THE WORLD'S FIRST public announcement that 15th-century Chinese ships had been found in New Zealand was supposed to be a polite book promotion at the Hong Kong Football Club.
About 500 members of the Royal Geographical Society came to the Happy Valley club on Wednesday night to hear Gavin Menzies run through evidence supporting his international best-seller, 1421: The Year China Discovered The World (Bantam Books).
The book has caused plenty of controversy - and ridicule - among historians since it was released in January, with its claims that an armada of enormous and sophisticated Chinese junks sailed around the globe a century before Ferdinand Magellan, finding America 70 years before Christopher Columbus and Australasia 350 years before Captain James Cook.
Now the loose band of scientists with whom Menzies had been secretly working since March have decided to go public with the bizarre news that 44 of Emperor Zhu Di's ships had been found on New Zealand's South Island and that they pre-dated the arrival of the Maoris by 250 years.
The rest of the world was yesterday digesting the idea that Chinese may have been exporting smelted iron from New Zealand since 100 BC.
But that was old news for Gavin Menzies. He had a book tour of Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Mexico and Eastern Europe to reorganise.