The Development of the Times from Ancient Shipping: An Atlas of Ship Forms in Guangdong

Lu Shijie’s Sailing to Taiwan: A Maritime Chronicle of Taiwanese Boats and Vessels (2013) and Wang Guanzhuo’s Atlas of Ancient Chinese Ships (2000) represent two foundational works on the typological and technological evolution of traditional vessels in Taiwan and its adjacent maritime regions. Lu’s work systematically traces the migration and transformation of ship types originating in Guangdong and Fujian since the Ming and Qing dynasties, with particular focus on vessels such as the red-head junks (hongtou chuan), Cantonese ships (guang chuan), and sand junks (sha chuan). It underscores the ethnocultural diversity and geopolitical diffusion pathways of maritime traditions. Published by China Water Conservancy and Hydropower Press, Wang’s atlas is the first comprehensive visual archive in China to integrate historical scholarship, engineering schematics, and archaeological findings. It offers detailed documentation of both inland and ocean-going vessels, emphasizing structural innovations such as watertight bulkheads, keel configurations, and double-planked hulls. The atlas includes extensive records of commercial and military vessels prevalent in Guangdong during the Ming and Qing periods, including fu chuan (Fujian junks), guang chuan, and naval warships. Together, these two sources offer complementary perspectives from ethnographic and craft-historical standpoints, providing critical visual evidence for maritime archaeological studies in China. Through sustained effort, the research team has consolidated and categorized a dataset of 174 vessel samples derived from these works. Users of this dataset are kindly requested to cite the original sources accordingly