Could Chinese explorers have settled New Zealand before the Maori?

For generations, the narrative of New Zealand’s human settlement has held that Polynesian voyagers – the ancestors of the Maori – arrived and settled the islands in the 13th century, followed by European explorers in the 17th century.

This timeline underpins New Zealand’s history and its political model. The Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 between the British Crown and about 540 Maori chiefs, served as New Zealand’s founding document, paving the way for Britain to claim sovereignty and incorporate the country into the British Empire.

Outside the halls of universities and government institutions, two independent researchers are on a quest to discover pre-Maori Chinese presence in New Zealand.

Citing underwater shipwrecks, carbon-dated structures and anomalous artefacts as evidence, scholar and author Sheng-Wei Wang has proposed a theory that a Chinese “treasure ship” fleet met its end there around 1435–1436 owing to the impact of a meteorite.