early Chinese ships

Dave Siemens wrote:

Had a little time and did a Google search. There were several massive Chinese expeditions in the early 15th century headed by Zheng He (Cheng Ho). They at least reached Arabia, may have reached the Cape of Good Hope and beyond. His "treasure ships" had a length of at least 440 feet, according to the translation of the Chinese records, up to 600 feet.

What a coincidence! Today I went to Harvard and had lunch with Thomas, my Chinese historian friend. He was at Harvard for a conference on Chinese history. He was the plenary speaker for a symposium on "Quantifying Chinese Economic History" and his talk was titled "Determining the specifications of historical Chinese ships." Remembering your note, I asked him for more details of his talk. He said one of the items he discussed was the expedition of Zheng He and he proceeded to tell me about it. Zheng He was a Muslim eunuch who desired to go to Mecca and attempted to do so by ship. It doesn't appear that he actually made it to Mecca, though he might have, but he did visit East Africa and purportedly brought a giraffe back to China. Maybe as a eunuch he didn't follow Noah's example and bring back two of them. (Hence, no giraffes in China!!) Thomas did the analysis of the size of Zheng He's ships by working through the details of Chinese taxation records which were based on the volume/capacity of ships. On this basis, he estimates that Zheng He's ships were approximately 50-60 meters long.

Before I could mention your note, he proceeded to tell me about the myth of Zheng He's huge ships, purportedly 125-145 meters in length. He said there are many reports circulating about the enormous size of his ships, comparing them with many war ships, illustrating them to be nearly 4 times larger than Columbus's Santa Maria (at about 35 meters), comparable to Noah's ark, etc. Thomas' own analysis sharply contradicted this "common knowledge." He then was able to trace that perception to Joseph Needham, noted historian of Chinese science, who died in the '90's. Needham was the one who reported this large dimension and, because of his prominence in the field, this was accepted uncritically and widely circulated. Needham based his analysis on two sources. 1) A very old account of Zheng He's travels was written by a member of his group around 1450 or 1460. This account cites a dimension of 125 meters and, because of the early date of the source it was considered highly reliable. 2) An enormous rudder was discovered in the 1950's and extrapolation from other ship designs led to size estimates of 145 meters or more.

However, recent discoveries of older editions of the account of Zheng He's travels did not include any mention of the length of the ships. It was inserted much later in more recent editions and historians no longer consider it reliable. Also, more large rudders have been discovered of comparable size and have been found to be associated with ships on the order of 50 meters or so rather than the extrapolated 145 or more. The net is that most Chinese historians no longer feel that the purportedly large size of Zheng He's ships is credible.

That piece of evidence for early large scale ships seems to have evaporated. If any of you are interested, I may be able to obtain a copy of this paper and send it to you.

Randy
Received on Sun Jun 4 18:28:04 2006