2017 Robbie Robertson Dartmouth Book Award -- Shortlisted
Paul Chiasson reveals the possibility that early Chinese settlers landed in Cape Breton long before Europeans.

From the very beginning of the European Age of Discovery, Cape Breton was considered unusual. The history of the area even includes early references to the island having once been the land of the Chinese. In 1497, at least a century before any attempt at European settlement in the region, the explorer John Cabot had referred to Cape Breton as the Island of Seven Cities.

The indigenous people of the region, the Mi'kmaq, were the only aboriginal people of North America who had a written language when Europeans first arrived. This writing, clothing, and customs also suggested an early Chinese presence.

In Written in the Ruins, Chiasson investigates the ruins at St. Peters in the southern part of the island, where evidence brought to light supports a theory that could answer all the questions raised by the island's curious, unresolved history.

The Island of Seven Cities unveils the first tangible proof that the Chinese settled in the New World before Columbus.

In the summer of 2003, architect Paul Chiasson decided to climb a mountain he had never explored on Cape Breton Island, where eight generations of his Acadian family had lived. One of the oldest points of exploration and settlement in the Americas, with a written history dating back to the first days of European discovery, Cape Breton is littered with remnants of old settlements. But that day Chiasson found a road that was unique. Well made and consistently wide, and at one time clearly bordered with stone walls, the road had been a major undertaking. But he could find no record of it. In the two years of detective work that followed, Chiasson systematically surveyed the history of Europeans in North America and came to a stunning conclusion: the ruins he had stumbled upon - an entire townsite on a mountaintop---did not belong to the Portuguese, the French, the English, or the Scots. And they predated John Cabot's 1497 discovery of the island.

Using aerial and site photographs, maps and drawings, and his own expertise as an architect, Chiasson re-creates how he pieced together the clues to one of the world's great mysteries: a large Chinese colony existed and thrived on Canadian shores well before the European Age of Discovery. He addresses how the ruins had been previously overlooked or misunderstood, and how the colony was abandoned and forgotten, in China and in the New World. And he discovers the traces the colony left in the storytelling and culture of the Mi'kmaq, whose written language, clothing, technical knowledge, religious beliefs, and legends, he argues, expose deep cultural ties to China.

A gripping account of an earth-shaking discovery, The Island of Seven Cities will change the way we think about our world.