2000 Girls & Chinese Diplomacy

2000 Girls

Geez, no wonder the harems are places of politics and intrigue! 2000 women, cooped up with (at least according to popular depictions) nothing to do, but if they can attract his attention they can have the ear of the Emperor. Or they can have nothing. Yikes. Talk about catty!(pg 50)

History Repeats

I'm neither a student of economics or of Chinese history, but it seems to me that history is beginning to repeat itself:

Rulers paid tribute to China in return for trading privileges and protection against their enemies, but China always gave its trading partners a greater value of goods -- silks and porcelain at discounted prices, often funded by soft loans -- than was received from them. They were thus in perpetual debt to China. (page 52, emphasis added)

The Chinese preferred to pursue their aims by trade, influence and bribery rather than by open conflict and direct colonization. (page 60)

We keep hearing about how China has become a major purchaser of American national debt. Looks like this preference for having other nations in debt to them is a well-established policy. And why not? Any country that we owe money to has that to hold over our heads! "Do what we want or we'll make you pay up." No wonder the dollar is weak. Surely there is a lesson here to be learned: PAY OUR DEBTS!

Halley's Comet

So, my first question is that since the Chinese have been tracking this comet since before Christ (page 55), why in the world is it named after a 17th Century Englishman?? In any case, the information in Wikipedia about Halley's Comet is pretty interesting. I remember its visit in 1986. But I don't know that I should plan on making it as long as 2061 to see the next visit. And this comet is a "short period" comet!

America's Name - Italian or Bristolian?

I'm not actually finished with Chapter 9 yet, however, this chapter has already sparked my thoughts and led me down some tangential paths and has given me several days worth of information to research and learn about.

So it all started with the world map, Universalis Cosmographia, published in May of 1507, drawn by cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. This map, Mr. Menzies says, is "the first to chart latitude and longitude with precision" (p. 238).

While reading in this book I've always been fascinated by the descriptions of the evolution of the maps. Not so much the actual fundamental details and inner-cog workings of how they did it, but it's fascinating to watch as they get more and more accurate and similar to our world view of today. I have had to reshape my thinking by a new found admiration I have for these early explorers. Their understanding of math and astronomy, and whatever other sciences necessary for them to figure out longitude and latitude and draw amazingly accurate maps while sailing around on wooden boats without any fancy tools, demands greater respect than what I had previously been giving to these people.

ANYWAY, that's not where I was going with this entry.

Mr. Menzies comments only briefly on page 238 that this world map of 1507, that it was the first to have called these two continents "America" in writing. And he leaves it at that. No more details, just moves goes on from there.


However, the statement that this map was "the first ever to call the continent 'America' " made me realize I had no idea where America got its name. Of course it had to come from somewhere, but where?


In doing some searches I found many websites. However, I quickly discovered that the name America is surrounded by as much controversy and conflicting stories as is the history of who discovered her first! Ah, history and its many keepers.


So, here is what I've found:

"America" - Possible Origin #1
Americo Vespucci: Italian explorer who first realized that the Americas were two continents, independent of Asia (c.1499). Along with the world map drawn by Waldseemüller, there was an accompanying book, Cosmographiae Introductio, published by the same author. This book explains that the name was derived from the Latinized version of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci's name, Americus Vespucius, in its feminine form, "America", as the other continents all have Latin feminine names. However, news traveled slowly back in the day and eventually that name was withdrawn by Waldseemüller after he realized that Columbus arrived on that continent before Vespucci. Still, the name stuck.

"America" - Possible Origin #2
Richard Amerike: a wealthy Bristol merchant Richard Amerike, who was an overseas trader living just outside the city in Long Ashton (c. 1480). I found an article that said that previous to this time, Bristol merchants bought salt cod in Iceland until the King of Denmark stopped the trade in 1475. In l479, four Bristol merchants received a royal charter to find another source of fish and trade. This article purports that the new source was the Americas. And, the continent was named as such because Richard Amerike was largely the funder of the expedition. It is indicated that on the fishing map, the name America was used and that Vespucci was given a copy of these maps. Also, there is reported to be a letter in the Spanish National Archives confirming that Bristol merchants had traveled to the Americas first and the maps was also sent to Columbus for his journey. So, that area had been called America before 1507, there just weren't any extant maps to prove it.

Both of these stories have compelling points. However, nowhere do they factor in the Chinese maps that Mr. Menzies indicated were the possible reference maps for that 1507 world map, so who really knows?? I'm inclined to think that due to the largely European slant on all of our current, mainstream history, the name probably caught on from Mr. Waldseemüller's world map. Plus, I think it fitting that Mr. Vespuccio get the naming rights since he's [the European] accredited with the discovery of it being its own continent.


But what if it was a mixture of both? I can see that too. Everybody is sharing maps, right? So, maybe the Bristolians did come first. And it was called America on those maps, and it was just easier to refer to it as that when Americo Vespuccio used the maps for his journey. And what if Mr. Waldseemüller, the poor stay at home cartographer, had no idea why Vespuccio referred to it as America. So, he just guessed in his book, and his book was published and then people believed it forever.


So much speculation! Isn't this fun? :)



Anyway, my conclusion: I just don't know.

However, some purport that it's a shame that America wasn't named for Columbus. However, I think that since the man lived and died thinking he'd found the Indies and never really knew it was its own continent, regardless the origin, it's ok that the Americas weren't named for him.

Chapter 6

So, the first thing that I wanted to know about when I started chapter six is this extinct warrah - the Falklands' fox. Wikipedia to the rescue! They had this public domain picture in their entry for the Falkland Island Fox. There's a little bit more information on Wikipedia, but you can't expect a whole lot for a species that went extinct almost 150 years ago! Mr. Menzies says that he thinks these are the descendants of the dogs left behind & promises more on his website, but I couldn't find anything when I looked this evening.

My next thought was to wonder where the Falkland Islands are. One of the things that this book has definitely done for me is to show me how poor my geography is! Happily, Wikipedia answered that question too: the south tip of South America. Here's another map, one that's a bit easier to look at.

Errr.... more later. It's time for bed.

Finding yet more stars by wandering around Antarctica

Alright, in continuing our discussion of how much navigation detail Mr. Menzies puts in the book, Chapter 6 is no exception. The author spends a lot of time providing evidence for his postulations, which is good. However, I feel like he spends so much time taking about his methods of deduction that I lose track of where the characters of the story are and what they're doing. (this could be just my deficiency and short attention span when reading a non-fiction book) But I frequently feel as though he's stalled out the story with his long descriptions of discovering ways to measure latitudes (didn't we just talk about that in chapters 4 & 5?) and repetitive retracing of his line of deduction.

I find it quite amusing that Mr. Menzies doesn't do much to conceal his disdain of European explorers. Not to say that I think Columbus or Magellan were saintly gentlemen by any means, but it rather seems that Mr. Menzies is indignant on behalf of the Chinese who's nautical achievements have been so overlooked and that indignation manifests in snarky commentary on their European counterparts. Pages 172 and 173 sketch out a description of Magellan that is almost as unflattering as the one for Columbus in earlier chapters. Seriously, I am firmly convinced that history is really all about the historian spinning the tale.

However, I cannot help but be astonished again and again at the amazing aptitude of the Chinese as they sailed around the world and were able to discern the circumference of the earth and triangulate their position with the stars and discovered a way to track longitude. And their sailing prowess; Mr. Menzies description of sailing the Strait of Magellan is a powerful example of the sailors' skill.

It must have been a treacherous journey. I was struck by how much these sailors gave up in agreeing to go on this trek. A ship wrecked off the coast of Australia, and the ship's description fits that of one from the Chinese fleet, and there is a legend among the Aborigines of "yellow men" settling in among them. Can you imagine the change of life that must have been? Yikes.

So much Navigation!

Ok. So I've just finished with the 4th chapter. There is so much information squashed into that chapter! It's really interesting to hear about Mr. Menzie's methods and path of deductive reasoning as he's pieced together this bit of history.

I sort of felt torn about this chapter. Part of me really appreciated that he was so thorough in the support of his claims about his abilities of deduction based on looking at maps and reading travel-logs (basically the support for thesis of the book.. heh) He went into great detail explaining how exactly he determined how the Chinese were so accurate in their mapping abilities, and who met whom where and when. However, it was that same detail that I got bogged down in as I was reading. Maybe it is just that I'm not much of a seafarer nor am I an expert on cartography, but I found the gobs of details rather laborious.

In the end, I took notes on the people he introduced and and tried to summarize the rest of the detail things. In the end I thought myself fairly successful :) I find, however, as I read further, that his claims seem more and more substantiated. This amuses me slightly, just because I have approached this book with a substantial amount of skepticism. Not that I thought that, irrevocably, Columbus MUST have been the first to find the Americas, but that I was skeptical how reading maps could really be the way he would support his thesis.

I am perfectly ok believing that other people found the Americas first. It seems pretty reasonable that it be the Chinese, especially when looking at them as Mr. Menzies has painted them. They were so much more knowledgeable and advanced at the time compared to the Europeans. Still, this new light really doesn't change much for me here in the United States in 2008; the Europeans still were the folks who made the immigration and colonization stick. But now, I begin to let my mind wander as I wonder how things would've been different if all the records had not been destroyed so carefully. And also if the Chinese culture of the time had been more prone to sharing their amazing amounts of knowledge with the rest of the world.

Henry the Navigator

He's an interesting character in our story, although Mr. Menzies doesn't go into a great deal of detail about him until the end of the book, he does mention him in the introduction, which I am still laboring through. I, of course, wanted to know a little more.

But you know what I found out? There seems to be a lot of disagreement online about what is actually factual in this guy's life. But at least I found a nice picture.

Refresher Course

Mr. Menzies keeps talking about all these explorers, and it's been quite some time since I studied them in school. Therefore, I am taking all the European explorers that he mentions in the introduction and putting them in chronological order, with the stuff that they "discovered."

1488 - Bartolomeu Dias (page 33) rounds the Cape of Good Hope (southern Africa)

1498 - Vasco da Gama (page 33) becomes first European to reach India by sea.

1492 - Christopher Columbus (page 33) arrives in the Bahamas. (The Encarta link is a pretty long bio on Columbus & has some fun information. It says that there was a reward for sighting land, nearly a year's pay, & that Columbus dishonestly pocketed it himself. This fits with Mr. Menzie's depiction of Columbus & his brother as crooks.)


OK, I'll be back to add more explorers later, as they come up.

Interesting Tidbits

So, this second time through I'm planning to take the time to look up all the odd little bits that last time I wasn't sure what exactly what going on, but I wanted to know the story, so I just pressed on past it. Places I can't point to on the map, people and explorers that I'm unfamiliar with, that sort of thing. So here goes.

The first one is this cartographer, Zuane Pizzigano. So I googled him. The very first hit was this odd Mysteriuos World site that I'm not entirely sure that I trust. But they did say that his map is available for folks to go look at at the University where Mr. Menzies originally found it. It's not terribly far from here, maybe the next time Andy gets sent there for business I'll tag along and see if I can't see the map. But this site seems a bit ... off ... to me.

Here's an actual copy of the 1424 map, found on the 1421 website. That's pretty interesting, although it's a little small.

Here's an interesting (if a little long) article about the 1424 map. Looks like it was written well before our book, but one of the things that they mention at the end of the article is that you'd have to outline what voyage made landfall on "Antilia." But apparently Portuguese children are taught a different story of the discovery of the Americas.

Oh, hey, this is interesting. I looks like notes from a presentation that Mr. Menzie did at some point. Mr. Menzie & his buddies think the Chinese were a major factor in kicking off the Renaissance. Not that they say it in so many words, but the contributions they're crediting to the Chinese are things that contributed significantly to the flowering of knowledge and technology that became the Renaissance. Things like movable type and calculating latitude. Makes me wish that I could go to some of the sessions that he's talking about these other men presenting.

Here's another one, that starts out quite hostile to Mr. Menzies right from the get-go. It's a 39 page .pdf, so bring some hot chocolate and some cookies. However, be warned that the author of the paper is rather unfriendly to Mr. Menzies, preferring an Aribic-Islamic theory of the discovery of the world. It's not a pleasant read at all, but it does answer one question I had about Mr. Menzies's theory: he seems to discount the Arabs pretty early on as incapable, but I'd always thought that they were the folks that gifted us with the concept of "zero" among other important things, and it seemed odd that they should be so casually brushed aside. So it's somewhat comforting to discover that there are other theories out there. It also further muddies the water. I have come to the conclusion that we basically have No Idea who got to the Americas "first."

Anyway, back to 1421. (Although I still know little to nothing about this Zuane Pizzigano guy.)

Ming China

So, learning history is much much easier when you have a story to hang it all on, and reading this has made me much more interested in the stuff that my Asian history class tried to teach me in college. Back then I couldn't remember names or places or keep the one separate from the other in my mind. It was just a big mish-mash. But now that I've got some story to hang the various parts and pieces on, I find that the history makes a lot more sense. Here's a bit from my old text book, A Brief History of Chinese and Japanese Civilizations.

The very early Ming was a period of vigorous Chinese military resurgence after the period of Mongol domination. The founder of the dynasty, Zhu Yuanshang ... (Mentioned on page 45 of 1421 - he's Zhu Di's rags-to-riches father.) For his era name he chose Hongwu, which means "grand military achievement," and his military accomplishments were certainly impressive. By the end of his reign, the Ming had won control of all China and dominated th frontier region from Hami, in Zinjang, north through Inner Mongolia and into northern Manchuria. (Here's a map of Ming China.) Beyond that, the Ming had won the subjugation of Korea as well as various Central and Southeastern Asian states which sent tribute. Chengzu, the third Ming emperor, often referred to by his reigh name, Yongle, continued his father's expansionist policy, leading five expeditions against teh Mongols, intervening in Annam and then incorporating it into the empire, and sending out great maritime expeditions, which established China as a naval power. (According to our Mr. Menzie, Zhu Di was 3rd Ming emporer, let me see if I can find any information about these 2 people. Ah, yes. Wikipedia and this other site will be happy to tell you about it.) The early Ming was thus a period of vigorous Chinese military resurgence coming after the period of Mongol domination.

Taizu (The father; no wonder I had such a hard time... in addition to each ruler having a fistful of names, the book is very equal-opportunity in using them all!) was a harsh and autocratic ruler. The position of Chancellor was abolished, and ministers now had to kneel in front of the emperor whereas in the Song (a previous dynasty) they had stood and in the Tang they had sat in the imperial presence. Taizu insisted on deciding personally even matters of secondary importance. A very hard worker, he went through stacks of memorials: in one period of ten days he is reported to have perused 1,660 memorials dealing with 3,391 separate matters. ... Merciless in exterminating those who stood in the way or were suspected of doing so, he obtained information through a secret service provided with its own prison and torturing apparatus. Officials who displease the emperor were subjected to beating in open court. Always painful and terribly humiliating, the beating was sometimes so severe that the victim died. ...

Chengzu (our Zhu Di) was as politically and militarily vigorous as his father but did not follow the first emperor's example in all respects. After defeating his nephew, the second emperor, in a massive civil war, Chengzu moved the capitol from Nanjing to Beijing, which he largely rebuilt. To assure supplies for the capitol, he also reconstructed the Grand Canal. Just as severe as his father when it came to purging real or suspected opponents, he was better educated than Taizu and more generous in his patronage of Confucianism. ... He also sponsored major scholarly projects. The most grandiose of these was the compilation of a huge literary treasury, which employed more than 2000 scholars and when complete in 1408 resulted in a compendium of 22,877 rolls, or chapters. Under Chengzu the complete, unexpurgated Mencius (an influential book of Confucian philosophy.) was also once more available.

Looks like for this section, the textbook has some very similar although less detailed things to say about the Early Ming period of history. The next section goes on to talk about the Maritime Expeditions, mentioning the enormous fleet and the foreign envoys that are brought back to pay tribute to China. Apparently the King of Borneo was buried in China, outside of Nanjing, and you can still see his grave there today. But the text only lists destinations of "not only various areas of Southeast Asia but also the Indian Ocean, Arabia, and the east coast of Africa.(page 241)" It's not terribly surprising that it doesn't list all of the destinations that Mr. Menzies gives, as his reading of the history and the evidence for his conclusions in some cases, is new and controversial. At least it is in the West, and this is an English language textbook, published in the USA. Huge portions of our history will need to be re-written if Mr. Menzie is correct about many of his assertions at all!

Chapter 2 - Disaster!!

Heh.. Ok folks. I'm starting to feel like a blabermouth on here. Feel free to add posts in between my huge long ones.. *hint hint nudge nudge* (Anyway, with that disclaimer aside, I'll go on and say my bit about the next chapter)

Oh my goodness! The turn around of fortune from the previous chapter was so drastic! Gavin Menzies is a very compelling author. He is very gifted in putting a spin on a story. Not to say that I think it's all untrue, or impossible, but he does seem to have a lot of flourish and detail and an impressively fleshed out story for something that had all documentation destroyed.

All that aside though, one can't help but feel great sympathy for Zhu Di and his complete downfall before the end of his reign as emperor. By the end, all his dreams had been squashed and destroyed. I'm sure it's very American of me to look at it ( and so not Confucian) and think that it was so admirable that Zhu Di achieved so much greatness and that it be so tragic that his successors would turn it around so completely after his death. However, I'm sure Zhu Gaozhi and Zhu Zhanji felt they were doing what was best for China; all of Zhu Di's extravagance almost bankrupted the country and was so heavy with human life. Still, I think it's a sad sad tale.

I think I feel the most sympathy for the poor sailors who went on that two year voyage and came back to a completely changed country. I'm sure they were so excited to return with all their successes, and then to be shunned for being part of Zhu Di's extravagance is so very tragic.

Though, in it all, my question is: If all the records were so meticulously destroyed after the voyagers returned, how did Columbus get those maps, or the Venetian cartographer Zuane Pizzigano?

Hehe... hopefully Mr. Menzies will address that eventually.