A little squall ruffled the staid world of historical scholarship earlier this month after a Beijing lawyer and amateur collector produced a tattered, bamboo-paper map that at first glance appeared to undermine an axiom of Western history. The map, which Mr. Liu Gang said he bought in a Shanghai bookshop in 2001, purports to be an 18th-century copy of a Chinese map of the known world, drawn in 1418.
According to Mr. Liu and his supporters, it proves that the great Ming Dynasty navigator Zheng He had not only circumnavigated the globe by that date but had discovered America en route -- more than 70 years before Christopher Columbus. "For Chinese history, this is very significant," Mr. Liu said.
Well, perhaps so, but that would depend on the map's authenticity, which remains up in the air almost two weeks later. Carbon-dating tests are being done to determine whether the drawing is a forgery, either a modern one or an 18th-century one. Many historians and cartographers have expressed doubts about the claims made for the map, citing multiple anachronisms and "un-Chinese" features (China, the fabulous "Middle Kingdom," for example, is not even in the middle of the map). Furthermore, as a National Geographic article pointed out last week, even if the map does date from 1763, as is inscribed, that doesn't prove the existence of the 1418 map it was supposedly copied from. Columbus can rest easy in his grave, for now.