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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

> The Ming ships are fantastically larger than anything the world has ever seen. Europe’s conquest of the global seas will begin in the 1490s, with the departures of Vasco da Gama for India and Christopher Columbus for the Americas. All seven of their vessels would have fit easily on the 80,000-square-foot main deck of Zheng He’s flagship; the Europeans’ combined crews of 260 amount to less than 1 percent of Zheng He’s 30,000.

I am not sure how much those numbers are to be trusted. For one thing, that is a huge leap in a single generation. Secondly, you are limited in how big you can make wooden ships (especially ocean going ships) because they have to be able to withstand the forces caused by waves lifting up one end of the ship. It wasn’t until steel ships that we had a material that was strong enough to be able to build these massive ships.

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I'm wondering if this is a propaganda meme, as someone shared a related article with me within the last few weeks: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/zheng-he-china-explore...

> Both Marco Polo and the Moroccan explorer Ibn Batuta wrote of seeing huge seagoing vessels in their visits to the East. Some experts believe the treasure ships Zheng sailed were 400 feet long, or five times the size of Columbus’ ships, with 70,000 square-foot decks, though those numbers remain in debate.

Taking it at face value, it appears some other force of history in their culture annihalated all evidence of an technologically advanced civilization and allowed the region to be exploited by the Portuguese and British without even a land invasion. If this mega ship tech existed in the region, what did the invaders have that prevented them from being repelled?

China went into isolation after Zheng Hes journies, going as far as burning the ships and declaring basically the coast a no-go zone. What little seafaring the Chinese did was illegal smuggling (a lot of others, e.g. Japanese, seafarers contributed there) and coastal fishing. Hence, when the Europeans showed up, with better armed ships, there was not much in opossing them on the seas.

So the answer is, by the time the Europeans showed, those ships didn't exist anymore.

This is slightly inaccurate.

The "little seafaring the Chinese did" in illegal trade was actually a huge business, and these "pirates" ended up merging with the remnants of the last Ming court, and eventually drove away the Dutch forces settled in Formosa (aka Taiwan). See eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Fort_Zeelandia

Even during the Qing dynasty, "pirate" forces in the China coastal seas were huge, often commanding forces up to tens of thousands of men, and hundreds of war ships. The Chinese government in Beijing of course did not do much though, and basically repeatedly and actively sabotaged the sea trade in order to suppress the "pirates". (see eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_Yi_Sao )

If the Chinese governments at the time did not see these "pirates" as an adversary but instead figured out profit sharing schemes like the European powers did with the "East India Companies", it's hard to say whether the Europeans would have dominated the Far East trade so easily.

Had the Chinese emperors not retreated from the Pacific, world history would look a lot different now, that's for sure.

> it appears some other force of history in their culture annihalated all evidence of an technologically advanced civilization

There have been multiple occasions both in the imperial eras and the Cultural Revolution when the upcoming Chinese power has attempted to eradicate all evidence of a previous power that didn't fit an approved narrative. In particular, the "treasure fleets" were the victim of domestic power struggles.

The Japanese invasion of China was enabled by China's internal collapse and the final demise of the Empire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Dowager_Cixi

Isn't that the geopolitical equivalent of 'You wouldn't know her. She goes to another school. In Canada."?

Chinese records by the 1600s note that European ships were more maneuverable especially sailing against the wind and had longer range cannons. The advantages hadn't grown large enough so the Ming were still able to beat the few limited European incursions that made it all the way to China, but the differences grew larger over time that the Qing fleets were too slow and their gun ranges were much much worse.

indeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He#Disputes_of_historica... covers this

also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He#Treasure_Shipyard_exc...

both are an interesting read.

In addition, there’s 300 years of intense competition and iterative design between European ships of thee 1490s and the Santisima Trinidad(to name a big ship). Including embarrassments like the Vasa going straight to the bottom of the Baltic.

So I’m curious where the design expertise for the massive treasure fleet came from? Earlier Chinese designs? Maybe Malay peoples?

Southern China has always had a lot of sea trade activity. You don't hear that often because Chinese history is mostly written by people from the North, where the political center is usually situated (i.e. Beijing).

So you think the unearthed rudder mentioned later in the article is fake?

No. But scaling from the rudder size to a ship size is very inexact and involves a lot of assumptions.

No. But rudder size doesn't linearly scale with the ship. Different types of vessels have different rudders, based on their hull and environment. And it wasn't a rudder, but a rudder pole. And size of the rudder it was supposed to be part of is under heavy dispute.

The article discussed a rudder pole AND the remains of a large rudder.

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