Publisher's Synopsis
Suggested navigational routes, timelines and evidence relating to the seventh (and last) voyage of Admiral Zheng He have been extracted for the first time, from a 1597 volume entitled An Account of the Western World Voyage of the San Bao Eunuch by Luo Maodeng.
From 1405, in order to maintain and expand the Ming Dynasty's tributary system, Yongle Emperor Zhu Di and Xuande Emperor Zhu Zhanji ordered eunuch Zheng He to lead giant fleets across the seas. But soon after Zheng He's seventh and last voyage in the 1430s, the Ming emperors put an end to this activity and ordered all records of previous voyages to be destroyed. Chinese writer Luo Maodeng, knowing the history of some of these voyages, wished to preserve a record of them, but, conscious of the possible penalty, decided to record the facts 'under a veil', in his 1597 novel.
This volume shows the derivation of the complete trans-Atlantic navigational routes and timelines of that last journey, and presents the idea that Zheng He's last expedition plausibly reached the ancient American Indian city, Cahokia, in the U.S. central Mississippi Valley in late autumn, 1433, long before Christopher Columbus set foot for the first time in the Americas. It supports the hotly debated view that Ming Chinese sailors and ships reached farther than previously accepted in modern times and calls for further research, bridging the gap in our understanding of ancient China-America history and the era before the Age of Discovery.
