Currently in an Asian History 101. Professor just told the class that the Chinese went to America twice...

Currently in an Asian History 101. Professor just told the class that the Chinese went to America twice. Once with Hui Shen and Zheng He. Is there any historical proof of this, or is she just indoctrinating?

Other urls found in this thread:

historycooperative.org/not-rewrite-world-history-gavin-menzies-chinese-discovery-america/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessarakonteres
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syracusia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusang
reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1sbztl/why_is_there_a_limit_to_how_big_wooden_boats_can/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_lecturer
chengho.org/downloads/SallyChurch.pdf
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_(schooner)),
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Chinese also went to the Moon and solved the Poincare conjecture.

She also just said that Olmec writing is similar to old Chinese. Christ.

>They raised deer for meat and milk, just as the Chinese raised cattle at home, and produced cheese with deer milk. They traveled on horseback and transported their goods with carts or sledges pulled by horses, buffalo, or deer.

mootnote: your history teacher is spooked and will probably get triggered if you disprove him, accuse you of being racist then proceed to sabotage your education, just humor him

/x/-tier
not even/x/-tier.

Your prof is going to wewuz you all semester, user. Get out now.

Seems strange to be teaching history that is actually the very unlikely alternate theory.

That's bullshit. We barely know anything about the Olmec language.

Why is this shit allowed, even at my liberal school (UW Seattle)?

I can't find anything to confirm, and have never heard this.

You better run the other way, like right now. She's a loon. Gavin Menzies is not history.

My sophomore history teacher got away with teaching us that the Egyptians and Phoenicians discovered the New World.

She got away with it through seniority I think.

Hui Shen is new to me, but I have heard the claim that Zheng He visited the Americas before Europeans.

Zheng He's ships are wicked exaggerated, yes there were massive Chinese ships, but they weren't ocean-worthy.

Your professor is shockingly ill-informed. No historian thinks there were pre-colombian Chinese voyages to the Americas. And no, Gavin Menzies isn't a historian.

Here's an academic review of Menzies' book on the supposed voyages:

historycooperative.org/not-rewrite-world-history-gavin-menzies-chinese-discovery-america/

Some good excerpts:

>Throughout "1421", Menzies places great emphasis on imperial officials in 1477 destroying many of the documents regarding the Ming expeditions in order to prevent a renewal of the project ... There are plentiful surviving documents on the expeditions, however, that prove there were no “missing years.” ... Thus there are no “missing years” for the Ming fleets, no time for even a portion of the extraordinary exploits narrated in "1421".

>He suggests that the Chinese captured a few giant South American sloths (or mylodons) in Patagonia. This deduction arises from the author’s notion that a “dog-headed man” depicted on the Piri Reis map of 1513 —which, of course, Menzies regards as based upon a copy of a Chinese map from Conti’s collection—is in fact a mylodon ... He further supposes that one of the sloths aroused itself enough to escape Chinese incarceration in Australia because a stone carving near Brisbane (he thinks) looks something like the Patagonian beast (p. 185).

>It is impossible to keep track of how many self-confirming assumptions are at work in such citations of alleged evidence. Piling supposition upon supposition, Menzies never considers a question that he does not beg: every argument in 1421 springs from the fallacy of petitio principii. The author’s “trail of evidence” is actually a feedback loop that makes no distinction between premise and proof, conjecture and confirmation, bizarre guess and proven fact.

Oh she's absolutely Chinese-centric. Here's her notes on it:

>Gavin Menzies, British historian, and map expert, 2002, the Chinese discoveries were made by ships sailed by admiral Zheng He in the early 1420's which brought back treasures from foreign lands

>Evidence: travel manuscripts, including maps, written in 1434 by Venetian merchant Nicolo da Conti, who was board one of the Chinese vessels.

>Other maps made by officers on the admiral’s chips include those of Americans, the cape of good hope, and straits of Magellan, which links the Atlantic and pacific oceans.

Why weren't they ocean-worthy?

I hear this claim a lot, but without any substance.

>Why weren't they ocean-worthy?
Wooden ships that large have a tendency to flex in rough seas, which lets water into the hull.

Also, the hulls were very wide, and flat-bottom boats do poorly at sea.

To elaborate: From what I've read, the largest reported sizes (140m/450 long, 7 masts, etc.) either describe ceremonial barges that only sailed on the Yangtze River or are just plain exaggerations.
The treasure ships were certainly very large, but we have records of their voyages and they stuck to the Indian Ocean, reaching as far as Zanzibar. That's really far from China! ...but it doesn't require crossing 10,000 kilometers of open ocean. There's no way the Chinese would've attempted that, even though their ships were capable enough.

I've never heard of the Hui Shen thing, but apparently it's a theory an 18th century frenchman came up with that no one has taken seriously in over 100 years.

Not directly related, but the existence of giant wooden ships in Western antiquity is pretty well attested in the written sources, if not archaeologically.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessarakonteres
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syracusia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusang

>Both of those ships either sailed once or not at all

I'm not doubting Zheng He got to Zanzibar. In doubting that his ships were anything close to the Yangtze and Great Canal pleasure barges.

Not sure how your pic shows Zheng he visited America. I mean I have heard that claim, but not by anyone credible. Even Wiki doesn't mention that he went to North/South America..

Not to mention sailing the open Pacific would absolutely annihilate his ships.

Could he have hugged the coast most of the way?

I agree with you on all three of those points, not trying to say otherwise. My point is that, on top of our written evidence of their actual itineraries, the treasure fleets stuck close to land and never would've just gone 'splorin into the open Pacific.

Absolutely not, there's no coast to hug going south or straight, and if you go north you end up in the Bering Sea which is rarely calm and has icebergs in it.

Then you're in Alaska.

Like the Bering Strait? All the way up to Alaska, and then come down?

Not unless he wanted to sail in the arctic for thousands of miles.

Your teacher is wewuzzing, there's no proof for that. Drop the class.

But no Bering strait is very rough, many modern ships go sinking there.

Is your teacher Chinese?

We wuz Qings n sheeiiit

There are documents that verify that Zheng He went as far as Mekka and East Africa. Nothing about America, though. Just wrote an exam about this topic.

You know, it shocks me that university teachers do this. I had one shit professor who wasn't even that level of tard; a comparative politics professor who spent the entire semester talking about how awesome Burkina Faso is and how stuff about Poland.

She got terrible reviews and was fired after 2 semesters. How the hell do people not boot out these tardstains who inspire these stories?

>hulls
Water tight. The Chinese were making water tight hulls since atleast the 11th century Song dynasty (ship book). A contemporary Morrocon arab traveler also recorded the giant ships of China in great details in 14th century.

>flat bottom
A problem for traditional european ships. But the Chinese were using sternpost-mounted rudder since the 1st century AD. These rudders would be raised upwards. European version of these rudders didn't appear until 14th century or so. Probably from the Chinese/Arab traders.

I used to think history was immune to this sort of shit guys. An an institution I mean. There's always been wewuzzing but I thought universities were stringent enough to keep it out of the actual humanities.

Yea these "Zhen he went to Americas" are based on HYPOTHETICAL scenarios where few of their ships sailed offcourse and crashed in Americas.

It might happen, but there's no proof. So it should remain in the lands of "what if", not part of actual history.

Wish I could, need the credit.

Yes, born in hong Kong and raised in Seattle.

Dunno man, she's a senior lecturer so I don't think people question it.

reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1sbztl/why_is_there_a_limit_to_how_big_wooden_boats_can/

>senior lecturer
That's usually non-tenure track position. Literally means she's not important.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_lecturer

>On the other hand, some universities use the term to refer to full-time, tenured faculty whose primary responsibilities are teaching and service instead of research.

There are multiple records from records that note of the large chinese ships. Macro Polo(Venesian), Ibn Battuta(Moroccan), Niccolò de' Conti(Italian in SEA), etc all reported various large ships that could house hundreds of crew. The treasure ships themselves were ~9 mast and 4 decks with capacity over 500 passengers + cargo. Both Macro and Ibn Battuta describes ships with capable of transporting 1000 people. Niccolo describes ships with 5 masts in SEA. 19th century Junk ship wreckage found near Indonesia could transport 1600 people.


Chances are its not fully wooden. Most likely utilizes iron or some type of reinforcement to keep the ships together. Their rudders were large iron rudders, so its a plausible explanation.

You should have asked him why Zheng He fought with claws and not swords.

No one is saying that they weren't large--they were almost certainly the largest oceangoing ships in existence at the time.

The problem is that some of these sources list sizes (450-600 ft long) that are technologically impossible for an oceangoing wooden vessel, not just for the 15th century, but for anybody. It just flat out doesn't work. And no they did not make iron-hulled ships, and "iron reinforcements" would not be enough to make a 450-600ft long wooden ship seaworthy.

Here's a relatively recent academic paper which concludes that it's unlikely they were more than 250ft long.
chengho.org/downloads/SallyChurch.pdf

But no remains of ANY of them have been found. Historians have found Nero's floating palaces, and swedish warships that immediately sunk centuries ago, and 19th century ships that large that couldn't handle the water (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_(schooner)), but not so much as a rudder from a treasure ship.

I believe they probably existed, but that the gargantuan examples were for river traffic only, since there wouldn't be any ship-breaking waves to worry about.

The treasure ships weren't sunk but were probably scrapped or burned on the Emperor's decree. The system was very expensive to maintain and they didn't want to keep paying for these ships.

Some of them had to of. 400+ feet wooden ships are not sea-worthy.

If the 400+ foot treasure ships went out on open ocean, they would have sunk, and given that Zheng Hu's routes are fairly well known, it's not out of the realm of possibility that one of them should have been found by now.

>born in hong Kong and raised in Seattle.
Oh, one of those race traitor chinks.

It's funny, but most actual Chinese I've met seem to have pretty realistic and rational views of their own history. It's always western born and raised race traitors that constantly sperg out with nonsensical and superficial interpretations of Chinese history that make real Chinese scratch their heads in confusion.

How did the chinese build ships? Hullfirst or shell first?
A seaworthy 400 foot wooden ship would almost necessarily be a monocoque shell-first design with relatively thin walls.

There are very few surviving shell-first Greek and Romand ships because the outer shell gets eaten quickly by sealife. Despite the fact that there were battles involving hundreds of ships and major storms that BTFO huge armadas.

>not sea-worthy
Again with the claim.

But its a certainty that ships were sunk, the stories tell of ships being lost to ocean and such. The oceans themselves are pretty deep and 95% percent are unexplored by humans. So chances are, if those survived till now, it would be down there somewhere.

It argues for the fact about European inability to build larger ships and conflates that as a basis for reality. About Europe's inability to build iron-reinforced ships until 19th century as a universal rule of thumb.

Comon, now. This is not evidence but rather a factless eurocentric view of the world.

At best it can be said there's no archeological evidence, which is true. This is where the issue is. There's hardly any evidence of Zheng He's ship. The most we get are some Europeans/Mulsim explorer's record and Chinese legends. If we take these as true, then we need to fill in the blank and find a proper explanation. Discarding these multiple different experiences as "fake news" isn't a satisfactory answer.

The Greeks built a few 350-400ft long ships in the Hellenistic Period, but, as mentioned upthread, they could barely move and would never in a million years been able to sail from China to Zanzibar.

Chinese ships are laminated bamboo folded 1000 times.

I don't see how that makes her a race traitor of her parents brought her over young.

They used that ship from italy to egypt to trasport shit.

I would bet a chinese version of the exact same spec would be able to do that too. Unless ofcourse you believe in the power of race playing a factor.

It sailed exactly once; they clearly didn't have a ton of confidence in its seaworthiness.

The treasure ships went on 7 voyages, each of which was orders of magnitude longer than Syracuse-Alexandria.

I would be willing to bet the Ming dynasty of the time had finances/resources/experience many multiple times larger than the Greek variant.

If it can be done once, it can be done again.

Marco polo user, not macro

Macro Polo.

Think big.

After you get past Indonesia there were no islands from which the hulls of the ships could be amended and supplies to gather. Simply impossible without colonizing along the way through Micronesia to create the port facilities to assist ships in transit.

I am not exactly sure of the Ming dynasties ship building expertise. Most of the trade back and forth from canton was Arab traders. The Chinese simply provided the goods at the market for them to buy. The captains were Arabs/Swahilis and the shipmen were a mix of the fucks they could pick up along the way.

They've inhereted nearly 2000 years of ship building expertise.

Gavin Menzies is not a historian or a cartographic expert. He's an ex-submariner and failed politician. He cannot speak Chinese.

He retired from the Royal Navy in disgrace after accidentally sailing his boat into an American minesweeper, which was moored in a harbor at the time. Ask her what level of map expertise that is.

Wait, this is a college lecturer teaching this nonsense? Report them to the dean, you're paying cash money for this, they can't teach proven nonsense and get away with it.

>Water tight

No shit retard, obviously a ships hull is water tight. There's a difference between being water tight and being able to survive out in the ocean, a paper boat is "water tight" but you wouldn't expect it to survive a storm.

The ships had water in them, flooding mechanism and drainage mechanism so they wont sink from few holes.

I mean, it's not 100% disprovable. This is how professors at tough to get into universities get to teach stuff like this.

To be fair, she could just be implying that the Olmec script is a logogram based script, like Chinese.
Although, she sounds like a Wewuzer

Nope, she literally said that some Chinese people went to see olmec ruins and were able to translate shit.

Zheng He's job was to make a big Chinese show of power to other known states in the region and re-assert China's supremacy to demonstrate the power of the Ming dynasty. Why would he need to cross to America?

Is this class or a trial? This is like Nazi occultism or Hitler claiming that the Greeks were Nordic, or Koreans claiming that Sumeria was a Koreanic civilization.
Imagine if Jews were the ones distributing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is what is happening in America today.

It really makes you question what else your teacher said that is blatantly wrong, but you just don't know any better.

>my cousin in Oregon says that her teacher told America intentionally allowed Pearl Harbor to happen to expand in Asia

But China has rarely to never ventured out onto the Ocean. Also, expertise waxes and wanes over time. See Portugal during the age of exploration. They were fantastic in the early period, but after about a hundred years they were getting btfo on the sea.

Also, Ming China was society in decline primarily with a huge population and the government desperately trying to administer it.

>implying that's wrong

What if you demand that she stop teaching poorly supported speculation? Make sure to bring lots of evidence for your own point of view if you're going to argue with her. And if she keeps at it, could you lodge some sort of complaint against her?

I'm sure I could, but would something get done? Unlikely. Will I get a shit grade and a bad rep? Very likely.

America: land of the WEWUZZERS

There is always conspiracy of this. Besides, America seems already knew Japs were going to attack, just not sure about time and location.

This is UW Seattle, it's a SJW shit hole so it's no surprise that they would teach this kind of bullshit. I would know because I live just outside Seattle.

Maybe she just wants someone to call her out on it. You know, think critically.

Well there is possibility. I think some guy build old type papyrus boat and sail to America from Egypt.
There are also a records that Phoenicians on order of one of pharaoh went around Africa and it take them 4 years.

>Cut Japan's access to Oil
>Japan either gives up its empire or fights the Allies for oil deposits in East Asia
Americans knew the Japs would eventually attack

You can't hug the coast crossing the fucking pacific, not without sailing into the bering sea which is extremely rough and full of icebergs. Chinks never made it to the americas.

>HURR not selling oil to an insane imperialist regime is the same as declaring war on them!

Fuck off retard, /pol/ is that way

The hull breaking apart because it's an oversized flat piece of shit isn't "just a few holes"

Basic fucking physics is "eurocentric"? Why can't we ignore fantastic claims which lack any evidence? inb4 "muh 5,000 years chinese history"

There's no physics shown. There's "european ships haven't done it therefore no other ship from any other civilization can do it" explanation.

Do not confuse eurocentrist claim with a physics claim. A physics claim require physics demonstration.

It's not about european ships, it is a simple fact that applies to all wooden structures because of the inherent physical properties of wood, and which no one has explained how the chinese would overcome to make boats that large seaworthy.

Does the Chinese ships have to be fully wooden? Couldn't they have been reinforced by some other materials like iron or cement?

>USA threatened other countries to not sell oil to Japan
>Free market

Do tell, which countries did they threaten? Surely you can provide proof of said threats.

wtf. first niggers and now chinks. I guess everyone is responsible for native american culture except you know native americans. christ