In 1421, the Ming emperor Zhu Di dispatched four great fleets under the admirals Hong Bao, Zhou Man, Zhou Wen, and Yang Qing to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. The four fleet commanders' initial task was to return to their homes the delegates who had come to China from as far away as the coast of East Africa to celebrate the opening of the Forbidden City. But that was to be only the first part of the task assigned to the Chinese emperor's navy.

After depositing the foreign dignitaries in their various homes, the four great fleets, each consisting of vessels weighing as much as 2,000 tons and equipped with watertight bulkheads, desalinization plants, and holding tanks for schools of fish, were ordered by Zhu Di to "proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas�to attract all under heaven to be civilized in Confucian harmony."

And, if the former Royal Navy officer and author Gavin Menzies is right, that is exactly what the four admirals and the sailors under their command did. Between 1421 and 1423, according to Menzies, the author of 1421: The Year China Discovered America, the ships of the Ming navy rounded the Capes of Magellan and Good Hope, touched on both coasts of North America, explored the Pacific coasts of Mexico and Peru, charted Australia's Great Barrier Reef, and skirted the outer reaches of the Antarctic ice sheet. It was as if in 1961 John F. Kennedy had not only ordered NASA to land men on the Moon, but to send manned expeditions to Mars, the moons of Jupiter, and the rings of Saturn as well.

The Chinese adventurers left behind plenty of evidence of their travels. In Central America and Mexico, the Chinese may have introduced technologies for paper-making, dye extraction, and jade working. Buried in the sand near the Australian cities of Sydney and Perth are what are apparently the wrecks of fifteenth-century Chinese ships.

A case can be made for the existence of a similar wreck lying buried beneath the banks of the Sacramento River near San Francisco. Aboriginal rock paintings in Australia show men and women wearing long robes and men on horseback. When the first Spanish and Portuguese explorers arrived in the New World they found Asiatic chickens. And since Asiatic chickens can't fly, somebody had to have brought the birds to the New World to be �discovered' by the first European visitors.

But when the surviving (as many as 90% of ships and their crews didn't survive their voyages) sailors finally returned to China in 1423 they discovered that Zhu Di's oceanic exploration program had been terminated by the Confucian scholar-officials that controlled the imperial bureaucracy. Upset by the expeditions' huge financial and human cost, and by the thought of strange ideas from the outside world disrupting the harmony of the Chinese empire, the Confucian scholar-officials broke up the remaining ships, shut down the shipyards that had produced them, banned the teaching of Chinese to foreigners, ended most of China's international trade�and destroyed as many of the records and maps of the great voyages of exploration that they could lay their hands on.

Still, the memory of an undertaking as massive as Zhu Di's couldn't be entirely erased, and apparently a few copies of the expeditions' maps survived and eventually found their way into the hands of European mapmakers and explorers. Columbus may have had a copy of an old Chinese map when he sailed across the Atlantic in 1492. The great eighteenth-century English explorer, Captain James Cook, may have had access to a secret British Admiralty map, itself copied from a 300 year-old Chinese map, when he sailed down the east coast of Australia and charted the Great Barrier Reef.

This passing of the crown of exploration to the Europeans had tragic consequences for China. In Europe, the Great Age of Exploration developed side by side with the Renaissance and the Age of Reason; both periods that led to the explosion of ideas and technology that gave the West the world domination it has enjoyed until very recent decades.

One of the chief victims of Western expansion was Imperial China. Blinded and crippled intellectually by centuries of self-imposed isolation, the Chinese empire was in no shape to contend with the dynamic westerners who continually defeated and humiliated it throughout the course of the nineteenth century. The only thing that may have saved China from final division and destruction was the start of World War One, when the European colonial powers decided to kill each other rather than concentrate their appetites on a defenseless China.

China's leaders know this history very well, as do the scientists and engineers who have worked hard over the years to achieve last week's historic launch. So underneath all the euphoric talk that circulated last week about a Chinese space station, a Chinese space telescope, and Chinese probes to the Moon and Mars, there might be one particular strain of thought running through the minds of many Chinese: we're back now, so let's not make the same mistake our ancestors made nearly 600 years ago.

Let's not drop out of the race for the future again and consign ourselves to more generations of backwardness and vulnerability. It's this sense of historical grievance, that China was number one a long time ago and failed to maintain its lead not because of the superior abilities of other nations, but only because of a shortsighted mistake, that is probably one of the main forces driving China's space program forward. Let's see how other people like it when they're behind us is how the reasoning might run in the minds of the people now running her space program.

Other people could soon find out what it's like to be behind China. Russian space officials, knowing that their country's space effort is hampered by a severe money shortage, have already expressed concern that China's space program may soon overtake their own.

As for the United States, the fact that the Chinese launched their first manned mission while NASA's space shuttles are still grounded after the Columbia disaster should be a pointed reminder that history stands still for no one, not even for the people who put men on the Moon�34 years ago.

After all, one name for China used to be the Celestial Empire.

Michael G. Gallagher lives in Chonan City South Korea. He can be contacted via tholian56@[email protected] - @NOSPAM@ with single @

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