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We are pleased to announce the New Asia Currents: NAC Focus has added four new webpages featuring Dr Sheng-Wei Wang’s work on pre-Columbian Chinese voyages.

NAC Focus archives editorial projects on specific subjects to supplement the 2025 release of New Asia Currents. New Asia Currents outlines their editorial purposes, audience and objectives here. These include publising projects for people interested in “Frontiers of Art, Science & Human Civilisations”.

The first story, Part 1: “Tracing the admiral’s forgotten voyage to the Americas”, can be read here. This is about Dr Wang’s research journey into finding and questioning whether the Chinese went futher than Africa to the Americas. It also shows her first book, The Last Journey of the San Bao Eunuch, Admiral Zheng He (2019).

The second story, Part 2 “Chinese influence across the Americas before Columbus”, is here. This link features Dr Wang’s second work, Chinese Global Exploration in the Pre-Columbian Era: Evidence from an Ancient World Map (2023). It records Dr Wang’s research processes in her discovery of new ways of interpreting history to better our understanding of pre-Columbian Chinese in the Americas. Part of this methodology includes the recognition that Indigenous communities who have oral traditions recording overseas visitors are a key to understanding cultural continuity and memory. Another feature of this article is understanding why it is not widely accepted or studied.

The third story, Part 3 “Charting forgotten waters travelled by the admiral”, is here. This link focuses on Zheng He’s Ming treasure fleet in the Americas seven decades before 1492. This article delves deeper into Dr Wang’s first book, The Last Journey of the San Bao Eunuch, Admiral Zheng He (2019). Specifically, how the Ming Dynasty novel An Account of the Western World Voyages of the San Bao Eunuch by Luo Maodeng is actually a record of historical knowledge on the Ming voyages.

The fourth story, Part 4 “Map reveals pre-Columbian global exploration by China”, is here. In this article, Dr Wang addresses critics directly. The article says Dr Wang’s work is not intended to be anything more than re-interpretation of circumstantial evidence and that the second book of Dr Wang, Chinese Global Exploration in the Pre-Columbian Era: Evidence from an Ancient World Map (2023), should be taken as a dynamic dialogue starter, rather than a new proposal of facts set in stone. This book is not just about pre-Columbian Chinese presence, but it also challenges the reader away from a Euro-centric view of world hisotry and our past, to a more balanced view of cultures and history from around the world thoughout time.

We hope you enjoy Dr Wang in NAC Focus and as always, her books are available for browsing and purchase here.

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