Silk Roads Trade and Zheng He's Voyages

Up until the European age of exploration beginning with 15th century Portuguese explorers attempting to find routes around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean and on to the Spice Islands, the southern and eastern hemispheres were alive with land and sea commercial activity. Indians, Arabs, Micronesians, Malays, and Chinese all contributed to a process the Chinese historian Lynda Schaffer called, "Southernization." On land and water this trade was conducted over the Silk Roads, as the map below illustrates.

Some students of world history wonder why the Chinese did not discover America. (Most Chinese historians discredit the Menzies hypothesis that the Chinese were in San Francisco about 75 years before Columbus ever sailed.) Truth be told, they did not need to. They had already discovered the Spice Island to their south about 500 years before Ferdinand and Isabella sponsored the Columbian voyages.