evidence: Research by a Canadian postgraduate researcher, Chris Chung, has shed new light on what happened.[13] In 1946 the RoC Ministry of the Interior commissioned a ‘Location Sketch Map of the South China Sea Islands’ (Nanhai Zhudao Weizhi Lüetu南海諸島位置略圖). The resulting map included an 8-dash line stretching around the Sea and as far south as the James Shoal, just off the coast of Borneo. At this time, it appears the RoC believed the shoal was an island. In 1935 an RoC committee had translated its name as Zeng-mu (the transliteration of James) ‘Tan’ – where Tan means a sandbank. It was only in December 1947 that the cartographers realized their mistake and borrowed the literary word ‘Ansha’ to use as an equivalent to ‘shoal’. The line the cartographer drew, incorporating this non-existent island and vast areas of sea, remains with us to this day. I have argued elsewhere that the shape of the line is a legacy of a series of ‘maps of national humiliation’ drawn by Chinese nationalists in the first half of the twentieth century.[14] As such it owes more to those nationalists’ misunderstandings about Southeast Asian history than it does to any real assertion of historic Chinese sovereignty. It’s a mistake now being forced upon the region with ideological rigour. [...] China’s Historical Claim in the South China Sea.MA Thesis, Departent of History, University of Calgary, Alberta. September, 2013 [14] Bill Hayton, China’s false memory syndrome. ProspectMagazine.co.uk 10 July 2014.