Introduction

“Thirty days after the spring rain,
Comes the ten thousand li sailing wind.
These songs haunting in the mountains Suddenly travel down on the water to the sea.”

- Su Shi (AD 1037-1101), “Bozhao Feng”

While ancient kingdoms and empires in Egypt, Greece and Italy rose and fell to dominate the Mediterranean, at the other end of the world the Chinese also took to the sea.


From Neolithic beginnings as a river-dominated culture, China in time created a naval force unrivalled by any other in the world. The Medieval rulers of the Southern Sung, Yuan, and Ming dynasties built tremendous fleets of thousands of vessels.

By the Ming dynasty, China controlled the sea-lanes from Korea and Japan to the north, Vietnam and Thailand to the south, and ranged as far west as the Indian Ocean and the shores of Africa. Then, amazingly, the Chinese retreated from the high seas in a period of anti-expansionist, anti-foreign sentiment, leaving the waters of the world open to the growing power of the Mediterranean and European states.

Had China not withdrawn from its control of the seas, it might well have ruled the world. By the time the Europeans were first venturing into longer voyages on the open seas, Chinese shipbuilding stood at the apex of thousands of years of development. Chinese merchant craft and warships of the 15th century surpassed anything built in Europe, and Chinese innovations and inventions, when introduced to the western world, radically changed the form and design of European ships and the art of war on land and sea.

Chinese nautical innovations included watertight bulkheads and the rudder. The Chinese compass also improved the efficiency of European ships, while gunpowder and cannon, other Chinese inventions, paved the way for the great galleons of the 16th century.