There’s a funny tweet I saw somewhere (and I don’t care enough to find it again) about kids these days, making breathless TikToks about learning stuff online that “they just didn’t teach you in school!”1 The tweet observed acidly that the sorts of things being highlighted in such TikToks often ended up being somewhat unhinged, like how some piece of common technology originated from aliens or whatever.
If Gavin Menzies were alive today, bless him, he’d be an online content creator churning out pseudohistory. The TikTok girlies would be all over him.
This isn’t a review of his books — 1421: The Year China Discovered the World is the first and best-known — which I leave to the professionals. First, though, I will give you a brief overview, starting with the history as it is accepted by mainstream academia.
In the early 1400s, the Ming dynasty sent the admiral Zheng He (a eunuch from a Muslim family) with a fleet of ships to explore the Indian ocean. The expeditions were undertaken as a sort of grand show of force; the fleet received tribute from regional states, fought pirates, did a bit of gunboat diplomacy (e.g. overthrowing a ruler in modern-day Sri Lanka and reinstalling the previous dynasty) — oh, yes, and made absolutely sure that the Yongle Emperor’s nephew, whom he had usurped, had not somehow escaped his death.2 The Ming fleet ventured as far as the eastern coast of Africa.3 Then they stopped; the Yongle Emperor died, his successors were less interested in that sort of thing, and the whole affair became a dusty footnote in the official chronicles.
That’s the scholarly understanding of the whole thing. According to Gavin Menzies, after reaching East Africa, Zheng He’s fleet continued around the world, following ocean currents, making landfall at various places in Europe and the Americas. He bases this conclusion almost entirely off vibes.
Then he sold a bunch of books, pissed off just about every serious historian who heard about him, and died.
Again, I’m not trying to review Gavin Menzies and his pseudohistorical literary output. Actual historians have already done so. I can’t even be mad at Menzies, because I have some level of respect for anyone who would stand for Parliament against Enoch Powell on a platform of unrestricted immigration.4
The trouble is, just about everybody read this book and got the idea that Zheng He was definitely the kind of guy who could’ve discovered America before Columbus. The trope diffused into popular understandings of alternate history, even among those who had no initial contact with Menzies and his books. Archived forums threads dating back to the turn of the millennium discuss what would have happened if Zheng He’s legacy had been slightly more solid. On AlternateHistory.com, “Zheng He discovers the Americas” is apparently an old cliché, despite the fact that very few people actually write Ming dynasty alternate history. In the Victoria 2 mod “Divergences of Darkness,” featuring alternate history countries in the 1800s, the nations of Zhourao (on the Australian continent) and Qingqiu (on the coast of California) are said to have been founded by Zheng He. And, of course, whenever the History Channel or other peddlers of edutainment decide to run through “Old World expeditions to the New World before Columbus,” they always mention China and the voyages of Zheng He.
Maybe it’s the conspiratorial nature of it all. To make the story of Zheng He discovering the Americas work, you have to imagine that jealous court officials systematically destroyed all evidence that his fleet had ventured that far — but, of course, for some reason they did not destroy the documents referring to him sailing around the Indian Ocean as far as the eastern coast of Africa, where no Chinese ships had ever gone before.
Or maybe it’s just because he’s the only guy whose name is out there, because Gavin Menzies wrote those books and catapulted him to posthumous fame. And his story is cool. But we can find even more interesting, underappreciated stories out there. Jumping-off points for alternate history that don’t require quite as much speculation.
Let me share one such example.
Zheng Chenggong, better known as Koxinga, was a pirate warlord who happened to be around when the Ming dynasty was falling apart. He and his family were loyal to the emperors of an increasingly notional Ming state, as forces loyal to the Qing swept into China. Eventually, with things seeming lost on the mainland, Koxinga took his family’s fleet of warships and descended upon Taiwan. There, they defeated the Dutch outposts, set up their own kingdom (with a Ming prince on hand to make everything legit), and ruled for some decades before the Qing eventually kicked the shit out of them.
The island, to him, was something of an afterthought, a place to rebuild strength in hopes of eventually restoring the Ming to their rightful place on the mainland. (Indeed, it was one such attempt that proved to be the undoing of the kingdom in its later years.) But Koxinga didn’t merely concern himself with the fight against the Qing; he apparently also threatened to invade the Spanish in the Philippines, and according to Tonio Andrade (a scholar whose works I need to further study) he likely would have succeeded, if it hadn’t been for his untimely death.
Now there’s a neat idea for alternate history! It’s even about another guy surnamed Zheng. Imagine — Koxinga and his successors are less interested in stirring up trouble in mainland China and instead direct their attention towards the islands nearby. In order to preserve the lineage of the Ming emperors, they carve out a maritime empire for themselves, kicking out the Spanish from their colonial possessions. Maybe Europe gets less interested in that kind of colonization; maybe a seafaring power with the incentive to care about foreign interlopers does a better job than the powers that existed in our history.
I dunno. To some extent, my existing alternate history timeline deals with these themes — although the point of divergence is decades earlier, and Koxinga’s father Zheng Zhilong is more of a major character (for now). There’s still tremendous potential in the subject. Zheng He has had his day in the limelight; in the realms of historical fiction and alternate history, we are well overdue to see more of Koxinga.
Speaking of TikTok, I know full well that the House has recently passed, and the Senate is considering, a bill that would essentially force TikTok (or other designated websites) to be sold on the penalty of blocking American app stores from offering it. President Biden has indicated he’ll sign such a bill if ratified. I have no great love for TikTok but I would rather see FTC enforcement action against it rather than this present chicanery which I suspect America will soon come to regret. The FTC has been unusually vigorous in going after companies, thanks to the efforts of Biden’s appointee Lina Khan, but even under much less dynamic leadership the FTC has successfully raked Snapchat and other social media companies over the coals for playing it fast and loose with client data. What I’m saying is, TikTok is dumb and the politicians who drafted that piece of legislation are even dumber.
The whole story is a lot of fun and I recommend that you just go ahead and read about Zheng He, the Ming treasure voyages, and the Yongle Emperor when you have the chance. Wikipedia is fine.
In the grand strategy computer game Crusader Kings 2, that’s about the geographic limit for diplomatic interactions with China. My first step, while playing as Ethiopia, is to charge eastward into present-day Somalia in order to gain access to diplomacy with China and that sweet, sweet cash from the Silk Road. What a lovely game. I’ve been playing it for about a decade now.
He did so as an independent candidate and received a tiny number of votes.