Menzies found what looks like large scale Chinese colonies, city size, on Peru’s coast but many centuries before Zheng He’s 1400’s voyages as well as one in Canada’s maritime provinces

I thought Gavin Menzies made a compelling case that Zheng He’s massive fleets did and left trading outposts where Chinese DNA, crops, livestock, buildings, artifacts, and shipwrecks remained but with no successive visits to reinforce, expand populations, build, and resupply trading posts they faded into merging with local populations or being exterminated by native raiders or empires.

There was some amount of repeat trade with the Olmecs (or they wouldn’t have carved giant heads with Asian facial features and facial hair) and later Mayans (apparently China’s Shang Dynasty) to trade mathematics, astronomy, symbols, jade, etc., Asian elephants and animals also appear in Mayan graphics then).

Chinese explorers reported back to the Emperor’s Court official records on their multi-year explanation of North America from Alaska to Mexico and as far inland as the Grand Canyon and back to China, calling North America “Fu Sang” but apparently that wasn’t followed up with colonization or frequent trade. Native Americans living along the West Coast had many tales of Chinese ships, built their own housing using the conventions of Chinese shipbuilding then (uniquely using wood planks over post & beam, rope fasteners, etc.-see Peter Nabokov’s “Native American Architecture”), some DNA, fishing boats similar in construction sometimes to Chinese’s ship’s boats, oral histories of shipwrecked sailors and visiting ships, Chinese ship’s anchor stones scattered along the coast, etc..

Menzies found what looks like large scale Chinese colonies, city size, on Peru’s coast but many centuries before Zheng He’s 1400’s voyages as well as one in Canada’s maritime provinces.

Later European colonies without steady resupply and expansion voyages faded away quite quickly, often without a trace in the 1500’s-1700’s. I’ve looked for a well-known fur trading post 2,300 miles from resupply built in 1808 for as many as 350 men and actively managed from Saint Louis by William Clark of Lewis & Clark for 4 years that there’s no trace of at all nor general awareness of, earlier Spanish trading caravans are considered myths if at all since they left no trace and their gold mines are ignored or assumed to be centuries later.

So I guess the answer is that the low or no priority that the Chinese imperial courts put on further trade or colonization in the Americas at least three times meant that very little resulted and Zheng He was hardly the first even for China.