The most startling discovery from Zheng He’s treasure ship shipyards by Prof. Pan Biao and my response
1. Professor Pan Biao’s startling groundbreaking find
On September 21, Zheng Zi Hai, a Zheng He descendant and a prolific writer on Zheng He history, accompanied me to visit Nanjing’s Jingjue Shi[Mosque of Enlightenment], founded in 1392 by Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty. From 1392 to 1492, for a hundred years, an Istanbul sojourner in Nanjing, Ke Ma Lu Din and his posterity ran the mosque. After the tour, he introduced me to the deputy Secretary of Nanjing mosque management committee, Mr. Ma Song Ren and his colleagues at the office. During our long but very interesting conversation on Zheng He history, Mr. Zheng Zihai gave me a copy of September 20 “Jing Ling Wanbao”[Nanjing Evening News] reporting a groundbreaking study in Zheng He history by Professor Pan Biao at the Institute of Wood Material Science of Nanjing Forestry University.
Prof. Pan Biao’s latest finding is indeed rather startling: modern international exchange and trade of timber wood has its origins in Zheng He voyages. Ever since 2003, Professor Pan and Professor Xu Yong Ji teamed up together to research into a total of 236 pieces of rotten wood samples collected from the Zheng He’s treasure ship shipyards in Nanjing. According to their finding, about 80% of the wood materials were fir wood, 11 % timber wood and 5.5% ge mu or lined wood. The finding considerably excited Prof. Pan Biao. This finding has proven that China’s shipbuilding technology during Zheng He’s era was not only rather superior and stable but also becoming rather familiar with the different functions of wood materials. Meanwhile, Zheng He’s era set the first examples of massively importing expensive quality Southeast Asian wood materials. This fact was not uncovered by any previous archaeological discoveries or reported by any historical texts.
The fir wood materials were largely derived from South China in origin. Such wood materials were good materials for shipbuilding because they were known as soft, humid-resistant and decay-resistant. They had long been widely used as the ideal materials for building houses and ships in China. Long before the Ming, the Chinese shipbuilders were already very familiar with the properties of fir wood. Not surprisingly, fir wood pieces surviving from the era of Zheng He could be found in the Nanjing shipyards of Zheng He treasure ships.
But the massive use of lined wood is a different story altogether. Lined wood is recommended by today professional shipbuilding text books as ideal shipbuilding materials, because it is hard and heavy, strong and resistant to insect decays. Thus even until now it remains the recommended materials for heavy constructions and for the main frames of ships. Before Zheng He’s era, no record of massive use of lined wood in shipbuilding in China was found. The massive use of lined wood for building the treasure ships is a clear indication that the Chinese shipbuilders during then were already familiar with the properties of various wood materials. Their exploits in the use of various wood properties and materials equaled today.
Still, the most amazing thing was the massive import of timber. It’s suggested by the fact that nearly 11% of the surviving wood material samples from Zheng He treasure ship shipyards were made of timber. According to Prof. Pan, it was not until as late as 1925 that timber was first transplanted into China. Until the Yuan, China’s shipbuilding industry had never seen a trace of timber wood used as its shipbuilding materials. Originally, however, timber was widely grown in India, Burma, and Thailand. This kind of wood is commonly known for its strong decay-resistant, acid-resistant, and termite-resistant properties. It used to be the best shipbuilding materials before the use of steel for shipbuilding. “Before Zheng He, timber had never left its countries of origin a single step,” says Prof. Pan, “But during Zheng He voyages and the one or two hundred years influenced by his voyages, timber was not only massively used in shipbuilding but also transplanted first time ever into Southeast Asia.” Java is said to have been the earliest country in the world transplanting timber around 400 or 600 years ago. All this new evidence seems to have suggested, Prof. Ban Piao argues, Zheng He voyages contributed greatly to the remarkable progress in Southeast Asian shipbuilding industry and a large scale international trade of timber wood materials.
Still, questions remain. Since when Zheng He began to import quality timber wood materials from Southeast Asia, for example? And by what means did he import to Nanjing such a large quantity of timber? But judging from the fact that ocean-going ability of Zheng He fleets was increased each and every time after a voyage, Prof. Pan reckons at the initial stage of his voyages, Zheng He didn’t use any Southeast Asian timber for making his ocean-going ships. It was only after having close contacts with Southeast Asia that he began increasingly using imported wood materials from Southeast Asia in a large scale. And he also suggests Zheng He fleets could import the timber either by shipping them home in piles on the ships or by loading the already processed timber wood materials in bulk inside the fleet’s cargo ships.
2. My response: the timber materials were more likely imported from the Red Sea and Persian-Gulf ports
What Prof. Pan Biao tells us is most likely only half the story. Fact is, timber was only first transplanted into Java outside its countries of origin only 400 or 600 years ago. Clearly, there is, thus, little or no likelihood that Zheng He fleets could have been sourcing its imported timber from Southeast Asia. Prof. Pan Biao is clearly wrong here about the source of China’s imported timber during Zheng He’s era.
More likely, however, it is an integral part of the larger story of a global trade between the East and the West, centuries long in existence before even Zheng He’s era. In this East-West trade between Venice, Genoa and Florence of Italy and Alexandra, Damascus of Mamluk Egypt, Aleppo of Syria, each of these Italian city states was vying with one another to establish its dominance of the trade from the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean that terminated at Alexandria. They all had their trading centres and consuls established in Alexandria, Damascus, and Aleppo and even further afield. “While Europe predominantly exported bulk goods such as textiles, TIMBER, glassware, soap, paper, copper, salt, silver and gold, it tended to import luxury and high-value goods,” says Jerry Brotton. “These ranged from spices (black pepper, nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon), cotton, silk, satin, velvet, and carpets to opium, to tulips, sandalwood, porcelain, horses, rhubarb, and precious stones.”(see Jerry Brotton: The Renaissance, A Very Short Introduction,(Oxford University Press, 2006),p.23).
As a matter of practical need, the Italian city-states developed new ways of moving large quantities of merchandises by ships. In this process, the heavy, round-bottomed masted ships or cogs were used to replace their older galleys, narrow oared ships. “These cogs were able to transport over ‘300’ barrels of merchandise, (one ‘barrel’ equaled 900 litres), more than three times the amount possible aboard the older galley.”(Ibid, p.25) The cogs were used to ship bulky goods such as TIMBER, grain, salt, fish and iron between Northern European ports and Arabic ports. Alexandria, Damascus and Aleppo then re-export the timber from Europe to India, China and Southeast Asia either directly through the frequent visits and shipments from Zheng He fleets or indirectly through the private Chinese or Indian or Southeast Asian ocean-going merchant ships. In a very globalized world during then, it was most likely that Zheng He fleets sailed across the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea directly tapping into the source of re-export European timber wood from Alexandria, Damascus and Aleppo rather than from Java ports or any other Southeast Asian ports.
Although China’s massive import of timber wood from the Red Sea and Persian Gulf ports was only part of the larger story in the East-West trade between Mamluk Egypt and Europe, the same was no less true of Javanese transplanting timber from abroad ahead of the rest of Asia. One of the reasons for this may be that Javanese shipping particularly flourished in the 15th century. Evidence showed the Javanese during then dominated the trade in Indonesian waters, including Melaka in the west and Maluku in the east. Prof. Antony Reid suggests the likeliest explanation for the flowering of the 15th century Javanese shipbuilding industry is “a creative melding of Chinese and Javanese marine technology in the wake of Zheng He expeditions.” “In each of these seasons of 1406, 1408, 1414, 1418, and 1432, fleets of a hundred or more Chinese vessels spent long periods refitting in the ports of east Java.”(See Anthony Reid: Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680, Volume Two: Expansion and Crisis, Yale University Press, 1993,p.39.). Yet, more importantly, the significant players contributing to the flowering of Javanese shipbuilding industry and Javanese transplantation of timber were the growing Chinese communities during 1405 to 1433. As Prof. Anthony Reid rightly points out: “These communities built the trading fleets of such cities as Gresik and Demak(both in Java), Palembang, Malaka, Patani and Ayutthaya, organized their tributary trade to China, and established trading network throughout the region”.(Ibid) Indeed, the overseas Chinese networks in Java played a major part in all of these spectacular Javanese globalized developments in the 15th century.
What Prof. Pan Piao has found from Zheng He treasure ship shipyards in Nanjing is certainly amazing. But perhaps what is more amazing is the larger story of how incredibly globalized the world already was in which Zheng He was playing a major part in its unimaginably extensive globalization and global trading system.
