Their discussion of the archaeological evidence did not detain them for long. They argued that standards of excavation are high in China – the painstaking manner in which the first emperor’s terracotta army has been uncovered and preserved at Xian is one of the most recent examples – and concluded that ‘there can be little doubt that the aluminium artefacts were found in the tomb’. They also gave short shrift to a suggestion that the belt had somehow been ‘planted’ by grave-robbers:
It is difficult to see why they should have left the silver objects in place and have carefully inserted pieces of aluminium for the confusion of future excavators. A tomb-robber is scarcely likely to have had scraps of kitchen utensils about his person and to have discarded them accidentally. It would also need a miraculous breeze to replace the dust.
Butler and his colleagues devoted most of their paper to the central question: Did the Chinese of the Jin Dynasty have the know-how to produce aluminium? While the modern method of isolation uses electricity, aluminium has been produced in furnaces, though these need to be extremely hot. The Chinese certainly had furnaces capable of producing high temperatures, perhaps as great as 1,500°C, but, the St Andrews team concluded, these would have been capable of making metal containing only very small amounts of aluminium. And there was no method available to Jin Dynasty metallurgists which would have enabled them to manufacture aluminium of the purity of the metal found in Zhou Chu’s tomb.
So what is the answer? How can it be that pieces of almost pure aluminium should turn up in an ancient tomb? With a touch of the theatrical, the Scottish researchers saved their theory for the last paragraph of their report:
We are led to suggest, for want of something better, [they wrote] that the aluminium was introduced as an academic prank by a participant who was probably greatly embarrassed when he realized the consequences of his actions. Fortunately for scholars in the West, the Chinese themselves were the first to doubt the authenticity of the claims. It is perhaps a mark of our regard for the enduring genius of the Chinese people that the claims were taken seriously for so long.
The St Andrews paper seemed to have settled the argument. Hoaxes, of course, are nothing new in archaeology, and the story of the Nanjing belt was duly dubbed ‘the Chinese Piltdown’ after the most celebrated hoax of modern times, in which a weird amalgam of a human cranium and an orang-utan’s jawbone, unearthed in the south of England in 1912, was successfully passed off for some forty years as the skull of an important ‘missing link’ in the evolutionary chain.
Yet in 1985 the Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences reported a discovery which revived the possibility that aluminium had been available in China at the time of General Zhou’s burial. Geologists from the Shenyang Institute of Geology announced that they had found grains of ‘native aluminium’ in Guizhou Province. ‘Native aluminium’ is extremely rare, indeed only a handful of claims for its discovery have ever been made. According to the Chinese geologists, their specimens contained ‘some copper and sulphur, also chromium and iron’ and were harder than pure aluminium, but they were satisfied that they had been found ‘in a situation where contamination by men was eliminated’.
The report brought this comment from Dr Anthony R. Butler of the St Andrews team:
I think the evidence for the presence of native aluminium is good but the manner of its production is obscure. The grain size indicates that it could not possibly have been used to make the Nanjing belt. For native aluminium to have been used for that, an even rarer geological process, giving lumps of aluminium rather than grains, would be necessary. While this is a possibility, made more possible by the discovery of grains of native aluminium, it remains a remote hypothesis. However, a general rule is never to underestimate the Chinese. After all, they did invent the compass, printing and gunpowder.
The Stone ‘Doughnuts’
The achievements of the ancient Chinese were also much discussed in the course of a controversy that arose after the discovery of mysterious artefacts off the coast of southern California.
In 1973 a US Geological Survey ship dredged up a peculiar stone from 13,000 ft (4,000 m) down on the bed of the Pacific, off Point Conception. Roland von Huene, the geologist who first examined it, soon noticed something odd: the stone had a hole in the middle, and ‘had clearly been made by tools’. The underwater ‘doughnut’ was covered with manganese deposits, which suggested that it had been on the ocean floor for some considerable time.
The ‘doughnut’ was quite a curiosity and when, two years later, a whole hoard of similarly worked stones were located off the same coast, historians of the sea really began to get excited. Two professional divers, Wayne Baldwin and Bob Meistrell, had been exploring a reef off the Palos Verdes peninsula when they saw at least twenty stones lying 16 ft (5 m) down amidst the seaweed. They brought a few to the surface and stored them in a yard outside a diving shop at Redondo Beach, south of Los Angeles.
The discovery of a few old stones does not often make the headlines, but the theories advanced to explain the purpose and presence of these ‘doughnuts’ off the Californian coast became big news. The stones, the theorists argued, were ancient ships’ anchors of a type often found in the Mediterranean Sea. Sailors used to bore a hole in a heavy rock, tie a rope through it and cast this primitive anchor overboard when they wanted to moor their vessel. But it was the explanation advanced by a group of Californian academics, that sent the reporters rushing to their typewriters.
The stones, they opined, were anchors lost from Chinese ships which had visited America 1,000 years or more before – centuries before Columbus. James R. Moriarty III and Larry Pierson expressed little doubt. ‘Stylistic comparisons with historical, archaeological and ethnological data indicate great antiquity for the anchors,’ they wrote. ‘Geologic studies show that the stone from which they were made is not of Californian origin … It seems clear to us that Asiatic vessels reached the New World in pre-Columbian times.’
The idea that ancient seafarers reached America before Columbus is nothing new. Claims that the Chinese got there first rest on an account in a history of the Liang Dynasty, which nourished from A.D. 502 to 557. In 502 a monk called Huishen appeared at the court of the Emperor Wu Ti and told of a journey he had made to a wonderful country called Fusang. According to the mariner monk, it lay 20,000 li (6,500 miles) to the east of China.
Some later scholars, particularly those of the mid-nineteenth century, discovered in Huishen’s narrative what they took to be uncanny similarities between Fusang and America, and on this somewhat slender evidence the idea that the Chinese had sailed in their junks to the New World took hold. It even survived a thorough debunking by Gustaaf Schlegel of the University of Leiden, Holland, in 1892. Schlegel argued that since Huishen’s story clearly exaggerated some of the marvels he had seen – he had told of mulberry trees thousands of feet tall and of silkworms 7 ft (2 m) long – his estimates of the distance he had travelled to reach Fusang might well be inaccurate too.
From his description of the features of the country, Schlegel deduced that the fabulous Fusang had really existed, but was much closer to China than Huishen had admitted. Schlegel identified it as a large island near Japan called Sakhalin.
The discovery of the ‘Chinese anchors’ off California, however, revived the diffusionist arguments. In 1980 support for the American theorists who believed the anchors were evidence of a pre-Columbian landfall off California came from China itself- in the form of an article written by a leading maritime historian, Fang Zhongpu. According to Fang, ‘many Chinese historians believe that the Fusang the monk Huishen had visited is today’s Mexico’, and he welcomed what he deemed to be this proof of ‘friendly intercourse between China and America in ancient times’, and argued that Chinese junks and seamen of 1,500 years ago were well capable of crossing the Pacific.
Meanwhile, however, analysis of the Palos Verdes stones by the Geology Department of the University of California at Santa Barbara, dealt a blow to the diffusionists’ claims. The analysts found that the stones had not originated in China, but had come from the local Monterey shale.
Professor Frank J. Frost of the same university had been sceptical of the claims made for the Chinese, and he seized on the geologists’ report in a bid to clear up the mystery.
Presumably someone already in California shaped these stones and drilled holes in them. Both the large number of objects (about 20) and the wide distribution over more than an acre of ocean bottom would seem to rule out any conceivable pattern left by a shipwreck. Instead, the impression left is of an area where boats anchored frequently and occasionally lost their anchors. The question remains, therefore, what frequent visitors came to this reef and anchored using primitive weight anchors made of local stone?