Shipbuilding and navigation of fashi

Fashi is located on the alluvial plain at the confluence of the lower reaches of the Jinjiang River, the geographical location of the pillow mountain gargles the sea, the heart of the river has Zhongyunzhou, forming a dangerous terrain, since the Song and Yuan Dynasties has been the key place for the soldiers to garrison and fortify. Here the water and land transportation is convenient, up the slippery stone, the factory mouth about five kilometers to Quanzhou City, down through the Crab Pu, Houzhu out of the Daiyu Gate, can be cross-sea and foreign trade, is not only a natural trade port, but also Houzhu Port to Quanzhou City bustling market town. This article focuses on the historical relics found in the Fashi and talks about the shipbuilding and navigation industry in Sidi.

In 1959, when digging a canal in Wumoshan'ao and Jimu'ao, which are not far from The Fashi, they dug up the ship's board, three meters deep from the surface, and found a ship mast and a thick cable, and local farmers also reflected that they had dug a wooden boat more than ten years ago, which was estimated to be a Song and Yuan object. From the geographical point of view, Wumoshan'ao and Jiheo were the places where ships were sent to shelter from the wind or build ships at that time, and later the harbor was gradually silted up, turning into a rice field in the sea. During the Southern Song Dynasty (1174-1189), Fashi was already an important coastal defense fortress in Quanzhou, and the government stationed troops here to defend the safety of the county. Zhenxi Mountain, which was the Taishou of Quanzhou at the time, once set up a Fashi village in Fashi and became one of the three fortresses of Quanzhou's left-wing water army. And in this place, "build a large warship and add sailors", because the place is "enough to defend the city of Hanzhou inside and enough to strangle the sea road outside". Pu Shougeng, an Arab who was in charge of the Shipping Department of Quanzhou City at the time of the Song and Yuan Dynasties, had a lot of private belongings to the sea and operated overseas trade for decades, and once built the "Haiyun Lou" on the coast of the thirty-six capitals northeast of the capital, that is, on the present-day Fashi Baojue Mountain, in order to send overseas ships in and out. Sztroni followed the tradition of Persian merchants who often built a south building high on the coast to look out over the sea. This shows the importance of the legal stone in the navigational status of the Song and Yuan dynasties.

During the Song and Yuan dynasties, Quanzhou Port became a major port of world trade, and a large number of Arabs sailed on the mountain and gathered in Quanzhou to trade or spread Islam. At present, the surnames of Jin, Ding, Guo, Pu and Bu in Fashi and its nearby villages are mostly of Arab descent. Pu Shougeng's older brother Pu Shousheng, who once lived in seclusion in the Fashi area and built the Yunlu Garden, in 1978, he found a stone carving of "QuShui Liuqian" in the garden, which is the physical object of Pu's poetry and feasting in the garden. To this day, the villagers of Yunlu still have inherited the tradition of planting flowers from their ancestors for generations, especially the cultivation of exotic flowers such as frangipani flowers and jasmine flowers imported from Arabia, and the use of flowers and spices to honor their ancestors. According to the Genealogy of the Bu clan in the Yunlu Bu Clan Genealogy, they changed the Pu surname to Bu during the Yongle period in the early Ming Dynasty. This should be related to the scourge of Yipu in the early Ming Dynasty. In the Meishan Tianfei Palace near the Jincuo Mountain called the West Cemetery, found a lot of Arabic style stone tomb covers, more complete there are four, should be the Song and Yuan expatriates live in the Arab burial ground of the Stone, so the local people call these Western people cemeteries "West Tomb". In 1956, near the Heavenly Palace and Heavenly Well of Fashi, the "Tomb of the Ancestors of the Yuanguo Clan" written in Chinese and Persian was found, which is the ancestral tombstone of tens of thousands of Guo surnames in Baiqi and Shishi Lake in today's Taiwan Business District, and its predecessor was the Arab Ibn Kus Deguanggong Nam. The discovery of so many overseas transportation relics in one place is the physical witness of a large number of Arabs who sailed to Quanzhou to do business and trade, and gathered ethnic groups to live in the Fashi, and also reflected the important position of the Fashi in Quanzhou's maritime activities at that time.

In 1976, when the East China Sea Office of the Agricultural Bank of China excavated a well, it dug out pine wood similar to a ship board, and in 1982, the Institute of Natural Science History of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Quanzhou Municipal Cultural Relics Management Committee, and the Quanzhou Overseas Transportation History Museum decided to jointly excavate the ancient ship after field investigation. Because the middle and front parts of the hull are still pressed under the main building of the East China Sea Business Office, and considering the issue of the protection of the remains of the excavated ship, after four months of excavation, the four compartments in the rear of the ancient ship were cleaned up, and after some ship components and relics were excavated, the hull was re-covered. From the disclosure part, it can be seen that this ship is a pointed bottom ship with a keel, which belongs to the Fukugawa type. The main keel is square in shape with the tail keel, made of pine wood and reddish-brown hardwood. The bottom plate of the boat is a single-layer pine structure, which is different from the Houzhu ancient ship, which is made of two to three layers of board, and then nailed with shovels, and then twisted with tung putty and hemp tendons to make it dense and not leaking. This lap method is similar to the Sunan Yuan Dynasty shipwreck in South Korea, so Mr. Choi Kwang Nam, director of the Sinan Shipwreck Museum in Mokpo City, South Korea, who came to Quanzhou in 1989 to visit Quanzhou, returned to China and reported in the "Wu wait daily" with a full-page report: Quanzhou, the hometown of the Xin'an shipwreck. Japanese scholar Tetsu Matsugi and Professor Chen Xinxiong of National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan share the same view. From the four compartments that have been cleaned, there are still three remnants of the watertight partition plate, which is stitched up and down with a right-angled square mortise with four corners and reinforced with shovels. Compared with the Houzhu ancient ships, the Fashi ancient ship did not use ribs, the partition and the bottom plate in addition to being nailed with square nails, but also reinforced with wooden nails and directly nailed into the hull plate, the keel above the bulkhead support material, so as not to block the flow hole, so that the overall structure of the ship is more solid. Pointed bottom Fu ship type, conducive to splitting waves, deep draft, large stability, ship plate thickness of 9.5 cm, width of up to 34.5 cm, strong and durable, advanced shipbuilding technology, adapt to ocean navigation, is an ancient excellent ship type. The cabin spacing of the Fashi ancient ship is larger than that of the Houzhu ancient ship, with a maximum of 184 cm and a minimum of 80 cm, with a high volume ratio. From the overall structural analysis, the length is more than 23 meters, the load capacity can reach more than 120 tons, which is a medium-sized ocean-going cargo ship. Judging from the ceramic pieces excavated from the cabin, there are 5 fragments of small-mouth bottles and 10 pieces of lanterns, which are relics of the Song Dynasty of the Jinjiang Magnetic Stove; 12 pieces of bowl pieces are relics of the Song Dynasty of Dehua, Tong'an, Anxi, and Jingdezhen, Jiangxi, and there are no coexistences after the Southern Song Dynasty, so it can be known that this should be a shipwreck of the Southern Song Dynasty. The bamboo sails excavated in the ship are an important harvest of this archaeological excavation. Bamboo sails are folded in many pieces, hexagonal bamboo weaving is sandwiched with bamboo leaves, and the edges are sealed with small bamboo pipes, this discovery confirms that the bamboo products of the houzhu ancient ships also have the existence of bamboo sails, making up for the lack of cloth and grass canopy recorded in the Song Dynasty literature, which is stronger and more durable than cloth and grass sails. At the bottom of the wreckage, a number of repairs were found, and the patch was attached to the undulating recess of the bottom plate and twisted with tung putty. According to this analysis, this ship should be the remains of the Fashi people who used it for many years at that time, and abandoned it on the spot because it was too dilapidated to be repaired anymore. About 100 meters away from the land of the Fashi Song ship, a granite carved stone was also found, 232 cm long, 29 cm wide in the middle section, 17 cm thick, and a groove with wooden claws chiseled in the middle, weighing 238 kg, which is the first wooden claw stone fragment found in Quanzhou, which coincides with the Song Dynasty literature. Among the wooden cargo signs found by the Houzhu Song ship was an ink book "Qiu Ding Shui Ji", which should be the same as the Fashi for the management of this Qiu surnamed Qiu. In 1899, a Yuan Dynasty limestone of the same type was found in the waters around Saga Prefecture in Japan, and was regarded as a treasure enshrined in the Minako Shrine in Karatsu City. Therefore, the discovery of the Fashi stone has aroused great interest in the Japanese academic community. From the above archaeological discoveries, it is enough to explain the important achievements of Fashi in shipbuilding and navigation in the Song and Yuan dynasties.

In the second song and yuan dynasties, Quanzhou was one of the most important shipbuilding bases along the coast of China, and in addition to the ships built through the sea, the warships needed by the government through foreign countries were also funded from Quanzhou and other places. In particular, at the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, the imperial court ordered Quanzhou and other places to "build 3,000 ships" in the 17th year of the Yuan Dynasty (1280), and in the 19th year of the Yuan Dynasty (1282), it also ordered the quanzhou ports to "build 3,000 large and small ships". As a traditional shipbuilding base in Quanzhou, Fashi naturally has the unshirkable responsibility to undertake part of the shipbuilding tasks.

Since the Ming and Qing dynasties, the status of Quanzhou's overseas transportation has undergone a huge turn, and the historical glory of Quanzhou Port as the largest port in the East has gradually declined, replaced by the rise of counterpart trade and private business. However, Fashi is still a huge port for trade, with frequent merchant ships and windy docks. In 1982, when the ancient ship of Fashi was excavated, the stone docks of the Ming and Qing dynasties were found in the first and third exploration pits, and in terms of paving methods, the ancient docks found in Houzhu Port were based on rubble and then built strips of stone, which is also the "sleeping wood sinking foundation" method used to build granite rock bridges and piers since the Song and Yuan dynasties in southern Fujian, and also walks in the ranks of advanced technology in the world, and has been used for thousands of years.

Since the Song and Yuan dynasties, Fashi has built many temples related to navigation. During the Song Dynasty, there was a Zhenwu Temple built in the temple, which was "the place where the county watched over the sea gods", such as the Mazu Palace in Meishan and Changchun, and the wangye palaces of Wenxing, Bantou, Changcheng and Meishan, which were dedicated to the gods related to navigation, as a kind of spiritual comfort for the boat people who had been fighting with the wind and waves at sea for many years. The Meishan Tianfei Palace, built during the Ming Yongle period, is quite large, and the custom of Wenxing Palace to build a king ship to Taiwan reflects the custom of the coastal residents of Quanzhou to expel plague gods from the sea at that time, and also spread the Mazu faith and the Wangye faith to the outside world.

In the forty-eighth year of the Qianlong Dynasty (1783), the ship merchants erected the "Zeyu Seaside Monument" in the Fashi: "There are twenty-four in Macao, and the Fashi is the key, and the cover is outside the Tongnan Pass, and the external fall is the place where the real merchants and fisheries must come in and out, and the area where the spokes and salty are near and far." The Former Ministry Hall, the Bunkan Pavilion, and the Martial Arts Hall are all located, so the inspection is thorough, the tax evasion is checked, and the place is also tried. It is also explicitly forbidden to "leave difficulties and block the slightest extortion" of ships carrying grains and goods in order to maintain the prosperity of the port. In the eleventh year of Qing Tongzhi (1872), the "Record of rebuilding the Haiyin Temple" recorded: "The sea sails the tree, before it", and you can also glimpse a glimpse of the prosperity of the Fashi maritime.

In terms of the construction and management of the sea route, the Song Dynasty tried to set up a stone village, the early Ming Dynasty Fashi set up a river berth, and the early Qing Dynasty set up a flood to manage the twelve floods such as Shishi and Tangshi, and Fashi became the military center of the region. In the twenty-second year of the Qing Kangxi Dynasty (1683), Taiwan was reunified, General Shi Lang asked to set up a customs, Quanzhou had ten tax ports, and the Fashi customs mouth was counted as one, until during the War of Resistance Against Japan, due to enemy aircraft bombing, the tax mouth stopped exercising its functions.

With the prosperity of the navigation industry, the shipbuilding and navigation industry of Fashi has also endured for a long time. The temple, Wenxing, Changchun, and Meishan were all places of shipbuilding at that time, and there were still place names called Shipbuilding Lane and Dacang Lane in the local area. According to the investigation of the late Mr. Wu Qingtan: In the Qianlong Period of the Qing Dynasty, the eighteen shipwrights of Fashi gave the Changchun Tianfei Niangniang a canopy, and the shipkeeper Chen Apo owned as many merchant ship masts as the chopsticks at home, and the local people used "big brick walls and eighteen merchant ships" to resemble the wealth of the ship merchants. These boat owners not only traveled to Hebei, Shandong, Jiangsu and Yangtze River basins, trafficking in cotton, timber, etc., but also carried rice to Quanzhou in Gaozhou, Guangdong. During the Ming Dynasty (1506-1521), Chen Li, a native of Jinjiang, served as a Taishou in Gaozhou, Guangdong, and strongly encouraged Gaozhou merchants to smuggle large quantities of rice grain into quanzhou port trade, because most grain merchants unloaded goods in Fashi, so they set up a "Gaozhou Guild Hall" in Meishan to receive passing merchants.

Shippers also went overseas to trade in Southeast Asia, and some settled overseas to expand their businesses, so since the 1970s, Fashi has unearthed many batches of Spanish silver coins from the Ming and Qing dynasties. In 1974, 148 silver coins were excavated in the kiln at the foot of the Temple Palace in Bantou Village, including 1779 characters, which belonged to king Charles III of Spain; in 1977, 61 more were found when the Donghai Grain Station warehouse was built, and 38 were found again at the grain station warehouse site in 1979; it is reported that in 1984, a batch of 200 to 300 pieces were unearthed locally, but unfortunately it could not be collected. From the Latin words Gallops and Ferdinand, as well as the abbreviations 82, 93, 99 and other words in the Arabic numeral chronology, these Spanish silver coins should have flowed into China in the early and middle Qing dynasties. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, The Fashi people went abroad to do business and trade abounded, and a large number of overseas Chinese went abroad with ships to make a living, traveling between China and the Philippines. The Philippines was poor in resources and backward in productivity, unable to meet the daily necessities needed by the Spanish colonists, so it had to rely on the goods transported by Chinese merchant ships, and even in the Americas, it also relied on the supply of Chinese shippers. In the Philippines, where there was no other property, the Spanish colonists had to barter with silver, and the merchants returned from the silver money and did not bring it with them, resulting in a steady stream of Spanish silver coins flowing into the coast of China. The excavation of a number of Spanish silver coins from the French stone is a witness to the prosperity of the French stone navigation trade, and it is also a good explanation of the historical situation of the galleon trade that attracted worldwide attention at that time. The grain depot where silver dollars were unearthed was originally the old cuo land of overseas Chinese surnamed Lin.

Whether from the perspective of historical documents or from the study of historical relics found in Fashi, Fashi has made outstanding contributions in shipbuilding and navigation since the Song and Yuan dynasties, and occupies a prominent position in political, economic, military and maritime activities at home and abroad, and plays an important role as the gateway of Quanzhou Port.

exegesis:

"Coastal Ancient Dock Ruins" is published in "Compilation of Quanzhou Overseas Transportation Historical Materials".

Eight Min Tongzhi Volume Seventy-Three.

Stone Carvings of Islam in Quanzhou, Ningxia People's Publishing House, Fujian People's Publishing House, 1984.

Chen Xinxiong, "Ocean-going Trading Ships of the Song and Yuan Dynasties", in Research on the History of Overseas Development of the Song and Yuan Dynasties, 1992 edition.

"Briefing and Preliminary Discussion on the Trial Excavation of Quanzhou Fashi Ancient Ships", in Research on the History of Natural Science, No. 2, 1983.

Chen Pengpeng and Yang Qinzhang, "Discovery of Song and Yuan Stones in Fashi Township, Quanzhou", in Research on the History of Natural Sciences

No. 2, 1983.

"Yuan Shi Honki Sezu Ki".

Chen Pengpeng, "A Preliminary Study of Sino-Philippine Trade Relations Before the Nineteenth Century", in Asian Culture, 19th Issue, Society for Asian Studies, Singapore, 1995

(Published in "East China Sea Stone History and Culture Research Album", 2000)

This article is selected from the Quanzhou Historical and Cultural Center series "Chen Pengpeng Literature and History Manuscripts"

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