Wrote a medium length post on AskHistorians responding to a question about cheese and dairy in East Asian cuisine.
It is always a little amusing to me that these sorts of minor questions can achieve a a level of virality, while posts I deem more significant such as the two I made last week about piracy on the South Chinese coast don't go anywhere.
I had originally just ran with the first statistics I found for crew sizes, those in Dr. Nanny Kim's "Mountain Rivers, Mountain Roads: Transport in Southwest China, 1700‐1850."
The numbers given for crew size/labor-input for both large (400 tons) river vessels and ocean-going freighters are very high (1 crew per 53 tons, 1 crew per 27 tons) compared to a lot of the statistics I found subsequently, One figure from Bozhong Li indicated a crew size of 1 crew per 24 tons for oceanic vessels in the first half of the nineteenth century, while the overwhelming bulk of statistics were 12 tons per sailor or less. For river vessels the average ton per sailor was much lower, overwhlemingly in the 2 to 7.5 range. Crawfurd and certain other 19th century sources give the same tonnage for oceanic vessels, as does Antony in his work on Piracy gives crew sizes of 15-25 for coasting junks, and 60-100 for larger vessels, which would present a maximum of 12 tons/sailor for large oceanic vessels, but probably much lower as most ships were 100-400 tons.
So the numbers in the secondary literature vary widely, and I really would like to get at some of the primary sources for this type of information. But it has been very difficult to try to obtain a copy of the primary sources on oceanic crew sizes, Chen Chen Fang has published various Filipino records of the junk trade which list crew sizes and vessel tonnage (華人與呂宋貿易（1657—1687)), but attempts to purchase the ebook were stymied by my lack of a credit-card issued by a Taiwanese bank.
A major Japanese compendium of trade ship reports, which I believed includes crew and tonnage is Hayashi Harunobu, Hayashi Nobuatsu, comps., Ura Ren’ ichi, anno., Ka-i hentai (Tokyo, 1958)
But I have similarly been unable to find a version of it to buy as a book or Pdf. There is secondary literature which gives some of the info I'm looking for, but not both sets of data (crew sizes and tonnages).
The search for a full monograph on this topic or a accessible form of the historical data continues.
Recently purchased a copy of Artur Leonel Barbosa Carmona's books "Lorchas, Juncos, e Outros Barcos Usados No Sul Da China" which as the title implies is written in Portuguese. If there is an English version of the text I have found no evidence of it's existence.
The book is a fairly short work, richly illustrated, focused on craft of the Zhujiang/Chu Kiang delta and South China Sea. As far as I can tell, there is little overlap with Worcester or Audemard or other major works on the topic. I have no Portuguese or Iberian language skills, but the google-translate app has a helpful photo translate tool that I have been using to read the sections of the book which interest me most.
The section below was particularly interesting, as I have never seen a vessel resembling the one in the illustration.
"The 'Tou' is a generic designation of row boats. The largest has 75 cubits in length, 20 in the mouth [beam] and 5 to 6 in draft...forming a large deck, with two floors and accommodation for passengers and cargo holds...They run routes for these ports in the East River Delta. Today these "tous' are already in tow by steamboats, costing $9,000 and $10,000"
I have been looking for additional information about these sorts of vessels, the picture aligns with some of the information I have seen passenger boats towed by steam launches. The top level of decking seems to be the sort of rough mat awning under which the cheapest class of far sheltered on overnight journeys. The front half of the vessel resembles photographs and descriptions of other towed passenger vessels, but the rear half of the vessel is more like the stern of a mayangzi or the larger class of Hua Ting.
All in all, an interesting source which has presented many new lines of inquiry to pursue.
I spent most of my free time during the last week building a historical price list for trade goods in Guangzhou. Similar European resources for a variety of historical periods are found with a simple google search. But I was unable to locate a similar price-list for an East Asian port at the other extremity of the silk trade-system.
I found small lists of prices in variety of academic articles, and stitched these together with some rough math to get prices for about 1750 CE, where a good chunk of the data was from. Some very rough inflationary calculations translated prices I found from the 1780s or the 1820s back to my baseline.
After about a week of steady work assembling, organizing, and cleaning up the data I ended up with a .pdf I was happy enough with and comfortable selling for $2 on drivethru.
But during a final edit, I was checking something in one of the source papers and found a fleeting reference to a Guangzhou valuation book from 1753 which apparently listed far more goods than I had been able to reconstruct data for.
It took a few hours to locate a version of this source, the "Guangdong Maritime Customs Record." The only typescript version is a book in Mandarin from the mid-nineteenth century, the 粵海關志 ('Gazetteer of Guangdong Maritime Customs'; 1839) by Liang
Tingnan 梁廷楠. The only English version of the source I could find was the scan of the 1753 manuscript "The Hoppo Book"
The manuscript is only partially translated, employs a number of interesting historical abbreviations, and the cursive is difficult to parse in many places. However, it has already provided a more fulsome and coherent picture than the previous week of research.
It has been very gratifying to locate this source and get into the process of transcribing it into textscript, but I can only wryly chuckle at the week of wasted labor which preceded this development.
