Download or read book The Chinese Origin of the Age of Discovery written by Chao C. Chien and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of the Age of Discovery has long been questioned by scholars and laypersons. The era erupted onto history suddenly. What spurred Europeans on to go to sea? How did Columbus obtain his inspiration to sail west to reach China or India? Indeed, even experts cannot agree on where he was going. Was it really India or China, or was it Japan-Cipangu? We're told that he carried with him a letter for the "Great Khan," who had not existed for 100 years, and a translator who spoke Arabic. Why Arabic; did the Indians, Chinese, or Japanese speak Arabic? Then, as if by miracle, while it took the Portuguese 80 years to struggle down the western African coast to reach the Cape of Good Hope, it took Columbus merely a few months to "discover" the Caribbean. It is all too fantastic, yet we accept it as history. Do you know how hard it is to sail the world's oceans? Today we have all kinds of devices to help us navigate the treacherous waters. We have satellite guidance for navigation, and sonar to detect hazards, for instance. Then, as all sailboat owners know, you must take sailing classes in order to obtain a sailing permit. To tell us that in the 15th century Europeans explorers went to sea en masse and discovered all sorts of lands hitherto unknown to them at a time when many people thought the earth was flat and that the Atlantic Ocean, called the Sea of Darkness, was not to be ventured in is a hard sell. Yet the Europeans did go to sea, and they did reach these lands. So the question remains: Why did they do it, and how did they do it? What made them suddenly want to explore, and how did they know how to sail the oceans? We're in the 21st century. We can now sail to the outer edges of the solar system and beyond. Divine inspiration as an explanation no longer cuts it. As it were, the answer is simple. The conundrum is only the result of our historians refusing to look beyond their own culture. If we turn the history book page and look at that of other peoples in this world besides Europeans, we see the other parts of the picture. There were others that sailed the oceans too, and they had been doing it a lot earlier than Europeans! They braved the trails and passed on to the Europeans their maritime knowledge. In early 15th century the Chinese launched an epic maritime program. Headed by the legendary Admiral Zheng He, a magnificent Chinese fleet consisting of some 200 ocean-going ships built using the most advanced naval technologies the world had seen braved the world's oceans for almost 30 years. Most Western scholars are unaware of this grand event. However, the European intelligentsia and mapmakers of the Age of Discovery knew about it. They did not know who these ancient Argonauts were, but they had records of their enterprise. It is these documents that incited and enabled the European explorers to go to sea. Nah! Nonsense! But it's not nonsense. It is not even speculation. The records are there, IN EUROPEAN HANDS! This book is the research into those records; that evidence. Through diligent and meticulous analyses a lost history is reconstructed. The hundreds years old records are deciphered and the real history has emerged. It tells of a glorious and intriguing story, and the whole saga reads like a whodunit. If ever there is a page-turner, this is one. The history reconstruction effort is not merely to explain what made Columbus do what he did. It bears on history itself. It is intimately tied to the explosion of Western science and technologies, and the blossoming of the Renaissance, ultimately the rise of the West and its domination of the world. Putting it succinctly, this book is simply a must read for all historians and knowledge seekers, regardless of nationality.
Download or read book The Chinese Origin of the Age of Discovery written by Chao C. Chien and published by Booklocker.Com Incorporated. This book was released on 2012-07-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The likely real history of the Age of Discovery has been recovered in this startling 300+ page volume. Extant maps and documents of the period are meticulously researched and analyzed to arrive at the unexpected but clear reconstruction. The evidence is shown in over 300 illustrations. Debates on the subject have raged for years. The new research promises to settle the dispute once and for all, or inflame the issue in a big way. CHINESE LANGUAGE EDITION.
Download or read book Chinese Global Exploration In The Pre columbian Era Evidence From An Ancient World Map written by Sheng-wei Wang and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2023-10-16 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How early did the Chinese explore the world? Did the Treasure Fleets, led by Admiral Zheng He, discover many parts of the world before Christopher Columbus? While it is known that Christopher Columbus discovered America and Europe ushered in the Age of Discovery, there is an ongoing debate on the 'unknown' areas depicted in Western maps from the period and earlier. There is agreement among scholars that certain areas seem to have been mapped out prior to the arrival of Western explorers.Chinese Global Exploration in the Pre-Columbian Era: Evidence from an Ancient World Map analyses the world's first modern map — known as Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (KWQ) 《坤輿萬國全圖》 in Chinese, translated as the 'Complete Geographical Map of All Kingdoms of the World' to demonstrate evidence of Chinese global exploration in the Pre-Columbian era. The map of concern was first printed by Italian missionary, Matteo Ricci in 1602, and has been purported to be of entirely European origin, based on Ricci's former maps which he had brought to China in 1582.This book, thus, seeks to be transformational in presenting essential new insights on Pre-Columbian world history and Chinese global exploration, moving away from the norm of the studies of geography and cartography by:
Download or read book 1421 The Year China Discovered The World written by Gavin Menzies and published by Random House. This book was released on 2003-11-25 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China under the command of Emperor Zhu Di's loyal eunuch admirals. But by the time they returned home, Zhu Di had lost control and China was turning inwards, leaving the records of their discoveries to be forgotten for centuries.
Download or read book The Hunt for the Dragon 2nd Edition written by Chao C. Chien and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-09-30 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Age of Discovery was a fabulous yet mysterious time. Beginning from early fifteenth century Europeans took to the sea in droves. The result is the discovery of entire heretofore unknown landmasses, including the Americas, Australia, Greenland, Iceland, and others. Indeed that is why the time is known as the Age of Discovery. From the European point of view Europeans "discovered" these places. Today we hail personalities such as Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan and the like as heroes. Yet we know pitifully little about the history of the period. There are scant official records. Most of what we take as history is in fact basically legends and mythology. Facts are in short supply. Is the name America really derived from from Amerigo Vespucci, a minor adventurer who did not explore the new continents? Today even textbooks attribute the honor to him, but in fact we have no proof that the name America was indeed derived from the name Amerigo. Why are American Natives called Indians? Are they from India? Hardly. Then why do we call them Indians? Where did the name California come from? Is that an Indian name? Nobody knows. The fact is, the Age of Discovery is full of such conundrums and questionable assertions. Much of what is accepted as history is in fact false. Yes, Christopher Columbus did not discover America! Da Gama, who was credited with opening the sea route from Europe to the East, was a savage and brutal man. Hern�n Cort�s, who conquered Mexico, was a failed legal scholar that could not make good at home and took to adventures. His cousin Francisco Pizarro, who conquered the Incas and founded Peru, was an illiterate, uneducated, illegitimate son of a minor military man. Our heroes of exploration were across-the-board ruffians. What drove them to risk their lives for greatness? In the prequel of the present book, The Chinese Origin of the Age of Discovery (now 2nd Edition), the case is made that some five hundred years ago Europeans took to the sea because they had inherited the knowledge of the world from the Chinese. At the beginning of the 15th century the Chinese Ming Dynasty had a civil war. At the end the young emperor was defeated by his uncle and vanished. Most thought he died, but the victorious uncle, who was now the new emperor, thought the ex-emperor had escaped overseas, so he built the greatest fleet the world had never seen before to go after him. Thus the Ming fleet roamed the waters of the world for thirty years, and its exploits were learned by the Europeans, who utilized the Chinese sea charts to go to sea, ushering in the Age of Discovery. Ironically, today historians are unsure of the true purpose of these grand expeditions, and the history of the period is largely lost. In its place absurd theories disguised as history took hold. Now it is claimed that the Ming fleets were enacted to spread the glory of the Ming civilization, to promote international commerce, and proselytize the messages of peace, and the greatest nation on Earth at the time had t do it for 30 years! In the mean time, the biggest mystery of them all: the disappearance of ex-Emperor Jianwen, was left unsolved. Yet, there exist a host of evidence-seemingly unrelated historical tidbits, often unexplainable and ignored-that can shed light on the events of the time. For one, the Ming fleets consistently sailed west. Does that not tell us something? Surprisingly, these historical remnants are not found in the Chinese archives, but in European documents and consciousness. As the extension of The Chinese Origin of the Age of Discovery, 2nd Edition (ISBN 978-1548435554), The Hunt for the Dragon delves into the mysterious events of the world of six hundred years ago, and offers a shocking take on the extraordinary incidents that now mostly have been forgotten. Have we been propagandizing a wrong history all this time? You get to be the judge.
Download or read book Age of Discovery written by Ian Goldin and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present is a contest between the bright and dark sides of discovery. To avoid being torn apart by its stresses, we need to recognize the fact—and gain courage and wisdom from the past. Age of Discovery shows how. Now is the best moment in history to be alive, but we have never felt more anxious or divided. Human health, aggregate wealth and education are flourishing. Scientific discovery is racing forward. But the same global flows of trade, capital, people and ideas that make gains possible for some people deliver big losses to others—and make us all more vulnerable to one another. Business and science are working giant revolutions upon our societies, but our politics and institutions evolve at a much slower pace. That’s why, in a moment when everyone ought to be celebrating giant global gains, many of us are righteously angry at being left out and stressed about where we’re headed. To make sense of present shocks, we need to step back and recognize: we’ve been here before. The first Renaissance, the time of Columbus, Copernicus, Gutenberg and others, likewise redrew all maps of the world, democratized communication and sparked a flourishing of creative achievement. But their world also grappled with the same dark side of rapid change: social division, political extremism, insecurity, pandemics and other unintended consequences of discovery. Now is the second Renaissance. We can still flourish—if we learn from the first.
Download or read book Making the New World Their Own written by Qiong Zhang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-05-26 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Making the New World Their Own, Qiong Zhang offers a systematic study of how Chinese scholars in the late Ming and early Qing came to understand that the earth is shaped as a globe. This notion arose from their encounters with Matteo Ricci, Giulio Aleni and other Jesuits. These encounters formed a fascinating chapter in the early modern global integration of space. It unfolded as a series of mutually constitutive and competing scholarly discourses that reverberated in fields from cosmology, cartography and world geography to classical studies. Zhang demonstrates how scholars such as Xiong Mingyu, Fang Yizhi, Jie Xuan, Gu Yanwu, and Hu Wei appropriated Jesuit ideas to rediscover China’s place in the world and reconstitute their classical tradition. Winner of the Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS) "2015 Academic Excellence Award"
Download or read book The Image of China in the Age of Discovery written by Roy Neil Schantz and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Discoverers written by Daniel J. Boorstin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-01-26 with total page 770 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original history of man's greatest adventure: his search to discover the world around him. In the compendious history, Boorstin not only traces man's insatiable need to know, but also the obstacles to discovery and the illusion that knowledge can also put in our way. Covering time, the earth and the seas, nature and society, he gathers and analyzes stories of the man's profound quest to understand his world and the cosmos.
Download or read book Finding God in Ancient China written by Chan Kei Thong and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2009 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finding God in Ancient China is a sweeping historical, cultural, and linguistic tour through the history of China that seeks to connect the God of the Bible with ancient Chinese language, traditions, and rituals.
Download or read book When China Ruled the Seas written by Louise Levathes and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One hundred years before Columbus and his fellow Europeans began their voyages of discovery, fleets of giant junks commanded by the eunuch admiral Zheng He and filled with the empire’s finest porcelains, lacquerware, and silk ventured to the world’s “four corners.” Seven epic expeditions brought China’s treasure ships across the China Seas and Indian Ocean, from Japan to the spice island of Indonesia and the Malabar Coast of India, on to the rich ports of the Persian Gulf and down the East African coast, to China’s “El Dorado,” and perhaps even to Australia, three hundred years before Captain Cook’s landing. It was a time of exploration and expansion, but it ended in a retrenchment so complete that less than a century later, it was a crime to go to sea in a multimasted ship. In When China Ruled the Seas, Louise Levathes takes a fascinating and unprecedented look at this dynamic period in China’s enigmatic history, focusing on the country’s rise as a naval power that briefly brought half the world under its nominal authority. Drawing on eyewitness accounts, official Ming histories, and African, Arab, and Indian sources, many translated for the first time, Levathes brings readers inside China’s most illustrious scientific and technological era. She sheds new light on the historical and cultural context in which this great civilization thrived, as well as the perception of China by other contemporary cultures. Beautifully illustrated and engagingly written, When China Ruled the Seas is the fullest picture yet of the early Ming dynasty—the last flowering of Chinese culture before the Manchu invasion.
Download or read book The Many Hands of the State written by Kimberly J. Morgan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The state is central to social scientific and historical inquiry today, reflecting its importance in domestic and international affairs. States kill, coerce, fight, torture, and incarcerate, yet they also nurture, protect, educate, redistribute, and invest. It is precisely because of the complexity and wide-ranging impacts of states that research on them has proliferated and diversified. Yet, too many scholars inhabit separate academic silos, and theorizing of states has become dispersed and disjointed. This book aims to bridge some of the many gaps between scholarly endeavors, bringing together scholars from a diverse array of disciplines and perspectives who study states and empires. The book offers not only a sample of cutting-edge research that can serve as models and directions for future work, but an original conceptualization and theorization of states, their origins and evolution, and their effects.
Download or read book Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery written by Peter C. Mancall and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a primary source collection of narratives about the travel and discovery in North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe in the 16th century.
Download or read book The Great Bronze Age of China written by Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.) and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 1980 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the Chinese Bronze Age, including the development of the Chinese state, writing, religion and architecture.
Download or read book Ancient Chinese Discovery and the Future of the World written by Wee Chong Tan and published by Joseph Needham Museum of Ancient Chinese Discovery, Canadian College for Chinese Studies. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 11 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Genius of China written by Robert K. G. Temple and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the achievements of ancient China.
Download or read book Fathers of Botany written by Jane Kilpatrick and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focussing on the lives of four great French missionary botanists as well as a group of other French priests, Franciscan missionaries, and a single German Protestant pastor who all amassed significant plant collections, the author unearths a lost chapter of botanical history.
