Posted on 10/18/2010 11:30:24 AM PDT by Palter
It is not much to look at - a small pitted brass coin with a square hole in the centre-but this relatively innocuous piece of metal is revolutionising our understanding of early East African history, and recasting China's more contemporary role in the region.
A joint team of Kenyan and Chinese archaeologists found the 15th Century Chinese coin in Mambrui-a tiny, nondescript village just north of Malindi on Kenya's north coast.
In barely distinguishable relief, the team leader Professor Qin Dashu from Peking University's archaeology department, read out the inscription: "Yongle Tongbao" - the name of the reign that minted the coin some time between 1403 and 1424.
"These coins were carried only by envoys of the emperor, Chengzu," Prof Qin said.
"We know that smugglers would often take them and melt them down to make other brass implements, but it is more likely that this came here with someone who gave it as a gift from the emperor."
And that poses the question that has excited both historians and politicians: How did a coin from the early 1400s get to East Africa, almost 100 years before the first Europeans reached the region?
When China ruled the seas
The answer seems to be with Zheng He, also known as Cheng Ho - a legendary Chinese admiral who, the stories say, led a vast fleet of between 200 and 300 ships across the Indian Ocean in 1418.
Until recently, there have only been folk tales and insubstantial hints at how far Zheng He might have sailed.
Then, a few years ago, fishermen off the northern Kenyan port town of Lamu hauled up 15th Century Chinese vases in their nets, and the Chinese authorities ran DNA tests on a number of villagers who claimed Chinese ancestry.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Re read that. The Kenyans would have found some “joints” ~ the stuff grows wild ya’ know.
Koreans and Chinese are genetically identical. The Korean language is an import from Northern and Western Asia.
So would the japanese and the koreans. But that doesn’t change the fact that they are all chinese...ish
ping
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They were, over the Bering Land Bridge thousands of years ago. Ever doubt it just go visit Peru.
A few Sicilians, too...
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That would explain it all nicely...
The 1400s AD? Laughable. That was modern history for the Europeans. The Byzantines were all over East Africa long before that. Dittoes others.
I had a round, brass Chinese coin with a square hole when I was a child. I have no idea where it is now, but it could be one of my knick knack boxes. I also have no idea where my parents, or grandparents, got it. It was just lying around the house when I was a kid, and they let me have it.
More recently Chinese families contributed old family crest rings to the national treasury to help defeat the Japanese invaders.
Along the way many crates of these things ended up in the United States in the hands of a company called BEST (not Best Buy, but BEST).
They sold these rings as guaranteed old Chinese silver rings. I checked out several hundred of them and determined that the greater number were actually Japanese family MON rings. (A mon is usually thought of as a family crest ~ used as a large design pattern on kimono or hapi coats, or anything you want)
I don’t know where this coin originated, or how it was connected to our family. It was just lying around in a drawer and was given to me as a child for my MEAGER foreign coin collection. My grandmother moved to San Francisco as an 18 year old in 1906 (same year as the great earthquake) and it may have been something she picked up there. She was a great saver of odds and ends. I remember she used to harague me about washing my hands after touching money because, “you never know where it has been.”
She often told me a story about when she first came to SF that she saw a “Chinaman with a long braid down his back and long, curving fingernails take a coin out of his ear to pay for his fare on the streetcar.” She’d follow up with a lecture about library books and doorknobs.
In my short lived part time job not long ago we had lots of young kids ( 7-16) come into the shop. These were kids who had interest in history, coins, science and so on. One of my favorite subjects to clue them in on for study was the Chinese treasure fleet.
Most of the kids were regulars and you should have seen how excited they were the next time they visited. Being a history geek and discovering something you’ve never studied before is such a joy.
That was another one of those "high spots" just before a serious decline. China has had several flood situations over the last 4,000 years that simply stopped civilization in its tracks, so we can imagine all sorts of advances being wiped out without a trace.
Korean is an Altaic-Ural language family.
Korean, Japanese, all sorts of languages all over Siberia, Eastern Russia, Northern China, Tibet, Central Asia, etc.
I’ll say it:
IT’S PROBABLY A FAKE.
China is hugely active in counterfeiting coins. Lots of them on fleabay. Lots.
If it’s a coin, and it advances any Chinese agenda.
It’s probably a fake.
No one else has the virus. It's peculiar to the two areas ~ Japan and Peru.
The Zuni are demonstrably decendants of Zen practitioners who arrived in the Sierras in the 1300s.
A recent burial site uncovered in Costa Rica is clearly Japanese/Chinese and not American Indian. it's dated to the 1200s (we just had a news article on that).
Most Japanese were illiterate until modern times, and no writing system is known to have existed in Japan until the late 6th century (at the earliest).
Japanese were able to catch currents and winds and sail to the Americas virtually at will for thousands of years and did so. They just couldn't get back! It's a one way trip.
So, where did the MesoAmerican writing systems come from? It's a just a guess on my part, but they probably came overland through Alaska from the Aleutians from Kamchatka about 5,000 years ago with the Athabaskans.
American Indian sign language is essentially the same as the precursors to the Shang Dynasty bones, and if you know the sign language, or the bone language, you can read either. Indians wandering about with a sign language could readily reproduce it in stone, or paint, or whathave you. It's a pretty obvious application. I think the nomads had a hard time hauling around the stones though.
the Chinese authorities ran DNA tests on a number of villagers who claimed Chinese ancestry. “
I would imagine the ladies of the East Africcan coasts would have been glad to see some guys sail in with some coins in their chests.
“Been at sea long, sailor? Me give you good time.”
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