1434 (18 page)
Authors: Gavin Menzies
A pictorial version of the aerial car, from the
Shan Hai Ching Kuang Chu.
“The skill of the Chi-Kung people is truly marvellous; by studying the winds they created and built flying wheels, with which they can ride along the paths of the whirlwindsâ¦.” “The artist here has drawn the aerial car with two wheels, but both seem to be intended to represent screw-bladed rotorsâ¦.” (Text of the-2nd century, or earlier, plus 17th-century commentary).
A later description comes from Marco Polo in the Z manuscript.
And so we will tell you how when any ship must go on a voyage, they prove whether her business will go well or ill. The men of the ship will have a bundle or a grating of willow stem and at each corner and side of this framework
will be tied a cord and they will all be tied at the end of a long rope. Next they will find some fool or drunkard and will bind him on the hurdle, since no-one in his right mind or with his wits about him would expose himself to that peril. And this is done when a strong wind prevails. Then the framework being set up opposite the wind, the wind lifts it and carries it up into the sky, while the men hold on by the long rope. And, if while this is in the air, the hurdle leans towards the way of the wind, they pull the rope to them a little so that it is set again upright, after which they let out some more rope and it rises higher. And if again it tips, once more they pull on the rope until the frame is upright and climbing, and then they yield rope again, so that in this manner it would rise so high that it could not be seen, if only the rope were long enough. The augury they interpret thus: if the hurdle going straight up makes for the sky they say the ship for which the test has been made will have a quick and prosperous voyageâ¦. But if the hurdle has not been able to go up, no merchant will be willing to enter the ship.
8
The idea of a man using wings for flight existed in Chinese legend hundreds of years before this fifteenth century Sienese flying man.
One of the many weapons mastered by China before Europe was the cannon.
The dismountable cannon appears in da Vinci's notebook and in those of many other Renaissance engineers.
Leonardo drew an array of gunpowder weapons, including three variations of the machine gun, which can be seen in the fire lances used in China since
A.D.
950.
The Genius of China
states:
Fire lances with several barrels were frequently used and they were built so that when one fire-tube had exhausted itself, a fuse ignited the next, and so on. One triple barrelled fire lance was called the “triple resister” and another was called “the three eyed lance of the beginning of the dynasty⦔ One curious weapon was the “thunder fire whip” a fire lance in the shape of a sword, three feet two inches long tapering into a muzzle. It discharged three lead balls the size of coinsâ¦. There were also huge batteries of fire lances which could be fired simultaneously from mobile racksâ¦a great frame with several wheels would hold many layers of sixteen fire lances one after the otherâ¦. When the enemy
approaches the gate, all the weapons are fired in a single moment, giving the noise like a great peal of thunder, so that his men and horses are all blown to pieces. You can then open the city gates and relaxing, talk and laugh as if nothing had happened; this is the very best device for the guarding of cities.
9
Leonardo's multibarreled machine gun was essentially a reworking of a concept that had been used by the Chinese for centuries beforehand.
Leonardo also drew different types of cannons, mortars, and bombards. The Chinese use of bombards is well catalogued throughout the ages.
10
Leonardo designed many different types of bridges, including suspension bridges. The first mention of a suspension bridge with cables and planking appears in 25
B.C.
“Travellers go step by step here, clasping each other for safety and rope suspension bridges are stretched across the chasms from side to side.”
11
By the seventh century China had segmental arch bridges. The Ponte Vecchio in Florence is a copy of a bridge in Quanzhou.
Leonardo was extremely curious about printing. He was eager to
reproduce his drawings faithfully while saving time and labor through increased automation. The printing press by his time was in use all over China. Moveable type, however, was a relatively recent development; we shall return to this in later chapters.
Comparisons of the machines of Leonardo with earlier machines from China reveal close similarities in toothed wheels and gear wheels, ratchets, pins, and axles, cams and cam-shaped rocking levers, flywheels, crankshaft systems, balls and chains, spoke wheels, well pulleys, chain devices, suspension bridges, segmented arch bridges, contour maps, parachutes, hot-air balloons, “helicopters,” multibarreled machine guns, dismountable cannons, armored cars, catapults, barrage cannons and bombards, paddle-wheel boats, swing bridges, printing presses, odometers, compasses and dividers, canals and locks.
Even the most devoted supporter of Leonardo (like my family and I!) must surely wonder whether his work's amazing similarity to Chinese engineering could be the product of coincidence.
A revolving-type table printing press found in the
Nung Shu
, 1313. The
Nung Shu
was printed using a similar device.
Was there any connection between the Chinese visit of 1434 and Leonardo's designs sixty years later? For many years I searched for clues in Leonardo's life but could find none. He was extraordinarily observant and inquisitive and certainly was fascinated by Greek and Roman art and architecture, literature, and science, including the works of Aristotle and Ptolomy. He is said to have slept with copies of Vitruvius's works beneath his pillow. But illustrated examples of the Greeks and Romans did not account for a quarter of Leonardo's engineering devices shown on the
1434
website.
Moreover, whether Leonardo appreciated it or not, he was surrounded by evidence of the Chinese impact on the Renaissance, such as Alberti's books on perspective in painting and architecture. The basis of Alberti's work was the mathematics he had acquired from the Chinese explanation of the solar system. Replacing the ecliptic coordinate system used by the Arabs, Greeks, and Romans with the Chinese equatorial system was a fundamental break with the old world, overturning the authority of Aristotle and Ptolomy.
However, that is a far cry from claiming that Leonardo copied existing Chinese inventions. One thing we can be sure of: Leonardo did not meet anyone from Zheng He's fleets when they visited Florence in 1434. So it appeared that the similarities noted above were due to an extraordinary series of coincidences. Years of research by the
1421
team had apparently been fruitless.
Venice, the heart of Renaissance Europe's maritime empire.
This map in the Doge's Palace clearly depicts the northwest coastline of Canada and North America set “upside down”âwith north at the bottom, as was the practice of Chinese cartographers. The roundels describe the sources of the information used to draw it: Marco Polo and Niccolò da Conti.
Detailed working shows the conversion of Waldseemüeller's map into a globe with striking results.
Schöener's globes of 1515 and 1520 clearly depict North and South America, and the desolate Straits of Magellan supposedly “first discovered” after the maps had already been drawn.
Universalis Cosmographiae,
Waldseemüeller's map of 1507, and his green globe of 1505/06 clearly depict the Americas with remarkable accuracy for the time, and corroborate Toscanelli's story of meeting the Chinese delegation in Florence.
The Columbus map, CGA5A, tallies up with the Waldseemüeller map, showing curious “rhumb” lines that extend out across the Atlantic, all ending on a circle.