Financial Times
Published: January 17 2006

Retired British submariner Gavin Menzies has won fame and huge book sales with his theory that China discovered the Americas and much of the rest of the world in 1421 - so you might think he would be upset by a new Chinese claim that he got the date wrong.
 
Not so. Menzies is embracing the findings of Liu Gang, a lawyer, who says he has a map that shows fleets commanded by the Chinese eunuch admiral Zheng He had been all around the globe by 1418 at the latest.

In fact, Menzies, the author of the bestseller, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, now reckons the eunuch's men were merely following in the wake of sailors answering to Mongol conqueror Kublai Khan, who he thinks made it to America in the 13th century.

Menzies' new timeline is unlikely to impress historians who have dismissed 1421 as a frothy blend of suggestion and supposition - but then sceptics are also unconvinced by the world map Liu says he bought from a book dealer in Shanghai four years ago.

Liu, who unveiled copies of the map in Beijing yesterday, says it was made in 1763 by a cartographer working from a previously unknown 1418 Chinese map that was drawn using information from the admiral's voyages.

Sceptics note the 1763 map's similarity to those produced earlier by European cartographers, who are generally credited with bringing to China the first accurate pictures of global geography.

Challenged for evidence that the 1418 map existed, Liu admits that he is taking the 18th-century cartographer's word for it. But he adds that the unknown mapmaker signed himself as a "subject", suggesting that he planned to offer the map to the emperor - and lying to the sovereign would have been a capital offence.

Such logic persuades Menzies, who has hailed the 1763 map as "absolutely genuine". Indeed, the former submarine commander bristles at any suggestion that the long-dead cartographer's written word might fall short of the truth.

His work rewriting Chinese history has shown him that people are trustworthy, Menzies says. "I've found time after time after time, people tell the truth. They don't lie."