Saturday, February 15, 2014

Ancient Discoveries - Chinese Super Ships


Today on Far Future Horizons we present another exciting episode of the History Channel’s acclaimed documentary series “Ancient Discoveries” where we will meet the master shipbuilders of Imperial China.


These master shipbuilders of the Far East created the most deadly warships of ancient times in their quest for supremacy of the seas.


This installment of Ancient Discoveries uncovers the extraordinary ingenuity of the ancient engineers whose innovations would take shipbuilding to new heights and create some of the largest and most fearsome navies of the ancient world. Could this very same ancient Chinese naval technology have transformed China into a nascent naval power with the ability to discover and colonize the new world some seventy years before Christopher Columbus set sail into the unknown and discovered America?




The year 1421 could have been a pivotal year in world history and would make a magnificent point of divergence in many an alternate history novel. 1421 could have been the year when Ming dynasty China could have set into motion a series of events that would have led the Chinese to discovery the Americas some seventy years before Christopher Columbus, circumnavigate the globe and transform Imperial China from merely a regional power into a major naval superpower of global extent on which the Sun would never have set.





The story of the voyages of Zheng He is a wonderful and cautionary tale of lost opportunity and the “might have beens” in the annuals of global history. Zheng He was the admiral of seven major ocean expeditions, that were to voyage as far as Indonesia, India, the Middle-east, the east coast of Africa and as far as Arabia. These voyages took place over the course of the first three decades of the Fifteenth Century (1405-1433). Zheng He’s fleet consisted of three hundred ships and a crew of twenty-eight thousand men. The ships of this majestic fleet dwarfed the exploratory vessels of Portugal, Spain and England during all the Great Age of European Exploration of the latter part of the Fifteenth Century and well into the Seventeenth Century.




Ancient Discoveries is one documentary series you will want to add to your collection and is available on DVD from Amazon.com.

Ancient Discoveries - Chinese Super Ships


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