Menzies offers such evidence as Asian-looking faces in Renaissance paintings and diagrams that "look similar" between Chinese and Italian books as proof for his claims. Cultural contact between China and the West is normally attributed to the continents-spanning Mongol empires of the 13th and 14th centuries. The extensive volume of documentation from both Zheng He's voyages, in Chinese and 15th century Italian, mysteriously fail to mention this visit. In Beijing, Menzies presented his evidence, detailed in 1434: The Year a Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, that a large Chinese fleet of eunuch admirals led by Zheng He, sent by Emperor Zhu Di, arrived in Tuscany in 1434, supposedly bringing with them advances in science and technology that would set the Renaissance ablaze – including Da Vinci's inventions, the Copernican revolution, and Galileo's theorems of astronomy. Menzies' astonishing new discoveries of Chinese influence on Western culture didn't stop there. In his New York Times bestseller 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, published in 2002, Menzies claimed that it was the Chinese who discovered America, not Columbus.
Menzies' controversial 1434 attempts to stir up the world by – literally – rewriting the history between China and the West of the mid-15th century. Was someone making a sly reference when inviting "historian" Gavin Menzies to speak at the Bookworm earlier this month.
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