"...On the 8th of March, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen sailed from its base in China. The ships, huge junks nearly five hundred feet long and built from the finest teak, were under the command of Emperor Zhu Di's loyal eunuch admirals. Their mission was 'to proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas' and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony. The journey would last over two years and circle the globe.
When they returned Zhu Di lost control and China was beginning its long, self-imposed isolation from the world it had so recently embraced. The great ships rotted at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. They had also discovered Antarctica, reached Australia three hundred and fifty years before Cook and solved the problem of longitude three hundred years before the Europeans..."
Read this book. It makes you think. This one was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me. It read like a novel, and makes you realise just how far ahead of the rest of the world the Chinese Empire really was. The research is ongoing, and reported on their website. Many scientists call it crap, mostly I think because (i) it messes with their theories and (ii) a non-historian thought it up first. The various "for and against" arguments are in Wikipedia.
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