This is something right up my alley, entertaining and informative speculation what if that actually makes lot of sense and appears logical in historical contest.
We are aware that China was light years ahead of Western Europe when it comes down to technical discoveries, inventions and cartography but for some reason, official explanation was that Western Europe and its Renaissance was true beginning of human knowledge and understanding of universe, rebirth of ancient knowledge long forgotten from antiquity and fall of Roman empire. We accept that whatever knowledge about building, astronomy and technology ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome had, was preserved somehow in monasteries and slowly re-discovered in Renaissance (no doubt contact with Arab world trough crusades also helped, although I wonder that crusaders saw further than loot).
Gavin Menzies suggest - very passionately, convincingly and in fact backing every single chapter with facts - that it was not some special air of Renaissance or even a particular time but a specific reason why Renaissance happened: it was because a huge Chinese fleet arrived in Venice (trough Indian Ocean, Red Sea and Mediterranean) bringing gifts, slaves, maps and encyclopedias of their knowledge and these documents, given to kings were preserved in archives and castles, just to slowly wait their re-discovery and this is a true influence on our Renaissance. According to Menzies, Chinese emperor Zhu Di sent a huge fleet with gifts to Venice with idea to enlighten the barbarians with Chinese knowledge and expectations that barbarians will respond with annual tributes. No doubt Chinese were way ahead of Europeans in technology and their knowledge of the world (for example) by far eclipsed anything we knew (including measurements of longitudes and latitudes) - it is documented they sailed as far as East Africa and they described cities on Nile, pyramids and Cairo (which they called Misr). However, the most interesting part of the book describes a curiosity that maps of the world (with detailed descriptions of all continents) were actually known and used by Columbus and Magellan, the fact that makes the whole "discovery" a bit confusing - what it means to discover places that were already known by somebody else? Menzies explains that these maps were given to Venetians by Chinese, among with many other documents. Even better, Leonardo de Vinci's famous technical inventions seems to be nothing but illustrations of Chinese encyclopedia "Nung Shu" which was known in Europe several generations before he was born. By far the most interesting bit of historical mystery is the fact that people among coast of Dalmatia (today Croatia), particularly on island Hvar, have unexplained Asian DNA (scientifically proved by Department of Molecular Genetics) that Genzies suggest is the result of locals mixing with Chinese slaves escaped from those ancient ships. That DNA is virtually absent in rest of Europe (and even Croatia itself) but present on Dalmatian islands? Official explanation is that this could be leftover from days of Mongol invasions but this curious inheritance of Chinese and Asian (Mongol) genes is really noticeable nowhere else but on islands - logically, if these were really results of Mongol invasions, we should be able to trace their footsteps all the way up north to river Drava and than down to the sea? But we find this oddity only on islands and Menzies explains this with 1434 arrival of Chinese fleet to Venice and influence of escaped Chinese sailors and slaves who stayed on these islands. There is much, much more curiosities in the book and its quite mind boggling.
Excellent read.
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