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Originally posted by EartOccupant
This is a nice documentary about voyages of the legendary Admiral Zheng, in 1421.
His records where destroyed, but in this docu they try to reconstruct his 7 great voyages with his enormous fleet.
Not much to add from my part, still sucking it in.
It has it all, ancient maps, mysteries, deliberate records destruction.. nice ATS food ;-)
I think worth sharing , nice quality and a intriguing quest!
Enjoy:
Originally posted by Jessica6
I have a very old US History book from the 1800s - more of a timeline really - and on the first page is a paragraph on the Chinese exploring the western now-US coastline in 450 ad.
A country named Fusang was described by the native Buddhist missionary Hui Shen (Chinese: 慧深; pinyin: huìshēn) in 499 CE, as a place 20,000 Chinese li east of Da-han, and also east of China (according to Joseph Needham, Da-han corresponds to the Buriat region of Siberia). Hui Shen went by ship to Fusang, and upon his return reported his findings to the Chinese Emperor. His descriptions are recorded in the 7th century text Book of Liang by Yao Silian, and describe a Bronze Age civilization inhabiting the Fusang country. The Fusang described by Shen has been variously posited to be the Americas, Sakhalin island, the Kamchatka peninsula or the Kuril islands. The American hypothesis was the most hotly debated one in the late 19th and early 20th century after the 18th century writings of Joseph de Guignes were revived and disseminated by Charles Godfrey Leland in 1875. Sinologists including Emil Bretschneider, Berthold Laufer, and Henri Cordier refuted however this hypothesis, and according to Needham the American thesis was "stone dead" by the time of the First World War.
Originally posted by Picollo30
what about the vikings (leif ericsson, vinland) finding america before columbus theory, has it been debunked?
All told, the University of Washington anthropologist George Quimby estimated, between 500 and 1750 CE some 187 junks drifted from Japan to the Americas
In October 1813, the junk Tokujo Maru left Tokyo, returning to Toba after delivering the shogun’s annual tribute. The nor’westers swept it out to sea and it drifted for 530 days, passing within a mile of California when offshore winds blew it out to sea. Eleven of the fourteen men aboard perished. Then, 470 miles off Mexico, an American brig hailed the hulk and rescued the three survivors. After four years away, the Tokujo Maru’s captain, Jukichi, returned to Japan. Somehow he escaped execution and secretly recorded his travels in A Captain’s Diary. Though it was officially banned, Jukichi’s Diary intrigued and influenced Japanese scholars, paving the way for Commodore Perry and for another foreign guest who arrived six years before him. “Unquestionably,” James W. Borden, the U.S. Commissioner to Hawaii, remarked in 1860, “the kindness which had been extended to shipwrecked Japanese seamen was among the most powerful reasons which finally led to the opening of that country to foreigners and foreign commerce.”