Gavin Menzies’ ‘1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance’ is a parody of historical scholarship that purports to offer insight into the critical stages of early global modernity. Cast in a flawed East/West paradigm that has shaped much of Euro-American scholarship, 1434 enjoys significant popular and political readership internationally and eclipses recent scholarship that would allow a more nuanced and integrated understanding of our shared early modern history. This review article challenges the Sinocentrism of Menzies and others, and suggests a broader Eurasian perspective for understanding the interplay of societies that defined innovation and creativity at the start of the modern era.

Buddhism contributed to the culture and politics of thirteenth-century Eurasian intellectual exchange, depositing literary, artistic, and architectural traces subsequently eclipsed by layers of Islamic and Eurocentric history. Within extensive cross-continental networks of diplomatic and commercial activity, Ilkhanid Buddhism and the Buddhist revival of which it was a part drew serious attention among contemporary travelers, scholars, and statesmen including Ibn Taymiyah, Roger Bacon, and Rashid al-Din. This article argues that awareness of a Buddhist scholarly and political elite in the Muslim heartland, with its center at Tabriz, generated a historically significant Eurasian Buddhist discourse during a critical passage in the turn to modernity.

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The 1911 Revolution was a momentous event in bringing down the monarchical institution with a history of 2,000 years. Yet its consequences were ambiguous, it was overshadowed by the more radical revolution that followed in 1949, and it was stigmatized by the defeat of the Kuomintang, which claimed it as its own. Its ‘revolutionariness’ has been in question even as it has been celebrated as a turning point in modern Chinese history. This discussion reaffirms the revolutionary significance of the event, but also suggests that it is best viewed as a ‘high peak’ in a revolution of long duration that is yet to be completed. The current regime in China has revived aspects of monarchical culture and practices that revolutionaries sought to abolish in 1911. Most importantly, the promise of full citizenship for all that animated the 1911 Revolution remains unfulfilled, which may explain the contemporary regime’s nervousness over the celebration of its 100th anniversary.

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