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Gavin Menzies.
1421: The Year China Discovered the World.
London: Bantam Press, 2002.
ISBN 0593050789 / 0593051580;
ISBN-13: 9780593050781 / 9780593051580.
Hardback, stitch bound; printed boards in dustjacket.
165x240x47mm.
xxiii,520pp inc. 34 maps, 3 diagrams, all monochrome, plus 32 pages of colour plates; illustrated endpapers.
English.
Good to very good condition: some wear to the dustjacket, particularly at the top and bottom of the spine; text pages starting to yellow.
This item £9.50
[Publisher's price £20.00]
1032g.
On 8 March 1421 the largest fleet the world had ever seen sailed from its base in China. The ships, huge junks nearly five hundred feet long and built from the finest teak, were under the command of Emperor Zhu Di's loyal eunuch admirals. Their mission was "to proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas" and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony. Their journey would last over two years and circle the globe.
When they returned Zhu Di lost control and China was beginning its long, self-imposed isolation from the world it had so recently embraced. The great ships rotted at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. They had also discovered Antarctica, reached Australia three hundred and fifty years before Cook and solved the problem of longitude three hundred years before the Europeans.
Gavin Menzies has spent fifteen years tracing the astonishing voyages of the Chinese fleet. Now, in a fascinating historical detective story, he shares the remarkable account of his discoveries and the incontrovertible evidence to support them. His compelling narrative pulls together ancient maps, precise navigational knowledge, astronomy and the surviving accounts of Chinese explorers and the later European navigators. It brings to light the artefacts and inscribed stones left behind by the emperor’s fleet, the evidence of sunken junks along its route and the ornate votive offerings left by the Chinese sailors wherever they landed, in thanks to Shao Lin, goddess of the sea.
1421: The Year China Discovered the World is the story of a remarkable journey of discovery that rewrites our understanding of history. Our knowledge of world exploration as it has been commonly accepted for centuries must now be revised. 1421 is destined to become a classic work of historical detection.
Related pages: | travel & exploration |
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