Who got here first? The China question

By Darrell Laurant

Published: August 16, 2008

If you’re intrigued by the exotic setting of the Beijing Olympic Games, there might be more Chinese in you than you realize. Just ask Charlotte Rees.

The Forest resident has just come out with her second book, expanding on a rather revolutionary premise first espoused by her father, a missionary in Asia. After discovering some ancient maps in a Korean antiques store in 1972, Hendon Harris became convinced that Chinese explorers had actually beaten Christopher Columbus to the coast of North America by several decades.

He followed up with some independent research, published “The Asiatic Fathers of America” in 1975 and, perhaps, awaited a storm of controversy. What he got, instead, was a massive yawn. The book sold poorly, and Harris died of a stroke in 1981.

Twenty years later, however, British writer Gavin Menzies published: “1421: The Year the Chinese Discovered America,” and that sparked more interest. Meanwhile, Harris’ map collection turned up under a bed in his son’s house, and Charlotte Rees became intrigued.

“In the beginning, I was a skeptic, like everyone else,” she said. “The more I looked over those maps, though, the more I became a believer. There were just too many similarities for it to be a coincidence.”
Take Peru, for example — a word that means “white mist” in Chinese.

“There are quite a few place names there that mean something in Chinese, but nothing in Spanish,” Rees said.

Then, there are the pictures of ancient villages in China that look quite a bit like the early Native American settlements in North America, complete with teepees. And how about the Oriental cast to the facial features of many American “Indian” tribes?

For that matter, isn’t it possible that when Columbus set off to find the Indies, he had actually heard something of Oriental people inhabiting the vague new land to the West?

All of this is discussed at length in “Secret Maps of the Modern World,” which Charlotte Rees published earlier this summer.

“The first book was pretty much me condensing what my father wrote,” she said. “This was a lot more of my own thoughts and research.”

And gradually, the idea of trail-blazing Chinese explorers is taking hold. Rees has been invited to speak at the Library of Congress and has found an ally in Menzies, who credited Rees (and, by extension, Harris) with some of the information in his own books — most recently, a description of how he believes the Chinese influenced the Reformation.

Meanwhile, Rees watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympics from her Forest living room last week and nodded her head.

“It was spectacular,” she said, “but it didn’t surprise me. Beijing is very modern, but Shanghai is almost futuristic. In fact, it’s so futuristic that many Chinese are afraid to go there.”

Obviously, the Chinese like the idea that they may have left the first “foreign” footprint on the North American continent, and they have embraced Rees and her work.

On the other side of that coin are the traditionalists. A cult of Columbus has grown up over the years, and how would that be affected by news that Christopher had finished second to the Chinese?

Would we still have Columbus Day? Would Columbus, Ohio, have to change its name?

That’s not Charlotte Rees’ problem.

“I’m just trying to get the information out there,” she said.

She once lived in Taiwan and has made several trips to both Chinas over the years. Both she and her husband Dave have enjoyed that interaction.

“Some things take getting used to,” Charlotte Rees said. “For instance, while the Chinese are very polite in their speech, they don’t believe in standing in lines. Everyone pushes and shoves to get to a spot first, and they drive the same way.”

This is, after all, a country of 1.3 billion people.

And while Rees didn’t write “Secret Maps of the Ancient World” to get rich, she can do the math.

“It would be very nice to get the book translated into Chinese,” she said.