The Great Voyage丨Were Tang Dynasty wooden sailing ships so advanced?

Rugao Tang Dynasty Wooden Sailing Ship

In the "Ancient Navigation History" exhibition hall of the "Navigation History Hall" of the China Maritime Museum, there is a beautifully shaped ancient sailing ship model, which is modeled after a Tang Dynasty wooden sailing ship unearthed in Puxi Township, Rugao County, Jiangsu Province in June 1973. The ship is a sand ship, one of the famous traditional Chinese ship types. It is popular in the inland rivers of Jiangsu and surrounding coastal areas because of its flat bottom and shallow draft.

Rugao wooden ship model collected by China Maritime Museum

What does a Tang ship look like?

The Rugao wooden boat was found beside a local river called Magang. Magang is also known as "Yemakou". In the Tang Dynasty, Magang was very close to the Yangtze River and may have been the mouth of the Tongjiang River.

Photos of wooden boats unearthed in Rugao

Archaeological data show that this Tang Dynasty wooden sailing ship in Rugao was a transport ship with a load of about 20 tons, 17.32 meters long, 1.3 meters at the narrowest part of the deck, 2.58 meters at the widest part, 0.98 meters at the narrowest part of the bottom, 1.48 meters at the widest part, and 1.6 meters deep. The hull of the ship was made of three sections of wood mortise and tenoned together. The ship was slender, slightly narrow at the head and tail, with a circular arc cross section on the bottom, 4 to 7 centimeters thick on the side, and 8 to 12 centimeters thick on the bottom.

Rugao wooden ship model collected by China Maritime Museum

From the perspective of the overall structure of the boat, the hull is narrow and long, with many compartments and a large volume. This narrow and long single-masted wooden boat has a fast speed and is easy to travel on the river.

China Maritime Museum Collection of Ship Nails

Except for the bottom of the Rugao wooden boat which was jointed with whole wood, the sides, cabin boards and awning covers were all nailed together with iron nails, demonstrating the advanced iron nailing technology of the time.

What's on board?

There are 9 cabins in the hull, separated by cabin boards.

Caption: Watertight compartments

The first cabin is the bow. Three "Kaiyuan Tongbao" copper coins were found in the seams of the wooden boards in the cabin, and remnants of bamboo cables were found outside the cabin. Fragments of pottery jars were found at the bottom of the second cabin. A section of the mast was still found in the bulkhead between the second and third cabins. Porcelain jars, broken porcelain bowls, wooden water ladles, etc. were found at the bottom of the cabin next to the mast. The third, fourth, and fifth cabins are the largest cabins in the entire ship. The bulkheads are interconnected. The upper covers of the cabins have all decayed, but traces of bamboo awnings covering the covers are still there. No relics were found at the bottom of the cabins, but there were traces of bamboo mats on the bottom of the boat. The sixth, seventh, and eighth cabins may be the living cabins where the boat people lived. The bottoms of the seventh and eighth cabins were covered with wooden boards, which were suspected to be beds. The ninth cabin is the stern, and the rudder no longer exists.

Civilian ceramics in wooden boats

Most of the unearthed cultural relics from this ship are ceramics, with simple shapes and rough textures. They are different from those used by ordinary nobles and should be used by ordinary people at that time. All the unearthed cultural relics are practical utensils, which should be the daily necessities of the boatmen on the ship.

The mystery of the sinking?

Experts believe that when the ship was unearthed, the mast had broken off, leaving only 1 meter, and the ship was tilted in the silt, so it is very likely that the ship encountered a storm while sailing, and the mast broke and sank. The excavation of the Rugao wooden ship once again confirms the development of ancient water transportation in Jiangsu Province, and provides important physical reference materials not only for the study of ship history, but also for the investigation of the changes in the geographical environment at that time.

In addition to the Rugao wooden boat in Jiangsu, representative ancient shipwrecks from the Tang Dynasty include the Shiqiao shipwreck in Yangzhou, Jiangsu, the Heyi Road shipwreck in Ningbo, Zhejiang, and the Chuanyanghe shipwreck in Pudong, Shanghai. These ancient ship remains provide us with valuable physical data for studying Tang Dynasty boats.

References

Nanjing Museum: "Tang Dynasty Wooden Boat Found in Rugao", Wenwu, No. 5, 1974

Wang Aihua: "Tang Dynasty Wooden Boats in Houling, Yongcheng City, Henan Province", Archaeology, No. 3, 2001

Yang Yu: History of Sailing, Shanghai, Shanghai Jiaotong University Press, 2005

Shi Donghui, Gu Shuangfei: A Brief Talk on the Development of World Sailing, Dalian, Dalian Publishing House, 2010

He Jiying: "Ancient Ships Unearthed in Shanghai Archaeological Excavations", Navigation, No. 3, 2015