Saturday December 22nd 2007 14.02
Solstice Special Diary
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Solar fortnight beginning:
Saturday December 22nd 2007 14.02
Hour Day Month Year
water metal water fire
quai gung ren mow
wei yan tze tze
sheep tiger rat rat
Month: ren tze the water Rat
Solar Fortnight: dung gee Winter Solstice
Solstice Special Diary
If you have noticed that my allegedly solar fortnightly diaries have appeared significantly less than 24 times this year, you are not alone. So by way of apology, grovel, recompense and sworn commitment to do better in 2008, here is a major (ish) piece to keep you engaged between the time the selections boxes and the champagne bottles go into the recycling and we resume our routines.
I hope you find it interesting,
Best wishes for 2008, the year of the Earth Rat. My year forecasts are intended to follow in January.
Richard A.
PS: If you can not be bothered with three-and-a-half thousand words of speculation at this festive time, would you mind scrolling straight down to the foot and considering voting for Nigel’s Eco Store (www.NigelsEcoStore.com) in the Yahoo People’s Choice Awards? Thanks. R
1421, 9/11 and Other Odd Numbers – Gavin Menzies’ 1421
How the Chinese discovered not only gunpowder, paper and monosodium glutamate but also Australia, New Zealand and the Americas.
My father, like Gavin Menzies, was a Royal Navy observer who could steer by the stars and estimate distance by dead reckoning. Like Menzies he was reserved in his judgements and believed that everything was explicable. All you had to do was measure and observe. 1421 is just the sort of dispassionate book he might have written. I offer this autobiographical intrusion only to distance Menzies from any hysterical theorising that may have become attached to his ideas which are broadly these: that in the year 1421, Chinese fleets discovered and left settlements in Australia and New Zealand as well as North and South America. This apparently outrageous contention is soberly presented and impeccably reasoned, referenced and footnoted. However barking it might sound, he makes a case that appears watertight
Along the way Menzies actually dispenses finally with at least two long-standing crackpot theories. One is Erich von Daniken’s “God was an alien” thesis which stretched profitably into several bestsellers in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Another is the attribution by WA Hapgood of high technology to prehistoric map makers. Menzies demonstrates once and for all that the fabled Piri Reis map, on which both of these theses depend, which shows the Americas, Australia and an apparently snowfree Antarctic, was based on 15th century Chinese plotting that predates Columbus. Only just, but it predates him. It may however be that Menzies has taken us out of the fire of one set of worrying speculations into the frying pan of still more.
Let me explain.
In 1999 my friend Nancy put me onto a website that claimed there were ancient statues and writings concealed under armed guard in a cave deep in the wall of the Grand Canyon. I sighed. These days, I find conspiracy theories so tiring that I rarely give them more than cursory attention. The Da Vinci Code is not for me. This is not because I have ignored them: in the 70’s I read all the books and indeed attended a lecture by Daniken and can attest to the high volume at which he rattled out the precariously connected segments of contention after contention. I personally investigated the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, locating for instance the crypt which Poussin depicted in his painting “Et in Arcadia Ego.” It was on the other side of the road than the authors placed it, by the way – which implies something about their belief in delegation.
My question was and remains this: what is the likelihood that history-changing secrets have been successfully concealed by thousands of individuals over generations? And more to the point – why would they bother? The very people who are thought to put conspiracies in motion – the Nixons, the Goebbels, the mediaeval Popes – are the most venal, greedy and shortsighted, the last people to put their desires on hold to preserve ancient knowledge for posterity. An understanding of deferred gratification is not the distinguishing feature of your Bush’s and your Mao Tze Dongs. Equally given the state of the world, it is hardly reasonable to suppose that large numbers of ambitious individuals have put their aspirations on hold and co-operated over millennia. If this were the case surely we’d have some sort of handle say on global warming or the AIDS virus by now?
Menzies’ book however set me thinking. Perhaps Nancy was right. Perhaps information about world history is being kept from us. If nothing else, thanks to Menzies, I can now tell you 23 years too late to save the crew of the Belgrano, the true importance of the Falkland Islands. There’s one conspiracy nailed then. Watch this space.
Menzies’ premise is that in 1421 Zhu Di, the Dongle Emperor, instructed Admiral Zheng He to map the world. At this time, the height of the Ming dynasty, China was united and prosperous and secure even from the recently-quelled Mongol threat in the North East. Zhu Di had built the Forbidden City and the Imperial Palace, inaugurated the complex at Wudang Shan and long since restored order following the chaos and civil war of his two predecessors. China had embassies and legations all round the Indian Ocean perimeter already and even beyond.
There were one or two other reasons for the expedition also:
<!–[if !supportLists]–>1. <!–[endif]–>In 1390 the Ottoman Turks took the last territories of the Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor. By 1421 they had closed the Silk Road beyond Persia. This drastically reduced the market for Chinese porcelain, silk and other goods. Access to and from Europe which had always been intermittent was pretty much blocked. It is an interesting synchronicity that the end of the Byzantine Empire that brought so much technical and cultural knowledge back to the West, helping to trigger the Renaissance, should have inspired complementary Chinese foreign policy.
<!–[if !supportLists]–>2. <!–[endif]–>Chinese navigation and mapmaking were the most sophisticated in the world. They could already plot latitude (the lines that go horizontally across the globe, indicating position North-South) as accurately as we can today. But only in the Northern Hemisphere. This was because they oriented from Polaris, the North Star, which sits precisely over the North Pole and enables the locations of rivers, cities and so on to be fixed by triangulation with high points in the landscape. This way they could also measure distance very accurately. Unfortunately there is no equivalent star in the South. The Southern Cross straddles the pole but none of its stars sits directly over it. What they needed was to choose a nearby star and measure exactly how far it diverged from true South and then locate a mountain in the Southern Hemisphere prominent enough to serve as a triangulation point. The point turns out to be Mount Adams in the Falkland Isles. Gotcha! All of this called for Zheng He to take a vast armada across the Indian Ocean round the Cape of Good Hope and across the Pacific to see for himself; a distance of some 20,000 miles there and back. But this was not the half of it.
<!–[if !supportLists]–>3. <!–[endif]–>Another skill the Chinese lacked was the ability to plot accurate longtitude. Because the night sky appears to move East-West, it is no aid to navigation along that axis. What was needed was for the distance from China of a series of positions along this line to be established once and for all. This called for measurements to be made simultaneously at points thousands of miles apart. There was only one phenomenon known to happen all at once in places so widely distributed: a lunar eclipse. Several of the points selected would be in observatories on the Chinese mainland, others would be on ships at sea whose crew would establish their exact location by the measurement of shadows before and after the eclipse. One observatory may astoundingly, have been in Newport, Rhode Island.
But Zheng He’s brief was far wider even than that. Emperor Zhu Di was master of a vast empire and a vaster network of alliances and trading partners but he wanted more. His ambition appears to have been to claim for China any part of the world as yet not contested. And some of it that was. China would for the first time in its history, open up to the world.
So Zheng He’s fleet of close to 4,000 vessels sailed together almost to the Southern tip of Africa. There a detachment rounded the Cape of Good Hope, notoriously itself one of the most dangerous of nautical undertakings and proceeded West where they found the one possible triangulation point in the Southern hemisphere at Mount Adams – Rejoice! – mapped Antarctica and proceeded up the East Coast of the Americas. Their maps were now precise to a fraction of a degree North-South but still shaky East-West. It was because of this shortcoming that the convoy drafted in error, maps that placed the South Shetland Isles hundreds of miles too far West. It is this error that makes Piri Reis appear to show ice-free land on Antarctica, providing ammo for all sorts of bugeyed theories. Of course the discrepancy could have been settled when all the information was collated on their return but that was never to happen as we shall see.
Zheng He was a Muslim Mongol from Hunan in the North East of China. He had been castrated and pressed into Imperial service as a young boy after being captured failing to defend Kunming against the unifying forces of Zhu Yuanzhang, Zhu Di’s father. As an adult he was over two metres tall, a ferocious and skilled warrior, masterful administrator and the chief advisor to Zhu Di. Only a eunuch would have been granted the power he wielded: power the Emperor might not have slept easily giving to a man capable of engendering heirs. A consistently loyal servant to the Emperor, the tale is told that Zheng He placed his severed penis in a casket and the casket in a temple believing that “it would accompany him to the next world where he could become a whole man.” This is a reminder that castration in the Imperial Court was an altogether more comprehensive procedure than we might perhaps imagine and there is a touching vulnerability to his aspiration.
All of the above meant that when Zhu Di decided to more than double his fleet there was only one candidate to oversee the construction and ultimately to command it. Zheng He had at that point, never yet set sail.
While the South Atlantic was being mapped, a second detachment was heading East towards Australia and a third along the American Pacific seaboard. This detachment may have found the North Pole and finally traversed what proved to be the elusive North West passage, the direct route westwards from the North Atlantic to the Pacific. This route turned out only to be navigable in freak weather conditions, so LaSalle, Franklin and Hudson were all wasting their time but Menzies shows that just such conditions prevailed in the third decade of the 15th century. Interestingly global warming freed this route up for the first time since then during the summer of 2007 and the ensuing scramble for the rights to the land either side demonstrated the farsightedness of Zheng He’s detour.
The detachment that landed in Australia appear to have succeeded in mining certain precious metals. Menzies describes what he found in the notes of the voyage, that they used the presence of plants to indicate where to dig. These indications follow elemental theory; that is to say that hot spicy, “metal” vegetables such as onions and cloves betray the presence of actual metal beneath the surface. Menzies speculates that while mining lead they might have encountered the radioactive uranium commonly found alongside which would account in part for the high casualty rate of that detachment.
Meanwhile back in the Forbidden City, on May 7th 1421, shortly after this extraordinary expedition had set out, a bolt of lightning had struck the Imperial Palace. This was taken as a judgement from heaven. Zhu Di was no longer young and he had failed in his central duty to sire an heir, despite maintaining what may have been the largest and most varied harem in history. The exchequer was strained and the borders didn’t look too safe with so many resources diverted into Zheng He’s voyage. The Emperor’s mandarins had been looking for a pretext for censure and here it was; a palpable questioning of the Mandate of Heaven: the divine right of the Emperor. The Middle Kingdom, more properly translated as the “Centre of the World”, was never meant to embrace the rest of it, they insisted. The Emperor was no longer strong enough to resist. In a futile and vindictive gesture Zhu Di had some concubines executed for infidelity. Even these made jokes about his impotence on their way to the scaffold.
Finally the mandarins had the entire coastal strip of South China scorched and settlements pulled back 30 miles. China closed down again.
Unknown to Zheng He, 10,000 miles away claiming the world for his master, the greatest fleet was in its absence decommissioned. On the way back, as agreed, as many vessels as could manage it were at their appointed location at the moment the lunar eclipse they had planned for occurred. Now Longtitude had been cracked as well as Southern Latitude.
En route settlements are recorded as having been left behind in locations as unlikely as Greenland, South Island New Zealand, California, Mexico and Melbourne. Recent dna analysis however backs up the voyage logs. Nonetheless it seems that governments as far apart as New Zealand, Australia and the USA have ruled independently that Menzies is wrong. What is inarguably a Chinese junk of enormous size off Fraser Island, for instance was ordered by the Australian government to be a 19th century Italian wreck. Which is a little inconsistent with its cargo of Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) china and Buddhist devotional items.
Similarly Menzies was refused permission to analyse the mortar holding together a pre-Columbian tower of unexplained provenance at Newport, Rhode Island in the USA. The tower is very similar to lookout towers in Nanking and Shanghai which may have been part of that final mapping project by the halflight of the lunar eclipse. If the mortar were to prove to be the distinctive composite of rice and lime favoured by the Ming, it is indeed one of these. Its orientation and the positioning of its windows already make this close to certain.
The New Zealand government in their turn have refused to consider the possibility confirmed repeatedly by dna testing that the Chinese settled South Island and that the remains of horses there can only be of the famous “blood ponies” of Tajikistan, brought from China.
The authorities may be right of course. But why the panic? Which is where my friend Nancy comes in again. Her view is that governments can’t be trusted. They will tell you or not tell you whatever it takes to keep themselves in power whether it concerns wmds, carbon output or mediaeval history. Information management is as old as information but the facts just won’t back down.
It seems as it happens, that the tongue of the Navajo Indians of Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico is close enough to Chinese for mutual intelligibility. Menzies cites a series of references for this. It also appears that among the numerous reports of early explorers concerning Chinese communities in the new world (including an account from John Smith of Pocahontas fame) is that of the conquistador Garcia Lopez de Cardeno who set out to find Quivira, the city of silver. He may or may not have found it. What is recorded as history is that he found the Grand Canyon, in the heart of Navajo country.
So a Navajo-Chinese connection, dna and linguistic affinity; none of this proves there are ancient writings under armed guard in the Grand Canyon any more than it proves that God was an astronaut or that the ancient Egyptians had ipods but it does raise questions about why these particular governments can and think they should suppress information which they ought to be able to laugh off.
What repressive motives do the governments of the USA, Australia and New Zealand have in common? One thing may be a sensitivity to land rights issues. Californian Pueblo Indians have won recent cases giving them the right to retain archaeological remains as being more likely their property than Europeans’. Native Americans have lodged claims to valuable land all over the USA, to most of which they clearly have at least a moral right. The New Zealand Maori after two centuries of exploitation appear to have reached an accommodation with the more recent arrivals. The last thing they want is to have questioned the fact that they were there first. Equally, millions of Australian dollars hang on the ownership of contested mineral-rich land in the outback.
So it is understandable that the New Zealand authorities should not want to rock the confidence of a shaky minority by conceding that much of their culture was not theirs in the first place. And it is understandable if a tad less dignified, that the Australian government are chary of conceding that a wreck containing thousands of the exquisite Ming plates that individually fetch 100’s of 1000’s of dollars at auction might originate from China. Who would own them?
By the same token, if the Newport Tower were proven 15th century Chinese it might not only rewrite history but to a paranoid American administration (and what other sort is there?) assert a prior Chinese claim on the Americas themselves. To a government that considers that the erosion of human rights is what is required to preserve uh…. human rights, evidence in the Grand Canyon of developed pre-Columbian Chinese civilisation in the American mid West might be something worth concealing.
Farfetched? Well, obviously. These speculations are as off-the-wall as Menzies’ careful and well-reasoned thesis itself which is a mystery that may not be satisfactorily concluded for a long time.
Why governments feel they can and should “spin” facts remains a bigger one. In his diaries, as an example, Tony Blair’s front man Alistair Campbell records without discernible embarrassment the controlled release of news of baby Leo’s birth at 10 Downing Street as if there were a danger that the infant might somehow be off-message. Campbell has been described as the “most pointlessly combative man in history” but surely this charts new frontiers of self-important fatuity? The George W. Bush administration not only invented tales of derring-do about heroic football jocks in action in Iraq but publicly ordered the Iraq mission “accomplished” just as it began in earnest.
And to illustrate this is not a Western or recent phenomenon, not only did Quinshi Huang Di the First Emperor (221-207 BC), burn all books of history and bury alive many of the historians who had written them, so the Qianlong Emperor (1733-1796) had much of the literature handed to his generation, “standardised”.
Almost predictably then, when Zheng He returned, he found that his voyage had been defined as contrary to the Mandate of Heaven and had therefore never taken place. Maps, records and charts were destroyed and Zheng He harried into retirement. Only recently have a growing number of academics in China recognised his achievements and come up with sufficient evidence to rehabilitate his memory. The fate of his precious casket is not recorded.
Menzies nonetheless, after a lifetime of enquiry within China and elsewhere has located maps that he has been able to compare with those of Columbus and Magellan and conclude that the Portuguese maps were based upon Zheng He’s discoveries.
History has a habit of asserting itself. Whether the suppression is The First Emperor’s destruction of unauthorised history, the circumstances that surround the security carve-up that was 9/11, or the sexing-up of security reports, people tend to hang onto the odd book, make the odd confession, hide the odd record and talk among themselves.Whether the administration concerned is that of George “Dubya” Bush, Stalin, Hitler or Zhu Di, the truth will not lie down.
Menzies gives us tremendous food for thought and several lessons in practical feng shui as well as a chapter on the development of the Chinese compass together with some insight into why astronomy is so central to Chinese culture. Oh and some retrospective motivation for the Falklands adventure. But above all he demonstrates how great achievements outlive the gluttons of power.
“They hate our freedoms” apparently.
Whose? When will they ever learn?
Richard Ashworth © 2007
Stop Press: Vote for Nigel and Save the World
Nigel’s Eco Store which sells all sorts of ecologically friendly kit, is up for a Yahoo People’s Choice Award. Nigel is a brave and good man and a visionary who is making a real difference while his business is testament to the power of the formulae of the Water Dragon Classic. Do please have a look at his website (www.NigelsEcoStore.com) and if you are as impressed as I am by his work, vote for him at http://uk.promotions.yahoo.com/finds2007/
Thanks,
Richard.
My (still) super-duper (still) revamped website is at www.imperialfengshui.info and my book The Feng Shui Diaries is available now from:
Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/Feng-Shui-Diaries-Richard-Ashworth/dp/1846940176/sr=8-4/qid=1166798863/ref=sr_1_4/026-3383613-4930062?ie=UTF8&s=books
Waterstones www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/displayProductDetails.do?sku=5567853)
or indeed Tescos. Do buy it from a bookshop if you can.
Feedback is welcomed including that you never want to hear from me again if that happens to be the case. Please also let us know if you are getting too many or too few diaries or that they are appearing in Cinemascope on your screen or whatever. Thanks. R