1434 Book Report

692 Words3 Pages
1434 William Morrow, 2008, 368 pps, $26.95 Gavin Menzies ISBN # 978-0-06-149217-4 In was the year 1434, Zheng He of China sent out a fleet of magnificent ships and sailed to Italy, igniting the Renaissance. It was not Leonardo da Vinci that invented the various things he is credited with inventing; he was just a brilliant illustrator of Chinese inventions. As a person who prefers to read fiction, I thought I was not going to enjoy 1434. But, it is a thrilling book packed with facts. What this book explains is the concept that China was centuries ahead of Europe in every subject. The book has evidence that they had mapped the North Pole, North and South America, Australia, and most other parts of the world centuries before Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas. All of the Renaissance inventions were mostly from the Nung Shu, for example, the world’s first book mass-produced on a printing press. “Between 1405 and 1431, Zhu Dhi assembled a team of three thousand scholars to compile the Yongle Dadian, an encyclopedia of a scale and scope unparalled in…show more content…
They had the first records of North America starting in 1320. Christopher Columbus was not sailing blind when he thought he was going to India. He himself admits having gleaned “the most copious and good and true information from distinguished men of great learning”, the Chinese who came to Florence in 1434. In the year 1418 the King of Portugal obtained a Chinese map. Ten years later, the Doge’s palace somehow got a map that included the Americas and Australia, yet no European had ever been there before. It included the same mistakes as the Chinese map, with the wrong distance between Europe and the Americas too. Waldseemuller, who never saw the ocean in his life, also somehow produced his “Green Globe” of the world. I believe it was not just coincidence that this map included the same flaws as the original Chinese
Open Document