Did you know that the Garden of Eden is somewhere in China?

It is, if you take Tse Tsan Tai's 1914 quest to pinpoint the fabled manicured lawn of earthly delights at face value.

Even though there have been numerous attempts to slap the Garden of Eden somewhere on the map, Chinese newspaperman and pro-democracy revolutionary Tse tossed Eden in the deserts of northwest China. Strange Maps goes into his reasoning:

In 1914, Tse wrote The Creation, the Garden of Eden and the Origin of the Chinese, in which he attempted to prove, based on the geographical description in the Bible, that the Garden of Eden was located in China.

Tse's outlandish theory was an attempt at proving that at least some Biblical events had taken place in China - and that therefore Christianity was not alien to the Middle Kingdom. The book was meant to dispel the notion that Christianity in China was a tool of foreign powers, at a time when the countries sending the missionaries were the same ones bullying a weak China into granting them coastal concessions [...]

The result is the location of Eden in what appears to be a most unlikely place: an area between the Tarim River and the Kuen Lun Mountains better known today as the Taklamakan Desert. The area, now the world's second-largest sand desert after the Empty Quarter in Arabia, is one of the most inhospitable places on earth.

You can read more about Tse's Chinese Eden maps here, which also goes into the unknown lost continent from Papua New Guinea to South America. For more Biblical adventures in Asia, see Jesus and Moses, buried in Japan.