Focusing on the layout of cities, Hardy said that both the Peruvian and Chinese cities of Chan Chan were similarly composed of straight rather than curved lines and that streets always met “at the right angles yet never forming a checkerboard arrangement.” He described compact housing in both cases, which left room for open space in the city, “an uncluttered urban layout.” He found that in the cases of both the Chinese and the South American ancient city, no single building dominated the landscape because of its size or importance as a structure. “Chan Chan huacas or temple mounds were only rarely built inside the citadels,” Hardy said. “The blind walls of the dwellings, forming continuous plains interrupted only by occasional doorways, were the principal visual and directing feature of the streets of Chan Chan as well as those of Chinese cities.”
Hardy’s fascinating comparisons included an analysis of land tenure—in Chinese cities and in Peru’s Chan Chan, land could not be privately traded. The lords of Chan Chan controlled land and water. Hardy compares the irrigation schemes of the Chinese with those at Chan Chan and the fact that the unskilled population lived outside the cities.
According to local legend, the Peruvian city of Chan Chan was founded by Taycanamu, who arrived in ships with dragon-headed prows—a royal fleet. After establishing a settlement he left his son Si-um in command and then disappeared over the western horizon from whence he had arrived. By 1450 the Chan Chan empire was at its height, stretching to Rio Chancay in the south, covering roughly 15,000 square miles. Chan Chan was at the center of a chain of local capitals absorbed into the Inca Empire between 1460 and 1480 under Topac Yupanqui.
Between Chan Chan and the interior, up to the foothills of the mountains, is the Pampa Esperanza irrigation system—a mass of canals originally with locks and sluices to collect and distribute rainwater from the centipede rivers. This fertile land is where the villages still now have Chinese names. China in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had extensive experience building locks, dams, and irrigation systems (please refer to 1434, chapters 17, 18, and 22 for further information on this subject).
Here is a summary of the evidence, then: the legend of Taycanamu, the layout of Chan Chan, the irrigation schemes, Chinese names of villages, the presence of South American plants that were found in China before Columbus.
The obvious inference is that Taycanamu was one of Zheng He’s admirals. This Chinese admiral founded the “American” Chan Chan based on Chan Chán (Canton) in China and started irrigation schemes that enabled crops to be grown for the inhabitants of Chan Chan and for export. Sweet potatoes in particular were shipped from the Americas across the Pacific to Asia and Oceania. Naymlap was, in my view, either a Song dynasty admiral or an officer of Kublai Khan’s fleet.
This would explain the suddenly acquired metallurgical skills of the artisans of Chan Chan. It was built to serve as a trading city. There are nine large rectangular compounds within the city, each surrounded by high walls. Each of these is divided into three distinct sectors: The northern sector, which served as the main entrance to that particular compound, had a series of courtyards and storage and administrative areas. The central sector, which contained the king’s residence, had a large burial platform in the southern sector. A large shallow walk-in well or sunken garden (the water table was higher in those days) showed Chan Chan probably contained many gardens, again as a Chinese city would have done.
Chan Chan’s status as a trading city dealing in high quality and high added-value manufactured food is supported by archaeological evidence. In his book Lost Cities, Paul G. Bahn analyzes the nature of commerce and enterprise in Chan Chan. The diversity of production was so immense, archaeologists have concluded that “thousands of crafts people and specialized traders lived in areas surrounding the citadels (the rectangular inner compounds) providing the elite with imported and manufactured goods that included finely woven textiles, wooden and stone carvings, metalwork and pottery. Raw materials, such as stone, metal, wood, art work and even partially manufactured goods were brought to Chan Chan from the edges of the kingdom and beyond, mostly by caravan.”
The beast of burden in those caravans was the llama, and scientists said the llama caravans must have been huge, with traders carrying exotic goods produced by skilled craftsmen from one capital to another, traversing the Andean peaks and valleys. “At least two separate areas within Chan Chan have been identified as caravanserais, centers of trade where the llama packers lived and traded. The traders enjoyed the privilege of living inside the city—an indication of their importance to the Chimor,” Bahn writes.
Cities south of Trujillo down to Lima, such as Chancay, appear on Diogo Ribeiro’s master chart of the world, published in 1529. This remarkable map was published before the first European expedition under Francisco Pizarro reached as far south as Trujillo, Chan Chan, or Chancay. Nevertheless, it named them “Cities of Chinese Silk.” To have done so the cities must obviously have existed before the arrival of Pizzaro and must also have been trading in silk—which at that time could only have been imported from China. The imprint of this embroidered silk has been found by archaeologists at Chan Chan.
The full extent of the length and depth of Chinese trade on the Pacific coast of Peru is evident in exhibits at the Rafael Larco Herrera Archaeological Museum, in Lima. Rooms are filled with shelves containing 4,500 exhibits from graves starting in the Cupisnique period (1000 B.C.) through the Moches (400–800 A.D.) to the more recent Nasca, Chimu, and Chanca periods. Claudio Huarache, the curator, showed me distinctive paintings of Chinese merchants from Moche, Chanca, and Nasca graves along the whole coast of Peru, from north to south and spanning the past two thousand years. A ceramic figurine of one of these merchants appears in the first color insert of this book. Evidence from the graves is corroborated by the Chinese customs and games that are still present in Peruvian and Chilean society.
SIMILAR CUSTOMS—CHILE AND CHINA
Some of the customs identified and compared between Chinese and South American cultures are quite distinctive. In both China and Chile, for example, people observe the same practice of covering chicken heads; they make similar types of lassos; and the Chinese and Peruvian method for treating smallpox is the same: they cover pockmarks with milk. As we’ve seen, Peruvian and Chilean cultures repeat similar legends about giants who come from the sea on fleets of ships. According to the Peruvian historian Maria Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, the Chinese lord based at Tambo Colorado in southern Peru was said to have possessed one hundred thousand ships. Peruvian use of quipu strings—a system used for accounting—is the same as in China.
Cristóbal de Molina says certain Chilean tribes have Asian names—Aruacans from Arual in Burma, Promancians from Prome, on the Burmese border; Poy-Yus from Po Yeon in Cochin China; Cunches from Cunchi in Sichuan; Pi Cunchi from North Cunchi (“Pi” is north in Chinese). In Peru the method of sacrificing sheep is the same as in China, as are methods for recording time by the meridian passage of the sun. Similarly, the determination of time by the moon’s phases by adding one month every twelve years is the same in China and South America. To this day an oasis near Ica in the south of Peru is named “Huaca China,” which is translated as “The Chinese Pyramid,” a name given by the local Peruvian people in the Santa valley who claim that the site was once the burial place of Chinese.
THE COASTLINE OF SOUTH AMERICA
It seems to me the whole Pacific coastline west of the Andes, from Rio Esmeraldas in Ecuador as far south as Chilean Patagonia, was a vast series of Chinese settlements built up by repeated voyages over thousands of years, culminating in Zheng He’s voyages. These later voyages are reflected in Zheng He’s 1418 map and corroborated by the wrecked Chinese junks found by the first Spanish to round Cape Horn and sail northwards up the Chilean coast.
With all of the emphasis on Zheng He’s map, we must recognize earlier Chinese explorations that paved the way for the voyage of 1421. The role of Marco Polo, sailing under Kublai Khan, has gained impor
tance in our understanding of China’s excursions to the New World.
PART III
China’s
Explorations
to the North
CHAPTER 11
Kublai Khan’s Lost Fleets
MARCO POLO’S ACCOUNT OF THE MONGOL FLEET
Marco Polo traveled from Venice with his father and uncle in 1271, when he was seventeen years old. He remained away for the next seventeen years and chronicled his life and adventures. In the third book of his travels,1 he describes a fleet commissioned by Kublai Khan in search of riches on an island he had heard of:
Kublai the Great Khan, who now reigneth, having heard much of the immense wealth that was on this island [Japan], formed a plan to get it. For this purpose he sent two of his barons with a great navy, and a great force of horse and foot. . . . They sailed until they reached the island aforesaid, and there they landed, and occupied the open country and the villages, but did not succeed in getting possession of any city or castle. And so a disaster befell them, as I shall now relate.
. . . And it came to pass that there arose a north wind, which blew with great fury, and carried the great damage along the coasts of that island, for its harbors were few. It blew so hard that the Great Khan’s fleet could not stand against it. And when the Chiefs saw that, they came to the conclusion that if the ships remained where they were, the whole navy would perish. So they all got on board and made sail to leave the country. But when they had gone about four miles they came to a small island, on which they were driven ashore in spite of all they could do, and a great part of the fleet was wrecked and a great multitude of the force perished.2
A number of historians have rejected Marco Polo’s account, saying that he made it up. However, a discovery in the late twentieth century showed that Marco Polo’s story was in fact true—he only underestimated the scale of the invasion fleet.
In the 1970s Japanese trawlers operating in the sea off Imari Bay in southwestern Kyushu dredged up pottery and artifacts buried in sludge. In 1981, Professor Torao Mozai of Tokyo University began a search with sonar equipment. His team found a treasure trove—spearheads, warrior helmets, stone balls for catapults, a cavalry officer’s sword, stone mills for grinding gunpowder, and anchors. A new museum was opened on Takeshima Island to exhibit the treasures. Local fishermen donated their own discoveries: a bronze statue of Buddha, and bronze seals of authority.
In 1991 the Kyushu Okinawa Society for Underwater Archaeology continued Mozai’s work. They found an anchor twenty-four feet long and weighing a ton—clearly used for a huge ship. Its stocks were of Chinese granite, its flukes of red oak. Thick anchor ropes leading into deeper water led to the discovery of the first wreck of Kublai Khan’s fleet. Within the wreck are more than seven hundred artifacts—day-to-day pots and pans and, most fascinating of all, exploding shells filled with shrapnel. Marco Polo’s account has been corroborated.
KUBLAI KHAN
In the 1260s Kublai Khan’s troops had rolled into China and Khan was enthroned as Chinese emperor and great khan of all the Mongols. He and his brother Hulegu controlled the world from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. In 1268 Kublai decided to take on Japan. The Japanese military rulers, the Bakufu, ignored his envoys’ demands. Kublai therefore built a huge fleet of nine hundred ships and prepared to invade Japan from Korea—only the narrow Tsushima Strait, about one hundred miles of sea, stood in his way.
In October 1274, 23,000 Mongol Chinese and Korean soldiers joined 7,000 sailors and the fleet set sail. They overran the island garrison of Tsushima and then landed beside Hakata Bay. The Japanese fought bravely, falling back on the fortified capital of Kyushu. There on October 20 the wind shifted. Kublai’s ships began to drag their anchors—nearly three hundred ships, a third of the fleet, were lost and half the army drowned. The survivors returned to Korea at the end of November—the Japanese were saved by the divine wind, the Kamikaze.
However, Kublai Khan was not the type of emperor to be put off by losing a few hundred ships. His envoys returned the next year to Kamakura, where the Japanese executed them—a dreadful slight on the great khan. This time Kublai ordered that a fleet of 3,500 junks be built in China and appointed 100,000 Chinese warriors for the next invasion of Japan.
Three separate fleets sailed for Japan in 1281, rendezvousing on Takeshima Bay. On July 30 another terrible storm struck. “A green dragon had raised its head from the waves . . . sulphurous flames filled the firmament.” Thousands of ships sank, drowning a great part of the huge army. “A person could walk across from one point of land to another on a mass of wreckage.” For a second time the divine wind, the Kamikaze, had saved Japan.
Kublai Khan decided on a third invasion but five years later, in 1286, he abruptly canceled it. He had a huge fleet at the ready but with nowhere to go.
FROM ASIA TO THE AMERICAS
After examining the Kangnido map at Kyoto, I decided to gather more evidence. This would take me across the Pacific to the Salish Sea (formerly called the Strait of Juan de Fuca), on the coastal boundary between the northwestern United States and Canada.
I set up a meeting with the eminent anthropologist, Dr. Gunnar Thompson, who I consider to be the leading expert on pre-Columbian voyages from Asia to the Americas. He has spent thirty years of his life on this quest and amassed a huge volume of evidence, publishing many very readable books in the process. Nu Sun tells the story of Asian voyages to America from 500 B.C. to 900 A.D. The Friar’s Map of Ancient America 1360 AD describes Nicholas of Lynn and the Franciscan Map of America; American Discovery is a summary of voyages over millennia, describing how the Americas became “a meeting ground of races and a congress of ethnic diversity—the first United Nations.” If anyone knew of the travels of Kublai Khan’s fleets, Thompson would.
In 2011, Thompson published a new book, Marco Polo’s Daughters,3 which was highly relevant to my search and described three maps at the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C. The maps detail Marco Polo’s voyage in Kublai Khan’s ships to North America. The maps and descriptions were bequeathed by Marco to his daughters Bellela and Moretta.
Bellela tells the following story. Sometime around 1277 (or 1287, after Kublai Khan had abandoned his assault on Japan), Kublai’s wife dispatched a Mongol fleet to convey a gift to the queen of Sakhalin Island—in short, diplomacy, not war, was now Kublai’s foreign policy. Marco’s ship was caught in a typhoon and was driven north to the Kamchatka Peninsula, known as the “Peninsula of Stags.” There Marco met a Syrian fur trader named Biaxo Sirdumap, who told him that to the east lay a distant land from where the furs were obtained. Bellela’s description accompanies a somewhat crude but easily recognizable map showing Southeast Asia, China, Siberia, the Bering Strait, Alaska, the Arctic Sea, and the northwest coast of North America. Thompson’s request to have the Library of Congress map authenticated apparently has not been fulfilled.
The direct link with Marco Polo (apart from his daughters’ notes) is a note on one of the three documents, the Pantect Map, with this inscription:
Map of India and Tartary by Marco Polo, of the numerous islands which he had explored, so that the Great Khan, to honor him, had entrusted him with authority over a province of his realm. No one had sailed more eastwards . . . a sundry desert three thousand miles from the realm [China]. But Marco Polo sailed with ten ships and went so far by sea that he reached a chain of islands and as far as a large peninsular. Caves on both sides were found there and people wear trousers and skirts of seal skin and deer skin. Done at Venice. c. AD 1329. Moretta Polo.4
The “Map with Ship” in the Rossi Collection clearly shows East Asia, the Aleutians, the entrance to the Northwest Passage, Alaska, and the West Coast from British Columbia to Mexico. It was drawn in about 1297 and is held in the Library of Congress. If the map is dated circa 1297, then Marco Polo, in Kublai Khan’s fleet, had “discovered America,” and not Christopher Columbus—another applecart turned over.
The first European explorers who reached Siberia and Alaska by sea were Vitus Bering, the Danish-born Russian naval explorer, arriving in 1728, and whose name of course was given to the surrounding sea and the strait; and Captain James Cook, British Royal Navy explorer, on his third and final Pacific voyage in 1778. Therefore, if there were any European maps published prior to 1728 that showed the same area as Marco Polo’s map, and if such a map was linked with Marco Polo’s map, it would be evidence that Polo’s map was genuine.
Thompson pointed to evidence that starts with the pioneering mapmaker, Gerardus Mercator, whose world map of 1569 shows Siberia, the Bering Strait, Alaska, and the Arctic Sea and was published more than two hundred years before Captain Cook charted Alaska. As a result, we can compare the two maps side by side, which shows their striking similarity. Thompson also provided the link between Mercator and Marco Polo.
Mercator wrote to his close friend John Dee, the English astronomer-mathematician-occultist, that he had obtained a copy of “a Marco Polo Map.”
Mercator’s 1569 world map also shows Hudson Bay, which Mercator describes as “Mare est dulcum.” Yet Henry Hudson did not “discover” the bay until 1610, forty-one years after it appeared on Mercator’s map. Did Marco Polo get to Hudson Bay?
I think he did. My reason, with help from Thompson, is Marco Polo’s extraordinary description of Polaris, which he says was “behind him” whilst appearing to have a southerly bearing. How could Polaris, the North Star, be behind someone?
Who Discovered America? : The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas (9780062236777) Page 13
