The evolution of the Chinese Junk?

there's surprisingly not that much scholarship on the subject

That is the annoying bit.

What about the various sources like Bhutta, da Conti and the like, plus the tales Zheng He? They all talk of big, many masted ships.
 

Maoistic

Banned
That is the annoying bit.

What about the various sources like Bhutta, da Conti and the like, plus the tales Zheng He? They all talk of big, many masted ships.
Who is Bhutta? Ming sources most likely exaggerate the size of Zheng He's fleet, and like I said above, they barely left any impression on the places they visited. One would think that Arabic, Persian and Hindustani sources would mention the remarkable size of this fleet more often and yet that doesn't seem to be the case. As for Da Conti, I feel his sources are on the same level as Marco Polo, meaning they are unreliable and are exaggerating.

Another reason why I also don't see the Song dynasty churning galleon-sized ships - I mean, this is a remarkable feat that no one else is replicating in the same period - is China's incredibly poor naval record, something that one wouldn't think is the case with all the Sinological exaggeration China is getting nowadays. Compare its record with that of neighbouring India, who turned the surrounding ocean into an Indian lake. It's the reason we talk of an Indian Ocean instead of a Chinese Ocean. It's also ridiculous that we talk of a South China Sea when almost all the territories there are part of the cultural milieu of Hindustan.
 
they barely left any impression on the places they visited.
From one Rasulid chronicle, composed around 1440, reporting the:
Arrival of Dragon-junks in the protected harbour city (Aden) and with them the messengers of the ruler of China with brilliant gifts for his Majesty, the Sultan al-Malik al-Nāsir in the month of al-Hijja in the year 821 (January 1419). His Majesty, the Sultan al-Malik al-Nāsir’s in the Protected Dār al-Jund send the victorious al-Mahatta to accept the brilliant gifts of the ruler of China. It was a splendid present consisting of all manner of rarities, splendid Chinese silk cloth woven with gold, top quality musk, storax and many kinds of chinaware vessels, the present being valued at twenty thousand Chinese mithqāl (93.6 kg gold). It was accompanied by the Qādi Wajīh al-Dīn Abd al-Rahman b. Jumay. And this was on 26 Muharram in the year 822 (March 19, 1419). His majesty, the Sultanal-Malik al-Nāsir ordered that the Envoy of the ruler of China returned with gifts of his own, including many rare, with frankincense wrapped coral trees, wild animals such as Oryx, wild ass, thousands of wild lion and tamed cheetahs. And they travelled in the company of Qādi Wajīh al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Rahman b. Jumay out of the sheltered harbour of Aden in the month of Safar of the year 822 (March 1419).​

Later Rasulid chronicle, saying Zheng He (emphasis mine):
had an audience with al-Malik al-Nāsir without kissing the ground in front of him, and said:
“Your Master the Lord of China greets you and counsels you to act justly to your subjects.”
And he [al-Malik al-Nāsir] said to him:
“Marhaban [welcome], and how nice of you to come!”
And he entertained him and settled him in the guesthouse. Then al-Nāsir wrote a letter to the Lord of China:
“Yours it is to command and [my] country is your country.”

He dispatched to him [Zheng He] wild animals and splendid sultanic robes, an abundant quality, and ordered him to be escorted to the city of Aden.
 
The source for 120m plus treasure ships appears to derive from a NOVEL written 150 years after serious voyaging wound down.

More contemporary accounts typically give the number of Treasure ships per expedition at about 60ish with around 27000-28000 crew (possibly including soldiers given some of the voyages included some rather extensive fighting on land?) aboard, giving somewhere around 500 sailors (and soldiers?) per ship. This isn't overly outta whack for the crews of of 15th-16th century large Naos/Carracks/ Great Ships (e.g. the Grace Dieu of the 1420s; well below that of the Great Michael of 1511; about equal to that of the Mary Rose; etc.) which varied from about 50 up to 70 m depending upon which end of that time frame you look at... and it's only about twice that of the 'core' crew of a bloody Venetian Great Galley/Galley of Flanders (so named for trading to North West Europe) of the 1300s (estimated to be about 35-40m in length)... if we assume the crew count is about half soldiers
That controversy is why I'm less interested in the likes of Zheng He and more in the descriptions by the likes of da Conti's description of ships with 5 masts and the seeming regularity of 3 masted junks in other sources.
Not sure the number of masts is a reasonable proxy for size... Again looking at European vessels c. 1500 it wasn't that uncommon for a 90 ton (17 m length) caravel to boast three masts while a Great Ship like Mary Rose or even Heny Gace a Dieu, at over four times it's size would only boast four...

All in all, I'm highly skeptical of 100m plus Treasure ships but think a 70ish m one is plausible. The presence of multiple masts on earlier vessels is quite likely but says little about size.
 

Maoistic

Banned
The source for 120m plus treasure ships appears to derive from a NOVEL written 150 years after serious voyaging wound down.

More contemporary accounts typically give the number of Treasure ships per expedition at about 60ish with around 27000-28000 crew (possibly including soldiers given some of the voyages included some rather extensive fighting on land?) aboard, giving somewhere around 500 sailors (and soldiers?) per ship. This isn't overly outta whack for the crews of of 15th-16th century large Naos/Carracks/ Great Ships (e.g. the Grace Dieu of the 1420s; well below that of the Great Michael of 1511; about equal to that of the Mary Rose; etc.) which varied from about 50 up to 70 m depending upon which end of that time frame you look at... and it's only about twice that of the 'core' crew of a bloody Venetian Great Galley/Galley of Flanders (so named for trading to North West Europe) of the 1300s (estimated to be about 35-40m in length)... if we assume the crew count is about half soldiers
Not sure the number of masts is a reasonable proxy for size... Again looking at European vessels c. 1500 it wasn't that uncommon for a 90 ton (17 m length) caravel to boast three masts while a Great Ship like Mary Rose or even Heny Gace a Dieu, at over four times it's size would only boast four...

All in all, I'm highly skeptical of 100m plus Treasure ships but think a 70ish m one is plausible. The presence of multiple masts on earlier vessels is quite likely but says little about size.
The average number of sailors in medieval ships was just a few dozens, far from the 500 sailors per ship of Zheng He. 60 ms ships were also extremely rare if there were any before the 16th century. The Grace Dieu for instance seems to have exaggerated scaling in European sources. The only European ships found to be 60 ms long before the 16th century as far as I know are the two Lake Nemi ships of Caligula, which were more like lake palaces than actual ships to begin with.

We can agree that Zheng He sailed with a whole fleet which engaged in a couple of military skirmishes, but not with 25,000 men and not with ships of crews with 500 sailors.
 
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The Grace Dieu makes me think what the treasure junks might be: prestige projects which are problematic in service. Ships bigger than 200ft had structural problems but since the rebuilt Mary Rose sank in the Solent structural problems are likely to be little deterrent to prestige projects. Such ships could easily carry 500 men.

As for the 27000 men, Francis Drake crossed the Atlantic with 21 ships and some 1800 troops, which I assume excludes a similar number of crew. The Spanish Armada had about 130 ships with 8000 sailors and 18000 troops, a journey more akin to those attributed to the Chinese.
 
Who is Bhutta?

He is bad spelling.

Ibn Battuta was a Muslim traveller (lawyer, scribe that sort of thing) who visited China in 1347.

We travelled to the town of Qāliqūṭ [Calicut], which is one of the chief ports in Mulaibār. It is visited by men from China, Jāwa, Ceylon, the Maldives, al-Yaman [Yemen] and Fārs [Persia], and in it gather merchants from all quarters. Its harbour is one of the largest in the world…. We entered the harbour in great pomp, the like of which I have never seen in those lands….. Every one of us was lodged in a house, and we stayed there three months… awaiting the season of the voyage to China. On the sea of China travelling is done in Chinese ships only, so we shall describe their arrangements….

The Chinese vessels are of three kinds: large ships called junks, middle-sized ones called zaws, and small ones called kakams. The large ships have anything from twelve down to three sails, which are made of bamboo rods plaited like mats…. A ship carries a complement of a thousand men, six hundred of whom are sailors and four hundred men-at-arms, including archers, men with shields and arbalists, that is, men who throw naphtha [a flammable liquid]. ….

In the vessel they build four decks, and it has cabins, suites and salons for merchants; a set of rooms has several rooms and a latrine; it can be locked by its occupant, and he can take along with him slave-girls and wives. Often a man will live in his suite unknown to any of the others on board until they meet on reaching some town. The sailors have their children living on board ship, and they cultivate green stuffs, vegetables and ginger in wooden tanks. The owner’s factor [representative] on board ship is like a great amir. When he goes on shore he is preceded by archers and Abyssinians with javelins, swords, drums, bugles and trumpets. On reaching the house where he is to stay they stand their lances on both sides of the door, and continue thus during his stay. Some of the Chinese own large numbers of ships on which their factors are sent to foreign countries. There is no people in the world wealthier than the Chinese….

When the time came for the voyage to China, the Sultan al-Sāmarī equipped for us one of the thirteen junks in the port of Qāliqūṭ. That night the sea struck the junk… and all on board died. In the morning, we went to the scene of their disaster; I saw the infidel, the Sultan of Qāliqūṭ, wearing a large white cloth round his waist, folded over from his navel down to his knee, and with it a small turban on his head, bare-footed, with the parasol carried by a slave over his head and a fire lit in front of him on the beach; his police officers were beating the people to prevent them from plundering what the sea cast up. In all the lands of Mulaibār, except in this one land alone, it is the custom that whenever a ship is wrecked all that is taken from it belongs to the treasury. At Qāliqūṭ, however, it is retained by its owners, and for that reason Qāliqūṭ has become a flourishing and much frequented city….

[The junk having been wrecked,] I set out therefore by the river, and hired one of the Muslims to carry the carpet for me. Their custom when travelling on that river is to disembark in the evening and pass the night in the villages on its banks, returning to the boat in the morning. We used to do this too. There was no Muslim on the boat except the man I had hired, and he used to drink wine with the infidels when we went ashore and annoy me with his brawling, which made things all the worse for me. On the fifth day of our journey we came to Kunjī-Karī, which is on top of a hill there; it is inhabited by Jews, who have one of their own number as their governor, and pay a poll-tax to the Sultan of Kawlam....

On the tenth day we reached the city of Kawlam [Quilon], one of the finest towns in the Mulaibār lands. It has fine bazaars, and its merchants are called Ṣūlīs [Chulia, South Indian Muslim traders]. They are immensely wealthy; a single merchant will buy a vessel with all that is in it and load it with goods from his own house. There is a colony of Muslim merchants there, the chief of whom is ‘Alā’ al-Dīn al-Āwajī, from Āwa in al-‘Iraq…. The cathedral mosque is a magnificent building, constructed by the merchant Khwāja Muhadhdhab. This city is the nearest of the Mulaibār towns to China and it is to it that most of the merchants [from China] come. Muslims are honoured and respected there.


http://bridgingcultures.neh.gov/muslimjourneys/items/show/84

Ibn Battuta, Abu Abdullah Muhammad (H. A. R. Gibb translator). The Travels of Ibn Battuta A.D 1325–1354 (vol. 4, pp. 812–817). London, England: Hakluyt Society, 1994
 
Considering bamboo has superior tensile strength than steel and more stiffness than carbon fiber I wonder how long a ship can be built using bamboo keelsons instead of wood. If I were to design a massive wooden ship I would incorporate bamboo cross pillars and keelsons. If I had bamboo plywood technology I think a 100 meter ship might just be possible.
 
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