Kiwi historians have labelled a new book's claim that a map from 1602 shows Chinese explorers could have discovered New Zealand before Europeans "inaccurate".
The claims came from author Sheng-Wei Wang, who posits in her book Chinese Global Exploration in the Pre-Columbian Era: Evidence from an Ancient World Map Chinese explorers' reach extended to the Americas, Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
Wang's conclusions, as reported by the South China Morning Post, are based on her analysis of the first Chinese-language world map, the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (KWQ), in which she concludes it was sourced from Chinese maps by Ming dynasty (1368-1644) explorers rather than being of European origin.
She said a group of islands off to the east of a huge, connected continent - believed to be Australia and Antarctica - could represent New Zealand.
However, the consensus among scholars is that Chinese marine voyages in the early 15th century only took the explorers to countries bordering the Indian Ocean.
And now New Zealand historians have weighed in.
Historian at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington James Beattie said maps of the era of relatively unknown places were "notoriously inaccurate" and "easy to misread".
"Think of early maps of NZ depicting Rakiura and Te Wai Pounamu joined, and this by Cook, who was regarded with great respect as an accurate mapmaker."
Beattie said Wang's views echo author Gavin Menzies' in his 2002 book 1421, which were "highly inaccurate".
"The author seems to make precisely the same mistake as Gavin Menzies in his highly inaccurate, but otherwise highly readable account, which pieces together shards of unreliable evidence together to create a misleading mosiac of Chinese voyaging."
Programme Director for the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre at Victoria University Duncan Campbell also said Menzies' claims "largely speculative, and, to my mind, entirely spurious".
"I have not read Dr Wang’s recent book, the focus of the South China Morning Post article, and nor do I intend to, but her reheating of the claims (and those made by Cedric Bell in the 1950s) seem presently, again to my mind, to play into a particular PRC [People's Republic of China] driven nationalistic narrative that this author (not a trained historian; and nor were Menzies, Bell et al) has shown herself prone to in the past."
He said a number of renowned historians have come out against Menzies' views, including Michael King, David Mackay and Dame Anne Salmond.
