Su, in pointing out some rather absurd errors committed by Menzies, stresses that Menzies did not discover any new documents or maps, but merely put a new interpretation on existing ones. Moreover, because Menzies cannot read Chinese, there are many mistaken interpretations of Chinese artifacts in the book, which have been pointed out one by one in the Chinese edition by translator Bao Jiaqing.
海洋大學海洋學系客座教授蘇明陽在指出孟西士的謬誤時強調，孟西士並未發現新的文獻與古地圖，甚至因為他不懂中文，書中出現大量中文古籍的錯誤引用，譯者鮑家慶在中文版中已用譯註一一標示。