Shell-first construction is revealed in these photos of a Kwantung junk taking shape in a south China shipyard in the 1960s . The bottom of the vessel is form ed from edge joined planking before fram es are installed, to take th e planking for th e sides of th e hull. This survival of a praclice abandoned in Europe a 1housand years ago is a living il/ustra/ion of how the Chin ese became, in effecl, loo successful in th eir ways of doing things , so leading 10 a slasis which resisted in11ova1ive change . (Photos from Surveyor, May 1969)
Shanghai 2500 miles south to Java, then up the Malacca Strai t to Ceylon (today ' s Sri Lanka), India, and right on to the Persian Gulf, some 4,000 miles to the westward. Subsidiary voyages went onward to Mecca in the Red Sea, capital of Islam , the Arab state relig ion, and south to Mogadi shu and Malindi, great Arab trading centers in East Africa. Except for a few special items, such as a g iraffe to pique the emperor' s curiosity, these grand voyages brought nothing back to China which the Chinese fo und of value, save prestige. And that they already possessed , in their own eyes and the eyes of the outer world. "China's territory produces all goods in ab undance," declared the Ming emperor Gaozong, less venturesome than his Mongol predecessors, "so why should we buy useless trifles from abroad?" According ly, in 1433 , just 54 years before Dias led Portugal's breakout into the ocean world, overseas travel was forbidden to all Chinese. The Middle Kingdom Ch ina, however, remained a magnet fo r foreign trade centering on unique Chinese goods, including innovati ve products rang ing from the magnetic compass to g unpowder. The superb Chinese porcelain so pri zed in the West has been dug up in spots ranging from Africa to San Franci sco on America ' s West Coast and Belize on the Caribbean coast. But these goods were carried in the despi sed foreigners ' ships, Arabian dhows on the African coast and the Spani sh galleon mak ing her annual trip from Manil a in the Philippines to Acapulco in Mexico, making her landfall in California on the way. What the Chinese did with the South American silver they received from the Spanish trade in Manila is instructive. As Walter McDougall points out in his lively history of the north Pacific , LettheSea Make a Noise , they used it as money to pay for building the Great Wall, to keep out barbarian inv aders from the north ! The Wall is of much more recent birth than legend has it. McDougall dates its heyday from 1572 to 1620. The legendary building date of the 200s BC may well have been ado pted by the Chinese sages, who wrote consensus history-perhaps to give add iti onal protection to what they call ed the Middle Kingdom, namely the protection of time, in SEA HISTORY 84, SPRING 1998
the fo1m of centuries-old precedent. It was ever a Chi nese thing to confo rm to the Will of Heaven as expressed in the flow of events over time and make their works fit in with the scheme of the universe, rather than go out and do battle to change the world . China ' s one aggressive attempt to change the course of hi story outside the ir borders had fai led miserably in the Mongol emperor Kub lai Khan ' s two mass ive attempts to invade Japan , in 1274 and 1281. The Japanese, determined to remain outside the Chinese orbit, thereafter evolved a quite different view of the world , in whi ch they did more to welcome Western innovation , while fiercely resisting Western dom inance.
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Returning from Ch ina in 1946 aboard the crowded troopship Dashing Wa ve, our group, the same I had traveled out with , spent much time simply gazi ng out at the seemingly end less ocean we were cross ing. I was ab le to visit aboard a great variety of river craft outside Tangku , where the US Navy had establi shed a traffic contro l center for traffic to Tientsin , the seapon for Peking. I had been fascinated by the differences in these craft from anything I had seen in America. The Chinese had arrived at totally different designs for so simple a thing as the shape and contro ls of a sail , or how a boat ' s bow shoul d part the waves. I confe ss I fo und these designs quaint and cumbersome, though the fam ilies that li ved aboard handled the clum sy-looking craft with remarkable deftness. One day, during a North Pacific blow, when cresting waves hammered o ur sh ip ' s steel sides and threw bursts of cold water across the decks , I spotted something like a large bird in the sea off the port bow. As we neared it yo u could make out the form and wet wooden decks of a fi shing junk, all sail stowed , lying to a sea anchor, bobbing to the boisterous seas that hurried by. She was like a bird indeed, a bird with her head tucked under her wing, perfectly at home in her part of the universe . J knew enough to know the vessel was an age-old designbut who would want to change it? She was perfectly at home in her corner of the vast Pacific, and could go where she needed to and do what she was called on to do. J, 15