Chinese Explored Asia Long Before the Europeans: An Ancient World Map Tells All is the fruit of the author's research into the history of exploration prior to the European Age of Discovery. This book analyses thoroughly the Asian regions of an important ancient world map: Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (KWQ) (坤舆万国全图), translated as "Complete Geographical Map of All the Kingdoms of the World". The map was published in 1602 by Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci in China. For over 400 years, the map has been regarded as strictly of European origin and based on maps which Ricci brought with him to China in 1582 during the Ming Dynasty.
However, after analysing the histories of all the geographical terms associated with Asia on the KWQ, this book presents multilayer evidence that the Asian regions on this map are of Chinese origin and that they reveal eras long before the arrival of Europeans: Japan in 897, Joseon in 1433, Ming China in 1433, Southeast Asia in 1432–1433, the Indian Subcontinent and its eastern periphery in 1432–1433, West and Central Asia in 1433, and Asia to the North of China in 1428–1433.
The present book, and the author's previous book titled
Chinese Global Exploration in the Pre-Columbian Era: Evidence from an Ancient World Map, can serve as a foundation for future China studies and offer new insights into the world history of land and maritime exploration.
Sheng-Wei Wang is an independent scholar and writer who founded the China-US Friendship Exchange, Inc. in 2006. She is passionate about uncovering our shared history of maritime globalisation.
She was born in Taiwan, lived in the US and Germany, and currently resides in Hong Kong. She has a BS in Chemistry from Tsing Hua University (Hsinchu) and a PhD in Chemical Physics from the University of Southern California. She was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship to work under the guidance of Professor Gerhard Ertl (2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry). She also did research at the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre. Later she was a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
In 2013, she started research on Pre-Columbian Chinese global maritime exploration. She has since single-authored two English books on this subject:
The Last Journey of the San Bao Eunuch, Admiral Zheng He (2019) and
Chinese Global Exploration in the Pre-Columbian Era: Evidence from an Ancient World Map (2023). This is her third single-authored English book on related topics. In 2022, she founded WorldDiscovery.net to share her work and to promote an inclusive and open dialogue about Chinese maritime exploration since Antiquity.
In 2023, she was interviewed on her books by the Hong Kong International Business Channel (HKIBC), and in early 2024 by the English-language newspaper
South China Morning Post (SCMP). Chinese versions of the SCMP interview reports were soon republished by the Reference News (《参考消息》) and the
Journal of Qinghai University (《青海大学学报》). In the same year, on July 11 — China's National Maritime Day — she was awarded the honour of "Zheng He Cultural Promotion Ambassador" by the Jiangsu Provincial Zheng He Research Society and others in Nanjing, China, for her contributions to Zheng He research.
She has been invited to give presentations to academics and the public worldwide to discuss how the globalised world is influenced by the common history of mankind. This new book provides abundant evidence showing that the Chinese most likely have conducted peaceful global maritime exploration before the Europeans. She hopes that this book will further stimulate China's maritime development and enables the readers to rediscover the true contributions the Chinese made to the world's maritime civilisation.
