SinoDefence Forum

FuManChu

I only wish people's interest in Japan was linked to a little more knowledge than it sometimes is - e.g. "Memoirs of a Geisha", samurai, Japanese schoolgirls, etc.

I know, I was surprised myself. But that's the way it was. The reason Hideyoshi lost in Korea was mainly that at a criticial stage in the campaign the Koreans mustered a fleet of "Turtle Ships" (enclosed ships with a cannon in a big turtle mouth at the bow) and knocked seven-bells out of his supply convoys.

I was glad to be able to use some of my not-so-useful knowledge.

__________________
"Japan is as much of a threat to China, as China is to Japan."

--FuManChu

KYli

I thought Korea also got a great Admiral(Yi Sun-sin) , he is given the honorable credit for recreating the Turtle Ship and defeating the Japan invasion. Japan wanted to invade Korea, planning to sweep through the peninsula and use it as a forward base to conquer China.

Gaginang

According to the book, lord of the rim, zheng he fleet went to west for 5 reasons.

first was to make diplamatic contacts with foreign countries
second was to trade with other countries of advance knowledge
third was to defeat the chinese pirate in the malay panencula
fourth to replace one of the indonesian king and replace one with chinese influence
fifth was to find the suviving enermy that flet oversea.

in the custom of the oversea chinese trader zheng he was elevated to the statue the God of the Sea.

mindreader

Um no. The reason Japan lost to Korea was because China intervened.

The capabilities of the turtle ships were greatly exaggerated. Their only advantage was they were designed to make boarding difficult. Despite this, the Koreans did no more than make a petty annoyance of the Japanese Navy until far larger ships and capable ships from China arrived. They disrupted the Japanese supply lines but was far from able to defeat the entire Japanese fleet.

I think people tend to forget that despite destroying Zheng He's fleet, the Ming fleet was still by far the best in Asia and one of the best in the world. The reason Japan lost is because the Japanese Navy, in an unflattering but accurate term, stunk.

FuManChu

Which is what I said earlier on.

__________________
"Japan is as much of a threat to China, as China is to Japan."

--FuManChu

FriedRiceNSpice

Admiral Yi sunk a thousand Japanese ships over the course of the war and lost less than a dozen.
When he was removed from command for political reasons, his replacement lost 286 ships in one battle while inflicting far less losses on the Japanese.
Admiral Yi defeated a fleet of 300 Japanese ships with 13 ships.
Admiral Yi destroyed 550 Japanese ships in a single batte with only 83 Korean ships and 60 Chinese allied ships.
Wow, I kind of feel like I'm telling Chuck Norris jokes here... thats how incredibly godly/amazing Admiral Yi is. If he was alive today, I bet he could sink the entire USN with the PLAN and loss no ships...

However, the ships of Korea, China, and Japan during this period were remarkably different.
Japanese naval strategy was one of grappling and boarding enemy ships and then defeating them in hand to hand combat. There primary ranged weapon was some kind of heavy musket, which fired a shot heavy enough to damage the hull of enemy ships, but with much inferior range and power to the cannon. These ships were smaller than Chinese and Korean ships, but were much swifter. Japanese ships also had keels, unliked the flat-bottomed Korean and Chinese vessels.
The Korean ships of the time were the Panokseon. They were armed with long range heavy cannon, and were much heavier than Japanese vessels. They were slower, but had flat bottoms and were more manuevable. Korean crews were inferior at hand-to-hand combat, and tried to avoid close-in combat. At close ranges, Korean crews also employed fire archers. Admiral Yi's stragtegy involved long-ranged combat and attacking from positions which made if difficult for the Japanese to close with the Korean warships. Panokseons were built in two sizes. The medium-sized variants were around 70 feet long, while larger variants was between 100ft and 120ft in lengh.
The Ming Navy of the time operated war junks. Among the most commonly used was the Fuchuan Warship. These were generally 165 feet long, making them the largest vessels used in the conflict. Chinese ships were cannon-armed. Chinese crews also operated crossbows. Chinese ships were flatbottomed like Korean ones. Chinese strategy during the conflict generally included long-range bombardment followed by close-in assaults.

QBZ957

Another way the Ming navy was able to defeat the enemy quickly was their ship formations. One in particular is known as the 'fei yin' or my guess the bird formation (because it does look like a bird). What it does if it was some type of expedition fleet, they would have like the treasure ships in the middle, then the supply ships or any other non-combat personnel ships to form a column in the middle. Then they would 3 battleships lined up like a spearhead in the front, a line of 4 or 5 on the top left and right hand corners and another 4 or 5 on the bottom left or right hand corners of the column. It allowed them to still be able to move properly to their destination while still with the ability to engage the enemy at will.

crobato

Regarding Chinese vessels, if I recall, Marco Polo's return journey with a Mongol princess to be sent to married to the Ilkhan in Persia, took place at sea and traveled much of the same route with Zheng He would take later on. The journey reached the Middle East and from then Marco Polo continued his trip back to Venice. And he did this with what seemed to be a routine trading vessel of that time without an armada or something like that. So it does seem that Chinese, Arab, Indian and Malaysian traders are already routinely traveling and trading between and along the ports from the Middle East to China. Zheng He didn't pioneer anything that traders already knew; his journey was more to trumpet the power of the Ming on an established route.

In my opinion, the value of the Treasure ships are exaggerated. You get the impression from watching documentaries that Chinese ship building went downhill to the can since they scrapped the fleet. Nothing can be farther from the truth.

While their size makes them engineering masterpieces for the day, they must also be slow and inefficient. Slow elephants when smaller, more nimble ships could do the job more faster and economically. Surely the next Emperor after the Yongle Emperor made a decree limiting the size and number of masts a Chinese vessel can be made. Blaming the technological decline of a nation to a decision akin to banning full size SUVs in order to make minicars is in my opinion, quite a bit of a stretch. I don't think the Chinese Navy would win their battles with huge, lumbering full size ships against smaller more nimble opponents. The Spanish learned that lesson when their Armada faced the English fleet.

And certainly the Treasure Ships were not just the only large junks built. Accounts by European explorers aout the 15th Century, of sighting junks of about 2000 tons or four times the size of 16th Century European Galleons, with as many as five masts. In comparison even the massive Portugese Carreons were like 1000 tons. Junks visiting Japan were recorded to be around 200 to 800 tons. Betweem the time of the Yongle Emperor to the Qianlong Emperor, there was literally thousands of junks, and the Chinese literally had both the biggest wartime and merchant fleet in the world. Even 'pirates' and Ming holdovers like Zheng Chenggong aka Koxinga fielded junks by the hundreds.

In 1848, a junk named Keyin reached past the Cape of Good Hope, reached Boston, and then reached all the way to London in a mere 21 days, a speed which even English ships have trouble matching. The vessel, which ended her days as a tourist exhibit, was about 800 tons and featured 20 cannons.

mindreader

I think you are understressing the value of the treasury ships. To start, they are in their time, among the fastest ships on earth relative to the rest of the world. No country in the world other than China can build vessels that matched their speed (of course, "nimbleness" is another issue).

Furthermore, you didn't stress importance of the strength of large see going vessels. Certainly, smaller ships (built in China that is) can out-run such lumbering giants, but they are also severely limited to quite a few practical disadvantages. The most important of which is lack of cargo space,which is a pretty huge disadvantage for trade vessels, but also ensures shorter distance travelled between port calls. This, in effect, limits the range in which they can travel. This is why we still use 100,000 ton cargo ships today.

Lastly, you mistake the treasure ships for warships. Certainly, I wouldn't want to be caught on the broadside of one of these, but that is not their role, which is that of trading vessels. People tend to forget that the Ming fleet was a combined fleet. Not all ships are over 300 metres long. There are ships of different sizes in formation filling different roles. There are far more warships faster, more nimble and more powerful than the treasure ships defending them.

But you are right on one thing. Even after the destruction of Zheng He's fleet, Chinese naval capabilities didn't decline significantly. The Ming fleet was still the most powerful fleet on earth for couple of decades and was at worst, the best in Asia and one of the best in the world even towards the end.

The difference really, is that the Europeans improved whereas the Chinese did not. You can blame the Qing Dynasty for that.

T98G

It wasn't the scraping of the fleet that the Ming navy went down hill, there were other factor such as the destruction of the navigation charts and the design plans for the ships in 1477.

There were actually plans to rebuild the navy in the later years, but because of the destruction of the design plans for the ships it was impossible.

The Ming court officials were certainly backward thinking and didn't think the fleets is needed. So all plans of the fleet were destroy so as not to make this mistake ever again.

Finn McCool

Has anyone read the book 1421: The Year China discovered America? It presents quite a bit of convincing evidence that the treasure fleets continued around the world and charted the West Coast of Africa, the Carribean, South Africa and the Pacific and circumnavigated the globe before returning home. I personally consider it to be a very real possibility.

__________________
Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.
-Winston Churchill

FuManChu

Then I'm afraid, Finn, you're a bit naive in terms of historical issues - no offence. More knowledgable academics have repeatedly given it a big thumbs down. One thing that you should realise is that as far as I can remember, to date no real historian (i.e. an academic with qualifications and perhaps a position at a university) has actually backed his claims in public. He gets lots of other "experts" - but sadly they all operate in other areas of expertise. It's a bit like when he goes to ask someone that does crossword puzzles for advice on a source, rather than a cryptologist.

Put it like this - Jung Chang's book on Mao has been better received by historians than Menzies.

Plenty of professional sites to read here:

http://thehallofmaat.com/modules.php...article&sid=91
http://www.1421exposed.com/
http://www.dightonrock.com/refutatio...in_menzies.htm

(This source is very interesting, because it's a refutation by a naval officer. According to his wife, Menzies completely failed to counter her husband's arguments when he went to see Menzies.)

http://hnn.us/articles/1308.html

"Ultimately, however, Menzies's presentation in 1421 is much like that delivered at the United Nations recently by Secretary of State Powell regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction: convincing only to true believers and leaving others at best, in the words of the old hymn, "almost persuaded."

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/conte...6/s1699373.htm

"This is not just a story about ones man’s wild theory. It is a parable of modern popular culture, a tale about intellectual chutzpah and about a publishing industry that knows how to extract profit from a public which wants to thumb its nose at the dry though documented history taught at school."

__________________
"Japan is as much of a threat to China, as China is to Japan."

--FuManChu

FuManChu

Oops, I think that sources numbers 3 and 4 were in post #24. Well, never mind, you get to read them again.

Also a few new ones.

__________________
"Japan is as much of a threat to China, as China is to Japan."

--FuManChu

Finn McCool

This should rock the world of some of my fellow westerners. Here's the wikipedia article on the 1421 hypothesis.
I read the book, and I must say that much of it is very convincing. I'm lazy so I just put the wiki article, but any more info on this would be appreciated.

__________________
Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.
-Winston Churchill

Kampfwagen

Most scientists beleve that alot of North, Central, And South America were colonized by various Old World civilizations. Many suspect that parts of the Southwest of the United States and Central America might have had contacts between African Explorers. Parts of Nicaragua are beleved to have been visited by the Japanese and of course there is the well known Colonization of Newfoundland by the Vikings. And dozens of nations have aluded to lands beyond the known oceans, some with quite a degree of Accuracy to areas in the Americas.

So if the Chinese came over, it does not suprise me. But it would also not suprise me to hear they were not the first, but one in a long line of unrecorded visitors.