In Thirteen Hundred Ninety-Two, Meng Ling-ch'u Sailed the Ocean Blue

I see today is Columbus Day. This reminds me of an alternate history, available over on my personal website, which I wrote a number of years back. In it America was discovered, not by Christopher Columbus, but rather by a voyaging explorer from China; and colonized, not by Europeans, but rather by the Chinese.

Meng Ling-ch'u, the "Chinese Columbus," was my own creation; yes, I'm quite aware of the real-life Chinese explorer Zheng He, but I wanted to have a free hand with that part of my alternate history. Most of the other characters in my narrative are actual historical figures, recontextualized in my alternate history, which I continued up through the late 20th century.