| Rethinking History - Did the Chinese discover America ? |
By Michael Janicot
January 2004
“Chinese “treasure ships” reached America between 1421 and 1423 –70 years before Christopher Columbus and circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan.”
Currently, all tourist guide books to Zihuatanejo attribute the naming of Playa La Ropa to Spanish conquistadors who began sailing from the Bay in 1527. Along the road that connects the city to the beach is a cliff top mirador where a bronze plaque (in Spanish) commemorates the first maritime expedition that left the port in October of 1527, bound for the Philippine islands. These galleons returned laden not only with silk and spices but also with coconuts brought from the Far East, and for awhile, Zihuatanejo vied with Acapulco for the Orient trade, but when that early era of maritime commerce folded, the settlement lapsed into obscurity.
According to legend, and to many native-born locals, the name La Ropa refers to the cargo of silks that was strewn all over the beach when a Spanish galleon shipwrecked there. However, in March 2002, Gavin Menzies delivered a lecture at a Royal Geographical Society conference in London which was broadcast around the world. (A subsequent article was published in 74 newspapers and magazines.) Menzies claims that Chinese “treasure ships” had reached America between 1421 and 1423 –70 years before Christopher Columbus and circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. Incontrovertible evidence supports his thesis that a Chinese fleet under Admiral Zihou Man, journeyed to the Americas in huge wooden junks over 400 feet long and build from the finest teak that was cut from the forests of present day Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
World-wide interest in the subject of Chinese “treasure fleets” is not new. Scholars from China, the United States and Europe have written extensively on the topic since the 1930’s. Louise Levathes’ When China Ruled the Seas remarked on the many similarities between the Olmec and Mayan cultures of Mexico with those from China. Olmec artists, Levathes states, “displayed an extraordinary skill fashioning jade that appears to have had no precedent in local crafts.” She points out that the Olmecs used jade as burial offerings in tombs, “where it seemed to have performed some protective or preservative function.” Strong influences of Buddhist elements also appear in Mayan art whereas Mayan bas-relief figures are depicted on lotus thrones. A stone statuary at Xculoc shows a distinctive hand gesture—right hand lowered, palm out; left hand raised, palm out—which appears to be classic Buddhist stance known as “the granting of a wish.” Furthermore, there are similarities between the Chinese alphabet and the square-shaped Mayan glyphs and “an astonishing correspondence” between the Chinese and Mayan calendars.
Another author, Theodore Cook, Jr., asserts that Chinese armadas of several hundred vessels carried a many as 37,000 men. These “treasure ships” –some 400 feet long and 150 feet wide—may have been the largest wooden ships ever built. (By comparison, Columbus’ flagship, the Santa Maria, was a mere toy, at 85 feet.) There were ships for carrying horses, supply and provisions, fresh water, troops and combat ships—“floating fortresses” armed with canon and weapons.
Chinese artifacts have been found from the Pacific shores of Oregon, Califonia, Baja, Michoacan, Guerrero, Central America, Venezuela, Peru and Ecuador.
In Mexico, a Nayarit legend tells of “ships like houses” arriving off their coast, and a painting on linen of the so-called Lienzo Jucutacato tribe shows foreigners disembarking from such a ship: “the leaders wore red robes and their followers white, they carried round Buddhist mirrors and had dogs resembling the Chines shar-pei breed. One person is depicted riding a horse.” Many other Chinese artifacts have been found in Mexico: statues, pottery, vases, ceramic horses, lions and medallions at Palenque (Chiapas), amulets and ear plugs at Teotihuacan (Mexico City) and numerous carvings of horses on the Yucatan peninsula. Also in Teotihuacan, a tomb at the base of the Pyramid of the Sun was found “with a Mongolian or Chinese body of an important person,” for the body was adorned with a necklace of green jade, which was unknown in Mexico.
At Cerro de las Mesas, an archeological zone of Olmec culture in the state of Veracruz, scientists found the largest cache of jade in Mesoamerica, consisting of more than 800 pieces. And La Venta, an Olmec site in the state of Tabasco, is renowned for its magnificent jade figurines and colossal heads of basalt stone.
There is further evidence of a Chinese presence beside the Rio Balsas leading from Uruapan to the coast: to this day on Lake Patzcuaro, in the state of Michoacan (“the place of fish”), fishermen still use butterfly shaped nets, whose origin is Chinese.
Chinese porcelain and ceramics have also been discovered in Zihuatanejo, and jade in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Other artifacts include copper ornaments and lacquer boxes that used “complicated technology identical to Chinese methods.” It is interesting that the state of Guerrero is known for its wooden lacquer boxes and decorative trays, an art ostensibly imported from Chinese artisans.
Menzies’ thesis, now in a book entitled 1421, The Year China Discovered America, claims that, “At the nearby beach of Playa La Ropa, on the seaward end of the Rio Balsas, is a Chinese wreck that even now still disgorges Chinese cloth after storms at seas.” (p.413) The Rio Balsas marks the boundary between the states of Michoacan and Guerrero, approximately 100 kilometers north of Zihuatanejo, and we do not know of any beach named Playa La Ropa at that site. We have been visiting Zihuatanejo for many years and we have yet to see Chinese cloth washed upon its bay shore after almost 600 years at sea.
Is the name of Zihuatanejo’s Playa La Ropa the same as that in Michoacan ? Could Menzies’ poetic license and hyperbole be true ?
1421 will be part of a two-hour documentary produced by the BBC and is to be aired on PBS in the spring of 2004.
For more information, see Gavin Menzies, 1421, The Year China Discovered America (Harper Collins Publishers, Inc.) New York, 2003; Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas (Oxford University Press) 1994; Theodore F. Cook, Jr. “The Chinese Discovery of the New World, 15th Century,” in What if ? - Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. |
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