The decorative techniques and colours used in Mexico and China are also remarkably similar, with spectacular reds incised into a deep black background. In both countries, the traditional colour is black obtained from the fine powder of burnt animal bones or burnt corncobs. Decorative maque techniques used in today’s states of southern Mexico are the same as in China and Japan. The design is carved using the point of a sharp cactus needle inserted in a turkey quill. The soft plume of the feather is used to brush off the excess clay, or maque, as it is carved off. The fine incised lines are then filled with contrasting colours, one colour at a time, with plenty of drying, scouring and polishing after each application. The end result, the wonderful decorated plate or box, is so similar in Uruapan and China that it is almost impossible for those who are not experts to differentiate between them.
Theoretically, if very implausibly, this elaborate and time-consuming process could have evolved simultaneously in China and Mexico, countries thousands of miles apart, but lacquering is not the only congruity when it comes to the artwork of western Mexico and China. Both also have extraordinarily similar and highly unusual methods of obtaining the dyes used in their artwork. Madder red, indigo blue, scarlet and shellfish purple are obscure dye-stuffs producing brilliant colours but requiring complex procedures to extract and fix them. Again, I would argue, too large a coincidence to be probable.
Madder is a red dye derived in China from the roots of shrubs of the Rubiacea family. The dye is prepared by digging up, drying, cleaning and pulverizing the roots, then soaking the mash overnight and steeping it for a short time at about 150° Celsius. The fabric is first mordanted, or fixed, with an aluminium sulphate before being boiled in the dye bath. It is then rinsed in water mixed with wood ash. In Mexico, the roots come from relatives of the Rubiacea – R. relbunium and R. nitidum, small, sub-tropical shrubs found as far south as Argentina. The New World mordant includes aluminium, oxalic acid and tannin.
The brilliant blue indigo, used for millennia throughout south-east Asia, is the oldest of all the natural dye-stuffs and requires the most complicated technology. The plant must be very carefully cultivated. The fresh cut leaves, whole or ground, have to be steeped in hot water for nine to fourteen hours, during which time the leaves ferment and produce the most unpleasant smell. The resultant liquid is clear, but yarn or cloth soaked in it turns a vivid blue upon oxidization with the air. The process used for dyeing in pre-Columbian Central America was almost identical, save that ash and lime were employed as solubility enhancers.
Vermilion dyes, obtained from tiny insects scraped off oak leaves, were extensively used in south-east Asia. The insects were drowned in a vinegar bath, giving them a reddish brown colour, and when crushed they yielded a dye that was dissolved in alcohol and then fixed with alum or urine. The other red dye that occurred throughout south-east Asia was lac (laccaic acid), obtained from wild or domesticated curmese or lac insects parasitic on various trees. The twigs were broken off, dried in the sun and dropped into a hot soda solution from which the liquid was evaporated and the residue made into cakes. Both Ma Huan and Niccolò da Conti described them on sale in Calicut.2
The New World equivalent made use of another scaled insect, the cochineal, parasitic on cactus plants. The insect envelops itself in a cottony white film, and when crushed produces a spectacular scarlet colour ten times richer than the curmes and lac of Asia. After the Spanish invaded Mesoamerica, they exported cochineal to the Middle East and Asia. As in China, cochineal’s colour was associated with royalty. True Mexican cochineal had reached southern Asia before Columbus set sail.3
The final dye was royal (tyrian) purple obtained from marine snails. This was the most celebrated of all colours used in the Old World. It was so expensive that only the wealthy could afford it, and purple robes became synonymous with high rank. The rulers of Byzantium were brought up in purple rooms and clothed in purple robes. In the New World, shellfish purple was produced from the region of Michoacán – the province surrounding Uruapan – and as far afield as Ecuador, and was very widely used on the Pacific coast. As early as 1898, this method of extracting shellfish purple was considered a possible indicator of pre-Columbian transoceanic trade.
… in many areas where the step of applying these substances as colorants might have occurred, it didn’t, and sophisticated application of them to fiber is so involved that it seems remarkable that it developed at all, not to say multiple times … thus when we find several of these dye stuffs, together with use of mordants, shared by distant regions, we must consider the possibility of historical contact, and rather intimate, repeated contact at that – especially in light of a host of other shared, and often arbitrary, traits.4
It is inconceivable that these dyeing processes could have been accidental, independent discoveries; ‘a common source of the two civilisations must therefore be assumed’.5
But the links between Mexico and China do not end with natural dyes, lacquerwork, hens and plants. Lake Pátzcuaro, upriver from Uruapan, is surrounded by mountains rich in copper ore. To this day, lakeside towns such as San Christobal sell beautiful copper artefacts to swarms of tourists, and the museums are filled with treasures from the past. In Michoacán, as in China, metals were separated after they had been mined, stored in different warehouses and catalogued according to the quality and type of the metal and whether it was to be used for religious offerings or as tributes.
The Florentine Codex – Fra Bernardino de Sahagún’s great book,6 completed in 1569, describing pre-Hispanic civilizations in Mexico – illustrates the processing of the metals by blowing oxygen through them to separate impurities, an advanced process not used in pre-Columbian North America. The metals used by the Michoacáns were copper, gold, silver and metal alloys. They were particularly adept at casting bells, which took up nearly 60 per cent of the metals fabricated. The resonance of a bell is determined by the type of metal alloy used; just as in Asia, the proportions were carefully measured to give the correct resonance. Metal bells using these same alloys were important symbols in the Buddhist religion, and visitors to Thailand, Burma, China and India are still charmed by the sweet notes of such bells through the day, as I know from dreamy afternoons spent in monasteries in Burma and Tibet.
Metal hachuelas – burial offerings in the shape of a crescent moon – are also found in abundance in Mexican tombs. Hachuelas were often placed in the mouth of the deceased, just as jade marbles were placed in the mouth of the dead in China. The curved, moon-shaped form was an important universal symbol of Lamaist Buddhism. Emperor Zhu Di made significant efforts to encourage Lamaism in China by inviting the Tibetan Karmapa to visit him and bestowing honours upon him. Moon-shaped ceremonial knives were used symbolically to sever the attachment with life, and can be found in Buddhist temples and tombs throughout Tibet and China to this day. While the eunuch captains were Muslims, the crews of Zheng He’s fleet were almost all Buddhist, attracted by Buddha’s teaching of universal compassion to all sentient creatures.
Mirrors also had an important place in the cultures of both Central America and China. In China, a mirror was believed to assist the transition of the soul to other planes, to the abodes of the spirits of gods and the souls of the ancestors. Most Chinese bronze mirrors were round, embodying the Taoist concept of the circle as a universal space. In China and Japan, the reverse side of a mirror was inscribed with symbols of animals and flowers, and with religious reliefs. It became a tradition to carry a symbolically decorated, round, bronze mirror as protection from evil spirits. In Michoacán, round metal discs called rodelas were used in ceremonies and rituals. Like bells, they were produced in large numbers from gold, silver, copper and alloys, and were decorated on the reverse side with symbols of nature and the universe.
As a result of this research, I was certain that the Chinese had been to Uruapan, had traded hens there, and that they must have stayed for months or possibly years to impart their knowledge of lacquerwork and dye technology to the Me
xicans. My tentative conclusion – that squadrons or individual ships had been detached as the fleet passed down the coast in order to set up colonies – seemed more and more plausible. There was corroboration of that in the oral history of the Nayarit, to the north-west of Guadalajara – tales of a pre-Columbian ship from Asia that arrived on the Mexican coast and was cordially received by the chief of the Coras, a prominent Nayarit people. I began to search through the museum collections. It was a long haul with little to show for it at first. Then I came across the lienzo de Jucutácato (the linen of Jucutácato), a painting discovered in the nineteenth century in the village of that name.
The lienzo comprises around thirty-five squares, thirty of which are about the same size, and each square tells a little story. The first scene shows men disembarking from a ship. Running ahead of them is a dog with a distinctive tail curved in a bow over its back. In shape, size and gait, especially its peculiar tail, it resembles the Chinese shar-pei, a hunting dog originally from Guangzhou, and much prized by poor Cantonese for its extreme devotion to its keeper and his family.7 At least one of the men is on horseback, a creature the local people would have found very strange and worthy of note; there were none in the Americas prior to the Spanish conquest. The leader emerging from the bows is dressed in a red tunic (the same garment Zheng He is wearing on the statue recently found buried in the Fujian Palace – see postscript) and he holds a round mirror. The mirror clearly had symbolic importance for it is repeated no fewer than fourteen times in the other pictures. In some of them the reverse side of the mirror is shown ‘marked with eight divisions’; this ‘wheel of doctrine’ relates to a major event in the life of the Buddha, particularly his preaching and enlightenment. The mirror being carried by the red-robed leader is entirely consistent with a Buddhist religious leader coming ashore to meet local people.
In the centre of the picture, a leader sits while local people lay trays of minerals on the ground at his feet – to my mind an obvious reference to their selling copper to the Chinese. At the bottom is a tree with rays of light emanating from it. It may symbolize the tree of enlightenment under which the Buddha sat. Finally, there are several drawings of a large bird with a drooping tail trailing on the ground. In size and posture, the bird resembles the Asiatic Malay chicken. Taken as a whole, the picture is wholly consistent with Chinese disembarking on horseback and on foot from a great ship, striding ashore with their mirrors to ward off evil spirits, assisted by the tree of enlightenment and the wheel of doctrine. The local people brought them minerals and perhaps in return the Chinese bequeathed their chickens, lacquerwork, dye-stuff and mineral technology.
According to the historian Nicolás León,8 the first person to have the lienzo analysed and copied, it was painted with black vegetable ink on a coarsely woven cloth and dates to long before the Spaniards arrived in Mexico. He states that it was altered in the sixteenth century by the Spaniards who added buildings and words in an attempt to explain it. These alterations were made with a different type of ink and at a later date.
Was it plausible that the Chinese had reached Jucutácato, even though it lies inland from the coast? The village stands some ten kilometres south of Uruapan where the Cupatitzio River ceases to be navigable. The Cupatitzio empties into a large lake some forty kilometres further south, which in turn is connected to the sea by the Balsas River. Just as at Sacramento, it is entirely possible that a junk could have reached Jucutácato from the sea, to obtain minerals and plants in return for trade goods and technology.
If the Chinese had made such a visit to trade and teach the Maya the secrets of lacquer technology, evidence of their stay should still exist. Professor Needham, one of the great experts on Ming China, visited Mexico in 1947 and described his experiences. ‘I was deeply impressed during my stay with the palpable similarities between many features of high Central American civilisations and those of East and South-west Asia,’9 he wrote, then listed more than thirty cultural parallels. In addition to the metallurgy described earlier, he cited Mayan drums resembling those found in China, tripod pottery, games, computing devices, jade used to demonstrate a panoply of complex beliefs, music (more than half the types of Mayan musical instruments are also found in Burma and Laos), Chinese carrying poles and Chinese neck-rest pillows. With respect to the great professor, I would go even further. From the Pacific coast of Mexico down to central Peru one can be forgiven for thinking one is in China, so similar is the atmosphere, so familiar the bustle, so reminiscent the ‘kik-kiri-kee’ of the hens in the morning, so alike the people.
To my mind, direct evidence of an early Chinese presence is littered right across the Mayan landscape. Pre-Columbian Chinese bronze figures were found in Peru, and Nazca figurines of the sun god have on their base a Chinese figure for heaven. The museum at Teotihuacan, then an important city, has Chinese medallions, and Chinese jade necklace decorations were found at Chiapa de Corzo in the modern state of Chiapas. Don Ramón Mena, then director of the National Museum of Mexico, described one medallion as ‘centuries old … carried to America when the Chinese came to this continent’.10 In the celebrated Cueva Pintada caves on the Mexican peninsula of Baja California, there are paintings of men pierced with arrows and a depiction of the Crab Nebula supernova of 1054 recorded by the Chinese (see chapter 1). In the debris at the foot of the paintings, charred wood has been found and carbon-dated to between 1352 and 1512.
Further evidence of a Chinese stay in Mayan lands comes from Guatemala. The distinguished biologists Carl Johannessen and M. Fogg describe the divination and witchcraft practised by the local people using black-fleshed melanotic chickens.11 They make a compelling case that not only were the chickens brought from China, but the Chinese must have spent a long time indoctrinating the different groups of people.
Seemingly incontrovertible proof of Chinese colonies in Central America also comes from the foothills of the mountains west of the Gulf of Venezuela, an area clearly shown on the Waldseemüller chart. I have seen these mountains from far out to sea, their snow-capped peaks silhouetted against the setting sun – an unforgettable sight. Some of the native tribes living in this remote area have traces of Chinese genes in their blood.
In 1962, Dr Tulio Arends and Dr M.L. Gallengo of the Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas, Caracas, reported the findings of their electrophoretic study of the distribution of transferrin phenotypes (the study of the migration of suspended particles in particular protein macro-molecules under the influence of an electric field) in linguistic and ethnological groups of the mature population of the American continent. They identified transferrins (proteins transporting iron in blood) in the Irapa, Paraujano and Macoita people who inhabited the foothills of the Sierra de Perija (9° to 11°N; 72°40′ to 73°30′W). These tribes were primitive populations on the verge of extinction. In 58 per cent of these people, the scientists found a slow-moving transferrin indistinguishable from one which to date has been found only in Chinese natives of the province of Kwantung in south-east China.12 As the report says, ‘this finding is additional evidence for the existence of a racial link between South American Indians and Chinese’. A goodly proportion of the crews of Zhou Man’s and Hong Bao’s fleets would have been born in Kwantung, for then, as now, its ports were among the busiest in China, thronged with boats and the seamen who sailed them. It appears that some of the Kwantung sailors aboard Zhou Man’s ships interbred with Venezuelan women.
There is also linguistic evidence of Chinese visits to South America. A sailing ship is chamban in Colombia, sampan in China; a raft, balsa in South America and palso in China; a log raft, jangada in Brazil, ziangada in Tamil. Until the late nineteenth century, villagers in a mountain village of Peru spoke Chinese.13 A mountain of evidence – wrecks, blood groups, architecture, painting, customs, linguistics, clothes, technology, artefacts, dye-stuffs, plants and animals transferred between China and South America – points to a pervasive Chinese influence the length of the Pacific coast of Central and
South America, and inland. So broad and deep is the influence that one may almost call the continent of that era ‘Chinese America’.
There is one further incontrovertible proof that the Chinese reached Mexico. When I commanded HMS Rorqual, I took her through the South China Sea and Philippine Islands to Subic Bay. There were many legends about Chinese junks lying on the sea-bed with their treasures intact. I searched for them with my sonar, but alas without success. Then I discovered that on 9 June 1993 a pearl fisher diving off Coral Bay in south-west Pandanan, a small island to the south-west of the Philippines (and marked on the Rotz chart), had found the wreck of a Chinese junk. The wreck was encrusted with barnacles, but much of the hull – of teak – remained intact. Under the supervision of Dr Eusebio Dizon, the head of the underwater archaeology section of the National Museum of the Philippines, the wreck was excavated in the spring of 1995 and 4,722 artefacts brought to the surface. They provide a vivid illustration of trade between China, south-east Asia and the Americas.
The wood of the hull has been carbon-dated to 1410 – very similar to the date of the wood found at Sacramento, the site of a possible junk. Both are of the same length and beam, approximately 97 feet by 26 feet, and both apparently carried iron woks in their holds – those at Pandanan have been photographed on the sea-bed and those at Sacramento were located by 3D magnetometer readings. Both junks carried exotic as well as ordinary commercial goods. The Pandanan junk had millions of tiny glass beads the size of those used by the Chinese as a sex aid, a practice noticed by both Ma Huan and Niccolò da Conti in south-east Asia (see chapter 3), and extant in the Philippines today. The (unconfirmed) Sacramento junk carried millions of tiny black seeds, some of which have been provisionally analysed as those of a poppy unique to south-east China. If this analysis is confirmed, it is possible the Chinese were trading in drugs. The Pandanan junk also carried metates – pestles for grinding maize – which were then unique to South America, and what appears to be Cholula ware, the eggshell-thin ceramics made in Mexico. The junk had been trading throughout south-east Asia before she sank, for the hold contained porcelain from eight separate countries, including superb ceramics from Vietnam and blue and white Chinese porcelain from the celebrated kilns at Jingdezhen. Complementing these beautiful pieces were ordinary household goods such as clay cooking pots and stoneware storage jars for rice, beans and seeds. There were also three bronze gongs from Dongson (Vietnam) and a peculiar bronze scale balance that may have been the compensating mechanism for a Chinese water clock.
1421: The Year China Discovered the World Page 20
