Asia's Undersea Archeology

by Richard Gould

Diver with bowl Overseas trading of fine porcelain and other objects began in China during the Song Dynasty.

Seaborne commerce on a large scale in Asia dates to the Song Dynasty of China (A.D. 960-1270). The Mongols in the succeeding Yuan Dynasty (ca. 1271-1368) went on to build even more ships on a grand scale, and during his stay at the imperial court from 1275 to 1292, Marco Polo described four-masted, seagoing merchant ships with watertight bulkheads and crews of up to 300. Early in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), an expansion of seaborne trade took place with the construction of an immense treasure fleet—reported to consist of 317 ships when it was assembled in Nanjing in 1405—that made trading cruises throughout the Indian Ocean and the China seas

 Although shipwreck archeology is relatively new in Asia, important finds are pointing the way toward the broader use of archeological evidence relative to the documentary history of this era of Chinese maritime expansion.