Pale Ink by Henriette Mertz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Henriette Mertz was a cryptologist during WWII and later a patent lawyer who published a series of daring and controversial books on diffusionist history. Pale Ink was her Chinese book, published in 1953. One of the narratives studied in it is the classic source for early Chinese knowledge of America. It comprises an Afghan Buddhist monk’s account of his travels with other monks to Mexico and the American Southwest sometime before 500 CE. Hwui Shan’s adventures were officially received by the Chinese emperor and court. They ended up enshrined in Chinese literature—but not accepted in Western histories. Fu-sang is apparently Mexico, and the beautiful and useful fu-sang plants are the maguey. There have been many translations and interpretations of this famous text since the eighteenth century. For accuracy and authority you may want to compare Vining, who gives other versions in parallel. Edward P. Vining, An Inglorious Columbus (New York: Appleton, 1885), pp. 263-299. Chinese contact and colonization in the Americas, as abundantly evident in North America's rock art record, has today become a burgeoning area of scholarship. Mention may be made of John Arthur Ruskamp’s Asiatic Echoes, Hendon M. Harris’s The Asiatic Fathers and Siu-Leung Lee’s work on Chinese maps. An older popular book by an academic that is very good and readable and takes the Chinese story in America down to the present is Stan Steiner, Fusang: The Chinese Who Built America (New York: Harper Colophon, 1980). Mertz deserves a lot of credit for bringing the subject into the forefront. Her writing style is razor sharp and her speculations inspired.



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Pale Ink