January 7, 2009 • 12 mins
Author Gavin Menzies believes a fleet of Chinese explorers reached the Americas before Christopher Columbus, but he's been repeatedly challenged to defend this claim. Check out this podcast from HowStuffWorks to learn more about revisionist history.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined by staff writer Jane mcres pagans. Hey, Jane,
do you remember a couple of podcasts again when we
talked about Rosie the Riveter and the topic of revisionist
(00:24):
history came up. That's right, and how people had sort
of misinterpreted what Rosie was. And the great thing about
revisionist history is that you have the freedom to go
back and correct these misconceptions about the past, as long
as you're doing it in a scholarly and authentic and
well researched sort of way. And to my knowledge, one
of the most constantly revised stories is the discovery, if
(00:48):
you can even call it that, even that word has
been revised, of America. And I know when I was little,
I was taught the hall uh in fo two Columbus
sailed the ocean blue. He wanted to prove to everyone
that the world John it was not flat, and he
may very well have done that, but I also learned
that he found America. And then I learned later that
that's not exactly the truth. That's that's right. Yeah, people
(01:09):
jump on on that story a lot, saying, you know,
he didn't discover it. There were plenty of people there obviously,
so you can't use the word discover. It's a very, um,
it's very egotistical thing to do to say that just
because you know you're from a different civilization and you're
imposing your your laws and your culture on another land
that you've discovered it. It's really you've you've visited. Yeah. Yeah,
(01:29):
it's very Eurocentric, which which a lot of people in
the past fifty years or so really jumping on their
way we we should there. They want to take the
emphasis away from Europe and be like, we should have
a worldly perspective on things. Yeah. So Columbus, just because
you had cuter breaches and some of the other explorers
out there, doesn't mean you get to claim America. And
we know for a very very true fact that people
(01:51):
from Asia came over to America long before Columbus. We're
talking some ten thousand years ago when they crossed the
Bearing Land Bridge from Siberia into what is now modern
day Alaska. Yeah, they think that's how it was originally populated, right,
But there's a scholar named Gavin Menzies who wrote a
book back in two thousand three, I think, called fourteen
(02:12):
twenty one, the year China discovered America, and this caused
a huge flush. First of all, it was a huge
It was hugely popular. It got like the best seller
list and everything like that. But um, it wasn't well
received by a lot of the so called respected historians.
We're talking anthropologists, archaeologists, historians and with more linguists, all
(02:34):
these people who would be very involved and studying the
way that a culture attaches itself to a land, and
the way that people interact and how trade occurs, all
these different pieces of evidence, tangible and non tangible, that
would prove a culture had been assimilated into another. That's right,
and according to Menzies theory, we should emphasize that the
Chinese actually arrived in America explored it, um about seven
(02:56):
decades before Columbus even set foot there. And it's story
goes that this Chinese admiral zang He I believe it's
pronounced not sure, but he It's well known that this
guy went on extensive trips and he explored a lot
of the world. Um, but it's not accepted that he
actually went all the way to America. Menzies claims that
he in fact did, and we should mention that, you know,
(03:19):
this guy in his own he uh, he was a
great explorer and he had these ships. The Chinese ships
were called junks and uh, they were gargangeline, they were um,
they dwarfed the ships that actually Columbus sailed on well,
and he was part of the Ming dynasty, and they
had what like a twenty eight thousand person fleet, right, yeah,
that's what I yeah, yeah, so the ships had to
(03:40):
be pretty big to accommodate all of those sailors. And
just like sailors from the Western hemisphere had their own
thoughts and theories about the sea, and they had their
you know, mythical colony of Atlantis, these Chinese sailors had
their own ideas about the sea and exploration too, and
one of the things they believed in was Fu sang.
And I'm not sure if I'm getting that pronunciation quite right,
but please forgive me if you're saying, was this mythological
(04:02):
or legendary land really analogous to Atlanta's. And then a
couple of years ago, a Baptist missionary named Dr. Hendon,
and Harris found a map of what he thinks was
through saying, and he noted that it looked a whole
lot like North America. And what's more, the map noted
all of these geographic and topographic likenesses between North America
(04:23):
and f You's saying. It even showed something like the
Grand Canyon. And people started to wonder, well, how would
the Chinese have such an intricate knowledge of North America
if they hadn't been there? Is right? And Harris tried
to write about this and and and advertise it to
people to make it known, and uh not a lot
of people jumped on board with his with his ideas
(04:44):
UM until Menzies came along, and he really loved it.
And actually Menzies is a kind of amateur historian. He
really has naval experience. He was in the British Royal Navy,
and that's really the experience that he calls upon to
UM to claim that he can that he can make
these interpretations, because he claims that he can read these
maps better than like normal historians can. He can read
(05:05):
the maps and the charts. And there was actually another
map called the fourteen eight Tea map I believe that
shows oceans and seven continents accurately, and they believe that this,
you know, proves beyond a doubt that like the Chinese
knew much more than we thought they did. And I
think that this fourteen eighteen map even shows formations like
the Potomac River exactly where they're supposed to be, shocking,
(05:25):
and the continents are the right size and they're in
the right locations. And Menzies is claiming that not only
did the Chinese explore the world first, but also the
Europeans use Chinese maps to guide them to the New World.
Figure that is, it's really bothering a lot of historians
that he's making these claims too, because you know, they've
based their their lives studying things that that Menzies is
(05:47):
calling all falsehoods, and so um Mensies is pointing this
in and saying, hey, hey, I know I'm getting a
lot of critics, but like, look at look at what
they're staking. It is. One of the problems with the
fourteen eighteen map that the critics have pointed out is
that China, as far as it's depicted on the map,
it's sort of a mass, like it has a blabbih shape.
It's not really true to form, and it's not emphasized
(06:09):
and um delineated as clearly as it should be. If
the Chinese in fact due this map of the world,
you would think that if they had made this discovery,
they would have really put a lot of emphasis on
their own land. I think if they knew anything, they
would know that, but very well. And also another another
point that critics point to is that the map is
based on the fact that the world is around and UH,
(06:30):
historians are pretty confident that the Chinese did not know
this at that time. So, with all of these glaring
loopholes and the theory, while Northwood minsies continue to pursue
his studies, and the answer is that there are a
lot of really strange coincidences going on. UH. There are
a lot of Native American folk stories that support the
fact that the Chinese were there. I think that even
(06:52):
one of the Incan rulers had a legend that he
communicated with the Chinese admiral who taught him how to
govern his land. We know that the Native Americans had horses,
and while for a while historians presumed that the horses
came from Europeans, some people presumed that they came from
the Chinese. Now, because we know that Chinese soldiers used
horses very very religiously in their cavalry. That's the story
(07:13):
is that the Spaniards brought horses over to the first
time to America. I mean giving us a side that
that his horses were actually brought over originally, but when extinct,
like thousands and thousands of years ago. Uh, Now they think,
or at least menzies think that China. China was actually
the first one to bring it over after that. And
what's more, and the Pacific Northwest archaeologists have found Chinese
(07:34):
coins in eight different places. And then somewhere else than
the Midwest, they found a Native American garment that has
it's about three years old as far as they can
date at but it has Chinese beads on it. So
people are wondering, well, where do these things come from
if the Chinese weren't here working with these people. One
of the stories that I find really interesting is a
different take on the story I was told in history class,
(07:55):
which was had to do with the Aztec emperor Montezuma.
And the story was everyone knows is that Ortez went
to meet Montezuma, and uh, the emperor mistook him for
a god, and uh, that's how Cortez was able to
sort of infiltrate um. But Mensies actually postulates that the
Montezuma actually mistook Cortes for his grandfather returning from the east,
(08:17):
as if he were familiar with Eastern people at that time.
And so Mensi's interpretations they certainly seemed to hold water.
But when you look at some of the common factors
that are just missing from the Chinese coming to America
first story, you have to stop and say now that
that can't possibly be. Like we know that when the
Norse came, the Vikings came, they were there about a
(08:38):
thousand years before Columbus came, seventy years before the Chinese
would have been there, and we can still see today
even though they are in ruins, the stone outposts that
they built. So if the Chinese came where the you
know that the standing artifacts, you know, the ruins, the
structors that they would have shown the people how to build,
and vice versa. And why did the Chinese take back
things like gold and corn and tomatoes like the European
(09:02):
the European fleet stead when they came back to Europe
from the New Worlds where there's no smoking gun that
really mens mensies can point to. And another thing is that, uh,
some historians, notably Robert finlay Um has pointed out that, uh,
the Chinese could not have nourished the horses that they
supposedly brought over on their ships. Apparently horses need a
certain amount of water, obviously, and they were surrounded by
(09:24):
by saltwater, and they didn't have the the decel and
theization uh processes that would have been appropriate to uh
feed all these sources water water everywhere of it and
dropped to drink. How about that? And actually, one historian
in particular, doctor Jeff White, he's so riled up about
the glaring and accuracies and an authenticity of Mensi's account
that he has filed a complaint against the UK publishers
(09:48):
who published Menzi's book. And um, I'm using air quotes
even though you can't see them. He called it Mensi's
history book, and you can just you can feel the
division just rolling off of that description. He's very upset
about it, and he makes some some start claims. He's
He's like, oh, look at this map. He even claims
that one of the maps that Menzies uses evidence is
a fake, that it was made for Menzies. Isn't that wild?
(10:10):
And we all know how to do that, you sort of,
you know, roll it and ground coffee and then you
so it looks really authentic and all. And he and
he actually points the evidence that like this map was
drawn based on Jesuit maps of the seventeenth century because
it makes the same mistakes and the mistakes that California
was an island, etcetera, etcetera, That China is at the
center of the world, and the text was translated into
(10:30):
Chinese from Jesuit. Right, so there you go. But if
you want to talk about another smoking gun, I guess
you could say to borrow Jane's phrase again. When the
Ming dynasty eventually collapsed, the dynasty that overcame it wanted
to bury all evidence that had ever existed from the
Ming dynasty, wanted to cover up out their accomplishments, everything
(10:51):
that they had done, because they were establishing a new
rule in order. Yeah, and you can never prove that
Menzies is wrong because all this evidence is destroyed. Um
and critics actually point to uh Mensie's arrogance in this
area saying he's MENSI is quoted as a saying there's
not one chance in a million that I'm wrong, And
so he's sort of sticking in the face of these
respected historians that you can understand how how upset they
(11:12):
can get over this. You know, Wow, that's a pretty
amazing hue restaurant there. But whether or not it is true,
we may never know. But it is testament to the
fact that history isn't a stale and uh finalized topic
of study. It's constantly changing and the revisious history really
points to that. And that's what's so exciting about it.
(11:32):
Not that not that you can be an amateur historian
and go out there and fabricate maps and make up
your own theories about who found what first, but that
this is the field of study that's open to, you know,
the new and rising, and it's the people in the
And it's still popular too, because one thing about Mensie's
fame is that he was able to create a website
around it and people would respond with their own evidence.
They're like, oh, there there's a junk buried uh off
(11:55):
the coast of where I live, and you know, I
know and like people just coming in and um as
he is actually writing a sequel or he did write
a sequel um based on like evidence that he got
submitted from fans. How about that well, and speaking of
submitting evidence from fans, If you ever have an idea
for one of our history podcasts or how to history
(12:16):
question that you want to know, go ahead an email
me and Jane at podcast at how stuff works dot com.
Just put history in the subject line and we'll be
happy to tackle some of your queries and then the
interim to satisfy your desire to learn more about China
and some famous Chinese rulers out there. Be sure to
check out how stuff works dot com for more on
(12:38):
this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff
works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send
an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined by staff writer Jane mcres pagans. Hey, Jane,
do you remember a couple of podcasts again when we
talked about Rosie the Riveter and the topic of revisionist
(00:24):
history came up. That's right, and how people had sort
of misinterpreted what Rosie was. And the great thing about
revisionist history is that you have the freedom to go
back and correct these misconceptions about the past, as long
as you're doing it in a scholarly and authentic and
well researched sort of way. And to my knowledge, one
of the most constantly revised stories is the discovery, if
(00:48):
you can even call it that, even that word has
been revised, of America. And I know when I was little,
I was taught the hall uh in fo two Columbus
sailed the ocean blue. He wanted to prove to everyone
that the world John it was not flat, and he
may very well have done that, but I also learned
that he found America. And then I learned later that
that's not exactly the truth. That's that's right. Yeah, people
(01:09):
jump on on that story a lot, saying, you know,
he didn't discover it. There were plenty of people there obviously,
so you can't use the word discover. It's a very, um,
it's very egotistical thing to do to say that just
because you know you're from a different civilization and you're
imposing your your laws and your culture on another land
that you've discovered it. It's really you've you've visited. Yeah. Yeah,
(01:29):
it's very Eurocentric, which which a lot of people in
the past fifty years or so really jumping on their
way we we should there. They want to take the
emphasis away from Europe and be like, we should have
a worldly perspective on things. Yeah. So Columbus, just because
you had cuter breaches and some of the other explorers
out there, doesn't mean you get to claim America. And
we know for a very very true fact that people
(01:51):
from Asia came over to America long before Columbus. We're
talking some ten thousand years ago when they crossed the
Bearing Land Bridge from Siberia into what is now modern
day Alaska. Yeah, they think that's how it was originally populated, right,
But there's a scholar named Gavin Menzies who wrote a
book back in two thousand three, I think, called fourteen
(02:12):
twenty one, the year China discovered America, and this caused
a huge flush. First of all, it was a huge
It was hugely popular. It got like the best seller
list and everything like that. But um, it wasn't well
received by a lot of the so called respected historians.
We're talking anthropologists, archaeologists, historians and with more linguists, all
(02:34):
these people who would be very involved and studying the
way that a culture attaches itself to a land, and
the way that people interact and how trade occurs, all
these different pieces of evidence, tangible and non tangible, that
would prove a culture had been assimilated into another. That's right,
and according to Menzies theory, we should emphasize that the
Chinese actually arrived in America explored it, um about seven
(02:56):
decades before Columbus even set foot there. And it's story
goes that this Chinese admiral zang He I believe it's
pronounced not sure, but he It's well known that this
guy went on extensive trips and he explored a lot
of the world. Um, but it's not accepted that he
actually went all the way to America. Menzies claims that
he in fact did, and we should mention that, you know,
(03:19):
this guy in his own he uh, he was a
great explorer and he had these ships. The Chinese ships
were called junks and uh, they were gargangeline, they were um,
they dwarfed the ships that actually Columbus sailed on well,
and he was part of the Ming dynasty, and they
had what like a twenty eight thousand person fleet, right, yeah,
that's what I yeah, yeah, so the ships had to
(03:40):
be pretty big to accommodate all of those sailors. And
just like sailors from the Western hemisphere had their own
thoughts and theories about the sea, and they had their
you know, mythical colony of Atlantis, these Chinese sailors had
their own ideas about the sea and exploration too, and
one of the things they believed in was Fu sang.
And I'm not sure if I'm getting that pronunciation quite right,
but please forgive me if you're saying, was this mythological
(04:02):
or legendary land really analogous to Atlanta's. And then a
couple of years ago, a Baptist missionary named Dr. Hendon,
and Harris found a map of what he thinks was
through saying, and he noted that it looked a whole
lot like North America. And what's more, the map noted
all of these geographic and topographic likenesses between North America
(04:23):
and f You's saying. It even showed something like the
Grand Canyon. And people started to wonder, well, how would
the Chinese have such an intricate knowledge of North America
if they hadn't been there? Is right? And Harris tried
to write about this and and and advertise it to
people to make it known, and uh not a lot
of people jumped on board with his with his ideas
(04:44):
UM until Menzies came along, and he really loved it.
And actually Menzies is a kind of amateur historian. He
really has naval experience. He was in the British Royal Navy,
and that's really the experience that he calls upon to
UM to claim that he can that he can make
these interpretations, because he claims that he can read these
maps better than like normal historians can. He can read
(05:05):
the maps and the charts. And there was actually another
map called the fourteen eight Tea map I believe that
shows oceans and seven continents accurately, and they believe that this,
you know, proves beyond a doubt that like the Chinese
knew much more than we thought they did. And I
think that this fourteen eighteen map even shows formations like
the Potomac River exactly where they're supposed to be, shocking,
(05:25):
and the continents are the right size and they're in
the right locations. And Menzies is claiming that not only
did the Chinese explore the world first, but also the
Europeans use Chinese maps to guide them to the New World.
Figure that is, it's really bothering a lot of historians
that he's making these claims too, because you know, they've
based their their lives studying things that that Menzies is
(05:47):
calling all falsehoods, and so um Mensies is pointing this
in and saying, hey, hey, I know I'm getting a
lot of critics, but like, look at look at what
they're staking. It is. One of the problems with the
fourteen eighteen map that the critics have pointed out is
that China, as far as it's depicted on the map,
it's sort of a mass, like it has a blabbih shape.
It's not really true to form, and it's not emphasized
(06:09):
and um delineated as clearly as it should be. If
the Chinese in fact due this map of the world,
you would think that if they had made this discovery,
they would have really put a lot of emphasis on
their own land. I think if they knew anything, they
would know that, but very well. And also another another
point that critics point to is that the map is
based on the fact that the world is around and UH,
(06:30):
historians are pretty confident that the Chinese did not know
this at that time. So, with all of these glaring
loopholes and the theory, while Northwood minsies continue to pursue
his studies, and the answer is that there are a
lot of really strange coincidences going on. UH. There are
a lot of Native American folk stories that support the
fact that the Chinese were there. I think that even
(06:52):
one of the Incan rulers had a legend that he
communicated with the Chinese admiral who taught him how to
govern his land. We know that the Native Americans had horses,
and while for a while historians presumed that the horses
came from Europeans, some people presumed that they came from
the Chinese. Now, because we know that Chinese soldiers used
horses very very religiously in their cavalry. That's the story
(07:13):
is that the Spaniards brought horses over to the first
time to America. I mean giving us a side that
that his horses were actually brought over originally, but when extinct,
like thousands and thousands of years ago. Uh, Now they think,
or at least menzies think that China. China was actually
the first one to bring it over after that. And
what's more, and the Pacific Northwest archaeologists have found Chinese
(07:34):
coins in eight different places. And then somewhere else than
the Midwest, they found a Native American garment that has
it's about three years old as far as they can
date at but it has Chinese beads on it. So
people are wondering, well, where do these things come from
if the Chinese weren't here working with these people. One
of the stories that I find really interesting is a
different take on the story I was told in history class,
(07:55):
which was had to do with the Aztec emperor Montezuma.
And the story was everyone knows is that Ortez went
to meet Montezuma, and uh, the emperor mistook him for
a god, and uh, that's how Cortez was able to
sort of infiltrate um. But Mensies actually postulates that the
Montezuma actually mistook Cortes for his grandfather returning from the east,
(08:17):
as if he were familiar with Eastern people at that time.
And so Mensi's interpretations they certainly seemed to hold water.
But when you look at some of the common factors
that are just missing from the Chinese coming to America
first story, you have to stop and say now that
that can't possibly be. Like we know that when the
Norse came, the Vikings came, they were there about a
(08:38):
thousand years before Columbus came, seventy years before the Chinese
would have been there, and we can still see today
even though they are in ruins, the stone outposts that
they built. So if the Chinese came where the you
know that the standing artifacts, you know, the ruins, the
structors that they would have shown the people how to build,
and vice versa. And why did the Chinese take back
things like gold and corn and tomatoes like the European
(09:02):
the European fleet stead when they came back to Europe
from the New Worlds where there's no smoking gun that
really mens mensies can point to. And another thing is that, uh,
some historians, notably Robert finlay Um has pointed out that, uh,
the Chinese could not have nourished the horses that they
supposedly brought over on their ships. Apparently horses need a
certain amount of water, obviously, and they were surrounded by
(09:24):
by saltwater, and they didn't have the the decel and
theization uh processes that would have been appropriate to uh
feed all these sources water water everywhere of it and
dropped to drink. How about that? And actually, one historian
in particular, doctor Jeff White, he's so riled up about
the glaring and accuracies and an authenticity of Mensi's account
that he has filed a complaint against the UK publishers
(09:48):
who published Menzi's book. And um, I'm using air quotes
even though you can't see them. He called it Mensi's
history book, and you can just you can feel the
division just rolling off of that description. He's very upset
about it, and he makes some some start claims. He's
He's like, oh, look at this map. He even claims
that one of the maps that Menzies uses evidence is
a fake, that it was made for Menzies. Isn't that wild?
(10:10):
And we all know how to do that, you sort of,
you know, roll it and ground coffee and then you
so it looks really authentic and all. And he and
he actually points the evidence that like this map was
drawn based on Jesuit maps of the seventeenth century because
it makes the same mistakes and the mistakes that California
was an island, etcetera, etcetera, That China is at the
center of the world, and the text was translated into
(10:30):
Chinese from Jesuit. Right, so there you go. But if
you want to talk about another smoking gun, I guess
you could say to borrow Jane's phrase again. When the
Ming dynasty eventually collapsed, the dynasty that overcame it wanted
to bury all evidence that had ever existed from the
Ming dynasty, wanted to cover up out their accomplishments, everything
(10:51):
that they had done, because they were establishing a new
rule in order. Yeah, and you can never prove that
Menzies is wrong because all this evidence is destroyed. Um
and critics actually point to uh Mensie's arrogance in this
area saying he's MENSI is quoted as a saying there's
not one chance in a million that I'm wrong, And
so he's sort of sticking in the face of these
respected historians that you can understand how how upset they
(11:12):
can get over this. You know, Wow, that's a pretty
amazing hue restaurant there. But whether or not it is true,
we may never know. But it is testament to the
fact that history isn't a stale and uh finalized topic
of study. It's constantly changing and the revisious history really
points to that. And that's what's so exciting about it.
(11:32):
Not that not that you can be an amateur historian
and go out there and fabricate maps and make up
your own theories about who found what first, but that
this is the field of study that's open to, you know,
the new and rising, and it's the people in the
And it's still popular too, because one thing about Mensie's
fame is that he was able to create a website
around it and people would respond with their own evidence.
They're like, oh, there there's a junk buried uh off
(11:55):
the coast of where I live, and you know, I
know and like people just coming in and um as
he is actually writing a sequel or he did write
a sequel um based on like evidence that he got
submitted from fans. How about that well, and speaking of
submitting evidence from fans, If you ever have an idea
for one of our history podcasts or how to history
(12:16):
question that you want to know, go ahead an email
me and Jane at podcast at how stuff works dot com.
Just put history in the subject line and we'll be
happy to tackle some of your queries and then the
interim to satisfy your desire to learn more about China
and some famous Chinese rulers out there. Be sure to
check out how stuff works dot com for more on
(12:38):
this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff
works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send
an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.
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