1434 (32 page)

So the people living along the Pacific coast of southern Ecuador, Peru, and northern Chile had an endless bounty of fish, shellfish, birds, and sea lions for food. Their river valleys were full of water for a quarter of the year, and they had plenty of fertilizer. So it is not surprising that this stretch of coast has produced rich human civilizations since the dawn of time. The land had as much to offer as the Nile, the rivers of Mesopotamia, the Ganges, or the rivers of China. South American civilizations are hence as old as any on the planet: Peru's Caral Supe are about 5,000 years old; Chinese civilization is 3,900 years old; India, 4,600; Egypt, 5,300; and Mesopotamia, 5,700.

The greatest civilizations of the Pacific coast of South America, starting with the sites of Caral and Chavín, were based between the Lambayeque River in northern Peru and the Ica River in southern Peru. South of the Ica the coast narrows considerably, and north of the Lambayeque the Humboldt Current and its fish supplies peter out. Since Peru was home to the richest civilization of them all, this area would have attracted Zheng He.

This part of Peru is awash with evidence of Chinese visitors over the past two thousand years. There are still one hundred villages in the Ancash region of Peru that retain their Chinese names to this day. Inca people have East Asian admixture in their blood to such an extent that their DNA profile could almost be called Chinese. (Professor Gabriel Novick and colleagues—see www.1421.tv, then ‘Evidence', then ‘Part VII—The Genetic legacy of Zheng He's fleets')
¹⁰

The clearest possible evidence can be seen in Lima's Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera, which has 45,000 exhibits from graves of the Cupisnique period (1000
B.C.
) through the Moches (
A.D.
400–800) and more recent Nasca, Chimu, and Chanca periods. I asked the most helpful curator, Mr. Claudio Huarache, if there were portraits of
Chinese merchants found on pottery from the graves. He immediately showed me beautiful paintings of Chinese from Moche, Chanca, and Nasca graves—spanning the past two thousand years and covering the whole coast of Peru north to south. A picture of a Chinese merchant is shown on our website.

Peru appears on Chinese world maps long before the 1418 map (Hendon Harris map collection) and before Zheng He's nautical chart (which also shows Peru—see Liu Gang's ‘Map speaks without words' on www.1421.tv). Diego Ribero's master chart of the world of 1529
¹¹
shows the coast of Peru in great detail, with an inscription that describes Peru as “province and cities of Chinese silk.” Ribero's map was published before Pizarro (the first European) got to Peru. The Waldseemüller map, also published before Pizarro reached Peru, shows the Andes along the whole length of the South American coast.

So it seems safe to assume that Zheng He knew of Peru before he set sail. He would have visited ports where his fleets could trade. We know from the records of the first Spanish chronicles that in the 1420s the principal trading areas would have been Chan Chan in the north of Peru, then, coming south, Chancay (north of Lima), then Pachacamac in the southern suburbs of modern Lima, then Paracas some 150 miles south of Lima. Chancay suddenly started to mass-produce pottery in the 1420s, some of which they called “china.” My first thought was that Chancay was the port Zheng He visited (in medieval Castilian the name means “City of Chinese silk”), but unfortunately the place has been so badly looted it is impossible to be sure. So we need other clues.

The 1418 map has this description alongside Peru: “The local people practise Paracas religion.” It also shows a river on the Peruvian coast. When Liu Gang published the map I researched Jesuit and Franciscan records to find when this religion was first mentioned in European annals. To my surprise there were no mentions at all. To find out more we drove south to the Paracas Peninsula, which today is a national reserve protected by the Peruvian government. Here is the Julio Tello site museum, which provided the answer to the riddle. The Paracas people buried their dead in very rich funerary bundles made of a fabric the local cotton and vicuña wool dyed with beautiful natural colors. The
fabric was first seen on the Lima market in the late nineteenth century and examined by Max Uhle, a German archeologist, who named it as Early Inca culture.

A typical scene at the papal court—Pinturicchio depicts the court of Pope Pius II.

Florence and her most famous son, Leonardo da Vinci.

RENAISSANCE MEN AND THEIR OUTPUT BEFORE AND AFTER 1434

Timeline showing key dates in the Italian Renaissance.

Ephemeris table from the Pepysian Library, Cambridge University.

Needham's postcard is self-explanatory.

Regiomontanus' ephemeris tables.

Chinese astronomy was clearly more advanced than European efforts until after the 1434 Chinese visit to Florence.

Where do future discoveries lead us? To America and beyond…