first circumvention of the earth in 1519 - 1522 for Western historians lies in the fact that these travels provided the first nails in the coffin of the flat earth theory. Ultimately they therefore assisted with the change which took place in astronomy in the early seventeenth century. Copernicus' book saw the light of day in 1542. It should be noted that the particular predilection for a flat earth stemmed from a particularly narrowed interpretation of the bible, and ultimately was an issue of christianity, not one of technological and scientific progress.
What I'm driving at, of course, is that the significance of the Western exploration of the world is primarily an internal issue of Western history (if we leave the subsequent history of colonisation out of it, at least).
Secondly, the claim that the map is genuine begs the question how it is that the Chinese didn't make more use of it? The answer to this question lies in the fact that political changes in China soon after Zheng's death left the junks to rot. A generation later most of knowledge on how to build and sail these ships over the oceans had vanished from Chinese society.
The lesson is thus that 'picking winners' by committee is a dangerous course to follow. The history of the following centuries would have been very different had the Chinese not made that particular mistake. One can only speculate about what would have happened had the early European discoverers and traders met with a confident and oceangoing Chinese empire.
