http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4609074.stm

nice fake..

Do I see Antartica?

Yes, and the whole pacific coast of america, from chile to alaska... ahem...

hehe.. they must have used a Satellites search and observe systems..

Obviously a copy of European map. Especially the seperate California and the globe shape plus the North-upward layout, and that round European ink-stamp on the top...

Keep us updated. I want to see what ever becomes of this map and the final results.

Yet no UK?

you don't think that is a very overly extended Normandi?

Based on my interest in the Chinese antiquities market I would say without looking at it even that the chances are it is just a fake, or the Chinese Ming era characters added to increase its value.....and it looks just silly anyway when I do look at it. Having no England on it doesnt make much sense if it was drawn in the late 18th century.
Note the 'experts are sceptical' and the testing is not yet done on the paper. We wont hear anything more about this story because when it is found to be a fake the story is no longer interesting. Some rank novice art collector just got burnt with a piece of fantasy history.
It sold for $500 in a Shanghai antique market yet I was told if you pay under $US600 for a antique Zhou sword even of ordinary style inside China you will be buying a fake. Would some body really sell this for $500 when it is priceless? Fake paintings can sell for many thousands of dollars and with the price it is commonly said that if the price seems too good to be true then the object is too good to be true.
I have seen Chinese collectors claim to have lost tens of thousands of dollars on expertly made fake Song paintings and such yet a chart of such signifiant sells as much as pocket money in the realm of antiques. The painting appearing from the blue and sold to some dumb chump lawyer for $500 is a nice profit when labour in China is about $3 a day.
This is like the Hong Shang jades that some people buy for $20 and they cant accept they are fakes despite the fact a Chinese collector would pay several thousand for a real one and so the items sold to Westerners are seldom real.
You just have to use your common sense when forgery and dishonesty is behind 95% of Chinese antiques on the market.
God knows why this is worthy of news. He had it since 2001. A quiet day at the BBC it seems.


Yep.
And the people who wrote the Ming reference on the painting were familiar with the same book also.
Adding writting onto a fake, or even a real antique, increases the value.
The fact the collector didnt even know its signifigance suggests he is no expert of such charts. The chances of somebody who isnt very sharp being handed anything but the fakes by a dealer is even less likely.

Edit;
I find reference to Menzies theory as early as 2002, so either the lawyers date isnt correct or else the theory existed earlier. He had the theory for 15 years however.
The claimed date of 2001 for the chart is interesting then...I smell a con-man.

I saw Menzies interviewed on telly and he was unconvincing, inarticulate in the face of questioning and unable to answer hard questions over real records and the movements of Zheng He. Some of the the harshest critics then were Chinese interviewed. His charts and maps were said by proffesional cartographers to have little to do with Americas coastline.
http://www.dightonrock.com/chinese_do_not_...e_menzies_t.htm
..."Nonsense," declares China 's Zheng He Association, which celebrates the exploits of Zheng He...
http://hnn.us/articles/1308.html
Unfortunately for supporters of this theory, he offers no proof, only a great deal of circumstantial evidence marred by questionable scholarship....
Authors that aim to rewrite 500 years of accepted history should rely less on subjective claims and more on hard evidence. And this is where Menzies ultimately fails to persuade. First, he does not read Chinese and thus cites no primary sources--a problem even if one accepts that the records were all destroyed. Even more fatal to his argument, Menzies often fails to provide corroborating data for many of his claims. To cite just four examples, he: never provides the DNA evidence supposedly linking the American Indians and Chinese; fails to document the discovery of Chinese anchors off the coast of California; appeals to unspecified "local experts," as when arguing that remains of 15th century Chinese shipwrecks have been found in New Zealand...etc.

I am from NZ. The idea of Chinese junks wrecked on the shorelines here are only held by a mixture of crack-pots or bigots who fancy other races were either here first (before Maori) or taught the Maori aspects of their culture. The more ignorant you are of physical realities the more the ideas appeal, and there has never been any ID of the junks as such despite I being in association with people who studied the preservation of wrecks and extraction of ship fittings. I never heard any 'junks' mentioned.
Hence my doubts over this map appearing too. Somebody will make money of this. Truth has little to do with it.

They currently examines whether it is drawn in 1763. The result will out in February. If it is true, it will be one step closer to proving 1421 theory. However, the map look very detail and extensive and hard to believe it is actually produced in 1418.

Quite impossible that it would not include Sri Lanka or the major islands of Southeast Asia, especially the Strait of Malacca. Those were major landmarks for Chinese sailors.

I recall that Menzies showed us something like this too, when we met him at his Singapore exhibition. I was not convinced at all.

What's the chance of a Chinese map that got their own and surrounding coastline muddied, whereas the entire American pacific (from the Bering strait down to Tierra del Fuego) and Western African ones relatively correct NOT a fake?

To topic:

No way man, America belongs to Iceland.

I presume you're joking...

Not really since the chinese media didn't even pay any attention on this map. I wonder why the western Media is so interested in this one.

They claim European copied the separation of California, anyway North-upward maps do not look ancient Chinese. Anyway I doubt that Chinese explored to the interior of the continents to show major rivers (and found Antarctica).
Or is it like just from a person who could see the earth from above (but does not explain the racism and the separated California)

Yes, actually I doubt the age is as old as Zheng He's time, and is the year written properly in Chinese? If so, then it could be 60 (and multiples) years older?

Or that they were just drawn so small?

On the side of .... "Maybe"...

I looked at the map, and I also offer some questions...

Could a single human being show ?? 15-30 islands in the Indian Ocean-Pacific area, AND the British Isles, and the Yucatan, AND map all this accurately in 30 years of sailing the oceans?

I may be wrong, but I am asking the "logic" question... the "possibility/probability" question...

somechineseperson quote...
"It seems more likely that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called “The Marvellous Visions of the Star Raft”."

I am not disputing Zheng He exploring the Americas... that is too plausible to me.

I am not disputing ancient Chinese knowing ALL about the land mass of the Americas, probably by 400 BC, maybe much, much earlier (2700 BC).

I am not disputing Chinese maps being in existence since the days of Huang Di who is credited with some form of compass device and mapmaking (some say his exploits were mythological).

The only possibility of this map being a true map, and not a forgery, in my mind, is if this map was a compilation of many previous maps. Magellan (who died on the voyage) and his crew took three years to circumnavigate the globe, and he came away only with a "big picture" of land masses, and their location, not their shape. To say that one sailor was the exclusive "first" and original map maker for such a large scale and accurate map, AND show a Northwest Passage through the Arctic circle where it probably was ice-bound, AND show rivers and streams where they don't exist, all in a single 35 year time frame, ... I think this is physically and "timely" impossible by one human being.

I don't see what China supposedly did in the 15th century has to do with what China is doing now. If you ask me, the media who are blowing it up are taking advatage of the stir that Galvin Menzies caused with his book than the "China Threat" idea you keep harping about.

That is just more deluded windbagging.
Where do you get this stuff from?.
Not only does it not make any sense but it is pure fantasy on your part.

On the article in the economist I would add a couple of points;
This is absolute rot!.
It might be worth noting not only have I never heard this said in New Zealand and also that the quote doesnt even supply a single identified cartographer who believes this either.


I am only down the road from Waikato University and if they really wanted to know the truth it might have been a better idea to send it to an auction house like Sotherbys as well as the laboratory, auction houses who are well familiar with spotting fake paintings. The mentality of the fakers and the tricks would be known by such people.
I know the university does carbon dating but it is a surprise they would send it here first.

I doubt we'll ever see the end result of the carbon-dating.

That's my big problem with Menzies' theory, it doesn't have any backing evidence, every so often a new one is announced (last one I remember was an undersea chinese city being discovered in Americas) in vague terms with no real expert opinions, and then nothing is heard of it again.

It makes me think that before too long a group of "Zheng He discovered America" historians will arrive on the net who will list references to these discoveries as unassailable proof, quoting websites in the same incestual way our afrocentric visitor used his.

If you noticed the round dial on top and between the twe circular portions of the map, it looks like a copy of the European solar system prints they have between the earth's halves.

Of course, I'm no mapper, maybe the Chinese did the same to their maps.

Was forwarded this by Geoff Wade, a researcher in my university and a determined detractor of the Menzies theory:



Wade was invited by a Singapore reporter based in Beijing to give a phone interview right after the press conference. He is currently also translating an essay rebuttal of the map by Gong Yingyan, an expert on old Chinese maps at Zhejiang University: http://huangzhangjin.blogchina.com/4203713.html

A major point raised by those who consider the map a hoax is the text written above the Europe area on the map, in which it is said that the people there believe in Jingjiao (a Tang term for Nestorian Christianity) and worship Shangdi. The reason is that the use of the ancient Chinese term 'Shangdi' to refer to the Christian God began only with the Jesuits in China in the late 16th century, while the term 'Jingjiao' had long fallen out of use by the Ming dynasty and it was only discovered that Jingjiao and Christianity were the same religion in 1625 when a Nestorian stele with the phrase 'Jingjiao' was found at Chang'an.

I can't believe that most experts believe the map is genuine.

Most don't, especially experts in China. Why do you get the impression they do?

I just found this news article in New York Times. ... It is another take on this map story. ...

January 17, 2006
Who Discovered America? Zheng Who?
By JOSEPH KAHN

BEIJING, Jan. 16 - A prominent Chinese lawyer and collector unveiled an old map on Monday that he and some supporters say should topple one of the central tenets of Western civilization: that Europeans were the first to sail around the world and discover America.

The Chinese map, which was drawn in 1763 but has a note on it saying it is a reproduction of a map dated 1418, presents the world as a globe with all the major continents rendered with an exactitude that European maps did not have for at least another century, after Columbus, Da Gama, Magellan, Dias and others had completed their renowned explorations.

But the map got a cool reception from some Chinese scholars and seems unlikely to persuade skeptics that Chinese seamen were the first to round the world.

Liu Gang, a partner in a well-known Beijing law firm and an amateur historian, said Monday that he bought the map for $500 in a Shanghai book store in 2001 and only subsequently discovered its value. He said he had consulted scholars in the field and had done extensive research of his own before deciding to present his findings to the public.

"The main issue is not the map itself," he said at a news conference. "It is the potential of the information in the map to change history."

At issue are the seven voyages of Zheng He, whose ships sailed the Pacific and Indian Oceans from 1405 to 1433. Historical records show that he explored Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf and the east coast of Africa, using navigational techniques and ships that were far ahead of their time.

But a small group of scholars and hobbyists, led by Gavin Menzies, a former British Navy submarine commander, argue that Zheng He traveled much farther than most Chinese and Western scholars say. Notably, Mr. Menzies claims that Zheng He visited America in 1421, 71 years before Columbus arrived there.

His 2003 book, entitled "1421: The Year China Discovered America" (William Morrow/HarperCollins), laid out extensive but widely disputed evidence that Zheng He sailed to the east coast of today's United States in 1421 and may have left settlements in South America.

Mr. Menzies has welcomed Mr. Liu's map as evidence that his theory is correct, and the two have cooperated in efforts to demonstrate its authenticity. Strictly speaking, Mr. Liu credits Zheng He with having navigated and charted the Americas at least several years before Mr. Menzies says he sailed there, though both say that is a minor contradiction.

Zheng He's achievements have been the subject of speculation for years, partly because much of the historical record was destroyed when later Chinese emperors changed their minds about the wisdom of connecting with the outside world. Last year, China's Communist government commemorated the 600th anniversary of Zheng He's better known voyages, but Beijing has not actively promoted the idea that he sailed far beyond Asian and African shores.

If the map genuinely dates to 1418, it reveals knowledge of longitude and latitude and the basic shape of the world, including the fact that it is round, that could not have come from European sources and could have been derived only from Zheng He's voyages, Mr. Liu says.

He referred to 15th-century books and memorial inscriptions and 16th-century maps that credit earlier Chinese discoveries among a variety of indirect evidence to support his thesis.

But Mr. Liu acknowledged that he had no hard evidence of the existence of a 1418 map beyond the word of the mapmaker who said he made the copy in the late 18th century, a time when all of its cartographical achievements would have been commonplace.

Gong Yingyan, a historian at Zhejiang University and a leading map expert, argues that the map is too full of anachronisms to date from the 15th century.

He said, for example, that Chinese cartographers did not use the style of projection seen in Mr. Liu's map - the rendering of a three-dimensional globe on a flat sheet - until after Europeans introduced that technique to the Chinese much later.

The map's Chinese notes about the cultures, religious and racial features of people in the continents of the world also contain vocabulary that would have been unfamiliar to a reader in the early 15th century, he said. He cited the term the map uses for the Western God, which he said was not used until after the Jesuits arrived in China in the 16th century.

"I had high hopes when I first heard about the existence of such a map," Mr. Gong said. "But I can see now that it is an entirely ordinary map that proves nothing."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/internat...a/17map.html?hp

I've linked this thread from a post on my blog about the map.

http://bowlingforillidan.blogspot.com/2006...orld-again.html

Can we call this map thing a hoax then?

I'm calling it a hoax. Other Chinese maps of the same period have Asia/Africa looking nothing like that.

http://guancha.gmw.cn/show.aspx?id=6212

http://www.economist.com/books/displaystor...tory_id=5381851

THE brave seamen whose great voyages of exploration opened up the world are iconic figures in European history. Columbus found the New World in 1492; Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; and Magellan set off to circumnavigate the world in 1519. However, there is one difficulty with this confident assertion of European mastery: it may not be true.

It seems more likely that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called “The Marvellous Visions of the Star Raft”.

Next week, in Beijing and London, fresh and dramatic evidence is to be revealed to bolster Zheng He's case. It is a copy, made in 1763, of a map, dated 1418, which contains notes that substantially match the descriptions in the book. “It will revolutionise our thinking about 15th-century world history,” says Gunnar Thompson, a student of ancient maps and early explorers.

The map (shown above) will be unveiled in Beijing on January 16th and at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich a day later. Six Chinese characters in the upper right-hand corner of the map say this is a “general chart of the integrated world”. In the lower left-hand corner is a note that says the chart was drawn by Mo Yi Tong, imitating a world chart made in 1418 which showed the barbarians paying tribute to the Ming emperor, Zhu Di. The copyist distinguishes what he took from the original from what he added himself.

The map was bought for about $500 from a small Shanghai dealer in 2001 by Liu Gang, one of the most eminent commercial lawyers in China, who collects maps and paintings. Mr Liu says he knew it was significant, but thought it might be a modern fake. He showed his acquisition to five experienced collectors, who agreed that the traces of vermin on the bamboo paper it is written on, and the de-pigmentation of ink and colours, indicated that the map was more than 100 years old.

Mr Liu was unsure of its meaning, and asked specialists in ancient Chinese history for their advice, but none, he says, was forthcoming. Then, last autumn, he read “1421: The Year China Discovered the World”, a book written in 2003 by Gavin Menzies, in which the author makes the controversial claim that Zheng He circumnavigated the world, discovering America on the way. Mr Menzies, who is a former submariner in the Royal Navy and a merchant banker, is an amateur historian and his theory met with little approval from professionals. But it struck a chord: his book became a bestseller and his 1421 website is very popular. In any event, his arguments convinced Mr Liu that his map was a relic of Zheng He's earlier voyages.

The detail on the copy of the map is remarkable. The outlines of Africa, Europe and the Americas are instantly recognisable. It shows the Nile with two sources. The north-west passage appears to be free of ice. But the inaccuracies, also, are glaring. California is shown as an island; the British Isles do not appear at all. The distance from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean is ten times greater than it ought to be. Australia is in the wrong place (though cartographers no longer doubt that Australia and New Zealand were discovered by Chinese seamen centuries before Captain Cook arrived on the scene).

The commentary on the map, which seems to have been drawn from the original, is written in clear Chinese characters which can still be easily read. Of the west coast of America, the map says: “The skin of the race in this area is black-red, and feathers are wrapped around their heads and waists.” Of the Australians, it reports: “The skin of the aborigine is also black. All of them are naked and wearing bone articles around their waists.”

But this remarkable precision, rather than the errors, is what critics of the Menzies theory are likely to use to question the authenticity of the 1418 map. Mr Menzies and his followers are naturally extremely keen to establish that the 1763 copy is not a forgery and that it faithfully represents the 1418 original. This would lend weighty support to their thesis: that China had indeed discovered America by (if not actually in) 1421. Mass spectrography analysis to date the copied map is under way at Waikato University in New Zealand, and the results will be announced in February. But even if affirmative, this analysis is of limited importance since it can do no more than date the copyist's paper and inks.

Five academic experts on ancient charts note that the 1418 map puts together information that was available piecemeal in China from earlier nautical maps, going back to the 13th century and Kublai Khan, who was no mean explorer himself. They believe it is authentic.

The map makes good estimates of the latitude and longitude of much of the world, and recognises that the earth is round. “The Chinese were almost certainly aware of longitude before Zheng He set sail,” says Robert Cribbs of California State University. They certainly assumed the world was round. “The format of the map is totally consistent with the level of knowledge that we should expect of royal Chinese geographers following the voyages of Zheng He,” says Mr Thompson.

Moreover, some of the errors in the 1418 map soon turned up in European maps, the most striking being California drawn as an island. The Portuguese are aware of a world map drawn before 1420 by a cartographer named Albertin di Virga, which showed Africa and the Americas. Since no Portuguese seamen had yet discovered those places, the most obvious source for the information seems to be European copies of Chinese maps.

But this is certainly not a unanimous view among the experts, with many of the fiercest critics in China itself. Wang Tai-Peng, a scholarly journalist in Vancouver who does not doubt that the Chinese explored the world early in the 15th century (he has written about a visit by Chinese ambassadors to Florence in 1433), doubts whether Zheng He's ships landed in North America. Mr Wang also claims that Zheng He's navigation maps were drawn in a totally different Chinese map-making tradition. “Until the 1418 map is scientifically authenticated, we still have to take it with a grain of salt,” he says.

Most forgeries are driven by a commercial imperative, especially when the market for ancient maps is booming, as it is now. The Library of Congress recently paid $10m for a copy of a 1507 world map by Martin Waldseemuller, a German cartographer. But Mr Liu says he is not a seller: “The map is part of my life,” he claims.

The consequences of the discovery of this map could be considerable. If it does indeed prove to be the first map of the world, “the history of New World discovery will have to be rewritten,” claims Mr Menzies. How much does this matter? Showing that the world was first explored by Chinese rather than European seamen would be a major piece of historical revisionism. But there is more to history than that. It is no less interesting that the Chinese, having discovered the extent of the world, did not exploit it, politically or commercially. After all, Columbus's discovery of America led to exploitation and then development by Europeans which, 500 years later, made the United States more powerful than China had ever been.

ok, I think I make a mistake.

if he claims that he discovered the world, there are other explorers who also fought for recognition as the true discoverer of america.

a hoax can be a true someday, or a lie could never die,

The particular map may or may not be a forgery, but I believe it is based on many, many, previous maps and facts and voyages and connections. The date of 1421 or 1405 is way too modern. My vote, all cultures were in the West 5000 years ago. I firmly believe the rumored stories that Christopher Colombus told the Pope that he found Chinese artifacts and Asian people in Hispaniola and the other islands he discovered. "Brendan the Navigator" is written about in all libraries of the United States, 558 AD. His book "Navigatio" apparently still resides in the Vatican. Even HE was not the first, not by 3500 years, yet not one school history books mentions this name even though the Irish of Limirick and Galway and parts of Long Island-USA celebrate his birthday and voyage.

The biggest propaganda fraud of the last 5000 years is that Christopher Colombus discovered the Americas, or that Christians discovered the Americas, or that Europeans discovered the Americas, or that the Vatican discovered the Americas. The Western Hemisphere did not disappear for 10,000 years!!! Most advanced cultures including the Chinese knew all about it... but they certainly did not tell their neighbors, and in most cases, I believe the ruling class and the educated priests did not tell the common folk. Even Chinese history books mention that "new Chinese rulers" would destroy the "culture" of conquered dynasties, that is one reason this knowledge remains so elusive and "lost".

There were good reasons to keep the shipping lanes secret, and the navigation routes secret, and certainly the copper mines and the gold/silver/turquoise/greenstone mines secret.

Question: How could a cabdriver, tourist, non-academic, wannabe historian, like myself, find Egyptian images on the Western wall of Teotuhuacan, in the Valley of Mexico? These images and the temple itself were completely unknown to even the Aztec culture, and the temple complex was not unearthed until 1880.

http://www.world-mysteries.com/gw_edziom3.htm

Yet the geographic layout appears similar to the Giza Plateau layout.

http://www.world-mysteries.com/gizavsteotihuacan.htm

As mentioned before, Teotu-huacan has Chinese implications too. My theory: Tehotu, Thoth, Tao Te Ching.

Zheng He having a map? Very possible, if not most likely.

Is this particular map authentic? Unknown.

Was Zheng He the "first"? I say, Impossible!

This is totally a hoax, and looks like a chinese cartographer copied a european map. dead give-aways are the mapped rivers through africa. This was the main form of transportation for imperialist europe to settle africa. The level of detail on this map had to have taken over a 100 years of travel and compiling of data if it was chinese, and if that were the case then there would be many european accounts of Chinese expeditions in and around europe.

I missed the quote, but someone mentioned south and south-east asian islands and indonesia are not present on the map. If you look closer to Aussie, you will see above are many scattered islands. i agree, another give away it is european....Chinese would have had this area much more detailed and accurate, I would think.

the biggest flaw that strikes me is no UK. Maybe, if the map was drawn in the mid-1700's, Qianlong tried to dispute the existance of imperialist britian, wanting no part of any trade, demanding it to be taken off the map. Just my theory.

and just to be a wise guy, it was people of asian decent that discovered the americas first anyways...they travelled over the, what is now bering straight (connected russia and alaska), down through north and south america.



agreed...both costs are distinguishable. It would have been incredibly difficult for chinese to sail around the tip of South America due to very cold and harsh climate. same goes for antarctica.

Of course you do, Ed. Of course you do.

It is on par with most of the other forms of distorted evidence you use.

the map is being dated in New Zealand

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3543104a10,00.html

While we wait for the scientific analysis of the map, let me add some background information on Chinese explorers besides Zheng He... and Marco Polo being influenced by the Chinese, and Chinese excursions around the world, and Egyptians.... "Did the Western Hemisphere Disappear for 10,000 years?"

Note... nobody seems to question Zheng He's alleged voyages to the new world... only the authenticity of the map found....

Bits and pieces of what I found... believe any or all or none of it..., I find it very interesting.

http://www.sun-herald.com/NewsArchive4/021...tory=tp9de9.htm

LINDSEY AT LARGE
Monks found America

It is certain that "Cristoforo Colombo" was johnny-come-lately in the discovery of America. Just who -- other than the Native Americans, who knew quite well where they were -- has been a controversy ever since Chris was accorded the honor.

Indeed, it is well-established that the great navigator we call Columbus was aware of Norse sagas about land on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean inhabited by "skrelings."

Archeologists have ample evidence that Old World sailors reached the Americas 3,000 years ago.

Thus, it is somewhat amusing to note the hullabaloo aroused last week by publication of a book "1421: The Year China Discovered America."

Author Gavin Menzies attributes the honor to a truly historical Admiral Zheng He, who is alleged to have sailed west -- a la Columbus -- completely around the world.

"It's crazy talk," says history professor Wang Xiaofu at Beijing University. "We (the Zheng He Association) absolutely do not accept this theory."

I agree with Professor Wang and offer a better candidate: Hwui Shan, who visited the North American continent in 458 and left a written record.

Hwui Shan is not his true family name but is a Chinese term meaning "very intelligent." Shan was born in land-locked Afghanistan and became a Buddhist monk. He was among 40 other young monks who set out to carry the faith of Buddha to the ends of the earth.

They spent a few years in China, which at that time navigated the open oceans with the aid of an instrument then unknown elsewhere -- the compass. We know that early Chinese ships sailed on regular schedules with ships capable of carrying up to 300 passengers.

Shan heard tales by sailors about countries beyond the "Eastern Ocean" -- a vast body of water the Spanish explorer Balboa would "discover" more than a thousand years later and name Pacific.

Chinese navigators knew there was land on the other side of the Eastern Ocean, just as Columbus knew the earth was round and that eventually he would reach land across the Atlantic.

The young Buddhist monks were intrigued by accounts of a fabulous land where "trees grew a mile tall, silkworms were 7 feet long, and birds had three legs."

A third-century Chinese poet, for example, had written of far eastern lands:

"East of the Eastern Ocean lie/The shores of the Land of Fusang. If, after landing there, you travel/ East for ten thousand li/You will come to another ocean, blue/vast, huge, boundless." (The Atlantic?)

The Chinese were among the earliest boat builders and navigators. Archeological discoveries in California and Central America bear out ancient contacts with Orientals.

The Japan Current, a strong river within the Pacific, speeds along at 70 to 100 miles per day in the initial stages of its course eastward to the southern reaches of Central America before swinging west. It is certain that pre-history sailors used this current as an aid in going to and coming from America.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/821404/posts

PROBABLE ROUTE OF THE EGYPTIAN VOYAGE IN 232 B.C.

Deciphered rock and cave inscriptions from the Pacific islands, western New Guinea, and Santiago, Chile, tell of an Egyptian flotilla that set sail around 232 B.C., during the reign of Ptolemy III, on a mission to circumnavigate the globe. The six ships sailed under the direction of Captain Rata and Navigator Maui, a friend of the astronomer Eratosthenes (ca. 275-194 B.C.), who headed the famous library at Alexandria. Maui's inscriptions, as deciphered in the 1970s by epigrapher Barry Fell, indicated that this was a proof-of-
principle voyage, to demonstrate Eratosthenes' theorem that the world was round, and approximately 24,500 miles in circumference.

http://www.atlantisinamerica.com/atlantis/articles/art.asp

Stone stelae at Copan (Honduras) display Chinese features, while the 15 foot tall statues at Tula (Valley of Mexico) display the features of Polynesians. It now appears that all these diverse people were coming to the heart of the Americas from 1,500 to at least 15,000 years ago. The complex origins of the first Americans has also been confirmed by DNA studies that have revealed the presence of haplogroup X among Algonkian-speaking tribes such as the Ojibway. Today, haplogroup X is found in between two and four per cent of European populations, and in the Middle East, but it has never been found in northeast Asian peoples.

The question is no longer, "Did navigators come to the New World before Columbus and Lief Erikson?" The question is when did they stop coming, and why did they lose all memory of man's navigational past? In Europe the answer may be tied to the onset of the Dark and Middle Ages. We are becoming inured to catastrophic events of late. But what event caused the Dark ages to begin and the history of navigation and other knowledge to become lost? The answer to that question still eludes us.

http://www.1421.tv/pages/evidence/content.asp?EvidenceID=24

Chinese records which escaped destruction (Largely taken from Chinese Discovery of Australia by Professor Wei Ju Xian) Australia

(i) Confucius: Spring and Autumn Annals (481 BC) recorded solar eclipses in Australia 17 April 592 and 11 August 553).

(ii) Classics of Mountains and Seas (338 BC) describes boomerangs, black millet and kangaroos.

(iii) Atlas of Foreign Countries (265-316 AD) describes small black natives of Northern Australia.
Poles/Equator

(i) Zhuangzi (3rd century BC): “It takes six months including flying and resting time for seagulls to fly 90,000 li from North to South Pole”.

(ii) Ancient Chinese books: “Distance North Pole to South Pole is more than 80,000 li”. [Old Chinese li = half a kilometre]

(iii) Qi-xie (643 BC): “If a person of Yan State [Hebei Province] goes north and a person of Yue State [Zhejian, S. China] goes south they will meet each other at the very end of their journey”.

(iv) Zhuangzi also mentions going round the earth from east to west. Xun zi [40 years after Zhuangzi] also mentions round earth from east to west.

(v) Lienzi (3rd century BC): “South of Africa sun cannot be seen for 50 consecutive days.

(vi) Illustrated Record of Strange Countries (published 1430) describes North Pole – Eskimos; coldness; sunshine hours; polar lights; sea elephants and seals.

(vii) Marco Polo mentioned several unique aspects of geography that could not possibly have been contrived from hearsay or imagination. For example, he mentions in one episode that while travelling towards the North Pole (by compass), he observed that the Pole Star (at the Geographic Pole) appeared to have a southerly bearing. This observation of the discrepancy between the location of the Magnetic North Pole and Polaris could only have been made by a person who had travelled to a point midway between the Geographic Pole and the Magnetic Pole. This is solid proof that Marco Polo had indeed reached the Canadian Arctic. – Dr. Gunnar Thompson. To view Dr. Thompson‘s fascinating research please visit www.marcopolovoyages.com

From 'Stuff';
I've met Dr. Petchey before. If we dont hear more about this I will call and ask for info about the results if need be.
The most important test for me would be the ink where it atributes the original map to Ming era. Adding extra value by faking this writing alone would be the logical conclusion if it is from the 18th century.


Ed,
You can find masses of bunk to throw at us via websources, but when I look at any one piece in depth it tends to fall down like most of your posts. I can give you some specific recent examples of your hasty conclusions if you need refreshing.
Rather than spaming us with Atlantis sites and conspiracies why not investigate a single part just a little to even a miminum standard of understanding?
Here is a start;

So the Chinese arrived by 481BC in Australia. I suggest you check the reference and tell me how it can make sense during the Spring & Autumn period, and what ancient Chinese word actually means 'Australia'.
Get back to me when you have looked into this.

Wow, even in the Tang dynasty the 'Journey to the West' (i.e India) was a momentus event of legend that the real characters are remembered for even today.
The Eastern lands from 458 with ''7 foot long silkworms and 3 legged birds'' does not even need to be America. We know for instance that even Chinese trips to Taiwan are hard to establish before the 3 KIngdoms period. There are many places for the buddhists to land on apart from America.
Do you have the original account by any chance?


Uhuh. Who deciphered them? Not an Egyptologist I'll bet. Do you have images and confirmation of this?
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.


Yeah. The name says it all. Nice.

Fine. Tell me what ancient words where used for 'kangaroo' & 'boomerang' for the author to arrive at this conclusion.


What word means Africa? What is the original phrase?.
Ed, are you sure your sites are accurate representations? (rhetorical question...of course you don't)


Sigh. refer to the above.
Do they make it easy to check their interpretations? Are the original examples posted for confirmation?
The less you know the better it sounds.
What they dont tell you will serve their purposes even better than what they twist around in retelling.

If you check that and the others they will be distortions or fabrications. Most people wil never check, and a few readers even want to believe such things and so positively avoid doing so.
I cant address all of your fancies but I suggest you ease off on telling us everybody discovered everywhere and show us just one culture that discovered one far flung place for certain.
Focus.

Some real proof would make a nice change too.

You are running in an academic marathon before you can even walk. I cant always point out your shocking errors of fact on 'Welsh speaking Indians found by Raleigh' and the possible Chinese origin of the name Wyoming. etc etc. There are not enough hours in a day, but leave the laughable websites out of it if you mean to really make a case of history.
You can clutch at straws for as long as you please but all you have in the end is enough to make a meal for farm animals.

Ken, the world is full of sewage and nay-sayers and negative people. You are certainly no academic.

Can you name me one of your positive posts on this website? Anywhere? Or do you spend your full waking hours shooting down speculation, with your own speculation?

Can an individual block another individual on this website? I do not consider you a positive contribution, anywhere, on any post, at any time.

Please enlighten me otherwise. I think you ruin the threads you slam, which seems to be everyone you post!

Well, if you mean that as a real response to my points then it is typically feeble of you.
Dont throw the toys out of the cot. Just look into your own subjects a bit deeper and my comments might make sense.
Rather than investigating my character, which you will no doubt make a botch up of this too, why not explain why you consider those sources as evidence beyond the imagination of idle amateurs?

I can see you equate me with sewerage (big deal), yet this piece of sewerage seems to be able to spot your childlike word games in Chinese and other languages....and it was me that told you that Raleigh never even set foot in America. I havent seen one thing you have ever said that stands up to a closer look.

I am not an 'academic' (any more than your internet sources are) but I am capable of spotting your poor attempts at evidence, since I am both academically trained and cooperate with proffesional academics. How I make my day money is irelevant. My association with the Archaeological Association these days is more ad-hoc but so what?
This weekend I am going to be collecting a large sampling of flakes from uncovered coastal stoneworking sites so identifications can be made at Auckland University. Last weekend a geologist visited me at home to view my artefacts and see the photographs previously unrecorded sites I discovered. This is to be used in a report on pre-historic trace in NZ. A publication is being drawn up for this, and even carbon dating to be done on the basis of shell midden I showed him from a 13th century site. The sites I provided fieldnotes for have already been used in publications in NZ.
I believe you drive a cab, as you often tell us. What does it matter? It is only your poor investigations I am questioning and not your lifestyle.
You pettiness does not make you more believable.

Ed, Ed, Ed,
Does anything I say make sense? Does asking for you to understand the subjects you dabble in mean I am being unfair?
Is asking for physical proof being unfair? When I ask for info on the boats in the Sahara you mention and you dont give it (typical) I dont think it is unfair.
I am just calling your bluff.

If you want to see positive posts then look under my most recent in Ancient Arsenal on Shang to Han armour and crossbows from Han to Song. In the archaeology forum I have a number of studies of physical features of artefacts and the explanations of their purpose, as well as links to other sites.
You in turn post almost exclusively the most unconvincing word associations based on cultures you havent bothered to check in depth. Many are nowhere contemporary in time, even if we believe your sea going Atlantis stuff.
My quick checks found the American placenames you used for these were either modern 19th century English versions, or the original Indian words had no relationship to the modern words you compare with Chinese. Why pack a hissy fit when you simply did a poor job. I am a bad guy for letting you know what a poor job you are doing? Sorry to be hurtful, buddy....but your posts cry out for it.
The reason you only see negativity from me is because you always bring on the same garbage.

Do I find what you think of me is a concern?
No.
I simply address your statements on their flimsy basis. I know you are beyond articulating specifics on these subjects so you fail as a matter of course. If you get all whiney about me being negative then I am not shamed into suddenly revising my opinion of you as very thoroughly unconvincing & confused.

C'mon. Lets not put up a smoke screen. Be brave, buddy.

I asked if you knew the internet translations for above were accurate.
How do you get the word 'Australia' from a Spring & Autumn text?
Sour grapes does not make your ideas any more convincing.

Ok guys, lets take five and cool off. The topic is interesting but lets refrain from taking pot shots at each other.

*deep breaths*
repeat after me, "Go to the happy place, go to the happy place..."
And remember to smile

Let's not make this about national pride. I think the map is not a 1418 map. Am I then anti-Chinese? That is how nationalism stifles academic debate.

lol, I wish the Japanese war crimes admitting Japanese people aren't consider anti-Japanese.

ok.. that was lobster and his spam..

back on topic...:

Do someone know about this book?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006054094...glance&n=283155

If you believe that little green men from outer space built Stonehenge or the Nazca lines in Peru, this is the book you want to read. Don't get me wrong. I like books that shake and rattle the academic establishment -- but you gotta be at least moderately credible and get most of your facts right. Menzies fails on both counts, although he's pretty good at covering up his astounding claims with a patina of scientific language.

Menzies thesis is that the Chinese sailed around the world in 1421 and on side jaunts discovered Antarctica, the North Pole, circumnavigated Greenland (!!), and left colonies all over the Americas including building stone towers near Boston. Moreover, the Chinese sailed around the world in only a couple of years. Oddly, the Chinese seem to have missed Europe where their visit would surely have been remembered and recorded.

As in all good cons, there's a grain of truth in Menzies. The Chinese undertook some serious sea expeditions in the 1400s, exploring the East African coast as far south as Mozambique and probably touching on the northern coast of Australia. It's conceivable that at some point in their long history the Chinese -- purposely or by accident -- may have reached the northwest Coast of North America -- as it is equally plausible that American Indians may have reached out toward Asia. Read "Kon Tiki."

Despite a kernel of fact, most of Menzies' book is a mountain of nonsense. To take just one claim, Menzies has the Chinese circumnavigating ice-bound Greenland, explaining that this was possible because of a warmer climate in those days. Au contraire, Gavin. As every geographer knows, the period from about 1400 to 1700 is known as the "Little Ice Age" and temperatures were significantly colder than they are today. Greenland was not circumnavigatable by sea in 1421; rather the Norse colonies in Greenland were dying out because of the miserable weather. The first non-motorized circumnavigation of Greenland took place in 2001, and it was accomplished by dogsled and kayak, not a 15th century Chinese junk.

Many, many other examples of silliness are found in the book. Suffice it to say that this book should be marketed in the fantasy section of your local book store.

Smallchief

I was disheartened to see the Chinese professors rebuttal state that if the map is a hoax, then we must consign Zheng Hes circum-navigation to the realm of fairy tales.

If the map is a hoax in no way impacts how far Zheng He managed to sail.
Because Columbus' diary was found to be a fake does not mean that Columbus never made it to the new world.

Xng and Kediren,

There is absolutely no need to make personal attacks. You're just further degrading the quality of this thread.

Yep, I so agree with you there... what a terrible magazine , politically,... though i'm sure the real pple behind it aren;t too bad,, just a bit warped politically



the chinese professors are a bit conserative, i don't think they actually go behind reading books and compiling data. i give menzies the credit for actually sailing the route, and actively researching, though personally his theory does seem slightly far-fetched.

To most on this thread...

As I told GZ, there seems to be a deluge of information in the libraries I go to, such as the wonderful New York Public Library, on 42nd Street, that have multiple publications mentioning the possibilities and probabilities of ancient oceanic voyages by virtually every large culture you could name.

I haven't read Menzies book, but he is only one of 50 or so that I have come across.

Do we say... CHF is a high-brow, pristine academic website, therefore, don't mention the "boatload" of fanciful accounts, the unfounded theories, the non-academic speculation based on single-found artifacts?

.... or...

Do we present the many, many concepts that have filled the American libraries, and may not be present in Europe or Asia? Likewise, I am crushed by the contributions of many, many others, with their new and insightful theories, which our libraries NEVER mention. Boatloads of fresh information on my side, boatloads on every other side which I have no access to.

End of the day, I feel like one of the 27 blind men trying to gauge what an elephant looks like... a rope? a wall? a tree trunk, or a pile of turd that just dropped on my head? We all have bits and pieces of the puzzle, some of it claiming to be "authentic", some of it claiming to be fanciful, etc. etc.

I say we present all sides of the puzzle, because none of us will ever know the full truth.

Zheng He was an authentic ocean-going navigator, in my opinion. The Western Hemisphere did not disappear for 10,000 years, not in my opinion. Chris Columbus was "Johnny come Last", in my opinion.

This is a wonderful, educational discussion, and I thank you for your opinions.

Huishen was not from the area of Afghanistan, and he did not sail from China. Instead, he claimed to be a visitor from a strange land called Fusang. The account is recorded in the Liang Shu, the dynastic history of the Liang dynasty (502-557). I will start a separate topic on it in the Age of Fragmentation section.

OK, here it is: http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php...wtopic=9554&hl=

I believe this is the most complete English translation of Huishen's account on the internet.