Nexus - 0207 - New Times Magazine-pages

Page Content (OCR)

It was Franciscan missionaries who went to Chia in the 16th Century, who were the first Europeans to obtain written evidence pointing to Chinese contacts with Australia. This evidence included copper scrolls dating from the 6th Century AD onwards, including a crude 6th | Century map of Australia. These scrolls are still being translated. They tell of such things as voyages across the Pacific Ocean in the 10th and 11th Centuries in gigantic fleets of junks - 60 to 100 ships carrying up to 200 or more crewmen each. It is obvious the Chinese possessed considerable knowledge Australia in biblical times). But what of the ancient Chinese, who were voyaging the Pacific Ocean centuries before the Europeans? Evidence is accumulating to prove that they too played their part in the discovery of Australia. The Javanese, with whom the Chinese traded, had an extensive knowledge of our waters, and could have been instrumental in directing Chinese explorers to our shores. Like the earlier civilisations of the near and middle-east, the Chinese certainly possessed often enormous wooden ships and navigation aids to enable them to undertake world- wide voyages in antiquity. For example, some of their huge junks were capable of carrying over : Spy of Australia as evidenced by their 1,000 people each. One type of ‘ : of the Chinese map] ancient writings. For example, huge junk measured at least 140 —S ‘ = i aioe Confucius in his "Spring and metres from bow to stem, and more ~~ Mao Ries in 1se4| Autumn Annals” (481BC), records than 30 metres across the beam. oe The map was a copy] two solar eclipses having been Between the fifth and eighth ote olaes""| observed by Chinese astronomers, possibly in Armhem Land - one (by modern calculation) on April 17th, 592BC, and the other on August 11th, 553BC. Another record, "Atlas of Foreign Countries", written between 265 and 316AD, describes the far north coast of the mysterious great south land as being inhabited by a race of one-metre tall Pygmies - an obvious reference to the pygmy sized Aboriginals identified by Australian anthropologist Norman B. Tindale, in 1938, in the mountains above Cairns, Queensland. In 338 BC, Shin Tzu wrote of the presence of apparent kangaroos kept in the Imperial Zoo, Peking and further similar reports continued in several later dynasties. Emperor Chao about this time dispatched a fleet of junks with orders to return with marsupials from the "southern land of Chui Hiao", and a Chinese book “The Classics of Shan Hai", written some time before 338BC The 80mm tall statuette of the Chinese god Shou Lao, | describes our Aborigines and their use of unearthed at Darwin in 1879, from benearth the roots of | the returning boomerang. an ancient banyan tree. About 213BC, Emperor Qin Shih centuries, the Chinese invented paddle-wheel operated vessels. These were operated by slaves working tread- mills inside the ships. By the 12th Century, they were building huge war ships with up to 23 paddle-whcels on each ship. A 15m rudder of one of these massive vessels has in recent years been unearthed on the coast of China. It is now preserved in a Peking museum. According to ancient writings preserved in China, a Buddhist monk, Fu Shai in 458 AD may have landed in southern California after an 11,000km voyage in one of these enormous ocean- going junks. Another Chinese explorer, Shu Shan Gee, is credited with having visited the same coastline about 1,000 years before Colombus “re-discovered" America. However, unlike the later European explorers, the Chinese were less interested in establishing colonies in far- off lands than in establishing temporary colonies solely for the purpose of trade or for mining of precious stones or minerals which they shipped home to China. APRIL-MAY 1992 NEXUS °18 About 213BC, Emperor Qin Shih