Gavin lived in China when his father was staying in ______.

W: What attracted you to China?
M: I went there when I was just two weeks old. My father was in the Navy at a time when there were a lot of British naval bases in China. I lived there for two years, before the Second World War. Later, when I was in the Navy, we went to Hong Kong. When I retired I just really wanted to go back.
W: How did your research begin?
M: Fourteen years ago, when my wife and I went to China for our silver wedding anniversary, I became fascinated with the year 1421 when Emperor Zhu Di—who had sent his loyal eunuch admirals on a quest to voyage around the world—moved this capital to the north to defend the country.
W: How are you rewriting history?
M: I used charts to show how the Chinese would have been able to explore the world, reaching America 70 years before Columbus and circumgyrating the globe a century before Magellan. I also looked at maps that proved the Europeans had prior knowledge of places they had yet to reach.
W: What evidence is there that the Chinese explored the world before Europeans?
M: One of many examples is that the Amazon River was shown on European maps from 1440 onwards, a century before Europeans reached it. Items only found in Southeast Asia, such as jade, Chinese chickens, rice—which couldn’t survive being taken across the Bering Strait—and DNA in people, are found around Cuiaba, Brazil. I was contacted by a walnut farmer in Sacramento who told me that there’s a Chinese ship buried beside the Sacramento River on his property, 110 kilometres inland. Its wood is dated to 1410 and is unique to southwest China.
W: What makes you think European explorers used Chinese charts?
M: Magellan quelled a mutiny by proving his knowledge of their route; he had a map. This is all quoted in his log. It couldn’t have been something he created as he went along because in his prior letters to the King of Spain, who had a copy of the map, he requests that the chart not be shown to anyone so that he can’t be followed.
W: Tell me about your talk at BBC.
M: It was a bit of a media frenzy really. It was absolutely luck though. Chinese television arrived in London on the day the Daily Telegraph published an article on my claim. They saw it and transmitted my talk back to China. NBC and ABC learned the Chinese reaction back to America. in all, about two billion people watched the talk. I’ve had thousands of letters since, and a stream of new information has poured in.
W: Did your naval knowledge help your investigation?
M: Yes, it did. I often used Canopus, the second brightest star, to navigate from submarines, as you can see it through a periscope. Chinese astronomers long sought to find the exact position of Canopus, and lots of expeditions were sent off to do so. This was a breakthrough for me. I was looking at a pre-European chart of Patagonia that had been drawn incredibly accurately because whoever had done it had been right underneath Canopus—which meant it could only be the Chinese. Also, having looked at Caribbean islands through a submarine periscope during my career, and finding out how sea levels have changed over time, I recognized two previously unidentified islands on a 1424 chart by the Venetian cartographer Zuane Pizzigano as Guadeloupe and Puerto Rico.
W: How did you feel when you made these breakthroughs alone?
M: When I got about two-thirds of the way through the story, I thought there was no doubt about it—the Chinese really did discover Australia and the Americas before the Europeans. "This is too much of a good thing", I thought. I then tried to corroborate my findings and found to my relief that there was a lot of evidence out them. That allowed me to sleep a lot easier.
W: What do you think the next revelation about Chinese discoveries will be?
M: The next furore will be about Bimini, a sand-spit island 80 kilometres east of Miami that features something called the Bimini Road. It leads from a sandy beach into the depths and is built from huge stone blocks. Some claim it leads to Atlantis. I’m certain the Chinese built it from ballast when their fleet was stranded there after a hurricane.