Today, we discover America -- a thousand years
before Columbus. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about
the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.
The Chinese were very
isolationist, 1500 years ago. China thought the
outside world was benighted and uninteresting -- to
be avoided and sealed off, not sought out. But a
newer breed of Chinese Buddhists had a different
view. Their business was to go out and convert all
lands to Buddhism.
In AD 499, a Buddhist missionary, Hoei-Shin, came
back from a long voyage and told of a strange
people in a strange land -- 20,000 Chinese miles to
the east. That would've put him right on the west
coast of Mexico.
Hoei-Shin named the place Fusang, after a succulent
plant he'd found in that arid land. The natives ate
its roots and made wine from its sap. From its
thick leaves they made cloth, rope, roof-thatch,
and even paper. Hoei-Shin wrote about their society
and folkways -- all very unlike anything Chinese.
Of course, the
fusang plant sounds just like the Mexican maguey
plant -- the Agave americana which
served
so many functions for the pre-Columbian natives of
Mexico. And we have to ask: Is this another mystery
of flying saucers or Bigfoot?
Or can we take Hoei-Shin's journey as established
historical fact?
A French scholar, Deguignes, wrote about Fusang in
1761. He had limited material, and his work kicked
up a firestorm of controversy. A German professor,
Neumann, published Hoei-Shin's narrative in 1841
along with a commentary. An American, Charles
Leland, translated and expanded Neumann's work in
1875.
It was a long process of raising and resolving
questions. Take the route: At first it seemed out
of the question to cross the Pacific in a
5th-century Chinese junk. Then we see that
circulating currents can take you from China, up
the east coast of Japan, past Korea, along the
Aleutians, south of Alaska, down the west coast of
America to Mexico. The same currents carry you back
to China on a westward path, just above the
equator.
The very simplicity of that enormous journey is the
most convincing argument of all. Since Leland's
book, experts have thrashed out the details with
little public notice. Anthropologists have found
Chinese and Japanese influences and artifacts among
Native Americans all the way south to Peru. It
appears that what Hoei-Shin was able to do, others
probably did as well.
None of this reaches the textbooks. And so we
forget. We forget there was a Russian capital on
our west coast before the Gold Rush. There was a
university in Mexico City before Shakespeare. We
forget that, just as the Roman empire fell, Chinese
missionaries were preaching -- to pre-Aztec
Mexicans.
I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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