Chinese Knew North America More Than 4000 Years Ago!

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                            Chinese Knew North America More Than 4000 Years Ago!






by Angus Sutherland

Today we know that Zheng He or Cheng Ho, China's greatest navigator (1371-1435) was not the first who discovered America. He reached the North American continent before the European explorers such as Magellan, Columbus, Vasco Da Gama and Captain Cook.
There are also Chinese maps of the Americas that show that the Chinese were familiar with the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of North and South America for about 2,000 years.
 


Or perhaps as it was suggested ancient Semites (early Hebrews) sailed to America already 2,500 years before Zheng He and Columbus. While we try to find out "who" really was the true discoverer of America, it would be worth to mention that an extensive scientific survey of the North American continent was made by the Chinese almost ... 4,500 years ago!

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 According to the early Chinese records, China possessed advanced knowledge obtained from the geographical survey of the world taken shortly after the Great Flood!

There is an ancient Chinese piece of literature known as the "Shan Hai King", which means The Classic of Mountains and Seas. Its author, "the great Yu" who became Emperor in 2208 BC is almost as legendary as his work. He wrote it approximately in 2250 BC, during the so called Yu period (2257-2208 BC) in China. This date - 2250 BC is particularly interesting because it is about a century after the death of Almodad. Almodad meaning "immeasurable", was the seventh generation descendant of Noah. He was known to "measure the earth to its extremities".

But later it came a dark period for the great work "Shan Hai King". This totally underestimated literary work was relegated and announced as unimportant.
But why? The answer is simple: the Chinese could not identify the invaluable geographical knowledge it contained.

In fact the oldest Chinese literary work describes - North America!
 


Some years ago, the "Shan Hai King" was for the first time reexamined and reevaluated. The Fourth Book entitled "The Classic of Eastern Mountains" has four sections which describe mysterious mountains situated "beyond the Eastern Sea" - on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

Each of the four sections of the book describes the geographical features of a certain mountain such like mineral deposits, shape, height, vegetation and all rivers located in the vicinity! Then other mountains are described in the same way and additionally the distances and directions are also provided for a better orientation.

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Some years ago, the "Shan Hai King" was for the first time reexamined and reevaluated. The Fourth Book entitled "The Classic of Eastern Mountains" has four sections which describe mysterious mountains situated "beyond the Eastern Sea" - on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
Each of the four sections of the book describes the geographical features of a certain mountain such like mineral deposits, shape, height, vegetation and all rivers located in the vicinity! Then other mountains are described in the same way and additionally the distances and directions are also provided for a better orientation.

If you guess the book describes western and central North America - you are right. To the same conclusion came those who investigated and analyzed the great work of the Chinese emperor Yu. But please remember that this book describing the North America was written soon after the Great Flood.

Then who made this extraordinary geographical survey of North America soon after the Flood?

The first part of the book starts with description of the Sweetwater River. Later it proceeds southeast to Medicine Bow Peak in Wyoming, then to Longs Peak, Grays Peak, Mount Princeton and Blanca Peak Colorado. Then continues to North Truchas Peak, Manzano Peak and Sierra Blanca of New Mexico. Through Guadalupe Peak and Baldy Peak, this astonishing description ends with Chinati Peak in the vicinity of the Rio Grande, Texas.

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The second part of the "Shan Hai King" is describing an expedition over an area starting in Manitoba, then proceeds to Moose Mountain in Saskatchewan. From there continues to Sioux Pass in Montana, Wolf Mountain and again to Medicine Bow Peak in Wyoming, later to Longs Peak, Mount Harvard and Summit Peak in Colorado; then to Chicoma Peak, Baldy Peak, Cooks Peak and Animas Peak, New Mexico.


This strange survey continues to Mexico describing the Madero, Pamachic, Culiacan and Triangulo heights and at the end reaches the Pacific Coast near Mazatlan.

In the third section of the book there are described mountains located along the Pacific Coast such as Mount Fairweather, Mount Burkett in Alaska, Prince Rupert and Mount Waddington in British Columbia. Mount Olympus in Washington is also described along with Mount Hood in Oregon, Mount Shasta, Los Gatos and Santa Barbara in California.

The last section describes Mount Rainier in Washington, mount Hood, Bachelor Mountain, Gearhart Mountain, Mahogany Peak and Crane Mountain in Oregon; then Trident Peak and Capitalo Peak in Nevada.

The oldest Chinese work of "The Classic of Eastern Mountains" is not only a geographical survey of high level but also a very strange book describing nature in different regions of the North America, its plants and animals.

The other parts of the ancient Chinese work, like the Ninth and Fourteenth books are full of worth to mention expressions:

"luminous" "great canyon", "place where the sun is born" or "a stream flowing in a bottomless ravine". Are the early surveors talking about a sunrise in the Grand Canyon? Other sections of the Chinese book written more than four millenia ago is under thorough investigation. But preliminary it is already confirmed that the remaining sections deal with further explorations of the Great Lakes and regions of Mississippi Valley...

Who were those anonymous surveyors working with their extremely accurate geographical studies of the American landscape? And did it more than 4000 years ago?...


http://www.ufoarea.com/aas_chinesediscovered.html

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                                   ANCIENT CHINESE KING 'LED TRIP TO AMERICA'





Paul Sieveking
Sunday Telegraph

SCANDINAVIANS are preparing to celebrate the 1,000 years since Leif Ericsson sailed to the New World from Greenland. However, the idea that Norsemen were the first to reach America by sea is widely contested.

For instance, Mark McMenamin, a professor of geography and geology at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, is convinced that the Carthaginians discovered America between 350 and 320 BC. In an issue of the Numismatic magazine, and at a meeting of the American Friends of Tunisia Association last May, he interpreted a series of puzzling gold coins of that period as depictions of the known world, which includes a land mass to the west of Spain.

Experts on ancient trade routes believe that the Carthaginians reached the coast of Brazil; Punic amphorae have been found underwater in a bay near Rio de Janeiro and 4th century BC Punic coins have been excavated at seven sites in the eastern United States.

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American archaeological finds offer a riot of anomalies, including ancient coins and many epigraphic puzzles. The Bat Creek Stone from Tennessee bears a Hebrew inscription said to date from about the second century AD; an inscription found near Philadelphia and dated to 800-600 BC seems to be in Basque.

The maverick historian Farley Mowat has just published The Farfarers: Before the Norse, in which he argues that the first Europeans to reach America were “Albans” who set off from the north of Scotland in the 8th century AD in search of walrus ivory. The 78-year-old Canadian author maintains that the remains of long houses far above the tree-line in northern Quebec were built by these immigrants. His 36 books on the life, history and ecology of North America have sold 15 million copies, and he shrugs off the scorn of conventional historians.

Evidence suggests that America has long been visited both across the Atlantic and the Pacific. The earliest human remains yet discovered in the New World, the skeleton of a young woman found in Brazil and carbon-dated to 11,500 years, shows distinct Australoid features, while the 9,300-year-old Kennewick Man from Washington State most closely resembles Polynesians of the South Pacific.

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 Xinhua, the Chinese press agency, reported that similarities between almost 300 markings found on pottery, jade and stone at unspecified ancient native sites in central America closely resemble 3,000-year-old Shang dynasty characters for the sun, sky, rain water, crops, tress and stars. American and Chinese pictographs in 56 matching sets were shown to senior academics at a symposium in Anyang, former capital of the Shang dynasty.

These impressive similarities add fuel to theories that Chinese arrived in the Americas before the end of the Shang dynasty in 221 BC. Shang legends state that a king led his people on a journey to the east, with some historians believing that he took them across the Bering Strait to North America.

The Chinese classic, the Shan Hai King of about 2250 BC, contains what seems to be an accurate description of the Grand Canyon. Peanuts and maize have been found at ancient Chinese sites dating back to 3000BC. The orthodox view is that neither of these plants left their native America before their export by European colonists in 16th century AD.

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In AD 499, a Chinese monk, Hui Shen, returned to China claiming to have spent 40 years in the land of “Fu Sang”. He left a record of the country he visited, which has been recorded in official histories – a land thought by some modern scholars to be ancient Mexico.

Then there is the 3,000-year-old pottery found on the Valdivian coast of Ecuador, decorated and incised in exactly the same way as pottery from the Jomon area of Japan, and not preceded in Ecuador by plainer and simpler bowls and urns.



Paul Sieveking is editor of Fortean Times.
http://www.goldenageproject.org.uk/124chineseking.html

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The group of explorers paused in the brilliant, early afternoon. They looked out over tangled sand and gravel to a river boiling around rocks as it emerged from the canyon. In places, dark green cane grew almost down to the brown water. Tall, jagged cliffs were etched in sunlight above them. One of the men shaded his eyes and pondered a chunk of blue-green rock he had picked up.



Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend National Park
Photographs courtesy of
Two Dog Woman Graphics

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Typical "badlands" or "hoodoo" erosion,
looking southeast along the Javalina
and Alamo washes near the
Old Maverick Road,
Big Bend National Park
Photographs courtesy of
Two Dog Woman Graphics







Behind these travelers were a hundred miles of land covered by cactus and yucca, with grasses and trees growing along infrequent but beautiful streams.

The man standing in front walked down to the river, dropped his pack, pushed back his hat, and sat down on a rock. His few companions did likewise, taking off their sandals and bathing their feet in the turbulent water where it ran up on the sand, cold in the sunshine.

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From his pack the man took a notebook made of a few strips of cane, cut not far north, dried and shaved almost flat, and laced together with a cord at one end. Earlier he had written on thin strips of wood, but his supply of these had run out. Taking a small square stone from his pack, he dipped a bit of water into its low depression. He then started rubbing a stick of solid ink into the water. Gradually the water turned black. Setting the freshly made ink to one side, he took a small brush between his fingers, then looked around at the clear day for a moment before beginning to write.

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Santa Elena Canyon,
Big Bend National Park:
looking downriver along the Rio Grande;
Texas is on the left, Chihuahua on the right.
Photograph by
Two Dog Woman Graphics






“Have walked about three hundred li since Bald Mountain. Here, Bamboo Mountain is near the river which looks like a boundary. There is no grass, or trees, but some jasper and jade stones. The river is impeded in its course here by rocks, but flows on southeast to the great body of water.”



Years later the account this man was writing would find its way into one of the oldest books in the world, the Shan Hai King, (1) often called the Mountain-Sea Classic or the Classic of Mountains and Seas. Edited at least three times and subjected to one national bookburning, it survived and retained the story of explorations over unknown lands.

The man was Chinese, the time was some 3,500 years ago, and he had been walking across part of what was later called the trans-Pecos area of Texas.

And that statement and the foregoing scene are speculative—yet perhaps not entirely fictional. This is one of the best examples of a historical account that could be true. (2) The story is just tantalizing enough to be fascinating, and this interpretation of the account is speculative enough to drive many historians into a frenzy.

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To be able to judge the truth of the story—to consider the evidence for the story—a person needs to know a few elements of Chinese history, beginning with a look at the Shan Hai King. This book containing a wide variety of descriptions and stories is called the world’s oldest geography. (3) It is also one of the earliest works of Chinese literature. In addition to geographical descriptions, it speaks of monsters and weird beasts, myths and wild tales; and it includes enough of these to cause many scholars either to brand the work nonsense or to ignore it completely. (4)



European ideas of New World monsters:
fanciful drawings of animals supposedly encountered
by Amerigo Vespucci.
Ogilby, John. America, London, 1671.
Institute of Texan Cultures, 84-137



 Monsters from the European tradition. Land and
sea monsters from Sabastian Munster's
Cosmographia universalis, 1550.
Institute of Texan Cultures, 74-233



However, it contains no more wonders than other records accepted as generally true by later critical readers. Many European works regarded as classics are laced with metaphor (or outright lies), but these works are not therefore condemned. (5) Sir Walter Raleigh speaks of headless warriors; Marco Polo writes of the Orc, a bird so big it could fly off with an elephant in its talons; Herodotus, one of the greatest Greek historians, includes winged serpents and ants as large as oxen; and even the level-headed conqueror Julius Caesar, in his account of northwestern Europe, speaks of the unicorn and of elk which never lie down to rest. Much of what they say, not all, can be confirmed in other sources. Thus, the basic reliability of these writers is not questioned.

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But even if an occasional monster in the Chinese classic can be overlooked, there are other problems.

The date of the Shan Hai King is hard to estimate, even more so the stories it collects. Furthermore, no certain author is known. Such things worry historians.

Early Chinese writers ascribed the collection to Yu, Minister of Public Works under Emperor Shun, in 2205 B.C.E. (6) The date is regarded by most later historians as being too early—much too early—in the near-legendary Hsia Dynasty. (7) Yet, since the turn of the present century, archaeologists in China have steadily pushed back the dates of known cultural achievements. ( Dynasties mentioned in earlier classics, once considered legend, have been documented through recent field work.

It appears more and more likely that China’s civilization has all the antiquity claimed by the oldest stories. The Shan Hai King is certainly well over 2,500 years old and quotes much earlier stories.

But still other problems stand in the way of accepting the document as true. Could the Chinese have carried out such a journey, to present-day North America, some thirty-five centuries ago?

For generations historians considered that the Chinese were not an ocean-going people. This opinion has largely changed. (9) The Chinese are now known to have sailed open-ocean vessels since the eleventh century B.C.E. and probably earlier. Stones, similar to anchors carried by early Chinese vessels, have been found off the California coast, but their authenticity as anchors has been refuted. (10) No Chinese shipwrecks of three millennia ago have been found conveniently off the California coast. In fact, no remains of Chinese ocean-going ships can be dated to the time of the Shan Hai King, but descriptions of Chinese ships of a somewhat later time, capable of making an ocean voyage west to Africa, indicate previous ship development.



 A Chinese warship, c. 1520
Institute of Texan Cultures, 74-1323
The Shang Dynasty

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The Shang Dynasty, the earliest so far confirmed by most modern archaeological studies, existed from the eighteenth to the thirteenth centuries B.C.E. and was an advanced culture. (11) Chinese of this period were highly learned: they had a written language; a bronze fabricating technology; fully developed institutions such as art, agriculture, and government; and distinctive architectures, weapons, musical instruments, plumbing, kitchens, courts, and chariots among the items archaeologists call material culture. They also may have had certain practices not socially acceptable today, such as occasional human sacrifice. Yet it seems clear that had they wanted to, Shang people could have put a party of explorers on another continent.

But did they?

That question causes one to look closely at the language of the Shan Hai King. The writing often seems a curiously choppy account which reads like a collection of notes.

The book in existence today does not contain complete, original records. Even though the Chinese people are very devoted to their classics and are constant note-takers and compilers of encyclopaedias, they have experienced troubled times. In 213 B.C.E. the emperor Ch’in Shih Huang decided to abolish all records of the past. He was not the first nor the last dictator to decide that accurate knowledge of the past was a dangerous thing in the minds and hands of the people. His premier, Li Ssu, suggested that destroying books—history books, to be sure, among others—would accomplish the desire to control information rather neatly. The effort was made but was ultimately unsuccessful. Books hidden in walls and wells later came to light.