"Chinese Columbus" Map Likely Fake, Experts Say

Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News

January 23, 2006

A recently unveiled map purporting to show that a Chinese explorer discovered America in 1418 has been met with skepticism from cartographers and historians alike.

The map depicts all of the continents, including Australia, North America, and Antarctica, in rough outline.

An inscription identifies the map as a copy made in 1763 of an original drawn in 1418.

Antiquities collector Liu Gang, who unveiled the map in Beijing last week, says it proves that Chinese seafarer Zheng He discovered America more than 70 years before Christopher Columbus set foot in the New World.

But experts have dismissed the map as a fake.

They say the map resembles a French 17th-century world map with its depiction of California as an island.

That China is not shown in the center also suggests the Chinese did not make the map, one expert says.

Historians, meanwhile, dismiss the idea that Zheng He, an admiral in the Ming dynasty's imperial navy, sailed to America. (See National Geographic magazine feature: "China's Great Armada.")

"There's absolutely no evidence that Zheng He's voyages went anywhere past the east coast of Africa," said Shih-Shan Henry Tsai, a history professor at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

Records Burned

Liu Gang, a Chinese lawyer, says he bought the map from a Shanghai dealer in 2001 for U.S. $500.

"This map embodies information I believe will help us understand Zheng He's seventh voyage," Liu reportedly told a news conference in Beijing last Monday.

"The map shows us the Chinese explorer has been to America years before Columbus," Liu added.

"The map also shows us the Chinese understanding of the entire world."

Liu said he realized the significance of the map after reading a book by retired British naval officer Gavin Menzies.

The book, 1421: the Year China Discovered America, argues that Zheng led a fleet of 300 ships to America in the early 15th century to expand Ming China's influence.

Menzies also asserts that Zheng was the first person to circumnavigate the globe and that Chinese settlers established now-vanished colonies throughout the Americas.

What really happened is difficult to prove, because China burned the records of Zheng's expeditions, scholars say.

But academics overwhelmingly dismiss Menzies's claims.

Historical records show that from 1405 to 1433, Zheng led China's imperial Star Fleet on seven epic voyages, but he only reached as far as the southern coast of Africa.

Out of Style

The map, which is reportedly titled a "general chart of the integrated world," is dated 1763 and inscribed with the name Mo Yi-tong.

A lab in New Zealand is radiocarbon-dating a scrap of the map's bamboo paper to determine its age.

But even if the map is shown to be from the 18th century, it would be difficult to verify that it is a copy of an original map produced more than 300 years earlier.

One U.S. map expert says the map does not fit the style of Ming China.

"If this is a 1418 map, it's a whole style very much different than any 1418 map that I've seen," said John Hébert, the chief of the Geography and Map Division at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Hébert, who has only viewed a small reproduction of the map online, says the map's depiction of the Earth with China not at the center raises a red flag.

"I don't know of any entity at any time, Chinese or otherwise, that did not usually center their cartographic pieces with them[selves] in the middle," he said.

The map's depiction of California as an island also suggests that it could be a copy of a French 17th-century map, Hébert said.

"The other thing that's troubling is the shape of California as an island. That is too much, taken out of what I've seen by French mapping for that [17th] century … [It] almost begs as if we're looking at a 17th-century French world map that had been converted."

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