Chinese treasure ship

The Chinese treasure ship was the largest type of vessel in the fleet of the Ming admiral Zheng He, a large wooden Chinese junk built for the seven voyages he led in the early fifteenth century. The ships carried valuable goods for trade abroad, including fine textiles, porcelain and tea. Their size is one of the long running disputes of maritime history: some old Chinese records give a length of 44 zhang, which some modern scholars read as over 100 metres, while others put the largest ship type at around 70 metres. Contemporary evidence is thin. Records of ship orders from 1403 to 1419 show construction at Nanjing, an inscription in the Jinghai Temple gives much smaller sizes, and the Longjiang shipyard record of 1553 notes that the building plans had already vanished.