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China Times
Wednesday, 26 Sept 2001
A New Craze for the Study of Zheng He's Voyages Down to the Western
Oceans: Scholars Participate on Topics Related History of the Seas
by Chen Chenglin, Taipei
With the help of modern science and technology, the route of Zheng He's
successive voyages to the Western oceans has become a subject for
computer-generated animation, and scholarly research related to this topic
has taken a new direction.
Beginning yesterday morning, a two-day conference entitled "Venture
Towards the Seas: A Conference on Cheng Ho", sponsored by the Preparatory
Office of the National Museum of Marine Science & Technology, is being held in Taipei.
Famous scholars from academic institutions all over the world have been invited
to attend this conference, as well as scholars of history, shipbuilding,
navigation, and so forth, from both sides of the straits. Between ten and twenty
papers will be presented.
Numerous scholars are presenting new research directions and discoveries
of new techniques to facilitate the presentation of information about
Zheng He in the future. From the historical person
of Zheng He, the conference will expand outward to include materials
related to ocean technology and history.
For example, Dr Sally Church, researcher at the University of Cambridge,
used the Ming dynasty map of Zheng He's voyages Zheng He hanghai tu,
which was included by Mao Yuanyi in the collection Wubei zhi (Treatise on
Military Preparedness), as the basis of her talk. After investigating the
Chinese place-names that appear on the 40 folios of the map, she plotted
them on a modern map with their names in English. She took us on the
journey from Nanjing through the Southeast Asian peninsula zhongnan
bandao directly to Hormuz Hemuzi and continued on to East Africa.
Then, she used computer animation to depict a ship (one of the treasure
ships) sailing along on its journey with sails unfurled. She said that she
thought that, although these 40 pages of the Zheng He hanghai tu were
completed 200 years after Zheng He's voyage across the seas, Mao Yuanyi
was a military man by profession, the places named are consistent with the
places visited by Zheng He's expeditions, the preface [to the map] in the
Wubei zhi claims that the map is related to the voyages of Zheng He, and
the title of the map mentions the Treasure Shipyard. All of these indicate
that the original material for the map must be close to Zheng He in time.
The Director of Taiwan Research Institute, Lung Tsuen-ni, stated that the
recovery of shipwrecks from the time of Zheng He, and results obtained from
underwater archaeology can open new vistas in studies about Zheng He.
Michael Flecker of the University of Singapore then made the point that
records of shipwrecks dating from this period are very few, and therefore
that the 15th century Bakau shipwreck discovered off the Indonesian
peninsula at the end of the last century is highly significant.
In 1999, Flecker had engaged in underwater archaeological work on this ship.
Because the fishermen who first discovered the shipwreck looted all the
porcelain and other trade items originally found on the ships, researchers had only the
structure of the body of the ship and its method of manufacture to analyze. From this
analysis it was possible to say that this was the earliest Chinese trading
ship ever to be found in the South Seas nanhai to date, and it proves
that China was an active trader along these 15th century trade routes.
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