Menzies on “1421” and “1434”
I remember one of the wisdom words from Newton” I can see farther because I am standing on the shoulder of giants” which means any progress in this world must owe on the previous progress from the older generation or any previous civilization. The works of Gavin Menzies could be the evidence of Newtons’s wisdom words. In 2003 Menzies published “ 1421: The Year China Discovered the World” and followed by “1434: The Year A magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed To Italy And Ignited The Renaissance” which is published in 2008.
In his “1421: The Year China Discovered the World”, Menzies notes that “On March 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China. The ships, some nearly five hundred feed long, were under the command of Zeng He, Emperor Zhu Di’s loyal eunuch admirals. Their orders were to proceed all the way to end of the earth. The voyage would last for two years and by the time the fleet returned; China was beginning its long self-imposed isolation from the world it had so recently embraced. And so the great ships were left to rot, and the records of their journey destroyed. And with them, the knowledge that the Chinese had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan, reached America seventy years before Columbus, and Australia three hundreds and fifty years before Cook”. This book containts not only showing the high achievement of China civilization but also giving us the very useful learning of the high cost of the isolasionist policy which means autarky in international trade.
As the sequel, Menzies (2008) in 1434: The Year A Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed To Italy and Ignited The Renaissance stated that “In 1434, a sophisticated Chinese delegation visited Italy. After that date the authority of Aristole and Ptolemy was overturned, and Chinese knowledge ignited the work of geniuses such as da Vinci, Copernicus, and Galileo. China’s influence had sparked the Renaissance. The course of Western civilization was changed forever. This book containts the contribution of the China Civilization and the other civilization to the nowdays on what so-called modern civilization.
