I wasted weeks on Menzies' Chinese explorers. Menzies is a fibber. Trust me!

Kenowith man was oriental, and he was here before our First Nations arrived. The corpse was controversial. It was a scientific marvel. A corpse that was proven to predate our Aboriginal Peoples. So scary was this body to some, that there was a tremendous battle over who owned it.
It was finally decided that scientists could test and examine this specimen, and then return the remains over to First Nations? People to bury it.
Where this evidence was discovered in the Pacific Northwest, the site was defaced by bulldozers and rendered useless from an anthropological revisit.
But it didn't matter, enough scientific evidence unearthed to prove that First Nations were not in fact first.
Read up on it, it pretty well takes out the " First " part out of the debate.

Ron
Could you post a few academic references to support your claim about Kenowith Man?

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First off, IMAC, Kenneworth man was NOT Oriental; he wasn't standard Amerind, BUT he did have what's called the "Inca star", which is a five-sided platelet at the back of the cranium. What's more interesting in the Lower Columbia is the mysterious old pottery culture there, which vanished due to floods/climate (or volcanic activity?) about 2-3000 years ago (can't remember the details).

Now as for Menzies and Chiasson, their junk science can go join Needham's junk history. Needham, in his sinophilia, makes ridiculous claims such as western classical and pop music actually being Tang Dynasty classical music (because of the similarities of the well-tempered scale vs the old European equal-tempered scale). He also tries to connect the dots, some of them galaxies apart, in ways that would make von Daniken, Hancock or Sitchin cringe; in fact at times when I'm reading reviews/raves of these guys (Menzies, Chiasson, Needham) I feel like I'm reading Chariots of the Gods or something of that kind: sketchy evidence combined with gee-whiz earnestness making totally detailed conclusions that have nothing to do with the evidence. All three of them eulogize over Zheng He, who obviously did a great deall, but as with other innovators and outward-looking people/things from China, he got shut down, and damned fast, for proving that there was intelligent life outside the Middle Kingdom. Much as someone might be shut down for coming back to Earth with accounts of cities on the moon and Mars, where there aren't supposed to be any. The China that Zheng He came home to has a lot more in common with Kim Jong-Il's Korea than it does with Europe in the Age of Exploration, let's put it that way...

As with its technologies, China turned its back on these explorations in the same way that they concocted gunpowder to provide entertainment, but never applied themselves (overly) to its political potential. "Well, we could have built it but we didn't bother" is very much like the Tang Dynasty Music thing - "we invented this scale, but we didn't think it was very useful so no one wrote any music with it" (In Needham's strange analysis of how it came to be that the music of European courts was Tang, it would seem that somehow Bach and Vivaldi were taught Tang music, presumably during their visits to Madagascar and Cape Breton....

Yet because China is now the world-centering, national-ego driven force on the world stage, all kinds of spurious rationales to make it sound like the Chinese could have conquered the world two thousand years ago but didn't. Next thing you know someone will be claiming Stonehenge was built by the Chinese, just as there are tose in the Fusang camp who claim that Mexico was administered as a Chinese province. All garbage, all fatuous nonsense like the re-invented history of BC as re-told to us by people who only moved here 20 years ago, who on the one hand like to condemn us for exploiting natives and their resources while on the other hand bragging and complaining that they didn't get enough recognition or pay for having helped with that exploitation (railways, gold, fish).

Fine, the US rearranged history and geography in its time, and Britain and France and Germany and the Ottoman Empire and everyone else before that. But making stuff up based on "we were superior so why didn't we conquer the world like everyone else" is just childishness, and more worthy of Mao's Cultural Revolution or the ego-serving vanity of the First Ch'in Emperor than any reputable modern culture.

Chinoiserie was a big deal in 17th and 18th Century European art and design. This didn't make it part of China, in any sense (not even culturally, as Needham's line of thinking runs and is the subtext to Menzies and Chiasson). The scary part is these guys can get publishers to give them money to put this kind of crap into print.

"the ego-serving vanity of the First Ch'in Emperor" is a bit redundnat; ego-serving destructiveness and historical censorship of the First Ch'In Emperor is more fitting

Thanks Skookum1, I knew he had the spelling wrong last night when the only Google result pointed back here to another poison-pen missive by - Ron Earwig himself - he's one fellow who's always on the same self-serving tack. Not surprising he’d spin the slim but interesting archeological data to make some kind of snide remark about First Nations and their claims. Once, not so long ago, Ronnie claimed he wished he had a status card.

I remembered the incident (the find, and the controversy) but I’d forgotten the final resolution.

Enjoyed your post on the Turner thread btw, if you haven't been back there - others were also interested. Some other files you might be interested in are now posted at the other place.

I just read the Bill Poser article http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000409.html and its mention of Hu Jintao's speech to the Australian Parliament claiming that the Chinese settled Australia ("the southern land") in 1420, pointing to Zheng He's voyage as proof.

But Zheng He did not carry settlers; he was gathering treasure - more pointedly, looking for more roots, berries and other cures to help the Emperor sustain (or get)_ his hard-on, to this day the central goal of Chinese medicine (under the guise "virility and energy") despite all the high-sounding talk about chiI/I] and [I]yin and yang. Zheng He was looking for more sources for "tiger bone" (penis), which was already getting rare in China by then, as well as looking for other peoples who would want to pay the Chinwse Emperor tribute. He wasn't carrying settlers.

But this didn't stop Hu Jintao from riffing off of Chiasson/Menzies/Needham and China's own claque of similar authors, asserting that China actually colonized Australia in the early 15th Century. Well, I'm sorry, but where are the joss houses, pagodas, even inscriptions or village/town ruins, even just a stray coin or two? Where are the Chinese records of this settlement? - because they DO have records of settling/colonizing in Vietnam, Mlalaysia/Indonesia and Thailand (all "southern land"). Where are the aboriginal legends of the sea-faring people from the north with a thing for noodles and lucky numbers?

But it's not just more hot air. Hu was not-so-indirectly asserting the "right" of Chinese to migrate to and settle in Australia, subtext "since we were here before you and this was originally our colony, not yours". Chinese imperialism's own counter to "white Australia" is the idea that Australia should become someting like a New England for China.

The same "logic" applies in the curent rewrites of BC history, which insist on the Chinese "right" to settle in this far-flung colony of the British Empire, as if we had had written on Beacon Hill the same kind of "give us your poor, your unwashed" propaganda that's on the Statue of Liberty. The subtext being the same: we have as much right to be colonialist exploiters here as you did/do (except they get to blame "us" for all the colonialist exploitation of natives, which they not only took part in but were a leading force in, particularly in the goldfields).

Turning truth on its head is nothing new for Chinese political propaganda. A glance at any discussion page where Chinese and Tibetans/Tibetan supporters square off gives a good idea of the totally twisted view of the outside world that even modern China labours under (killing most of the intelligentsia in the 1960s didn't really help with things, either...). One recent item here that caught my eye - piqued my poo, so to speak - was a Chinese Vancouverite blathering on in one of the badly-written ethno-histories about "why the Head Tax redress" claims that white workers from Canada/Britain were stealing jobs in BC that rightfully should have been Chinese. In other words, that it's not Chinese underbidding on labour contracts that was the issue, but whites taking jobs from the rightful Chinese colonists of this place.

Similarly on Wikipedia's various pages about Chinese immigration and Chinatowns, various claims about how Chinatowns were created by legislation restrction in North America were made cross-boundary; as if "we" treated the Chinese as badly as the Americans had (SOME Americans had, as there are many stories of success as well as tose of struggle, just like any other ethnic group. Here in BC Governor Douglas hadn't made a point of inviting Chinese to BC from California, or protecting them in the colony; but to read revanchist Chinese histories of BC you'd think this was the Antelbellum South; that "they" can ignore their own success stories in the process of drubbing everyone else is, to me, only proof of a cultural insecurity of the very same kind the Ming Emperor displayed when he destroyed Zheng He's fleet - any truth challenging his own must be destroyed, anything challenging his position/self-image must be ignored.....

And, as with the First Ch'in Emperor, rewrite history to suit yourself if you have the power. That's what's going on in BC right now, it's implicit in Hu Jintao's Australia speech and in nearly any pronouncement coming out about Tibet, etc. Chiasson and Needham and Menzies are just patsies to the whole game; inspired neophytes who don't have a grasp on history, or reality, so are content to make up their own, and have publishers stupid/greedy enough to publish their shit (there's lots of money in Von Daniken-Hancock type ravings....)

A 2,000 year old Chinese Urn came up in a net in the St of Juan de fuca, but with no other artifacts it is hard to clarify if it came from a 1400 Chinese Junk or a 1800 sailing ship. However Chinese coins have appeared in digs on the west Coast and anchors have apparently been found near Grey Harbour.

The currents certain favour vessels traveling from Eastern Asia to the Pacific Coast of North America and the Chinese Junks were capable ships. I certain believe it is possible and likely they sailed along this coast. Would have been interesting had they sailed up the Thames though!

I remember my dear old dad telling me a story about a Japanese fishing ship that drifted across the pacific maybe in the 1930s. All of the fishermen were dean and there was evidence of cannibalism if I remember the story correctly. So if chinese artifacts are found on the shores of the east pacific basin, that is only proof of artifacts - that may have been carried by derelict vessels or left by traders and explorers.

Not that I am rooting against the early explorers, but the evidence is clear that you don't have to have people to have artifacts.

Well, after going on about my dad, decided to consult the internet and found that research has been done on this subject: http://www.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/hhistory/japaneseshipwrecks/sources.html

I had the dates quite wrong, but anyway the Royal Museum article is a good source.

there is a Japanese fishing boat on display in Prince Rupert found drifting off our coast roughly 6 months after being reported missing in Japan.

"The Zuni Enigma..." is a well documented book presenting a strong argument about Japanese settlement on Turtle Island long before Columbus was lost and rescued in 1492.

Teresa Binstock

The Zuni Enigma: A Native American People's Possible Japanese Connection
by Nancy Yaw Davis
http://www.amazon.com/Zuni-Enigma-Possible-Japanese-Connection/dp/0393322300

Fascinating stuff Skookum. Thanks for taking the time to post that info.

myself:

Just noticed this typo/typefart: Governor Douglas HAD made a point of inviting the Chinese to the new colony, and was stern in his admonishments against the Americans who were hostile to them that they had equal rights to prospect, mine, settle etc; contrary to Chinese-Canadian mythology that their history here is one entirely of suffering and oppression and being discriminated against; they came here because they WEREN'T. By the mid-1870s 60% of alienated land in the Lillooet Land District (Pemberton to Barriere, roughly, though effectively Lillooet-Clinton-Ashcroft-Kamloops) was in Chinese hands; half of Barkerville was Chinese. And without the restrictive legislation confining them to Chinatown either, which is another part of widely-circulated fake mythologies, and they did rather better on the godlfields than white men did, although again their own mythonlogy websites (like the CCNC's) contend that they were only allowed to mine after the white man was finished and had to take poor leavings - an outright fabrication, but one happily funded by the feds Digital Colelctions folks, who fun "heritage" websites without actually fact-checking the crap that gets put up. This is an old tub-thump of mine, of course, but just interposed here because of my own writing error about Douglas and the Chinese.