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.
