The China Ship | Hacker News Reader

The China Ship

multimedia.scmp.com

118 pointswallflower41 comments

Reading about this always makes me remember how much we stand at the shoulders of giants.

Thinking about things like on each of those voyages half the crew will die of Scurvy and other illnesses, for hundreds of years.

Now it is going to the moon or Venus, or Mars what requires a significant risk to do, because of danger like radiation or absence of civilization out there.

Some day in the future, traveling to Mars will be routine and people would barely think on those that made it possible.

How much people think about the incredible thing it is we could travel to the other side of the planet on a single day?

Cool article. This was one time when I actually wish the article was slightly longer. I came away with only the vaguest sense of what made the return trip more difficult. Who were the "enemies" in question?

Your wish is granted! There are four chapters.

https://multimedia.scmp.com/culture/article/spanish-galleon/...

As for the "enemies," they were little more than pirates, brigands, and otherwise despondent vagrants looking for a bit of self-help justice (helping themselves to the spoils of thievery and robbery.)

Here some narrative on a privateer prowling the California coast at end of the China trade route period. http://factcards.califa.org/ran/elrefugio.html

Thanks a lot for the links! I was looking for them last time but never found it :(

ya, the navigation on the static footer of the page is really ineffective, as it difficult to see in an desktop browser. It should have been part of the page content or styled with much more contrast or something to make it more obvious.

A notable known one is Sir Francis Drake. He crossed into the pacific in 1578, took two treasure ships (among other, less important vessels carrying more mundane cargo), and returned in 1580. As a privateer, he surrendered half of his proceeds to the Queen. This half was worth more than all the other revenues of the Crown of England for that year.

England and Spain were not officially at war at the time.

Those articles are so cool, loved reading them. It reminds me of the long explanations in the book Cryptonomicon about Intramuros/Manilla and how the bigger ballast stones that came from Europe ended as huge stair steps.

In the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, part of the story takes place around the China galleons.

Definitely worth a read if you find this sort of thing exciting.

Yeah, that was a long but interesting read. He has a long discussion about the secret of what latitude to use to cross Eastward. I never understood that loop so well until I saw the pics and diagrams in this story.

edit - fixed some of my endless typos

Interesting how this circle trade route in the Pacific was used by Europeans for over 200 years before Hawaii was found by Cook in 1778.

The book Sapiens states that in the 1500s the Chinese had a 15 thousands ocean ready ship fleet, but for various reasons there were not really into exploring.

Is that really true? 15k ships sounds absurdly high for that era.

Chinese person here, I don't think those numbers are that accurate or those ships were being maintained or seaworthy. That period was chaotic on the seas and piracy was rampant with frequent attacks in-land, as well during that period the Chinese Haijin was in force, which means no private seafaring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haijin).

If they had that many ships, it was likely inherited off Zheng He's expeditions and the 1400s Chinese period's brief uprise in naval interest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He#Expeditions), the Vietnamese conquest or the Mongolian Yuan dynasty who might have used them as an naval invasion force or even other previous dynasties who were far more interested in commerce but all these events were more than 50 years before the 1500s. However, note at that period, China had went from years of prosperity in the early 1500s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongzhi_Emperor) to chaos in the mid to late-1500s and land wars were more important with Chinese fighting Mongols and Japanese (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanli_Emperor).

I've seen some similar numbers; in the thousands at least. After seeing some believed numbers for single battles involving ~500 Roman ships in ~260-0 BC [0], thousands for the entire Chinese fleet centuries later doesn't seem too surprising.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Actium#Order_of_batt...

The 15,000 number seemed quite high based on my understanding of China’s complete lack of capability in maritime warfare from about 1700s onward. Apparently, though, during the Míng dynasty China had a large fleet, which had a reported size of 3500 [0, unacademic] or 2700 and 3000 ships [1, academic]. They were exploring the Asian sub-continent in the so-called “Treasure fleets” [2], but those fleets did not go nearly as far as the European traders who would arrive in Canton and Macau from mainland Europe in the 1500s.

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/500-years-...

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/43383349

[2] https://www.thoughtco.com/why-did-the-treasure-fleet-stop-19...

Also bear in mind that China already had a population of ~130m at year 1500. More than twice as much population as the next 5 biggest groups combined (french empire, ottomans, Inca, HRE, and southern Indiana).

Literally like 30% of the world's population in one empire.

Just to keep scale in perspective.

India.... Stupid autocorrect, obviously southern Indiana was not the one of the top 6 empires in year 1500...

Wikipedia and my memory suggests it may have been hundreds to thousands of ships and tens of thousands of personnel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_treasure_voyages?wprov=sf...

Why the West Rules---For Now by Ian Morris discusses the expeditions at length. They weren't exploring, they were cementing relations with existing direct and indirect trading partners. That's the reason for the large crews.

On part 3 the passengers' paperwork was checked after a month of travel, about 500 kilometres away from the starting point of Manila. Sixteen were found to have lacking documents, and were left on an island.

That's of course terrifying, but also quite puzzling: why weren't the papers checked at the point of departure?

Possibly the crown was weak relative to commercial wealth at the port, and bribery was common. At a remote outpost, it might be easier to defend the crown’s interests against bribery. Just speculating.

When humans start journeying outside low earth orbit again, it can be like this. Long and dangerous trips.

Hopefully with less scurvy and pirates.

Scurvy/starvation, and pirates will always be with us. With the added bonus of losing air supply.

Since we figured out what causes scurvy and the amount of vitamins needed to prevent it weighs almost nothing, I'd bet that scurvy won't be one of the problems we encounter in space.

I agree, lack of nutrients and vitamins won't be a concern in most space trips. I also don't know about pirates. Where are they going to hide?

I think the biggest risks are loss of breathable air and claustrophobia/prolonged isolation (if people freak out in ships, imagine in deep space).

Pirates... maybe. They could go places hard to reach, so even if you knew roughly were they were, they could be hard to apprehend.

But anyway, if we have pirates, there is a space ecosystem large enough to leech off, so a win!

But you could detect them approaching your vessel, all you got to do is change course and/or speed up.

Battles in space are about who has more fuel and who can dissipate waste heat faster. You want to fire small, hard to detect ammunition from hours or days far away and try your best to anticipate the evasive maneuvers or shape your bullets' trajectories such that evading costs most fuel.

Interesting. So spaceships will probably be heavily armoured, full of big long range weapons (rail guns?) and huge fuel reserves for unforeseeable course changes.

The heavier you are the more fuel you need for high-G maneuvers, the more fuel you carry the heavier you are... more guns and more armor are not unconditionally better.

Is there much out there to find, that requires physical human presence?

No. In theory you can mine everything with robots.

However, every year you stay on Earth, you're kinda like throwing a 1d100 whether you get a WWIII and it turns into a nuclear wasteland or not. You can keep throwing it and hope it doesn't happen in your generation, or, you can get out of it and have a backup plan.

This is an interesting framing, because presumably the first space-living people will actually have a much greater than a 1d100 chance of dying in some horrible space-related way. We then basically have a collective action problem: in order for the species to have a better chance of survival, individuals have to do things that actually lower their chances of survival.

I think the first first experiments won't have any problem finding volunteers because we've been so acculturated to think of space travel as being "cool," but presumably after the first few extraterrestrial colonies dramatically cease to exist after explosive decompression accidents or are simultaneously poisoned by bizarrely-mutated e.coli variants in their water supplies, people will be much less eager to move off the nice, familiar, safe-seeming Earth.

I love the quality of their illustrations and info graphics. Anyone here have tips on how to make similar graphics?

South China Morning Post is a great source for information about East Asia. I recommend their daily newsletter to anyone interested.

Could you give more context about their biases? I’m not familiar with the news source, but would like to be informed about that area of the world (While not just reading heavily one-sided articles).

SCMP is a Hong Kong newspaper recently bought by the Alibaba group. Apparently it has the highest recorded credibility score among Hong Kongers which is 6.54.

I feel they are biased in China's favor but not so much so as to make the information unreliable. If you understand that many of the articles are written from the Chinese perspective, then you should be able to filter out the mild propaganda. It seems there are a number of international writers, as well.

I don't find them biased in China's favor, but you are right that they write from a mostly dispassionate and -- as Hong Kong is inextricably tied to China -- cautiously realistic perspective about China. It tends not to have the shallow caricatures, shrill alarmism, and conspiratorial/racist undertones of the American yellow press.

I would say "optimistic" not necessarily "realistic" perspective. Although some American journalism may show alarmism when discussing China, they are not completely wrong here. The Chinese government is very aggressive when trying to establish an economic hegemony over a certain industry or geographic region. Their ability to formulate and execute broad agendas across government and industry (e.g. China 2050, Belt & Road, etc) is quite impressive but everyone knows China is not really playing fair (e.g. government subsidized "private" companies, questionable business ethics, obfuscation of company data, theft of trade secrets, currency manipulation, different sets of rules for non-Chinese companies/investors, etc.) It's a bit like gambling in Vegas. You may not know the exact methods, but you know the system is setup so that the house always has better odds than you.

As Xi continues to lock down China and exert more and more control, it will be interesting to see if China's central economic strategies and dynamic startup industry will continue to flourish or if they will be crushed under the weight of totalitarianism.

Most HongKong people don't identify with Mainland China, the Hongkongese attitude is similar to that of Taiwan. Many Hongkongers would say that Hong Kong != China.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com