Chinese Connection Revealed Through South Island Cave Carvings

Beside the sparkling diamond spangled waters and pink-gold sands of Onetahuti, lies a cave of secrets. The cave shelters near Hanging Rock at Opihi in Golden Bay, in Abel Tasman National Park. Hidden inside are a number of symbols carved deeply into the granite walls. The cave is known to a few and little understood by most. But a paper by New Zealand geographer and ecologist, Professor Haikai Tane, links the incised images found in the cave with a culture that spread out from China into the Pacific and could have come to New Zealand some 4000 years ago. Experts in China have confirmed that the Opihi pictographs are Dao symbols for mapping and modelling watershed features based on the ancient water dragon and sunbird phoenix concepts.

Sunbird phoenix and water dragon symbolism are the key themes of Dao long-feng iconography and are central to Dao cultural intelligence. The living water systems of Dao cultures are represented graphically by cloud and river dragons interacting with the sunbird phoenix representing the sun and earth. These representations are the basis of symbolic mapping and modelling systems used by traditional Dao people. They show how dragon water cycles and phoenix solar energies are connected. This allowed them to model their interactions to create fertile, productive farming landscapes called terraquacultures: farming living water flowing through the landscape.

The past few decades have seen a ready acceptance by academics that the Opihi art is most likely to be of an archaic Maori origin, generated only within the past six to seven hundred years. But many of these sites are not recognised by iwi of today as having a link to their people, or to the people whom their forebears conquered. Indeed, there are large gaps in the knowledge and understanding of rock art in this land. Professor Tane’s research threw a whole new light on the subject.

Professor Tane had studied traditional Dao iconography, the transfer of knowledge by symbols, for many years, and observed that the Ruataniwha pictographs at the Opihi caves were images with possible links to Dao iconography in China. He called the pictographs at sites in the central South Island Ruataniwha iconography and long feng symbology. In his paper, he explains the use of Dao symbols for mapping and modelling watersheds based on the water dragon and sunbird phoenix concepts and explains their meanings and connections with the pictographs found in the caves in the South Island of New Zealand.

He says they were classified by European archaeologists as cave art by unknown Maori people, but goes on to say: “There was little reason to doubt this assumption until the Hemudu culture was rediscovered in the Hangzhou Bay region south of Shanghai, China in the 1970s. Here, and at related cultures nearby, were found some of the earliest sunbird symbolism in China. What has been named ‘Maori’ art in New Zealand was found at these sites, painted on rock. The river maps and other pictographs in New Zealand are etchings in a style that is not Maori - they have a much earlier heritage with a cultural iconography unknown to the Maori.”

In the same decade, the Department of Land and Survey investigated the origins of South Island pictographs for the Historic Places Trust. They recorded that Maori elders had no knowledge of who did the pictographs, or their meanings. They belonged to some earlier people, as did two ‘dragon mounds’ built on river floodplains in the Waitaki Basin. According to a Ministry of Works spokesman, the dragon mounds were destroyed when local Maori elders approached by Hydro Construction engineers expressed no interest in their preservation.

In 2004 Prof. Tane took copies of the Ruataniwha rock shelter images to China and gave them to Chinese Academy of Sciences colleagues. He asked them to check to see if they had any connection with Dao culture in China. CAS scientists and Provincial officials took the Ruataniwha images to leading scholars of Dao cultural iconography in Jiangxi and Shaanxi Provinces. At the southern centre of Dao culture in Jiangxi Province, there was immediate recognition and unequivocal response. The Dao scholars identified the imagery as belonging to Dao cultural iconography common in China 4500 years ago. They said the image was a Dao map of a watershed aligning a tiger mountain to a dragon river connected to a turtle lake. (At Opihi, these images linked with Aoraki Mt Cook, the Ohau and Pukaki Rivers and Lake Pukaki.)

The Ruataniwha image was then taken to the northern centre of Dao culture at Louguantai in Shaanxi Province. Again the recognition that the image was from Dao iconography was immediate. The watershed map explanation provided was the same as in the south. Both times, the Dao scholars were unaware of the origins of the imagery until after they had provided their response.

Prof Tane then visited the Hemudu site in Zhejiang Province to check whether the archaeological investigations undertaken and the museum artefacts revealed further connections. There was little doubt that the Chinese archaeologists had correctly interpreted the site as a prototype Polynesian culture circa 7000 years BP. Further, the jade carvings, pottery styles, string games and buildings on piles of the Hemudu people, unknown in other parts of China, were similar to ancient Polynesian people, such as the Lapita culture.

Is there a link between the Hemudu people and the Waitaki Basin? Archaeologists record that the Hemudu were originally boat nomads and sea raft farmers occupying the east China Seas around 10,000 years ago. By 7000 years ago they were estuarine dwellers in Hangzhou Bay where they excelled in flood plain farming, and fibre, stone and wood crafts. They are renowned as the first jade carvers of China.

“Modern research indicates that these ancient people formed a proto-Polynesian culture around 7000 years ago, and a thousand years later moved eastward into the Pacific and across to the Americas,” says Prof. Tane. “It is likely the Ruataniwha pictographs were etched during one of these stopovers or early settlements to provide watershed maps of the two inland basins in Dao cultural iconography. It is possible that these or closely related people came to New Zealand around 4000 years ago.”

There are many sites within the islands of New Zealand that contain rock drawings, incised and bas relief images ranging from animalistic and totemic figures, to water craft and readily identifiable images. Rock shelters and overhangs provide a protected environment for much of the charcoal and Kokowai images found in Canterbury and Otago. Over the years, I have visited a number of sites in the North and South Islands observing bas relief carvings and red ochre drawing that display images from single hulled vessels with central steering oar features, to hulls showing carved spirals and other symbols. In and around the obvious profiles of water vessels, are found many strange symbols and forms. These can be readily seen at the North Island sites of Lake Tarawera, the rock shelter in the Kaingaroa Forest and the shelter at Weka Pass in North Canterbury. For more than 160 years, European amateurs and experts have imposed much on these images, with many speculative views.

These exciting discoveries may well change the early contact history of New Zealand, and will certainly give a clearer interpretation as to the meaning of these unique symbols.

I find the promise behind these findings very timely, as I believe the very early comers to this land have left behind a legacy of place names and interpretations that still stand within the landscape that we know so well today. All of these people