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San Antonio's cultural experience museum..
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Chinese Texans: Far East The Chinese Far East Chinese civilization is one of the oldest and most continuous in the world. For centuries the Chinese—in wonderful irony—have regarded North America as the "Far East," just as earlier Europeans called China the "Far East." And the Chinese have known about their Far East for over three thousand years. Whether this knowledge was based on travel across the Pacific Ocean or good guesses remains speculation. But in recent years, increasing numbers of Western historians have realized that early China was not the isolated country it became by the 19th century. Chinese government documents from the early 6th century record the journey of a Buddhist priest to the Far East. Chinese Buddhists visited most of the known world west, from India to the Roman Empire, but Hwui Shan returned from elsewhere to tell a strange tale. He records a cross-Pacific journey into what appears to be the Southwest of the present United States and through parts of Mexico. Many of his observations of the lands and native peoples seem to fit, and the bow and arrow in use in China at this time may have appeared in North America about the time of his journey. Even more startling, the oldest geography in China, the Classic of Mountains and Seas , produced at least two thousand years ago, includes the records of land traverses in this Far East. One of the descriptions curiously matches parts of West Texas: notably a journey that seems to go by Guadalupe Peak, around Mount Livermore, and into the Big Bend area. Landforms—mountains, rivers, flats—are placed at correct distances; minerals, plants, and animals are described as if observed. For the most part, this account sounds very much like United States surveyors' notes made twenty centuries later. But the Chinese book also includes a few supernatural monsters. Early Chinese works of all kinds—encyclopedias, histories, court records, medical documents—include metaphoric language and even legends and folklore, and the mix puzzles many readers. Such references are usually meant as analogies. A twisting river is called a dragon, a quartz crystal becomes a magic window, a fog becomes the obscuring but beautiful breath of a god, and rock outcrops become dragon's scales. "There, we came upon a three-headed dragon, beautiful in gods' first glare." This, in context, means a river delta with three mouths, admired at dawn. The land surveys contain very little such language, but just enough to puzzle readers not familiar with the intense practicality of the Chinese combined with their love of literary techniques. And of the journeys themselves, no hard evidence exists.only these written records. For many centuries the Chinese possessed the necessary navigational and shipbuilding skills to cross oceans; descriptions of Chinese voyages to Africa at the same time as Hwui Shan, and earlier, are believed. But very few people can accept the idea that Chinese explorers walked across the trans-Pecos more than twenty centuries ago. They could have. But did they? Copyright 1998 |
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