Book claims Chinese discovered America

UPI ^ | Published 1/7/2003 11:49 AM | By FREDERICK M. WINSHIP

[BureaucratusMaximus]

Book claims Chinese discovered America

Great...next thing you know they'll try to re-unite us with the mainland.

[yankeedame]

Excellent post!
The "sea-friendly" Ming emperor-- and usurper-- was Emperor Yung-Lo who ruled in the first half of the 15th c. Some speculate that he commissioned these voyages b/c he was a usurper and so felt the need to bolster his reputation and power at home. Almost everyone disapproved of these "missions" as a waste of money, as a misdirection of money, and the fact that it gave extraordinary power to the already powerful upper ranks of palace eunuchs.
The emperors in the later half of the century were Ying Tsung, 1457A.D.(a spend-thrift playboy) and Cheng-hua, 1465A.D.(who stuttered so badly that he effectly withdrew from court/political life, turning over darn near everything to the court eunuchs). Neither had any interest in the "barbarians" outside the border of China.

[Slyfox]

Chinese Discovered America

Yeah, when they sailed into the Panama Canal and claimed it.

[blam]

"Then a bunch of horse barbarians from the north, the Manchu, started moving into China. "

When did this occur, who were these folks and where were they from. Your estimates of those questions is okay, I'm not expecting exactness. (I'm interested in this area...could they have been Hakka? Xiongnu?)

[pepsionice]

There is very little doubt that the Chinese were around America at least 70 years before Columbus. One has to wonder if the change in leadership back in China....mandating no travel and closing off the country...had kept the course instead....China would have been the most dominate country on Earth by the 1600s. The use and further development of new technology is obvious. The world today would be a much different place had the no closure occurred.

As for the Chinese who landed in America. One must wonder if they brought disease...as did the Spaniards...and if the Indians eventually decided the only good Chinese were dead Chinese. There is little written about gold-obcessed Chinese explorers...unlike the Spaniards.

As for how history changes once this is proven....and I think we are talking about just six months of research to prove DNA on this item...history is a ever-changing thing. The Vikings and their travel have been a constant argument for years....and most people are finally willing to accept that Vikings did come to America. We will likely see other developments which challenge our high school text books.

[Destro]

100% of scholars agree that the Vikings were living on the North American coast in at least one long term settlement.

Like I said if any people got to the Americans before 1492 AD they had no idea where they were, were lucky to get back alive and once home had no idea how to retrace their voayge.

I think the issue here is what historians call "diffusion" in other words contacts maintained long enough with the Americas and the old world for culture and technology to be diffused back and forth. This I think never happened.

[muawiyah]

How do we know they were "Greek"? Certainly there is a suspicion that the maps came from Byzantine sources, but when Columbus received them, Byzantium had been in the hands of the Turks for a number of decades.

Once the Turks took over, their established lines of communication to their linguistic cohorts in the East would have served to provide them with the Chinese discoveries.

One poster noted that the Ming (Mongol) dynastic elements were being kicked out of China during that period by the Manchu. Valuable exploratory maps undoubtedly financed peace and security for more than one Ming noble!

[MrsEmmaPeel]

Don't fool yoursel, the Europeans of Marco Polo's age (especialy North Western Europeans) with the exception of the Byzantines were unbathing moronons.

They knew more about the calendar then the Chinese did!

It was the west who sorted out the Chinese calendar problems-- a fact you seem to ignore!

[muawiyah]

That's a pretty good rendition of Chinese history. Marco Polo met the "Chinese" during the initial period of the Mongol Conquest - the Ming Dynasty.

Along the way, during a period of weakness (political stupidity at the top and an economic recession affecting everybody), the Manchu conquered China. That's when everything went down hill.

Then, it got worse - the West discovered China. The West also discovered Chinese people liked to smoke opium.

This period culminated in the period of Mao Tse Tung. Things have been getting better lately, but the Chinese have atom bombs with which to hold the barbarians and the West at bay.

Possibly they will remember all the other things they forgot.

[muawiyah]

The most backward country in Western Europe in terms of.....? It all depends on your criteria. At the moment I'd say the most backward place was the Nederlands. Their mortuary practices are not much advanced beyond that of the Innuit in the old times who used to leave the old folks out on the iceflow for the polar bears.

[muawiyah]

Ah, ha, but the West's recomputation of the Chinese calendar was done using Hindu numerals (received through the Moslems), and trigonometric concepts copied down from books in the great library of Toledo which was also obtained from the Moslems during the latter stages of the Reconquista.

Knowledge circulated differently in the old days.

[johnny7]

Those Chinee can deep fry a cat with the fur on!

They know everything about human-wave attacks.

They will sell you anything if you show them money.

Right now they're pimping NK. Hey Joe... you wanna buy?

[Eternal_Bear]

You don't need a calendar to explore the World. Man would have never populated the World if that was true. The Polynesians explored everything from Madagascar to Easter island. Their are stories they reached the Americas and skirted Anarctica. They had no calendar.

[MrsEmmaPeel]

You don't need a calendar to explore the World

You might be correct. However, if you ever want to get back home, you'll need that calendar. Its one thing to jump in your boat and hug the coast and say: "Land -ho" after a couple of months, quite another to jump in a boat and navigate in open seas with only the stars above as positional indicators. You need advanced knowledge of the stars, astronomy. You need good working theories on the size of the earth, too. Preferably you need to know longitude. Its only been in modern times that the world has settled on the standard 24 hour clock with time zones. (The old west didn't have such a concept). So how would handle time versus distance in your open boat, particular without a good time piece?

The only way to really do this, is advanced knowledge of astronomy. If you could do this, you could be a Viking or a Mayan. The Greeks and Romans hugged the coast. (The Chinese needed advice from Johannes Kepler.)

If you all you want is to just conquer your neighbors land, then all you need to do is jump on your horse, and like any Mongul or Vandal, march as far as the land will take you.

Those societies that had a good working calendars and understood astronomy were the true explorers.

One could argue whether or not if you were a successful explorer if you couldn't get home to tell anyone about it.

[ASA Vet]

Jean-Luc Picard was here before the Indians.

related thread

[MrsEmmaPeel]

More things to cogitate upon:

If you were an explorer of the 1400s, how would you determine your day-length? Remember a 24 hour day was the invention of modern times, as is the "International Date Line" .. presumably, your day length would be from sun-up to sun-down. In other words, it would be variable. So, how would you figure it out? At what point does the daylength get longer and longer? At what point does it recede? Assuming you understood basic astronomy in your home town and could predict when the sun would come up and when it would set, knew all there was to know about solstices and equinoxes and could predict them with ease, how would you do it in a moving boat?

How would you get back?

PS -- sending as letter to Johannes Kepler is cheating (there was no mail delivery in the middle of the ocean, besides he's outside our period.)

[MARTIAL MONK]

Several weeks ago I was in a Hopi village when a little girl of about three (could have been Hopi or Zuni) came in the room. Her facial features were exquisitly Japanese.
I have been around Indians all my life but I have never before seen such purely oriental features, a tiny sculpted geisha. I had heard the Japanese/Zuni theories before but that clinched it for me. It was jawdropping. It was like looking back hundreds or thousands of years into history.

[Eternal_Bear]

Consider the Cinnamon trade in Roman times. Traders crossed from the East Indies to Madagascar and hugged the coastline to Egypt. The Cinnamon trade flourished for several hundred years so the traders had figured out how to traverse the vastness of the Indian Ocean.

Columbus did not have an accurate calendar either but he crossed the Atlantic successfully several times. The Manilla Galleons of the 16th Century didn't have calendars either but they knew that land lay to the East of them. So they would bear due East. Yes, their landfall was often unpredictable and they often made land in Oregon or even British Columbia. They could tell by the flora that Mexico lay South of them so they would hug the coast southward. Magellan and Drake circumnavigated the Globe. When they returned home, their dates were askew but they still made it.

I once viewed a show on Micronesian navigation. Since they used small boats and all the islands were tiny, it was vital that they hit the island they were going to, dead on. The old time navigators were able to do this by learning the signatures of the currents. The navigators claimed they could sense how the current was being affected by the nearness to land and that every part of the ocean had different signatures of currents and countercurrents. The ability to read them took years and is now a defunct art.

The Chinese probably used the same methods that the early Spanish employed. They may have also employed methods developed by people like the Micronesians. It looks like some Chinese didn't make it back. When the fleet was disbanded, some of the colonies just withered away.

[blam]

This guy, Christy Turner, has done some good work identifying who's who by looking at their teeth. There are some suprises from his work.

[Eva]

There is alot of evidence that the what you are referring to as "Native Americans" were not the first inhabitants of this country, either. The Kennewick Man and a few other remains in other areas seem to indicate that the first inhabitants bore no relation to the modern day, "Native Americans".