THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY - HONG KONG

presents

“1434: The Chinese start the Renaissance”

by

Gavin Menzies

on

Thursday, 29 May 2008

2/F Olympic House, So Kong Po, Causeway Bay
Drinks Reception 6.30 pm; Lecture 7.30 pm

We are delighted to welcome to Hong Kong Gavin Menzies, to lecture again on his important new discoveries. On 15 March 2002, a sensation occurred in the lecture theatre of the Royal Geographical Society in London as Gavin Menzies presented the results of fifteen years of research: he argued that the Chinese had discovered most of the world by 1421, before any of the famous European explorers. The lecture was broadcast to a television audience of almost a billion people and made the front pages of newspapers worldwide, from the New York Times to the SCMP. The Royal Geographical Society Hong Kong was then privileged to host the first public presentation of Mr. Menzies’s theories on Chinese soil. Ever since, hundreds of scientists and historians have joined the increasingly controversial debate.

In this lecture, Mr. Menzies returns to the Royal Geographical Society to launch his new book, '1434', and while much of the contents of the book is still confidential, it is likely to be even more controversial than '1421'. Mr Menzies now argues that Zheng He's fleet's 1434 visit to Venice and Florence was not only the spark which set the Renaissance ablaze, but the visit’s resulting revolution in European thought fundamentally changed the history of the world. Whether you believe in Mr. Menzies’s theories, disagree or are “on the fence”, this is a lecture not to be missed.

Two years ago, a Chinese Canadian scholar, Tai Peng Wang, discovered Chinese and Italian records showing that Chinese delegations had reached Italy during the reigns of Zhu Di (1403-1425) and the Xuande Emperor (1426-1435). ‘1434’ is based around the highly significant meeting of that year and the great transfer of knowledge which Mr Menzies argues it resulted in. The consequences, Mr Menzies argues were of great importance because this transfer took place just as Europe was emerging from a millennium of stagnation following the fall of the Roman Empire. While the ideals, engineering and civilisations of Greece and Rome undoubtedly played an important role in the Renaissance, Menzies submits that the transfer of Chinese intellectual capital to Europe was the spark that set the Renaissance ablaze.

Emperor Zhu Zhanji, 1426–1436, ordered Zheng He and his eunuch crew to embark on another great sailing expedition in 1431, with some three hundred and forty-three ships available. Zheng He’s fleets had every weapon then known to the Chinese: sea skimming rockets, machine guns, mines, mortars, cannon, exploding grenades and much more. Zheng He’s fleets were powerfully armed and well supplied by water tankers, grain and horse ships, which enabled them to stay at sea for months on end. In addition, the ships were repositories of great wealth – both in material objects such as silk and ceramics and in the intellectual treasure contained in astronomical tables and encyclopaedias covering every subject known to the Chinese.

On the voyage was the “Yong Le Dadian”. This massive encyclopaedia was completed in 1421 and housed in the newly built Forbidden City. Some 3,000 scholars had worked for years compiling all knowledge known to China for the previous 2000 years, in 22,937 passages extracted from over 7,000 titles, a work of 50 million characters; an encyclopaedia of a scale and scope unparalleled until the publication of Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1768. The encyclopaedia covered every subject on the planet – geography and Cartography, agriculture, civil and military engineering, warfare, health and medical care, building and town planning, steel and steel production, how to paint ceramics, biochemistry including cross fertilisation, how to make different types of alcohol, silk production and weaving, how to produce different types of gunpowder, ship construction – even codes, cyphers and cryptography.

Of equal importance were the calendars carried by the fleets. The calendars contained a mass of astronomical data running to thousands of observations. It enabled comets and eclipses to be predicted for years ahead as well as times of sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset. The calendars enabled longitude to be calculated by using the slip between solar and sidereal time, by eclipses of the moon, or by the angular distance between the moon and selected stars or planets. Thus Zheng He was able to provide Europeans with maps, navigational tools and an astronomical calendar beyond anything they had yet been able to produce on their own.

Paulo Toscanelli, the great Florentine mathematician, geographer and astronomer described his meeting with the Chinese as having gleaned “copious and good and true information from distinguished men of great learning”. In letters, Toscanelli told Canon Martins and Christopher Columbus that the earth is a sphere and that China might be reached by sailing west from Spain, which information he obtained from Chinese who came to Florence in the time of Eugenius IV, thus around 1434. Yet in 1474, when Toscanelli wrote these letters, Europeans had not reached southern Africa and it was another eighteen years before Columbus set sail for the Americas, so Mr Menzies argues this information can only have come from the Chinese.

Thus, Mr Menzies argues Magellan was not the first to circumnavigate the globe nor was Columbus the first to discover the Americas. Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492. Yet 18 years before he set sail, he had a map of the Americas, which he later acknowledged in his logs. Even before his first voyage, he had signed a contract with the King and Queen of Spain that appointed him Viceroy of the Americas. The straits that connect the Atlantic to the Pacific bear the great Portuguese explorer Magellan’s name. When Magellan reached those straits, he had run out of food, but he continued, having seen the straits in a chart in the treasury of the King of Portugal, and made by Martin of Bohemia thirteen years before Magellan set sail. Mr Menzies asks where but the Chinese did the mapmakers gain this invaluable knowledge.

Mr. Menzies also controversially argues that everything which Taccola, di Giorgio, Regiomontanus, Alberti, Fontana and Leonardo da Vinci invented was already there in Chinese books: notably ephemeris tables, maps, mathematical treatises and books about civil and military machines. The information would have been handed over to the Pope and his advisors when the Chinese visited in 1434.

Mr Menzies also argues that the introduction by the Chinese of innovative rice cultivation and silk manufacturing processes had widespread consequences. By the 1450’s, Florence had silk and rice. The Medici family had derived unprecedented riches from the silk trade and had used their wealth to fund astronomers, mathematicians, engineers, sculptors, artists, explorers, cartographers, historians, librarians, archaeologists and geographers. The Renaissance was in full flood, thanks in part, Mr. Menzies argues, to the Chinese inventions. For instance, the introduction of locks which enabled an all-weather, all-season system of navigable canals to be constructed in northern Italy was of immense importance to the economic development of Lombardy. The introduction of Chinese rice, mulberry trees and silk was all the more valuable once the rice could be carried downriver on the Po. Marble, too, could be carried from the mountains to the new cities of northern Italy. The printing of books did not produce new ideas in itself, but the introduction of moveable type enabled revolutionary ideas to be spread the length and breadth of Europe.