Gavin Menzies, author of the best-selling and controversial "1421: The Year China Discovered America," claimed two more major pieces of evidence to prove his theory. He presented the new findings during his Reading Month lecture in Shenzhen on Saturday.

Menzies said the latest evidence is a Chinese map from 1418 and the ruins of a "Chinese navy base" in Nova Scotia, Canada where he spent two weeks this year.

"The site was found by Canadian architect Paul Chiasssion. His book will be published this coming March," Menzies said. During an interview with the Shenzhen Daily at his hotel Friday, Menzies showed photographs of the site, where he believed squadrons from the legendary admiral Zheng He's fleets once stayed.

"The history of the native Americans living nearby says that foreign people came in huge ships from their home on the other side of the pole, and they settled down and built the town on the promontory," Menzies said.

"When the first Europeans, Jesuit priests, reached the place, they found the (native Mi'kmaq) people writing in Chinese script," he said.

Menzies also gave as evidence of the Chinese in America 71 years before Columbus a 15th century map of the world found by a Chinese lawyer in Beijing about four years ago. "The name of the map is 'The Integrated Map of the World of Zheng He,'" Menzies said. The map includes North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Europe and Africa.

Menzies showed a photograph of the map to the Shenzhen Daily, but said the map couldn't be publicly shown until the results of carbon dating are announced Jan. 17.

Menzies said the paper and ink was now being carbon dated by researchers at Cambridge University in Britain and University of Waikato in New Zealand.

Menzies said parts of the Chinese map, including North America and South America, also appeared in a world map published in Venice before 1428.

"You have a Venetian map showing Alaska and North America long before Europeans got there," Menzies stressed.

"The Venetians say this map was a copy of a Chinese map," he said.

Menzies said there were about 30 to 40 ancient Chinese charts but none of them showed the world as completely as "The Integrated Map of the World of Zheng He."

"Finally, we've found Zheng He's records were not destroyed, so Chinese historians who said Zheng He's records were completely destroyed were quite wrong," Menzies said.

A former British Royal Navy submarine commander who spent the first two years of his life in China, Menzies published his bestseller in November 2002. So far, the book has been sold in 103 countries including China, with the English-language version alone selling more than 600,000 copies.

In his book, Menzies argues that the Chinese were the first to discover America as well as Greenland, Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand.

He believes most of the renowned European explorers, including Magellan, da Gama and Columbus, actually sailed to those lands in later years with maps drawn from Chinese charts.

Menzies challenged the widely accepted history that the seven Chinese naval expeditions from 1405 to 1433, commissioned by the Ming Emperor Zhu Di and commanded by Zheng He, only sailed as far as East Africa and the Red Sea.

"Menzies has no 'smoking gun' that proves his theory because the xenophobic Confucian officials who advised the later Ming emperors destroyed all records of these sea voyages," Timothy Furnish, an assistant professor of world history at Georgia Perimeter College in the United States, said in an article posted on the Internet.

Chinese historians generally accept as fact that most archives of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), including all records of Zheng's seven grand voyages, were destroyed in the fighting at the end of the dynasty.

"Authors that aim to rewrite 500 years of accepted history should rely less on subjective claims and more on hard evidence. And this is where Menzies ultimately fails to persuade," Furnish said.

"First, he does not read Chinese and thus cites no primary sources — a problem even if one accepts that the records were all destroyed. Even more fatal to his argument, Menzies often fails to provide corroborating data for many of his claims," he said.

Furnish says Menzies relies on "circumstantial evidence marred by questionable scholarship."

Menzies claims Chinese maps from as early as 1428 were used by European explorers when they started their own voyages decades later.

He also makes the argument that "DNA evidence" linking native Americans to Chinese shows that Zheng He left behind shiploads of his Chinese sailors in America.

Before the publication of Menzies' book, which he spent 14 years researching, his publisher sent the manuscript out for review. One of the historians contacted sent Menzies a map from 1424, which showed American islands.

"So somebody had been to America 70 years before Columbus, and my first thought was the Portuguese," Menzies recalled. It is believed that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492.

Although Menzies emphasizes that he is a retired submarine commander and not a historian, he says his research in Portugal established that the map was not Portuguese.

"But the Portuguese brought back world maps from Venice in 1428, so the whole world was known to the Portuguese before any of the European voyages was started," Menzies said.

Menzies said even if the carbon dating proves the Chinese map provided by the Beijing lawyer is not genuine, there were still other Chinese maps extant to prove that the Chinese were in America long before the Europeans.

Menzies does not read Chinese, but he says a team of Chinese volunteers helped him collect data for the past 10 years.

Menzies says any profit from his book goes into research and his website.

After Shenzhen, Menzies was off to Hong Kong in the hope of raising money for an archeological dig at the "Chinese navy base" in Canada to explore the possible China foothold in America.

From well-to-do families hiring Mandarin-speaking nannies for their tots to students in crammed Asian studies programs, demand for Chinese language instruction is booming like never before in the United States.

In a country that has never prioritised teaching foreign languages, demand is difficult to meet given a serious shortage of qualified instructors, said Michael Levine, who handles education at the New York-based Asia Society, which works to support cultural ties between the United States and Asia.

Clifford Greenhouse, who runs the Pavillion agency specializing in household help, said he gets more and more requests from "very wealthy families" seeking nannies who speak Mandarin, in the hopes their offpring will grow up bilingual. He can't always deliver.

"Mandarin-speaking people in New York tend to look down upon this work; they see it as being a servant," he said.

Leon Furchgott, 17, a freshman at prestigious Princeton University, grew up eating Chinese -- from the age of 10 months throughout his childhood in Bethesda, Maryland, an expensive Washington suburb.

"My mother likes to say that my first word was 'bu yao', which means 'I don't want,'" said Furchgott, who now speaks fluent Mandarin thanks to nannies and two hours of Chinese classes per week.

"When I was little, it was not difficult," he said.

Though Chinese has not yet reached the ranks of more traditional foreign languages, it is red hot in Pacific coast cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles.

But it also has seen a surge in interest in cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Houston, and in more rural states such as Kentucky and Kansas, the Asia Society says.

The interest is "coming from the heartland as well as from the big cities," said Levine. He said that behind the focus on Chinese was interest in doing business with China.

"Part of the demand comes from families who want to maintain their heritage, but in Chicago it comes from middle class families who see that as an advantage for their children", said Levine. "That's why demand is growing so rapidly."

Just about 50,000 US students are learning Chinese in public schools, and another 50,000 are studying it elsewhere, according to Asia Today.

"If we wanted to have five percent of all high schoolers in America learning Chinese, we'd need to have 25,000 qualified Chinese teachers" and not the current 1,000, Levine said.

To help deal with the teacher shortage, US philantropists and corporate foundations are beginning to chip in to support instruction in Chinese, he noted.

At the university level as well, demand for Chinese instruction is on the rise; it is now in seventh place among foreign languages behind Spanish, French, German, Italian, sign language, and Japanese. It places ahead of Russian and Arabic in terms of post-secondary students.

The latest data, from 2002, showed 34,153 university students were learning Chinese, up a sharp 20 percent from 28,456 in 1998.

At Yale, beginner Chinese class enrollment soared by 68 percent at the start of the school year compared to last year.

The Modern Language Association sees Chinese as the "new Russian" referring to the Cold war period when campuses saw higher interest in Rusian language coursework. That interest since has waned.