No. 237 Maritime Archaeology in the People's Republic of China ...

Figure 98.
Part of 18th century Japanese scroll Tõsen No Zu depicting a Fuzhou built, Guandong sent ship.
of the hull, the type of stem and stern, the method of fastening
the planking and frames, the presence or absence of water
tight bulkheads and the type of sailing gear. The surviving
traditional designs included the flat bottom hull form and a
single layer of carvel planking strengthened by bulkheads and
frame timbers and, an approximation to a rectangular cross
section. The characteristics described in historical ethnographic
accounts however only referred to those vessels found in the
waters north of the Fujian Province.
The other major design tradition was South-East Asian in
origin. In its purest form the vessel displayed characteristics
including the V-shaped hulls with a keel; pointed more or
less symmetrical stems and sterns; strakes and frames joined
exclusively by wooden dowels; no bulkheads, or bulkheads
with waterways and; double and quarter rudders (Manguin,
1984:198).
The vessels found in south east China, in Guandong, Hainan
and in northern Vietnam shared the characteristics of strakes and
frames fastened with iron nails or clamps; structurally essential
bulkheads dividing the hull into watertight components and
single axial rudders.
Maritime archaeological finds from the South-East
Asian region tend to indicate a wide variety of vessel
types. It is interesting to note that many of the shipwrecks
investigated display design characteristic that are different
from any of the historical ethnographic designs proposed
for traditional ships in southern China (Burningham &
Green, in preparation:12). Green & Harper (1983, 1987)
were the first to suggest that there was a growing body
of archaeological evidence in favour of a reappraisal of
shipbuilding classifications in South-East Asia based on
their observations of the Quanzhou shipwreck in China
and, the excavation of a number of wreck sites in Thailand
and the Shinan shipwreck in Korea.
The analysis of these shipwrecks prompted Mauguin
to suggest a hybrid shipbuilding tradition sharing the
characteristics of both the Chinese and the South-East Asian
types. He says of the dozen or so sites excavated (at that
time) seven revealed hull structure belonging to a previously
unheard of shipbuilding tradition. He also noted that no
large trading ships built with either pure South-East Asian
or northern Chinese techniques have been reported as wreck
sites (Manguin, 1984:198). Green and Harper (1986) and
Burningham and Green (in preparation) both give annotated
lists of wreck sites and provide comparisons between a
number of roughly contemporaneous vessels found in the
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