It's debatable when the story starts: 4,000 years ago, or in 1972 when the late Dr Hendon Harris stumbled across a volume of ancient maps in a Seoul bookshop.
The atlas depicted distinct land masses, including North and South America inscribed with the words Fu Sang, the Chinese name for a mythical land in the East.
Harris, a Baptist missionary who lived in Sha Tin in the 1960s, later wrote a book arguing that Chinese seafarers had been carried eastwards by Pacific currents as early as 2,000BC. It made little impact, and Harris died in 1981.
Two decades later, his daughter, Charlotte Harris Rees, read British author Gavin Menzies' 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, which posited that Chinese explorers had reached America years before Christopher Columbus.
Her interest piqued, Rees published an abridged version of her father's book, The Asiatic Fathers of America, and has since followed it with Secret Maps of the Ancient World. 'I was sceptical of my father's work at first, but then I started to think there was something to what he had said,' says Rees, who is a graduate of Columbia International University in South Carolina and now lives in Virginia.
'The information I have amassed on this subject is like a table with 100 legs. I have tried to use supporting 'legs' that are from academic studies and aren't easy to discredit. However, even if one were to knock off one or even a dozen legs on the table it would still stand because it has so much support.'
