Rudder - History of The Rudder - China

China

In China, miniature models of ships that feature steering oars have been dated to the Zhou Dynasty (c. 1050 BC – 256 BC). Stern mounted rudders started to appear on Chinese ship models starting in the 1st century AD. However, the Chinese continued to use the steering oar long after they invented the rudder, since the steering oar still had limited practical use for inland rapid-river travel. One of oldest known depiction of a stern-mounted rudder in China can be seen on a 2 ft. long tomb pottery model of a junk dating from the 1st century AD, during the Han Dynasty (202 BC-220 AD). It was discovered in Guangzhou in an archaeological excavation carried out by the Guangdong Provincial Museum and Academia Sinica of Taiwan in 1958. Within decades, several other Han Dynasty ship models featuring rudders were found in archaeological excavations. The first solid written reference to the use of a rudder without a steering oar dates to the 5th century.

Chinese rudders were not supported by pintle-and-gudgeon as in the Western tradition; rather, they were attached to the hull by means of wooden jaws or sockets, while typically larger ones were suspended from above by a rope tackle system so that they could be raised or lowered into the water. Also, many junks incorporated "fenestrated rudders" (rudders with holes in them, supposedly allowing for better control). Detailed descriptions of Chinese junks during the Middle Ages are known from various travellers to China, such as Ibn Battuta of Tangier, Morocco and Marco Polo of Venice, Italy. The later Chinese encyclopedist Song Yingxing (1587–1666) and the 17th century European traveler Louis Lecomte would write of the junk design and its use of the rudder with enthusiasm and admiration.

Paul Johnstone and Sean McGrail state that the Chinese invented the "median, vertical and axial" stern-mounted rudder, and that such a kind of rudder preceded the pintle-and-gudgeon rudder found in the West by roughly a millennium. However, Mott points out that the Chinese rudder worked by a very different suspension system, and that it was not permanently attached to a sternpost, leaving little point in comparing two such different types of rudder. The method of mounting steering gear from the stern was well known in Mediterranean navigation by the time the practice appeared in Chinese ships.