The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

A common objection to the Chinese Origin Theory (COT) is that there are no specifically oriental elements in the images.  But what could those elements be?

In my version of the COT, the Author transcribed a few "Chinese" books that the locals had recommended as the most important ones in each subject -- medicine, pharmacy, and astronomy/astrology.  He transcribed the text from dictation by a local reder, using an alphabet that he had devised for that purpose.  He copied freehand the illustrations that he could, presumably omitting any details that he assumed were just decoration.  Back in Europe, he or (more likely) a hired scribe copied his notes to vellum, creating BL MS 408.

So what could these "oriental" illustrations have been, and can we see them in the VMS?

• Drawings of organs and ducts: Unfortunately "Chinese" organs look pretty much like European ones.  Even eyeballs are just as round.  (But how common were such depictions in European books of the time?  I vaguely recall a claim that they were taboo...)
  
• Astronomical diagrams: Those we see in the VMS don't look specifically oriental.  But, if one ignores the decoration, they don't look European either...
  
• Zodiac diagrams: The nymphs and signs etc look European, but they are just decoration. Apart from them, it is hard to imagine what distinctively Oriental features there could be in a Zodiac diagram. Except maybe for starting the Zodiac with Pisces.  And dividing the Zodiac into sectors of equal number of degrees, instead of months with variable number of days.  And considering 24 sectors of 15 degrees instead of 12 of 30.  But on the other hand, the assignment of a short name to each of the 360 degrees is not Oriental.  Not European either, ok, but not Chinese.  At least as far as I know.  But I haven't looked into that.
  
• Pharma drawings: The jars are decorations, but, whether the COT is true or not, the drawings of plant parts must be just clean copies of the sketches in the Author's draft.  People who tried to identify them as European herbs haven't had much success, but of course that does not mean that they are distinctively Chinese.  They could be distinctively Sub-Saharan, or distinctively Indian, or distinctively Australian, or distinctively Inuit...
  
• Herbal drawings: Again, just because the plants don't look like European plants, it does not mean they are distinctively Oriental.  Some of the plants have absurd details, like telescoping roots and converging branches; but they would be equally absurd in China.
  
• Starred Parags: There are no images there, so there could not be distinctively Oriental features in there.  Unless, maybe, if only there was a famous Chinese herbal pharmacopoeia with about the same number of paragraphs and a similar distribution of word counts per paragraph, perhaps...
  

And indeed it is strange that there is not even one glyph or weirdo in the VMS that looks even remotely like a Chinese character.  Unless...

All the best, --stolfi