New Book by Gavin Menzies

Menzies has been skewered by the so-called "experts" for his book "1421: The Year China Discovered the World." It's a large book and it's on my reading list - I completed the Preface and the first chapter, and when summer comes around again and I spend hours out on the deck with my feet up, I'll be reading further. Keep in mind that, as so often has happened, today's "crazy theories" are - 30 years from now - the new orthodoxy. I guess people find it offensive that the Chinese might have been the first to circumnavigate the globe and might, just might, have opened up new thoughts and perspectives during a visit to Italy in 1434. This is the premise of Menzie's new book, briefly mentioned in this "damning by faint praise" article at The Wall Street Journal online: May 30, 2008, 8:10 am Did China Spark the Renaissance? Early 17th century Chinese woodblock print said to depict Zheng He It did indeed, according to Gavin Menzies, the author of the best-selling and highly controversial “1421: The Year China Discovered the World,” who’s back with a sequel, of sorts: “1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance.” In his earlier book (published in 2002), Menzies claimed that the Chinese fleet of admiral Zheng He had traveled to America and circumnavigated the globe in the early 15th century, well before the journeys of Columbus and Magellan. The theory, known as the “1421 hypothesis,” has been discounted by many professional historians. (Menzies himself is a retired British Royal Navy officer who doesn’t read Chinese.) According to its publicity materials, the new book asserts that “a sophisticated Chinese delegation visited Italy in 1434, sparked the Renaissance and forever changed the course of Western civilization. After that date the authority of Aristotle and Ptolemy was overturned and artistic conventions challenged, as was Arabic astronomy and cartography.” “1434” also promises to take us “aboard the remarkable Chinese fleet as it sails from China to Cairo to Florence, and then back across the world,” offering “further astonishing evidence that it was also Chinese advances in science, art, and technology that formed the basis of the European Renaissance and our modern world.” If Menzies’ last book was anything to go by, we can look forward to seeing “1434.” in every Chinese airport bookstore this summer. But we’re already wondering what Menzies is planning next. Perhaps “1447: The Year Zheng He Became the First Man on the Moon.” -Sky Canaves