China and Japan

The ships came ‘sailing like mountains with the wings of the winds on the surface of the water’. So the Arab writer Wassaf described his impression of the great Chinese junks he saw in the early fourteenth century. ¹ Marco Polo, too, described the ships he saw in Indian waters, double-planked, caulked with oakum within and without, fastened with iron nails and their bottoms smeared with a mixture of quicklime, hemp and oil. They had, he declared, a crew of 300, small boats slung from the side, sixty small cabins below decks, one for each merchant, four masts, four sails, thirteen bulkheads, and where the hull had been repaired, up to thirteen layers of wood sheathing. ² Both these quotations come from a period shortly before Chinese maritime affairs reached their peak, when a great Chinese fleet of vessels larger and more advanced than any in Europe, under the direction of Chang Ho, eunuch, ambassador, admiral and explorer, was to range from Zanzibar to Kamchatka in what Needham calls ‘the well-disciplined operation of an enormous feudal bureaucratic state’. ³