Drinks from 6.30 pm lecture starts 7.30pm

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Prior reservation (but not payment)  required please email admin@rgshk.org.hk stating the names of those who will attend.  If the event is very popular priority will be given  to members of the RGS HK

 Charlotte Harris Rees  speaks on "How the Chinese Sailed to America before Columbus".  In this lecture, Ms Harris Rees discusses her extensive research of ancient Asian maps of the world, which demonstrate that the Chinese sailed to America in the pre-Columbian era.  Ms Harris Rees also shows that this thesis is supported by early European maps of America which accurately depict regions not yet explored by Europeans, the information for which had to have come from an outside source.  In addition, Ms Harris Rees has found that Chinese writings indicate that Chinese sailors had been to the Americas before the ancient Chinese maps of the continent were made.
 
From very early dates Chinese writers described in detail a beautiful land to their east called Fu Sang. Fu Sang is indicated on the far right side of Tian Xia style maps along with the annotation: "The sun rises here." By the third century BC, one Chinese writer said that Fu Sang had enormous trees and was "10,000 li wide" and then one came to another big blue ocean.  Converted to modern measurements, 10,000 li is almost the width of North America.  The enormous sequoia tree, native to Pacific America, is depicted on at least one of these ancient Asian maps as the Fu Sang tree.  Ms Harris Rees argues that Fu Sang was America.

This lecture also discusses the powerful currents in the Pacific which are able to carry objects, and thus arguably early mariners, to the Americas and then back to Asia in a continuous warm gyre.  During the 20th century several different groups on rafts or small three-person boats demonstrated that it is possible to cross the Pacific by this 100km wide current.  The boats did not in some cases even need to have to use a sail.  Joseph Needham pointed out that the Chinese in the Warring States period wrote about that eastward flowing current and named it Wei Lu.

Recent studies show that Chinese sailors were ocean going by at least 2000 BC.  By at least the 7th century AD they had very large ships, many privately owned.  Some recent DNA studies also indicate that the earliest arrivals to the Americas may have arrived not by the land bridge route through the Baring Straight, but further south on the American continent, which would have had to have been by sea travel.  Furthermore, some parasites found in the Americas that were brought from Asia could not have survived the cold, northern route.

In conclusion, Ms Harris Rees argues that these transpacific voyages were not only possible, but also probable at early dates and that the ancient Chinese descriptions of Fu Sang (America) are surprisingly accurate even today.

Charlotte Harris Rees hails from Virginia, USA, though she was also a resident of Hong Kong as a teenager.  She is a graduate of Columbia University.  In 1972, her family acquired from an antique shop in Korea an ancient Asian map which led to a book contending that by 2200 B.C. Chinese had reached the Americas by sea.  Ms Harris Rees has taken that research forward for the last 10 years, when she took her family's map collection to the U.S. Library of Congress where it remained for three years to be studied.  She has published three books, The Asiatic Fathers of America: Chinese Discovery and Colonisation of Ancient America, Secret Maps of the Ancient World and her just released The Chinese Sailed to America Before Columbus.  Ms Harris Rees has appeared frequently on television and radio in the United States and Canada and in numerous international news articles.  She has lectured worldwide including at the U.S. Library of Congress, The National Library of China, Stanford University, the University of London, Tsinghua University and numerous other universities.