Why is it that these nuts always seem pick the Atlantic coast. You could make a far more plausible, if unprovable, theory that they got to the much closer Pacific coast.

Anyway the main point is that the Muslim-led Chinese fleets were not so much on "voyages of discovery" as in the later European sense but were more about seeking to dominate the spice and slave routes between the straits of Malacca and the African ("Zanj" or "Kunlun") coast.

Given that context, you'd think that the Americas would have seemed very uninteresting to them (just as the Portuguese used to boast to the Spanish about the comparative worth of their respective empires).

Having visited Chiasson's site, and read commentary from a local geologist, I conclude that there are no cultural features apart from 20th-century heavy equipment work associated with a 1947 forest fire and a well-documented and controversial 1990s quarry proposal. Most of the features consist of natural glacial till and bedrock formations.

On pages 184 and 186, Chiasson shows an air photo which he attributes to 1929, showing a Chinese road, wall and rectangular town site. It is in fact from 1953, and shows a fire road and fire break. On page 258, Chiasson shows air photos "taken in the 1990s," which indeed they were. The features are more sharply defined here and now inculde a set of roads terminating in courtyards surrounded by Chinese hamlets. In fact, they show the road redeveloped for the proposed quarry site, with test sites at the end of the shorter roads. On the following page, he shows a 1931 air photo with vague shapes, digitally enhanced and outlined with heavy black lines which he claims shows Chinese "platforms and courtyards." They are likely either bedrock or exposed rocky till. Without the added lines their regularity is less apparent. The full set of these 1931 photos shows no road, no wall, no townsite and no courtyards surrounded by hamlets, all of which begin to appear in the later 20th century.

The confusing and inconsistent use of air photos is typical of the way Chiasson creates his evidence for the city on the mountain. But there is no denying that the early 1931 air photos do not show any of the clearly defined features Chiasson attributes to the Chinese.

What puzzles me about his work is the influences on Miq Maq language, clothing, religious practices and stories of pacifistic people who had dcome before the Europeans.

actually.. i have never read the book, but i know my own culture and history. Paul states that Mi'kmaq culture adopted from the chinese, i beg to differ. The top cap that women wore (whihc paul said resembles a chinese version) wasn't a part of Mi'kmaq clothing until AFTER european contact. same with the clothes you may see today in pictures.

The book was good reading early on. I enjoyed the history of the area. The references to old maps and the famous Seven Cities of Cibola made his story interesting in the begining. His arguments however are weak and full of holes and his photos of supposed "ruins of an advanced civilization" ruined it for me. The "cut stone" is obviously natural angular broken sedimentary rock; and the road is obviously of recent construction with modern road building equipment, most likely a bulldozer. There is nothing there in either historic argument or artifacts to back up the incredible claim. Don't you think if there was a large Ming Dynasty city at the site for a number of years that the present day locals would have been picking up collections of bronze artifacts, jade and oriental porcelan, and some of these artifacts would have made their way to local museums? As a local, Chiasson would have seen these collections and mentioned it. I must assume there are no artifacts, there was no city.