• DOI:10.1177/084387149700900205
• Corpus ID: 130906334

The Great Ocean-Going Ships of Southern China in the Age of Chinese Maritime Voyaging to India, Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries

@article{Wake1997TheGO,
  title={The Great Ocean-Going Ships of Southern China in the Age of Chinese Maritime Voyaging to India, Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries},
  author={Christopher Wake},
  journal={International Journal of Maritime History},
  year={1997},
  volume={9},
  pages={51 - 81}
}

• C. Wake
• Published 1 December 1997
• History
• International Journal of Maritime History

In recent years the most significant contributions to the history of Chinese shipping and shipbuilding have been made by marine archaeologists. Yet valuable information may still be gleaned from well-known literary sources where archaeological findings can be used to clarify the meaning of a text or where evidence from previously unconsidered sources can be brought to bear on some particular interpretive problem. One such problem concerns the size of the great ocean-going junks which regularly made the long voyage from Quanzhou (Ch'uan-chou), in South China's Fujian province, to the west coast of India in quest of pepper in the period from the later Song to the early Ming (twelfth to fifteenth centuries). Contemporary Chinese sources and Arab and European travellers' accounts all seem to agree that these vessels were very large, both by Chinese standards and compared to the ships of the Muslim and Christian West. "The vessels which they navigate in Cathay be very big," wrote Jordanus Catalanus, who saw them in India in the fourteenth century. 1 "Like houses, their sails 'like great clouds in the sky,'" is how one twelfth-century Chinese source described them.? Not all contemporary references to the size of these vessels are this vague. Indeed, some are quite precise. The problem with all of them, however, is that the terms in which size is expressed are not clearly and immediately understandable to the modern reader.