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Rat Bastard wrote
Disputable, according to Wiki. Obviously, they burned all the craftsman, their tools and papers. |
They pretty much did.
The late Ming emperors decided that China could only get worse by having contact with the outside world, and were quite thorough about severing those contacts along with any chance of reestablishing them. This is fairly well documented.
Chinese ship used different design principles from western ships. Western ships were essentially rigid tension structures rigged with taut ropes. Chinese ships were flexible structures - the Chinese sail, for example, flexes in a high wind and relieves strain on the mast, thus enabling Chinese ships to get away with really spindly looking masts compared to Western ships. (Remembered from
here or possibly his other book, can't remember right now, but they're really good and actually make structural engineering interesting to laymen). From what I dimly recall Chinese hulls were based on similar principles and had some flexure designed in which would make hogging less of an issue. No, I have no idea how this would work in practice.
You also have to account for Western historians dismissing Chinese claims because they're Chinese. Watertight compartments, which the Wiki discussion page points out were invented in China, would massively alleviate the pumping problem for example.
None of which says the ships were genuinely that big. 450 ft may be an exaggeration, and 600 ft certainly is IMHO. I wouldn't be at all suprised if the ships were of the order of hundreds of feet though, so in the ballpark. There has been a rudder post found, mentioned in the discussion page and in the Wiki page on largest wooden ships, that when extrapolated gives a length of approx 400 ft.
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Any time I see "Lost Art", I smell Atlantean-style mythology.
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Atlantis was real! Kilik and Graham Hancock say so!
Seriously, though, technologies and arts do get lost, though generally because they are superseded rather than deliberately destroyed. Staying with maritime matters, for example, I doubt that many people alive today could circumnavigate the globe using only a sextant and dead reckoning. One of our oldest technologies, flint knapping, was pretty much lost for thousands of years and although there are some modern practitioners I don't think you'll find many who claim they are up to neolithic standards.
:offtopic:, I know.....