According to this book I just read, “Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne” some Buddhist monks led by Monk Hui Shen sailed to Mexico in, which she claims is proven by the existence of Buddhist-like artwork and similar symbols.
I’ve never heard this anywhere else.
Ever.
And it sounds like it would be the find of the century. The sort of thing that would be prominently displayed in textbooks everywhere.
I’ve already caught her basically dead wrong about some other facts, so is she just making stuff up at this point or have I been somehow avoided by this strange and amazing fact?
Not sure if this is related but one of my college profs once passed around some pictures and spent some time talking about some skulls discovered in Central or South America somewhere (I forget where) that anthropologists were pretty sure were Chinese. I think there may have also been some tools or artifacts or something that looked Chinese.
Sorry I’m shakey on the details but I do think there is some credible evidence that there may have been a pre-Columbian Chinese presence in the Americas who presumably could have been Buddhist. I’ll see if I can find any more.
Here’s something on a pre-Columbian [url=http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/books/01/13/1421/]Chinese presence in the Americas. Nothing about skulls, though (and come to think of it, it might have been mummies…)
Upon further googling I think I was conflating two different things in my mind. I was mixing up the Chinese-in-America theory with the discovery not of Chinese mummies in America but with caucasian mummies in China
I still think there are some artifacts in South America that look Chinese (I think it might have been knives) but I got the mummies backwards. Sorry about that.
Presumably you’re refering to Louise Levathes’ When China Ruled The Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433 (Oxford, 1994). Her account of the subject in general is vastly more cautious than Gavin Menzies’ and, as you probably realise, she’s usually cited as the sensible alternative to him.
That said, this particular issue is the eyebrow raising claim in her book. She vaguely states on p31-2:
This seems fair enough, as far as it goes. The first sentence is both non-commital and rather minimises the issue. And it is true that people have remarked on such “similarities”. Unfortunately, they’ve tended to be bonkers diffusionists in the Barry Fell mould. Personally, I don’t see any resemblences that are particularly worthy of note.
Her longer discussion of the issue on p40-1 is at least endnoted. The citation is to David Kelley, which strikes me as half-decent. He’s undoubtedly damn clever and a key figure in the decipherment of Mayan hieroglypics, but much of his later work is regarded as eccentric by other Mayanists. And I’ve never come across any of them endorsing him on this point.
Really? Granted, I’m not struck by any similarities in the first place, but any influence is surely rather minor. At best, it’s on a par with the Vikings in Newfoundland. Interesting, but of no great significance in the long run. (Of course, L’Anse aux Meadows does tend to get a high profile in textbooks, but that’s another issue.)
Out of interest, where do you think she’s wrong? (I’m not a specialist, so I wouldn’t expect to spot such mistakes, but I am interested in her general reliability.)
I’m currently enrolled in a Human Geography course. The other day we were discussing the European colonial movement. I asked if there was anything going on in the Eastern world at this time, and I got a bunch of blank stares. The consensus was that the Eastern world, specifically China, wasn’t doing much exploration at the time. I find that hard to swallow.
Pretty much correct. China abandoned the external world and followed a policy on inwardness strictly after 1433 or so. Colonialism started about that same time (acually, about a generation later, when the Portuguese managed to get around Africa). No one else had the interest, or at least power, to make colonies.
Hit it on the head.
True, but that was mentioned quite porminently in a very new textbook. You’d think it would have been worthy of mention, particularly since contact with the New and Old world is something of much importance to us 'Mericans.
Two things specifically come to mind.
She’s dead wrong about the introduciton of drydocks into European shipbuilding (forget the page she mentioned them on). She states that the English made the first in Eurpean history in the 16th century. In actual fact, the Greeks built some way back before Christ.
On a more general note, she’s a whiny hag-harpy. I mean that. She continuanually compares Europe to CHinese technology and engineering and society and always mentions, for no reason other than to bring up a pointless fact, the myriad ways in which China was better. I wouldn’rt have minded it much if she’d actually done a chapter-length comparison of the shipbuilding technologies of the day, but her goal is to snipe rather than explain.
Worse yet, she effectively lies because she ignores the actualy situation and limitations that western Europe faced at the time. She implies, for example, that the Santa Maria was the largest ship the Euros could produce, which is dead wrong, amid her personal wet-dream about ship sizes.
Not to hijack or anything, but I always thought that the nation to be the first to do _____, whether it was to colonize North America or send a man on the moon, also had a lot to do with national interest and not just feasability. I will acknolege that China had the technological capacity to do so, but whether or not they really cared to do so is an entirely different matter.
The egyptions had the technological capacity to do so in reed boats. For that matter, there is some evidence that Irish monks made the trek in skin coracles. People have done both.
The coracles, most interstingly, work very well in artctic waters. If you run into an iceberg, you just push off again. If onyl the titanic was made of seal.
Given the Kuroshio Current and similar winds, it would not be surprising if the occasional Chinese vessel went off course and ended up in the Americas. Their influence is clearly more debatable.
For any contact between Eurasia (or Africa) and the Americas, I am always curious as to what contagious diseases were prevalent among the peoples of the “old world” at the time of the purported contact. We already know that the Spanish contact with the Americas (augmented with a few journeys by people to the North of Spain) absolutely wreaked havoc with the peoples of the Americas, with smallpox, measles, and a number of other illnesses sweeping across the unprotected Americans like huge, lethal scythes.
To establish that some other “old world” society established any more than a bump-and-go contact with any “new world” society, one should be able to demonstrate that at the time of the contact, no contagious diseases were endemic to the “old world” peoples.
To my mind, an inability to demonstrate that the “old world” socities were free of pathogens at the times of contacts reduces the claims of strong contacts to wishful thinking.
No, it is a Nahuatl designation, given to the region by Nahuatl-speakers that accompanied Alvarado’s expedition in 1520, though just what it refers to is disputed. The most common translations are either “land of the trees” ( quahtemallan ) or “mountain of vomiting water” ( guhatezmalla - referring to the volcano by the second capital established in 1527 in the Almononga valley, destroyed by a mudslide in 1541 ).
