Did China also discover the Americas in 1421?

Thanks bbb - this subject fascinates me.

Often see little shorts on Discovery Channel about ancient China and it's inventions.

Nothing would surprise me anymore. They did just about EVERYTHING first.

America was not discovered it was invented. Se the book Invention of America by the Mexican historian Edmundo O' Gorman (there is an Irish man in there somewhere). His point is that the American had to be perceived as something new not just as someplace different. There were many people who washed uo on the shore of the New World beginning with the Native Americans some 25,000 years ago. But only Europeans had the intellectual tools (geography, cartography)and the technology (the compass, the globe, decked over, deep sea going ships) that allowed them to determine the shape of the New World and place it in relation to the Old World. This is a process of intellectual discovery, not adventure. Columbus for example never made the leap and to his dying insisted all four of his voyages had been to China. Amerago Vespucie could, and his name is on the New World. So whether or not the Chinese were here in 1421 is irrelevant, although I personally doubt they were. Such an alleged "discovery" initiated no revolution in the Chinese world view, and they might as well have stayed home.

I hate the "Ignorant Masses" which means I hate you.

Here's why.

To you Acquiunk....because you are the one who spoke up, but it's all right because EVERYONE is like you, except for maybe at most 1 million people in the world.

I happening to be one in this area anyways.

I suggest you read past the "cookie-cutter" propoganda crap that you are shoveled about "Amerigo Vespucci".

First off "America" is not the feminine form of "Aemerigo" it is a derivative of "Merica" which meant "Land of Milk and Honey" and was a term applied to the New World by the Knights Templar in the late 1200s, before they "supposedly" went there.

But they were sure that there was a land in the west (Probably passed to them from Norse knowledge of Leif Ericsson and the discovery of the never ending coast...or new foundland, possibly New York).

Now here's what I mean by you and the masses, you should all really look hard at the story of "Amerigo" because the information is there if you want it.

The man who is attributed with naming America is NOT Amerigo, that's stupid, he never ever said, "I name this new world, America, after myself", it was attributed by a GERMAN MAP MAKER.

I forget his name, but he marked his maps as "America" from OLDER MAPS relating to the land in the west (Templar in origin? Maybe maybe not, I think actually they were scottish, but this will come in later).

The German marked on the map "America" and assumed (him knowing nothing of the name Amerigo versus the word *not name* America, after all he being german), it was a derivative of "Amerigo".

He about 2 years later learned he was wrong, and restated this in writing that America was NOT named after Amerigo Vespucci, but his maps were already being printed and that makes it much harder to stop the rumor.

And so the real origins of the name "America" faded away, now found in obscure books, but mainly in books about the templars, I can't remember which though, I've read so many.

However why the Templars? Because when the Templars were persecuted in 1307 some escaped to Scotland. It is speculated that the Templars after going into hiding into Masonry and the Sinclair family (this is before written records so the actual extent of templar influences after 1307 is not fully known), that these templars passed on their ideas, and some knowledge.

There's actually a book that better discusses it, about how a certain Scottish noble was sort of "nudged" out the door to sail to America, where his journeys were FAR more extensive then the vikings (possibly giving reasons to there being a myth of a white man in armor being the god of the aztecs...and that he'd return with white sails...)...this would also explain why in Rosslyn chaple (built in 1430s, or a little before) there are carvings of such things from the new world...

Now remember columbus and his "white sails with red crosses", this comes from his connections. Being the newphew of someone decended from a Templar, and Portugal even recieving its name from the Templars "port of the holy grail" or such, in which the "Knights of Jesus Christ" or something basically took over the Templar naval assets and inherrited much of their maps.

Again I wish I could list the right book, because I've read so many and don't remember where I got all of it from...maybe "Born in Blood" but I thought it was in "The Temple and the Lodge".

However...main point, without trying to prove it though I could if I wanted to look at a bunch of dusty tomes all over again lol, is that America is named after "Merica" for whatever primary reasons.

Amerigo had nothing to do with it.

I don't like information based on the wrong information, and it's time justice was done to the true namers of America.

And wilso, your claim that China did everything first is just stupid.

For one, Iron working was first formed in the land of the hittites (Far from china), it is now proven that Gun Powder was developed in Europe independantly of china. Hell, true chemistry, vaccinations, all invented in Europe first.

Egypt had the first Anti-infectious agent, honey from a specific bee that was very sterile and formed a tight seal around the wound.

Actual sailing was invented by the Europeans, I mean technical sailing not the square sails with a few ropes but the complicated masts and various sails used for various winds.

It is because of Europe that we could sail against the wind, first done in history in what, the 1500s?

We did most everything independant of the chinese, who was first really is a moot point. Like the Greeks, the Chinese had no practical application for all that they did, and so they are worthless, and left out of most of history. What spared the Greeks was that they at least contributed Reasoning and philosophy, and science. They contributed Architecture in a way the world had yet seen.

The Chinese did little to benefit even themselves, most of their inventions being simply to entertain their very wealthy.

Actually a lot of things were done before we think...they teach in high school that man first went around africa in like 1430AD, in reality we first went completely around africa in 800BC, and it was a near 30 year journey by boat.

i think anything is possible

remember

absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

: )

After 600 years, nobody's gonna give a damn. c.i.

I am not sure about the Vespucci thing.

But I agree with Acquiunk and O'Gorman about the concept "invention of America": a process of intellectual discovery and domination.


Many people from "outside" visited the continent, but Columbus was the pioneer in the conquest and colonization process.

At least one European is known to have arrived to Mesoamerica centuries before the Spaniards. He became a legend.

The Aztec codex tell us the story of Quetzalcóatl, the man-God who came from the East-yellow-life-cane days and years. He was white in the skin and bearded in the face. He came from the holy waters (landed somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico), mingled with the local population and taught philosophy. He got drunk, made some misdeeds and was expelled. He went back to his realm, through the holy waters. He said he'd return.
On the year Acatl-1 (East-yellow-life-cane-1 of an East-yellow-life-cane century), notice came to emperor Moctezuma that white men with bearded faces had landed, coming from the holy waters. He understood Quetzalcóatl was back.

BBB-Im curious, How did Menzies say the Chinese computed longitude?
The Chinese had no deep water history reportedly. SO the computation of longitude , requires some standard of reference on the globe.Since China was known for coastal scudding in the areas from Ceylon to Japan, and the concept of star maps, used by the Polynesians only give references to island hopping points , not long voyaging to The Americas. Im not doubting his position but Id like to see where he gets his opinion.
I wonder if hes making a parralel for the long voyages across the Gobi as akin to a sea voyage? STill some sort of an ephemeris calculation would be required, and since GPS is probably not a chinese invention, I wonder how he sez they did it.

farmerman, Your statement, "and since GPS is probably not a chinese invention" was intrigueing enough for me to look into google to see if I could find the inventor. The only thing I could find was the following. http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blgps.htm
c.i.

Farmerman
Farmerman, I found two information resources of general interest regarding Chinese inventions:

This site is more germane to our topic re Chinese navigation skills. Be sure to click on "more" at the bottom of the screen to see "Galatea of the Spheres by Dali" and the entering details. Fascinating.
---BumbleBeeBoogie

http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:PkotctDahioJ:almuhit.phys.uvic.ca/~babul/AstroCourses/P303/chinese.html+Longitude+development+by+ancient+Chinese&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
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WHO INVENTED IT? WHEN? CHINESE INVENTIONS An Introductory Activity (Instructor not identified)

A common stereotype is that the Chinese traditionally lack scientific and technological ability, although, somehow, they stumbled upon papermaking, printing, gunpowder, and the mariner's compass.

Modern Chinese, themselves, sometimes are surprised to realize that modern agriculture, shipping, astronomical observatories, decimal mathematics, paper money, umbrellas, wheelbarrows, multi-stage rockets, brandy and whiskey, the game of chess, and much more, all came from China.

This information has been compiled by the work of Joseph Needham and his collegues in a study of ancient Chinese books on science, technology and medicine. His research has been published in the massive, and yet to be completed, multi-volume Science and Civilisation in China.

Some of Needham's work has been condensed in a well-illustrated and informative book by Robert Temple (The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery, and Invention. Simon and Schuster, New York. 1986). Information given here is from Temple's book.

This activity is an informative way to introduce Chinese history and technology. If the teacher chooses, it can also be used as an opportunity to discuss stereotypes and their influcence on our perceptions of reality, or as a culminating activity after the study of Chinese history.

INVENTIONS:

1. The Horse Collar: China. Third Century BC.

About the fourth century BC the Chinese devised a harness with a breast strap known as the trace harness, modified approximately one hundred later into the collar harness. Unlike the throat-and-girth harness used in the West, which choked a horse and reduced its efficiency (it took two horses to haul a half a ton), the collar harness allowed a single horse to haul a ton and a half. The trace harness arrived in Europe in the sixth century and made its way across Europe by the eighth century.

2. The Wheelbarrow: China, First Century BC.

Wheelbarrows did not exist in Europe before the eleventh or twelfth century (the earliest known Western depiction is in a window at Chartres Cathedral, dated around 1220 AD). Descriptions of the wheelbarrow in China refer to first century BC, and the oldest surviving picture, a frieze relief from a tomb-shrine in Szechuan province, dates from about 118 AD.

3. The Moldboard Plow: China, Third Centrury BC.

Called kuan, these ploughshares were made of malleable cast iron. They had an advanced design, with a central ridge ending in a sharp point to cut the soil and wings which sloped gently up towards the center to throw the soil off the plow and reduce friction. When brought to Holland in the 17th Century, these plows began the Agricultural Revolution.

4. Paper Money: China, Ninth Century AD.

Its original name was 'flying money' because it was so light it could blow out of one's hand. As 'exchange certificates' used by merchants, paper money was quickly adopted by the government for forwarding tax payments. Real paper money, used as a medium of exchange and backed by deposited cash (a Chinese term for metal coins), apparently came into use in the tenth century. The first Western money was issued in Sweden in 1661. America followed in 1690, France in 1720, England in 1797, and Germany not until 1806.

5. Cast Iron: China, Forth Century BC.

By having good refractory clays for the construction of blast furnace walls, and the discovery of how to reduce the temperature at which iron melts by using phosphorus, the Chinese were able cast iron into ornamental and functional shapes. Coal, used as a fuel, was placed around elongated crucibles containing iron ore. This expertise allowed the production of pots and pans with thin walls. With the development of annealing in the third century, ploughshares, longer swords, and even buildings were eventually made of iron. In the West, blast furnaces are known to have existed in Scandinavia by the late eighth century AD, but cast iron was not widely available in Europe before 1380.

6. The Helicopter Rotor and the Propeller: China, Forth Century AD.

By fourth century AD a common toy in China was the helicopter top, called the 'bamboo dragonfly'. The top was an axis with a cord wound round it, and with blades sticking out from the axis and set at an angle. One pulled the cord, and the top went climbing in the air. Sir George Cayley, the father of modern aeronautics, studied the Chinese helicopter top in 1809. The helicopter top in China led to nothing but amusement and pleasure, but fourteen hundred years later it was to be one of the key elements in the birth of modern aeronautics in the West.

7. The Decimal System: China, Fourteenth Century BC.

An example of how the Chinese used the decimal system may be seen in an inscription from the thirteenth century BC, in which '547 days' is written 'Five hundred plus four decades plus seven of days'. The Chinese wrote with characters instead of an alphabet. When writing with a Western alphabet of more than nine letters, there is a temptation to go on with words like eleven. With Chinese characters, ten is ten-blank and eleven is ten-one (zero was left as a blank space: 405 is 'four blank five'), This was much easier than inventing a new character for each number (imagine having to memorize an enormous number of characters just to read the date!). Having a decimal system from the beginning was a big advantage in making mathematical advances. The first evidence of decimals in Europe is in a Spanish manuscript of 976 AD.

8. The Seismograph: China, Second Century AD.

China has always been plagued with earthquakes and the government wanted to know where the economy would be interrupted. A seismograph was developed by the brilliant scientist, mathematician, and inventor Chang Heng (whose works also show he envisaged the earth as a sphere with nine continents and introduced the crisscrossing grid of latitude and longitude). His invention was noted in court records of the later Han Dynasty in 132 AD (the fascinating description is too long to reproduce here. It can be found on pgs. 162-166 of Temple's book). Modern seismographs only began development in 1848.

9. Matches: China, Sixth Century AD.

The first version of the match was invented in 577 AD by impoverished court ladies during a military siege. Hard pressed for tinder during the siege, they could otherwise not start fires for cooking, heating, etc. The matches consisted of little sticks of pinewood impregnated with sulfur. There is no evidence of matches in Europe before 1530.

10. Circulation of the Blood: China, Second Century BC.

Most people believe blood circulation was discovered by William Harvey in 1628, but there are other recorded notations dating back to the writings of an Arab of Damascus, al-Nafis (died 1288). However, circulation appears discussed in full and complex form in The Yellow Emperor's Manual of Corporeal Medicine in China by the second century BC.

11. Paper: China, Second Century BC.

Papyrus, the inner bark of the papyrus plant, is not true paper. Paper is a sheet of sediment which results from the settling of a layer of disintegrated fibers from a watery solution onto a flat mold. Once the water is drained away, the deposited layer is removed and dried. The oldest surviving piece of paper in the world is made of hemp fibers, discovered in 1957 in a tomb near Xian, China, and dates from between the years 140 and 87 BC. The oldest paper with writing on it, also from China, is dated to 110 AD and contains about two dozen characters. Paper reached India in the seventh century and West Asia in the eighth. The Arabs sold paper to Europeans until manufacture in the West in the twelfth century.

12. Brandy and Whiskey: China, Seventh Century AD.

The tribal people of Central Asia discovered 'frozen- out wine' in their frigid climate in the third century AD. In wine that had frozen was a remaining liquid (pure alcohol). Freezing became a test for alcohol content. Distilled wine was known in China by the seventh century. The distillation of alcohol in the West was discovered in Italy in the twelfth century.

13. The Kite: China, Fifth/Fourth Century BC.

Two kitemakers, Kungshu P'an who made kites shaped like birds which could fly for up to three days, and Mo Ti (who is said to have spent three years building a special kite) were famous in Chinese traditional stories from as early as the fifth century BC. Kites were used in wartime as early as 1232 when kites with messages were flown over Mongol lines by the Chinese. The strings were cut and the kites landed among the Chinese prisoners, inciting them to revolt and escape. Kites fitted with hooks and bait were used for fishing, and kites were fitted with strings and whistles to make musical sounds while flying. The kite was first mentioned in Europe in a popular book of marvels and tricks in 1589.

14. The rocket and multistaged rockets: China, Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries AD.

Around 1150 it crossed someone's mind to attach a comet-like fireworks to a four foot bamboo stick with an arrowhead and a balancing weight behind the feathers. To make the rockets multi-staged, a secondary set of rockets was attached to the shaft, their fuses lighted as the first rockets burned out. Rockets are first mentioned in the West in connection with a battle in Italy in 1380, arriving in the wake of Marco Polo.

Not all Chinese scientific and technological achievements lie in the remote past. Contemporary scientists include Chen Ning Yang and Tsung Dao Lee (Nobel Physics Prize, 1957), and Choh Hao Li (biochemist, world's foremost authority on the pituitary gland). Chinese physicists developed a nuclear reactor is 1958, an atomic bomb in 1964, a missile to deliver it in 1966, and put a satellite into orbit in 1970.

If China invented brandy and whiskey, everything else is gravy. c.i.

BBB-by developing a time equation using solar longitude, it would not allow the accuracy to do accurate positioning on the seas. this is becaus e the solar ephemeris advances at a cyclic rate through the year,it would work for a land trip where you have references to landforms . but in the ocean, unless youre just sailing east , you could miss the important refernces to meet places that are critcal to your voyage.

Your number 5, "cast iron" This infers that China developed iron at a time much later than the normally accepted dates for the "iron age" I know for a fact from data Id seen from the YAle "Beta Buster" that Carbon dating of iron artifacts from Xinjiang huddle around 1100BC, thats six hundred years earlier than your reference, which is about 900 years later than "meteroic iron" artifacts from the Levant.

Another interesting trivia about iron. There's an iron pole in Delhi that's called the Iron Inigma, because it's been rust free for over 1,600 years. c.i.

heres some trivia-how do we do Carbon 14 on a piece of iron?

farmerman, Good point. The only thing I could find on Google on the iron pole is the following. I just remembered what our tour guide told us when we visited the site. I also took a picture of the iron pole. http://freespace.virgin.net/adrian.ball/india.htm
c.i.

ci-I wasnt kidding, we often do C14 on iron because old iron hadnt been turned into steel by smelting so there is a lot of iron carbide Fe3C . We can actually do C14 on old iron , even though it sounds like an impossibility.

Something which is being missed in all of this, but which Fbaezer points to in his post--is the effect of an event. Yes, for a very brief period, Chinese mariners made incredible voyages--to no purpose. Columbus, on the other hand, made three voyages, and, as pointed out by Fbaezer, colonization was his intent.

China oscillated through two millenia of advance and relapse. Each dynasty after that of Huang Ti, the Yellow Emperor, was founded by active and vigorous "barbarians" (the Mandarins' judgment, not mine), and over the generations each became increasingly sinicized, each came more and more under the influence of the institutionalized traditionalist--the Mandarins--each eventally became sufficiently enervated to collapse, or to fall prey to the next band of active, militarily competent "barbarians" who would establish the next dynasty. For brief periods in the history of each dynasty, there were flowerings of invention and discovery--the value of which would be lost in long, slow, slide into the ancient imperial sleep.

The accurate calculation of longitude depends upon accurate time keeping. If you have a shipboard clock which keeps the time for a fixed point (it is no accident that the fixed point used in the western world is Greenwich--Heugenot refugees and Swiss Calvinist refugees brought among their many skills the art of clock and watch making), you can "shoot the sun" with a sexton, and establish local time with reasonable accuracy--and calculate your distance east or west of the aforementioned fixed point. Miscalculation can be disasterous--with no means of accurate longitudinal calculation, René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, landed far to the west of the mouth of the Mississippi river, establishing a colony near where present-day Galveston, Texas is located. The colony withered and died, and La Salle was murdered by his own men as he wandered to the East, hoping to find the river.

The Chinese invented a clock, and a fairly accurate one, long before anyone in the west. And it was a water clock about the size of a small two-storey house. It was declared to be the exclusive property of the Emperor, no further development or refinement was undertaken, and it became an oddity, a curiosity which languished in the Forbidden city, eventually falling into disrepair. In Europe, "clockwork" time keeping devices were devised, and soon there was one in the steeple of hundreds, and finally thousands of small towns all over Europe. The first ones kept the hour--but the clockmaker didn't stop there, and the potential for practical application was not lost on merchants and mariners. By the early 18th century, the process had so far evolved that merchants hoping to trade into the Levant from London present the Sultan in Constantinople with a coat, every button of which was a functioning watch.

But a more striking example is gun powder. Before i start that one, i put you all on notice that i'm not glorying in war--just pointing out the difference between societies which push always further down the path, and a civilization which turns inward, despises the foreigner, and actively seeks senescence. The Chinesde invented gun powder long before Europe, and the only uses to which they put it was to make fireworks to entertain themselves, and rockets to frighten the horse barbarians from the Yellow River Loop, Mongolia and the Gansu corridor. Eventually, that no longer worked, and Chingiss overran the Empire, eventually resulting in the foundation of the Yuan dynasty.

Do i need to recount what the Europeans made of gunpowder? I thought not.

There are literally dozens, perhaps hundreds, of such examples. The inventiveness and energy of the Chinese was squandered in nearly every generation. Even had the Chinese landed on the coast of the Americas early in the 15th century, the inevitable result would be meaningless. The Middle Kingdom was guaranteed to revert to its ancient ways, to drift off into its ancient, ego-centric, self-blinding slumber.

Setanta
Setanta, thanks for helping us better understand China's history. But I would like to also know if you think China has changed it's core instincts sufficiently to change it's historical pattern. I look at Hong Kong as an example of the ancient regressive tradition of China. And why is Taiwan an apparent abberation? These are both off-shore societies. Are there any inland Chinese areas that reflect these differences?

What say you?

---BumbleBeeBoogie

I think they have not lost the arrogant contempt they have always had for all things cultural which are not Chinese--with the caution that i don't lay this at the door of all the Chinese. I have anecdotal experience of my own and of others that many Chinese still feel contemptuous toward outsiders.