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China sits at the edge of most Atlantis books. The authors of the nineteenth century looked west, to Egypt, Greece and the Americas, and mentioned China mainly to say its records were very old. Yet on this site China comes up again and again: in a creation story that looks like Ymir and Tiamat, in a culture hero credited with the compass, in fossils that do not fit the usual story, and in theories that make Chinese a survivor of a lost continent.
Below I gather those pieces, from myth to archaeology to the lost land theories.
Creation and the first rulers
China’s creation begins with a giant. On Pangu Creation Story the body of P’an-Ku becomes the world: his bones the rocks, his flesh the earth, his veins the rivers, his breath the wind. The page compares it with the Norse Ymir and the Babylonian Tiamat, and names Sui-Jen, the Chinese Prometheus, who brought fire down from heaven.
Then come the culture heroes. On Huang Di – The Yellow Emperor the Yellow Emperor is one of the Five Emperors and the originator of Chinese civilization, credited with the compass and the first structures of government. On The antiquity of some of our great inventions Ignatius Donnelly follows the magnet to the Hindoos and from them to the Chinese, and links it to Atlantis through the magnetic cup that Oceanos lent to Hercules.
Immortals and sinking islands
Chinese myth is full of beings who escaped death. See The Eight Immortals, and Moon, where Chang’e lives on the moon after drinking the elixir. On The myth of a sinking city Yingzhou, the City of Immortals, is one of the mythical islands in the Eastern Sea, and the First Emperor sent expeditions to find it.
That same emperor left the largest tomb in China. On Chinese mounds, the terracotta army, and imperial tombs World of Antiquity looks at the forbidden Chinese pyramids and his reforms:
things he abolished other writing systems there's only one way to write a Chinese script now and that's one of his
World of Antiquity, Chinese mounds and the terracotta army, at 52:23
Liu Bowen’s prophetic visions adds a Ming dynasty strategist, the “Chinese Nostradamus”, who wrote of lost civilizations of his own.
Older than expected
The fossils tell their own story. On Is the Out of Africa Theory Outdated? I look at the teeth from Fuyan Cave:
Our study shows that fully modern morphologies were present in southern China 30,000-70,000 years earlier than in the Levant and Europe.
Wu Liu et al., Nature (2015)
The Longyou caves are a Chinese underground work whose builders and purpose are still unknown. The Dropa stones are said to come from caves in the Bayan Har mountains, with small large-headed skeletons and hundreds of stone discs. And on When Africa ‘Colonised’ China African History Fountain argues that contact between Africa and China goes back thousands of years.
China and the lost continents
The Theosophists gave China a place in their scheme of root races. W. Scott-Elliot writes:
The Chinese language of to-day is the sole great lineal descendant of ancient Lemurian speech for "the whole human race was at that time of one language and of one lip."
W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), pp. 30 and 31
It must, however, be noted that the Chinese people are mainly descended from the fourth or Turanian sub-race of the Fourth Root Race.
W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 31
See The Lost Lemuria (1904). James Churchward counts China among the places that kept records of Mu; on The Children of Mu he cites Lao Tse, who spoke of the learning of his prehistoric forefathers. In Oahspe’s Book of Saphah China is A’sah, one of the four branches of the earth whose languages grew from one root. And on The Oldest Son of Noah Donnelly suggests that the Turanian branch, which includes the Chinese, may have been the first to come out of Atlantis.
Related pages
- Huang Di – The Yellow Emperor
- Pangu Creation Story
- The Eight Immortals
- The myth of a sinking city
- Chinese mounds, the terracotta army, and imperial tombs
- The Longyou caves in China
- Dropa stones
- The Lost Lemuria (1904)
For every page I tagged with China, see the China tag archive.
