Fusang

Fusang (Chinese: 扶桑) refers to several different entities in ancient Chinese literature, often either a mythological tree or a mysterious land to the East.

In the Classic of Mountains and Seas and several contemporary texts, the term refers to a mythological tree of life, alternately identified as a mulberry or hibiscus, allegedly growing far to the east of China, and perhaps to various more concrete territories east of the mainland.

A country named Fusang was described by the native Buddhist missionary Hui Shen (Chinese: 慧深; pinyin: Huì Shēn) in 499 AD, as a place 20,000 Chinese li east of Da-han, and also east of China (according to Joseph Needham, Da-han corresponds to the Buriat region of Siberia). Hui Shen went by ship to Fusang, and upon his return reported his findings to the Chinese Emperor. His descriptions are recorded in the 7th-century text Book of Liang by Yao Silian, and describe a Bronze Age civilization inhabiting the Fusang country. The Fusang described by Shen has been variously posited to be the Americas, Sakhalin island, the Kamchatka Peninsula or the Kuril Islands. The American hypothesis was the most hotly debated one in the late 19th and early 20th century after the 18th-century writings of Joseph de Guignes were revived and disseminated by Charles Godfrey Leland in 1875. Sinologists including Emil Bretschneider, Berthold Laufer, and Henri Cordier refuted this hypothesis however, and according to Needham the American hypothesis was all but refuted by the time of the First World War.

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