Sandra Brenes Calvo 880659

Marjorie Martnez Castro A43177

Johana Rodrguez Vargas A3530
HISTORYS MYSTERIES
Susan Jakes/Beijing
A map suggests China discoveredwell, just about everywhere. Is it real?
I.
*It's every collector's fantasy*. An afternoon in an
antique shop produces a gem that lights up a dim piece of
the past. This was the seductive story on offer in Beijing
last week [when lawyer and collector Liu Gang unveiled a
map that, he says, proves the Chinese had detailed
knowledge of world geography long before the voyages of
Columbus, Magellan and da Gama brought such insights to
Europe.] This "Overall Map of the Geography of All Under
Heaven," [which Liu says he bought for $500 in Shanghai's
Dongtai Road Antique Market,] includes notes claiming *it
was drawn in 1763 as a copy of a map from 1418*. *It
purports to be based on the travels of Zheng He, an
admiral [who sailed throughout Asia and the east coast of
Africa between 1405 and 1433.*] But Liu's map also shows
the Americas, Australia and Europe,[where Zheng He isn't
known to have traveled.] "The chart I bought," said Liu,
"shows a completely different picture from those recorded in
the history books."
II. Liu says his find demonstrates [that Zheng He sailed
around the world and returned to China by 1418 with
precise knowledge not only of continental coastlines,] but of
interior geographic and cultural features, all of which
appear on the map. But these details were well known in

China [by the time the map was supposedly drawn in the
18th century,] argue critics such as Li Xiaocong, a
cartography expert at Peking University. *"It's simply not
logical,"* says Li, "to use a map drawn in [Emperor]
Qianlong's time to prove the existence of a map that might
have been drawn during the reign of Yongle"some three
centuries earlier, in the Ming era. Li adds: "We don't even
know if that Ming map existed."
III. Gavin Menzies, [the map's most vocal champion], is
sure it did. Menzies, [a retired British Naval Commander], is
the author of 1421: The Year China Discovered America, a
book that puts Zheng He's fleet on American shores seven
decades ahead of Columbus. Published in 2002, this best
seller mixes established fact with Menzies' own muchdisputed interpretations of history.* It was a Chinese edition
of 1421* and subsequent e-mails with Menzies [that Liu
says convinced him of his map's significance[. Menzies,
[who has helped publicize Liu's find], tells TIME: *"There
isn't one millionth of a 1% chance the map is a fake.*"
IV. But a lot about the map,[especially its use of
language], has led professional historians to view it with
suspicion. "[If you look at the text], *there are really some
things [that are a bit strange*]," says Nicolas Standaert,
[an expert on the Ming era at the Katholieke Universiteit
Leuven in Belgium]. Standaert points to passages circled in
red[which the map's legend says are copied from the
1418 map-] [that contain words or terms not used at that
time]. Among

them is the map's word for the

Christian God and its description of [what is now the

South China Sea as "the Great Qing Sea]," a term not in

use until the Qing Dynasty in 1644. "*It's always possible*
[that someone will use language differently from his
contemporaries]," says Standaert, "but I find [that *there
are so many questions from a linguistic point of view*] [that
the chances are the map is more recent than it says it is.]"

OUTLINE
IV. CONTRADICTIONS OF THE MAP
A. Ming era
1. Language
2. The word map
3. The term of South China
B.
1.
2.
3.

The Qing Dynasty

Language
The word map
The term of South China