[blam]

Here's a A Link Between Chinese and American Cultures? The Olmec and the Shang. Somewhere it's written in China that 250,000 "took to the sea" after the emperor lost the "Mandate Of Heaven" and the Shang dynasty collapsed.

Now, The collapse of the Shang Dynasty aslo coincides with one of Professor Mike Baillie's worldwide catastrophies (1159BC) detected in the tree-rings worldwide. Here's an article by Baillie:

Did Asteroids And Comets Change The Tides Of Civilization?

Mandate of Heaven

Then astronomer Kevin Pang of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) noted that 1628 B.C. and 1159 B.C. roughly mark the beginning and end of the Shang Dynasty of Bronze Age China. Both ends of the dynasty featured, according to ancient Chinese texts, environmental disasters - dimming of the sun and summer frosts that caused crop failures and famine. Pang notes also the Chinese concept of "mandate of heaven," wherein a dynasty reigned only as long as it protected the well-being of its people. This notion might have originated in the coincidence of dynastic change and climatic disaster.

Some of these Chinese 'refugees' may have ended up in Mexico and gave a 'boost' to the Olmec civilication, huh?

[Fedora]

Thanks for the links. I've seen some other interesting work on Chinese-Olmec links by the scholar mentioned in that first link, Mike Xu. The main source of information on the Shang dynasty is the Shu ching (aka Shu king, etc.; also Shang shu) or Book of Documents (aka Classic of History, Book of Historical Documents, Documents of Antiquity):

Shu King, the Book of Historical Documents

Unfortunately the first Emperor of the Ch'in Dynasty, Shih Huang Ti, destroyed most copies of the Shu ching, and the copies we have now are based on fragments recovered by Han Dynasty historians and mixed with forgeries, so I think it's difficult to say much with confidence about the Shang Dynasty, apart from archaeological data. I do think the evidence for Chinese-Olmec links is significant, though.