I was prompted to add this design to the ongoing Chinese rivercraft project when I saw a model of a similar vessel in a set of pictures from a Chinese maritime museum.
It took me a while to make the very obvious connection that it is a reconstruction of one of the vessel types from the famed painting “Along the River During the Qingming Festival” (清明上河圖) by Zhang Zeduan.
There are 28 ships and boats in the painting, a number of which are variations on this general design
I extrapolated the dimensions from a set of pictures of a modern model kit from various angles. The length to beam ratio was very low, the beam of the vessel seemed far too large, so I paused this set of plans until I could find a relevant academic source. At this point I also thought the mast was a bipodal sail mast rather than a mast for a tracking cable. The embarrassing first draft of this vessel featured a sail.
Dr. Nanny Kim (Universitat Heidelberg) provided the source I was looking for with her excellent paper "The houseboat in pre-modern China". Her research confirmed that the vessel dimension I had arrived at were historically reasonable, and proposed two potential internal arrangements of this type of vessel.
I'm nearly done with the full set of plans, though the taper of the bow is not quite to my liking. The draft of the vessel might also need revision.
Sources:
Kim, Nanny. "The houseboat in pre-modern China: Technology and culture in mobility history." The Journal of Transport History 37.1 (2016): 5-26.
Preview of the diagrams:
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