Fusang

Fusang is a mythical world tree or place located far east of China. In the Classic of Mountains and Seas and several contemporary texts, the term refers to a mythological tree of life, alternatively identified as a mulberry or a hibiscus, allegedly growing far to the east of China, and perhaps to various more concrete territories which are located to the east of the mainland. A country which was named Fusang was described by the native Buddhist missionary Huishen (慧深, Huìshēn), also variously romanized as Hui Shen, Hoei-sin, and Hwai Shan. In his record, dated to AD 499, during China's Northern and Southern dynastic period, he describes Fusang as a place which is located 20,000 Chinese li to the east of Dahan, and it is also located to the east of China (according to Joseph Needham, Dahan corresponds to the Buriat region of Siberia). Huishen arrived in China from Kabul in 450 AD and went by ship to Fusang in 458 AD, and upon his return in 499 reported his findings to the Liang emperor. His descriptions are recorded in the 7th-century text Book of Liang by Yao Silian, and they describe a civilization which inhabits the Fusang country. The Fusang which is described by Huishen has variously been posited to be the Americas, Sakhalin Island, the Kamchatka Peninsula or the Kuril Islands. The American hypothesis was the most hotly debated one during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, after the 18th-century writings of Joseph de Guignes were republished 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. In later Chinese accounts, other, even less well-identified places were...