Chinese Global Exploration in the Pre-Columbian Era: Evidence From an Ancient World Map

·  Publisher ‏ : ‎ World Scientific Publishing Company (November 27, 2023)

·  Language ‏ : ‎ English

·  Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 452 pages

·  ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9811271089

·  ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-9811271083

Purchase from Amazon, click https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Global-Exploration-Pre-Columbian-Era/dp/9811271089

Purchase from the publisher, click https://doi.org/10.1142/13273

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About the Book

How early did the Chinese explore the world? Did the Treasure Fleets, led by Admiral Zheng He, discover many parts of the world before Christopher Columbus? While it is known that Christopher Columbus discovered America and Europe ushered in the Age of Discovery, there is an ongoing debate on the "unknown" areas depicted in Western maps from the period and earlier. There is agreement among scholars that certain areas seem to have been mapped out prior to the arrival of Western explorers.

Chinese Global Exploration in the Pre-Columbian Era: Evidence from an Ancient World Map analyses the world's first modern map — known as Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (KWQ) 《坤輿萬國全圖》 in Chinese, translated as the "Complete Geographical Map of All Kingdoms of the World" to demonstrate evidence of Chinese global exploration in the Pre-Columbian era. The map of concern was first printed by Italian missionary, Matteo Ricci in 1602, and has been purported to be of entirely European origin, based on Ricci's former maps which he had brought to China in 1582.

This book, thus, seeks to be transformational in presenting essential new insights on Pre-Columbian world history and Chinese global exploration, moving away from the norm of the studies of geography and cartography by:

· Analysing the histories of all the geographical terms associated with Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, as depicted in the KWQ, thus demonstrating that these areas were most likely explored by the Chinese since Antiquity;

· Performing a comparison of KWQ with major European maps and state-of-the-art archaeological discoveries

Table of Contents

· Introduction

· Chinese Explored Cape Breton Island Long before the Europeans

· The Chinese Explored Australia, New Zealand, Land of Fire and Antarctica Long before the Europeans

· A Chinese-based World Map Depicts Europe between 1157 and 1166

· Chinese-based World Map Depicts Africa in 1433

· Did Zheng He's Mariners Explore the Americas before Columbus? An Analysis Offers Essential New Insights

About the Author

Sheng-Wei Wang is an independent scholar and writer, passionate about recovering our shared history of maritime globalization. She was born in Taiwan and has lived in the US, and Germany, and currently resides in Hong Kong. She is Eastern and Western educated with a BSc in Chemistry from the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Chemical Physics from the University of Southern California. Besides joining the research group at Munich University led by Professor Gerhard Ertl, the 2007 Nobel Laureate, she had also worked at top-ranking universities in the U.S. and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She started research on Pre-Columbian Chinese world exploration in 2013, and this is the second English book published on related topics.

In 2022, she founded WorldDiscovery.net to share her work and to promote an inclusive and open dialogue about Chinese maritime explorations since Antiquity. She was recently interviewed on her research findings by Azam Khan on the Talk The Walk Show of the Hong Kong International Business Channel (HKIBC). She also enjoys attending speaking engagements with academics and the general community to engage in the wider discussion on what it means to be a member of a globalised world and how it is shaped by our shared history as human beings; it is this excitement that she hopes to recreate on WorldDiscovery.net and in her books.