I MENTIONED THE CHINESE AGE OF EXPLORATION the other day, and a reader informed me of this not-yet-published alt-history novel on that topic: 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance. It could easily have worked out that way, and if you’d been watching things in, say, 1400 it probably would have looked like the way to bet.

UPDATE: A somewhat related item from Rand Simberg.

ANOTHER UPDATE: S.M. Stirling emails:

Noticed the bit on your blog about the Chinese “exploration” fleets of the 1400’s. In point of fact they didn’t do any exploration at all; they were prestige projects ‘showing the flag’ along trade routes that had been in operation for centuries, if not millennia.

Experienced pilots were available for every single mile. The Chinese did no exploration and had no interest in going anywhere they didn’t already know about; they were about as likely to find the Americas or sail around the Cape to Europe as they were to fly to the moon by putting their heads between their knees and spitting hard.

Furthermore, the reason they built very big ships was to impress the locals, not because of any technological superiority. Wooden sailing ships of more than about 2000 tons burden have severe technical problems and are less seaworthy than those of more moderate size; that’s why a 2000-ton ship remained “very large” well into the 19th century, when iron and then steel frames and hulls became available. The finest of the China tea-clippers, the Cutty Sark, was around 900 tons displacement.

Even in the late 1400’s, European ships were more efficient and the advantage increased over time. Eg., the ‘water-tight compartments’ of Chinese junks were of value only when the ship hit a rock. In between, they meant that the vessel couldn’t have a gun deck, and that moving cargo around was much more cumbersome.

The Chinese were an inventive people but not technologically inclined as a society. When the British stormed the Taku forts in the course of the Opium War, they found that the Chinese cannon were all fixed to baulks of timber (in a manner obsolete in Europe in 1400) and that the only models that could be aimed properly had been made under the direction of Jesuit missionaries in the 1600’s. And this in the country that invented gunpowder, and probably first used it as a propellant!

The Chinese were perfectly capable of casting cannon equal to those of the Europeans in the 1600’s, or for that matter the 1840’s — they had fine craftsmen who made large, intricate castings and had been using cast iron several hundred years before Europeans got around to developing the blast furnace. They just weren’t interested enough to do so, not until the gwailo marched into Beijing and molested their womenfolk and used the graves of their ancestors for an Aunt Sally.

The wages of isolationism.