Chinese Knew North America More Than 4000 Years Ago!

But the versions are identifiable. Hwui Shan’s is matter-of-fact for the most part. Yu-kie’s version has the thread of Hwui Shan’s words, but the bulk of it is humorous burlesque on a basic story. But a basic story there is.

The story is that Hwui Shan and his companions traveled east from China about thirteen thousand miles and, from a coast, traveled inland. Within some three hundred fifty miles, they met “primitive” people along the way and saw others who had heads of dogs and lived in round adobe homes. Traveling on, they eventually reached a “relatively civilized” people having a written language, a type of paper, a government, buildings, and a culture somewhat like that of the natives of southern Mexico. Hwui Shan described the geography only generally but had much to record about the social organization of the people.

The court records do not mention whether Hwui Shan was working from his own notes or not. If the story is true, he was a man recalling something he had done years earlier.

What the emperor thought of the priest’s story is not known, but into the court records it went. The record attracted some later comment about the Far East, but the Chinese consistently had other things to worry about than a real continent across the ocean. More than a thousand years passed before anyone apparently wondered where Hwui Shan might really have been.

Western scholars made the first controversial comments about the story. In 1753 Phillippe Buache made the outrageous suggestion that Buddhist priests had established a colony on the west coast of America. (31) In 1761 Joseph de Guignes presented a paper to the French Royal Academy concerning Hwui Shan’s account. Not only did he give a translation of the priest’s words, but also de Guignes maintained that Fu Sang was Mexico and that the people described by Hwui Shan were the Indians of Mexico and the southwestern United States. For many years there was a scholarly silence. Then in 1831 Julius Klaproth, an eminent German scholar, attacked de Guignes’s view, and the fight was on. The contention quickly attracted other scholars—but only the few who were attracted to Chinese sources.

To this day, the argument has not been resolved. (32)