Page 210 - Ming_China_Courts_and_Contacts_1400_1450 Craig lunas

Plate 22.4 (left) Stele in Jinghai Temple,
reconstructed in 1980s
Plate 22.5 (right) Rubbing of the Jinghai
Temple stele

the Ming history is that the compilers found these figures in specific types of ships for different purposes (see Table 1). It
the sources and copied them without thinking carefully is well documented that there were 27,000 to 28,000 people
about whether they made sense. (including crew and passengers) on most of the voyages. In
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Moreover, all the documents that had been in the official order to transport so many, the fleet would have needed
government archives concerning the voyages had quite a number of ships. Various calculations of the number
disappeared. According to one source, the documents were of ships based on these personnel figures have been made,
destroyed in the Chenghua reign period (1465–87), due to a which will be examined more closely later in the chapter.
power struggle between Confucian scholars and eunuchs. Another difficulty is the lack of images. There are
From Zheng He’s time onwards, eunuchs had become certainly no drawings of the ships that we could in any way
associated with ambitious maritime ventures, and they term ‘scientific’. The few images we have do not provide
became more powerful as the years went on. It seems that in accurate details, but just give a general impression. There
order to thwart the plans of the eunuch Wang Zhi 汪直 to are three main sets of illustrations that shed some light on
launch military expeditions, the Confucian scholar Liu the size of the ships and these will be discussed below.
Daxia 劉大夏, Vice President of the Ministry of War, We also do not completely understand the measurement
destroyed all the documents in the archives relating to units used to build these ships. While we know how long the
Zheng He’s voyages. 16 Ministry of Works chi 尺 (foot) was, there were other types of
Despite this unfortunate obliteration of the official chi in use as well. We have references to a shipbuilding chi, a
written record, references to the voyages have surfaced in a Huai chi 淮尺, a tailor’s chi, a construction chi and others,
number of sources. The trouble is that the surviving sources specialised according to profession, reminiscent of the
are still scanty, and information about the ships in them is English baker’s dozen. The length of a chi also changes over
quite rare. It is scattered among different sources, and does time from one dynasty to another, and differs from place to
not fit together as a neat whole. We might have the length place. Whether the Ministry of Works chi was the standard
and beam of one ship, the complement of another, the mast used in shipbuilding we do not know. Two wooden foot-rulers
height of a third, and the rudderpost length of a fourth, but have been found in the Treasure Shipyard, both about 31cm
no record of the dimensions of a single ship from the fleet in long. They provide enticing evidence, but there is no way to
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its entirety. tell when they were dropped into the basins.
One point that seems fairly certain is that there were As for the sources and what they say, there are three types
many different sizes of ship on these voyages. In addition to of source now extant: written works, illustrations and
the 62 enormous ships mentioned by the Ming shi, other archaeological evidence. For the written works, in addition
sources refer to 100–250 ships in the fleet. There were to the Ming shi, we have the Ming Veritable Records (Ming shilu
probably ships of many different sizes and purposes. Gong 明實錄), three first-hand accounts, one anonymous
Zhen 鞏珍, a staff member on the final voyage in 1431–3, itinerary, some stone inscriptions and some unofficial
refers to specially designated water ships, and there may histories. As we have seen, the History of the Ming mentions
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have been other specialised types. Although the novel only the length and beam measurements. There are no
cannot entirely be trusted, it does suggest that there were figures for depth or any other details. The Veritable Records

200 | Ming China: Courts and Contacts 1400–1450