A SURVEY OF VIRGINIA
Our 2008 U.S. tour included a meeting with Charlotte Harris Rees in Virginia. She has been carrying on the work of her late father, Dr. Hendon M. Harris Jr. (1916–81), an American missionary based in Taiwan in the mid-twentieth century. Dr. Harris collected seven map books, which included unusual round world maps, and located twenty-three similar maps in international museums or collections. He was convinced that these maps were descendants of a long-lost “mother map” that originally accompanied the Shan Hai Jing (“Classic of the Mountains and Seas”), the world’s oldest geography text, written in 2200 B.C. The Shan Hai Jing described exotic far-ranging expeditions, including to Fu Sang—a beautiful land to the east of China that we believe to be North and Central America.
After initially questioning the accuracy of her father’s work, Charlotte decided to take his map collection to several experts for study. Meanwhile, in 2006 she edited and published a new version of her father’s book, The Asiatic Fathers of America.3 The maps have now been reviewed by such specialists as Dr. Cyclone Covey, emeritus professor at Wake Forest University, an author and longtime scholar of ancient American history. Dr. Covey is also well-versed in the Shan Hai Jing.
As Harris Rees’s website, asiaticfathers.com, elaborates, “By the time of his death [in 1981,] Harris was aware of 23 other similar maps of this style (in addition to his seven) in prestigious museums and collections around the world. He correctly surmised that there were probably a few more. In effect, the true meaning of these maps has been hidden for years—right in plain sight.
“The Harris maps were printed from wood block. Most are on mulberry-bark paper and are written in classical Chinese. Although varying in ages they have only minimal differences. The oldest of the Harris maps are believed to be from the Ming dynasty [the 14th to 17th century].”4 Harris believed that the maps descended from much earlier maps.
Charlotte’s abridged version of her father’s book won rare praise from a distinguished scholar, Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee, mentioned earlier, the former chief of the Asian Division at the Library of Congress. Hwa-Wei Lee reviewed The Asiatic Fathers of America and concluded:
This scholarly and yet easy to read book is a major contribution to the early history of the Americas and the relations to China and other parts of Asia. There is much evidence that Chinese were in America hundreds if not thousands of years before Columbus. Based on the rare Asian maps collection of her late father, Dr. Hendon M. Harris, the author has painstakingly researched, including using the resources of the Library of Congress, to present her findings that Chinese had indeed travelled by sea to the Americas since 2000 B.C. . . .
Harris Rees’s research on these maps and the subject of early Chinese exploration of the Americas is spelled out in her books Secret Maps of the Ancient World (2008, 2009), Chinese Sailed to America Before Columbus (2011), and Did Ancient Chinese Explore America? My Journey Through the Rocky Mountains to Find Answers (2013).
A BURIED MING MEDALLION
One of the most fascinating discoveries about Chinese presence in the Americas involves hard evidence—a material find that supports the information we have gleaned from Zheng He’s map. In 1994 an American antiquities collector, Robertson Shinnick, had begun using a metal detector to search for old coins and other items of interest and eventually focused on an old, isolated churchyard atop a hill near Asheville, North Carolina. After months, he came across what he first described as a curious three-inch diameter disc with a strange inscription.
Shinnick’s find had been entirely a matter of intuition and luck, because he had no particular indication that he might uncover such an antiquity in that area. He had won the opportunity to search in the churchyard after being interested in doing so for some time. Though the area had seen modern development, including a church, Shinnick knew the history of the place. Records showed that a white settler, Samuel Davidson, had built a cabin there in 1784 but was killed by Cherokee who considered him a trespasser on their land. Shinnick’s blog Digger’s Diary describes the locale as having “many old tombstones in the cemetery and according to the sign out front, the original church had been established only a short time after” Davidson was killed. “The long-vanished original church was probably a log structure, as were most antebellum buildings in the region.”
Shinnick conducted a number of surveys at the churchyard, the first in the winter of 1994 during a driving blizzard. His early finds were U.S. coins from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but he continued searching the site through the spring and into the summer. Then finally in August, he dug out the medallion, “a curious bronze or brass disc, which had a plain back and a small cartouche on the front with Chinese characters. It was about four inches deep. I was mystified as to its identity. Obviously it was fairly old and had almost certainly been in the ground at least 50–100 years (after all, it was deeper than the 1894 half dollar that was found a few feet away, though that doesn’t prove anything).”
Shinnick understood from the beginning that the site easily qualified as having been occupied by Native Americans for a long time before Europeans might have been there. Its attractive characteristics were obvious, including a promontory that offered a good view of the surrounding area. “Twice while digging in other churchyards in the area,” he wrote, “I accidentally unearthed stone projectile points, one of them from the Paleolithic era.” It made perfect sense. “What is good real estate today has usually been considered good real estate for centuries, if not millennia.” Frequently, plantations had been built on Native American sites. For example, on the coast of Georgia he found fragments of pre-Columbian pottery, sometimes mixed with artifacts from the colonial period. “I often hunt these sites when they are being cleared for modern construction, which will add yet another layer to the archaeological strata. . . .”5
Nevertheless, in the case of the medallion, Shinnick did not at first think it had much value, even if it was obviously beautifully made. He put it aside as an interesting curio and thought little about it for more than a decade. Eventually, though, in 2006, he decided to search for information about the object using the World Wide Web, which of course was not widely available when he found the disc twelve years earlier.
The disc could have vanished into obscurity again had it not come to the attention of Dr. Siu-Leung Lee through a third party. Dr. Lee, a researcher living in Columbus, Ohio, was immediately intrigued by the Chinese inscription on the medallion, found to read in translation: “Authorized and awarded by Xuan De of Great Ming.” A simple search showed that the Xuan De era (1426–1435) came in the reign of Xuan Zong, “the fifth emperor of the Ming Dynasty.”
Without any idea of the authenticity yet of the medallion, Dr. Lee offered to buy the medallion from Shinnick. Shinnick agreed and sold it to Lee for what he described as a modest sum, “slightly higher than the very low value I had in my head, and I was satisfied.”6
Shinnick closed his report on his role of the affair by saying that if verified, the find was evidence and an answer to “a potentially large historical riddle. . . . I personally can attest to one thing—the medal was truly dug out of the ground, by me personally, as I have described. Beyond that, the rest remains an enigma.”7
Dr. Lee was a chemist, but had studied Chinese history and calligraphy for some time and hosted an online bulletin board, asiawind.com, which helped him gather information on Chinese antiquities, calligraphy, and culture. He started at the beginning by visiting the location where Shinnick had dug. He thought that the place where the medal was unearthed would be of vital importance—a place that was, sad to say, the site of countless battles and huge loss of life between the local peoples and the first European settlers. Hundreds of Cherokee Indians were massacred in many bloody battles. In 1776, right after the American Declaration of Independence was written, the United States government offered land grants to the soldiers in lieu of monetary payment. The Cherokee homeland was given to the soldiers,
resulting in yet more conflict and massacre. The Cherokee people were later driven more than a thousand miles away to Oklahoma in 1838–39 in the historical event known as the Trail of Tears, during which thousands of Cherokee Indians died. During the colonial era, 90–95 percent of the Cherokee perished.
How could such a medallion end up on a rural hilltop in former Cherokee lands in North Carolina? Dr. Lee’s analysis was astute and logical. He said, for example, that it was unlikely that a latter-day Chinese immigrant left it there in the nineteenth century. Chinese émigrés, of course, came to the United States starting after the 1850s, but most went as indentured laborers to mine gold or work on the railroads on the West Coast. They did not venture to the American South; convicts and slaves built the railways in that part of the country. Few Chinese came through Asheville. Even if a Chinese laborer at some point in history had ventured to the area, it was unlikely he would be carrying such a medallion; it was plain and not ornate and therefore did not have obvious monetary value. Neither was it likely that European missionaries might carry such an object with them.
In any case, Dr. Lee said, the medallion showed little wear or corrosion. On further analysis, it was found to be made of brass, which again would match with Chinese manufacture. It was during the Xuan De era that China began to blend copper and zinc to make the alloy, using it on precious vessels in which to burn incense.
The mere presence of a Xuan De Chinese medallion thousands of miles from China does not of course imply that it was transported there by the Chinese. Dr. Lee has, however, managed to piece together a set of corroborative concepts that seem to provide a far more convincing story. Slowly, Dr. Lee’s early skepticism about early Chinese voyages to America was eroding. The medallion was apparent evidence of the presence of Chinese explorers, possibly Zheng He’s team in the Ming dynasty, in the areas controlled by Native Americans before Columbus came to the New World.
While Dr. Lee did not make a categorical statement about the authenticity and dating of the medallion, his cautious approach did not stop the usual critics from declaring the find was a fake.
Dr. Lee’s analysis was that the medallion fit into the way in which the Ming emperors conducted affairs. It was customary that emperors send gifts to other nations to announce their victories and successes. He said that such a medallion “represented the highest authority of the emperor and was only delivered by a diplomat like Zheng He or his deputy.” After Zhu Zhanji died, China isolated herself from the rest of the world for another 150 years.
As Dr. Lee began to research the Cherokee in more depth, he found fascinating cultural similarities between the Native Americans and the Chinese. The Cherokee people have two original flags, one with a white background and a depiction of the famous constellation known as the Big Dipper in red, which they call the peace flag. They also have a war flag, with the same design but reversed in color.
As we have seen in previous chapters, the observation of the stars had been routine practice in China for thousands of years. The Big Dipper, part of the larger constellation Ursa Major, was regarded as the most important constellation by the Chinese, as far back as the first dragon motif in Henan, probably 6,500 years ago. The handle of the Dipper is typically used as an aid to trace an imaginary line to Polaris, the North Star. The constellation is featured on several flags in ceremonial parades from the Song to the Qing dynasty. The Ming emperors were especially fond of the Big Dipper in association with their Daoist beliefs. Zheng He used Polaris and the Big Dipper to calculate latitude.
Moreover, the Cherokee were not known to have a written language until one was developed in the early 1800s, never mind a need for recording their celestial observations. They had no knowledge of other constellations on record. So it is quite strange that they did not write, yet placed so much reverence on a star constellation that seemingly was of no interest to them.
Extending Dr. Lee’s inquiry, it is still reasonable to ask why the medal had been found so far inland. Who could have brought it there and why? He had his theories and suspicions. But proof was wanting. The medallion was unique and unlike any other that has been found. He hoped that one day another would surface elsewhere in the world, and the strange brass medallion would be placed in its proper time and setting.
This leads to another story. The neighboring coastal tribe in the area, the Catawba, has a long tradition of making ceramics. Some of their pottery designs are very similar to the bronze censers made in the Xuan De era. They also make tripod pottery identical to Chinese ceramics, and are the only North American peoples to do so.
The Catawba and Cherokee were rivals but also traded with each other. Could the Catawba tribe have been the first to have made contact with Zheng He’s fleets?
The Europeans, especially the English, had been trying to reproduce Chinese porcelain for ages, but without success. In 1712–22, a Jesuit missionary learned the secrets of Jingdezhen—China’s world-famous porcelain capital—and wrote two long letters home about the process used there. However, European potters still could not produce true porcelain, for lack of china clay. The first production of white clay in North America was by the English-born potter Andrew Duché, who worked in Savannah, Georgia, around 1730. Several decades later, Josiah Wedgwood, the famed founder of the porcelain industry in England, dispatched Thomas Griffiths to America to look for china clay. Griffiths succeed in a nefarious manner: He kidnapped the wife of a Cherokee chief, and then forced the chief to lead him to a white clay pit. The Wedgwood company began to ship tons of the white clay to London. Even so, throughout the remainder of the eighteenth century, English porcelain simply could not compete successfully with Chinese imports.
All the while, however, pottery in North Carolina was being produced in a style reminiscent of Ming pottery, produced both by Native Americans and European settlers. It had taken China close to ten thousand years to perfect the production of fine china, a skill not so quickly and easily learned, not even by the technologically adept Europeans of the time. How could the Cherokee and Catawba Indians master this technology so well?
Along with the prowess of Cherokee craftsmen, one must note that in the Cherokee language the word for china clay (kaolin) is unaker. In a Chinese southern dialect the word is strikingly similar: uk-nake. Is this a coincidence? The name uk-nake was used throughout the Ming dynasty. The word was then replaced by other terms, such as kaolin for china clay. A Jingdezhen porcelain expert told Dr. Lee that Zheng He, on his voyages, quite conceivably could have brought clay bricks (petuntse or baidunzi), and some of the porcelain workers could have been on board to look for new sources of raw materials. The knowledge of finding and preparing the proper clay material was very likely passed down by these Chinese potters.
THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP
One final note from this portion of the North American tour was a stop at the Great Dismal Swamp, a visit to our “holy grail”—a wrecked Chinese junk that was first uncovered 250 years ago.
With so many Chinese arriving in the Americas, there was likely to be evidence of ships that had been wrecked there. The first great challenge the fleet would have come across would have been the tempestuous winds that batter the North and Central American coastline in the late summer and early fall. For as long as the region has been inhabited, hurricanes have caused untold damage and misery to coastal settlers, as well as the fishermen and merchants who ply its shores. With such a magnitude of hurricanes there were bound to be shipwrecks, and this was one of the first things that caught our attention in the area.
The Great Dismal Swamp appears to hold just such a mighty piece of evidence. The swamp was drained on commission by some friends of George Washington in 1769. In the course of their work, they came across a huge old Chinese junk. It was the stuff of rumor and legend; the fact was that no one could explain how an ancient Chinese sailing ship ended up in the muck on the Atlantic coast between North Carolina and Virginia.
The Great Dismal Swamp is an enigma—a huge expanse of fore
sted wetlands formed more than one million years ago, where, despite its gloomy name, wildlife of all shapes and sizes thrives.
George Washington enters the story because he invested money before the American Revolution in projects to reclaim unusable land. He and others visited the swamp in 1763 and founded the Great Dismal Swamp Company. A portion of the area is now a U.S. national wildlife refuge. One of the canals built by the reclamation projects is named for Washington. In the course of dredging and draining, workers in the swamp company uncovered the hull of a boat in remarkably good shape. It was not a surprise that the wood was still intact and had not rotted. What was surprising was that the hull that emerged was that of a Chinese junk, and not a European caravel.
The waters of the swamp were already well known at the time for their preservative qualities; locals drank the water saying that its properties promoted long life. The amber-colored water contains acids derived from the bark of assorted trees that grow there—notably cypress and juniper. These acids prevent the growth of bacteria. The waters in the swamp are rich in minerals and low in oxidants, and thus the wood of the wreck was preserved in the swamp for many years.
At first, the discovery seemed astounding. But there was an explanation. The waters off the coast, as we have noted, are prone to forceful hurricanes, which sometimes can send storm surges far inland. Any ship caught in the rising seas and raging winds would naturally seek safe harbor in Pamlico or Albemarle Sound.
This was not at all a surprise to us, either. We believed that the junk sank in the swamp long before it was drained by Washington, since it was sighted as an old wreck before this initial drainage. We have corroborative evidence from the accounts of the first European explorers, including Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who founded St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, and others who had described the wrecks of Chinese junks, or groups of Chinese encountered both to the north and the south of the swamp. Furthermore, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, another Spanish explorer of the same period, reported seeing junks with gilded sterns near an estuary of the Mississippi River.
Who Discovered America? : The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas (9780062236777) Page 17
