1421: the year China discovered the world
Asian history, History
Human-narrated audio
Summary
A fictionalised "alternative history" of the discovery of the New World. On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China. Its mission was "to proceed all the way to the ends of the… earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas" and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony.When it returned in October 1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The great ships were left to rot at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost in China's long, self-imposed isolation that followed was the knowledge that the Chinese had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan, reached America seventy years before Columbus, and Australia three hundred and fifty years before Cook.