overshot the puck made in china

‘We expect GDP growth to improve to 7.1% in 2021 from 2.2% in 2020.Realized growth will likely overshoot potential growth in 2021, but from a policy perspective, we expect that the authorities would prefer to avoid an aggressive overshoot in one particular year in exchange for a smoother and more sustainable growth profile over the next five years.’

‘The infrastructure and real estate sectors have disproportionately benefited from the stimulus, while in contrast, private manufacturing, services, and parts of the household sector have lagged due to fragmented credit allocation mechanisms.’

‘We anticipate the divergence between production and expenditure-side indicators to fade going into 2021, a process that recent indicators suggest is already underway.’

‘The fashion of the convergence is expected to rely more on the acceleration of the expenditure-side recovery, but it will also include a moderation to production momentum.’

‘For the unevenness within the expenditure side, we anticipate manufacturing fixed-asset investment (FAI) growth, which has been lagging other FAI components, to catch up (Figure 46, above).’

‘From a policy perspective, we expect that authorities will likely avoid a pro-cyclical policy stance and, to the extent possible, rein in the overshoot in 2021.’

‘They would most likely prefer to avoid an aggressive overshoot in one particular year in exchange for a smoother and more sustainable growth profile over the next five years.’

‘There will likely also be modest downward adjustments to the official fiscal deficit target of about 0.3- 0.5% of GDP in 2021 relative to the 3.6% target in 2020.’

‘To be clear, even with the tightening policy stance, overall GDP growth and its various key components are still expected to have above-trend growth in 2021.’

‘For example, we expect real estate investment (REI) to grow by 6.5% in 2021, faster than the anticipated growth rate for 2020 (4.1%) but slower than pre- COVID-19 growth in 2019 of 10.0%.’

‘REI growth in 2020 will likely fall below the implied growth rate based on macroeconomic factors such as M2 growth and house price inflation, predominantly attributed to the COVID-19-induced contraction experienced in Q120.’

‘Hence, despite the anticipated slowdown to M2 growth in 2021 and authorities’ ongoing effort to curb house price inflation, we expect REI growth in 2021 to be higher than the implied growth rate normally associated with such macro conditions.’

‘After looking at sequential price momentum instead of year-over-year numbers, which are distorted by the base effect, we believe that headline CPI is about to enter a reflationary cycle.’

‘For the same reason that the PBoC did not tighten when pork drove up inflation during 2019, it will most likely not respond to pork-driven disinflation.’

‘Technology Advancement. The technology category encompasses the ongoing efforts to establish “new infrastructure,” innovate and enhance capabilities in the key strategic sectors, and secure essential inputs.’

‘Labor Productivity. The labor category aims to increase labor productivity, including labor market reforms to facilitate labor movement, educational reform to improve the quality of the labor force, and a further opening of Chinese markets to foreign participation and competition.’

‘Land reform will directly affect the pace of urbanization, which in turn would provide ongoing support to sectors such as real estate and traditional infrastructure in avoiding cliff-like decelerations.’

A Farmingdale-based company that promoted its "Patriot Puck" as "100% Made in the USA" has agreed to stop making false claims about ice hockey gear that in fact is made in China, the Federal Trade Commission said Wednesday.

The FTC complaint named George Statler III as an executive of Underground Sports Inc., also doing business as Patriot Puck. The company also used the names Hockey Underground Inc., Ipuck Inc. and Ipuck Hockey Inc.

Patriot Puck’s advertising, packaging, and promotional materials labeled the pucks as "Made in America," "Proudly Made in the USA," "100% American Made!" and "The only American Made Hockey Puck!" the FTC said.

The FTC complaint said that since January 2016, the company on Milbar Boulevard imported about 164,000 pounds of hockey pucks from China. Standard weight hockey pucks are about 6 ounces and training pucks are about 10 ounces.

But they are prohibited from making claims about the U.S. origin of their products unless they can show that nearly all ingredients and components and the final assembly and processing are done and sourced in the United States.

They also must submit a compliance report a year from now providing contact information for their businesses, describing their activities and how they are maintaining compliance.

But he acknowledged that the Patriot Puck brand name was on the packaging of some imported pucks, a fact that competitors seized on when they alerted the FTC.

In a dissenting statement issued Wednesday, Chopra called on the FTC to go beyond "cease-and-desist orders" in such cases and seek "disgorgement of ill-gotten gains," "opt-in return programs" or "admissions of wrongdoing."

Ken Schachter covers corporate news, including technology and aerospace, and other business topics for Newsday. He has also worked at The Miami Herald and The Jerusalem Post.

1This paper had its genesis in my attempts to understand how what is known as the Selden or East/West oceans map was constructed and is to be understood, though only from the point of view of it as a vector of navigational information.1 In engaging in this exercise, I found myself confronting data that, as a long time practicing navigator familiar with the three principal metrics of the navigator’s calling – time, direction and distance – I found some difficulty in fully comprehending. I had stumbled across the same problem a few years beforehand trying to understand the fascinating sequence of what we can loosely call coastal views, that constitute what may have been a junk navigator’s working rutter, now located in the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University and sometimes known as the Yale Maps.2 The problem had three elements, only one of which I shall focus on here. The elements I shall leave aside are the closely related – indeed in Chinese navigational terms possibly identical – measures of charted distances and time. That is not because these are less important – they are very important – but because there is neither time nor space to embrace them in this paper.

2Instead I shall turn to the fascinating and important issue of direction, for it is a widely accepted claim that this was a problem that Chinese navigators were the first to solve by the method with which we are all so familiar today: the mariner’s magnetic compass. Of course, there are scholars who argue instead for “multiple independent discovery” origins of the magnetic property of ferrous materials and especially its use at sea, but for the purposes of this article I shall assume it accepted that Chinese mariners were the first recorded users not only of a magnetized pointer, but in particular of one on a ship.3

3My interest here, provoked by the Yale Maps and especially by the Selden Map with its highly unusual, indeed unique deployment of a Chinese compass rose, is in a variant of what is sometimes called the Needham Question: briefly for the purposes of this article, why did not China come up with a compass that was as useful for marine navigation (in its technical sense) as the mariners’ compasses that, by the 17th century, were in wide use in Western ocean going ships?4 Derivative from that question, which I shall show raises an important issue as to what, actually, the magnetized pointer aboard Chinese ships was for, is the intriguing puzzle of how pre-western contact Chinese navigators went about their business, especially the linked requirements of knowing the required course to steer (the direction in which one must head to get to where one is going) and then maintaining direction – a steady course – at sea.

4The technical problem underpinning the key issue of whether traditional Chinese navigation was compass based can be simply expounded. Within a century or so of each other, both Chinese and western maritime cultures set out to sea with weakly magnetized or magnetizable thin pieces of iron or steel supported by a raft of some sort floated in a bowl filled with water. These serve to give at least some sort of clue to the orientation of the north/south line in relation to the ship’s head and hence, if they worked, to a desired direction.5 Sometimes, indeed as we shall see rather often, such a rudimentary instrument almost certainly did not work for reasons and causes we understand today but that at the time may have seemed capricious or mysterious. I shall suggest that the result was that the magnetic pointer may have gained and then retained a mystical/magical status requiring the services of an initiate, who alone might be the vector through whom the gods or animating spirits of the magnetized pointer would deign to ensure its compliance.

5For reasons or causes that are conjectures, though fairly obvious once we consider North Atlantic tides and weather and, later, the long-distance voyaging out of sight of land across or up and down the Atlantic that began in the 15th century, in the western maritime world this original recourse proved inadequate. Slowly changes were made to take the idea of a N/S direction seeking magnetized pointer, make it more mechanically reliable (+100 years) and adapt it better to use at sea (+200 to +800 years). But in the Chinese maritime world – at least before the Qing Dynasty – this did not happen.

6We have no reason to imagine that medieval and early modern Chinese mariners were not in every way the maritime equal of their Western peers in inventiveness, imagination, shipwrighting, sailmaking, seamanship, or navigation any more than we have when considering other non-Western maritime traditions. It would seem to follow that any answer to the question about the relationship between a technically primitive, embarked magnetic pointer and traditional Chinese navigation is to be found in how the mariners of the Ming Dynasty and earlier navigated and what routes they followed. For if the manner of their voyaging and navigation was such as to lead to few demands for directional guidance from the magnetized pointer then, unlike in the western case, any motivation to improve its performance would have been slight or non-existent. Why spend time and effort improving something you do not much use and that does what you want it to do on the comparatively rare occasions when it is turned to, even if sometimes it fails and even if you do not really understand why it works or does not work? As important therefore, why would something needed and used only in extremis ever become “demystified” and rendered just a workaday tool needing no divine assistance, just a bit of inventive tinkering?

7This then brings us to the conspicuously absent elements in the story of the Chinese compass. First, had Chinese navigators been as dependent on the compass for navigation as is often claimed, Chinese mariners would have become aware of the shortcomings of the tool they found themselves increasingly relying on, they would have come up with fixes and there would have been commentary that reflected such growing awareness and that described the steps that were taken in response. There should also have been discussion of specific, shipboard effects on magnetic compasses – deviation and inclination, or dip – and speculation as to its causes.6 There should also exist some residual artefactual trail – surviving whole or part compasses from the Sung through Qing Dynasties or depictions or descriptions of such instruments – pointing to what sort of practical responses were made. In what follows I shall provide a reasonably definitive explanation for why such elements are absent in the story of the Chinese compass.

8First, as some reflection on the normal trading routes of Chinese vessels suggests, their navigators were generally dealing with relatively short legs between known waypoints where their position could frequently be visually checked within the limits of the circle of probable error (CPE) of pre-modern navigation.7 Few legs of any of the multiple routes we know existed were out of sight of land for more than a few hours or, when they were, were so for much more than a day (say <100 miles). Indeed the very format of the Yale Maps with its dependence on coastal views asserts this mainly coastal route-based navigational world. The exceptions, of course, were the two major Indian Ocean routes from the northern entrance to the Malacca Straits to Sri Lanka and from India to the Gulf. The former (c.800 nautical miles) – an almost perfect example of latitude sailing along c.60N – explains itself. The latter, assuming Quilon (奎隆, today Kollam) to the headland at Ras Al Hadd, could have kept the Indian west coast in sight as far north as today’s Dwarkar, north-west of Diu, whence again it was a matter of latitude sailing c.500 nautical miles along 22.30N. The additional distance in the latter case is around 100 miles, or a day’s sailing in a favorable monsoon. In both cases high land behind the landfall would have been identifiable more than a day’s sailing away. But even before the Ming withdrawal from Indian Ocean voyaging, these passages would never have represented more than a small fraction of pre-Qing overseas voyaging, so even had they revealed shortcomings with the magnetic pointers, the vast majority of users would have been left unconcerned.8

9Within the China Seas on the longest legs – Quanzhou to Cape Bojeador (500 inm), the Pearl River to Cape Bojeador (400inm) or Vietnam to NE Borneo (650 inm) – there were cross course checks typical of non-instrument, non-compass dependent navigation. Birds and clouds over Pratas Reef (東沙群島, Dōngshā Qúndǎo) offer a cross course and cross-track error check 150inm out of the Pearl River. The high mountains of Luzon offer a similar pre-arrival check 100 or more miles out from Cape Bolinao. High land (Taiwan, North Luzon) would have been visible (especially at sunrise or sunset) at similarly useful cross course checkpoints on the route from Quanzhou/Zhangzhou to Cape Bolinao. A simple intervisibility calculation will show that an island like Pulau Condore (Côn Sơn Island), with its maximum height of 515.1 m, when viewed from the mainyard of a 30 m junk, thus from some 20 m above sea level, can be seen at 50 nautical miles in good visibility. Higher land can be seen at 100 nautical miles or more – in extremely good visibility sightings at distances of over 200 nautical miles have been recorded.9

10Second, Chinese trading was carried on in waters in which, for the most part, the sky is seldom overcast (fewer than 5% of days with 10/10ths cloud) and visibility (especially in earlier, less polluted days) excellent.10That means both the sun during the day and the stars at night would have been visible for much of any voyage assuming long-established practices and weather lore enabled well-chosen departure dates during the south-west monsoon. For navigators who used both sun and stars – and we know that Chinese seafarers did – these are generally good to excellent conditions and to a pre-modern navigator make a steering compass redundant.

11Third, Chinese trading was seasonal, conducted to coincide with the changing monsoon. Monsoon winds have a high degree of constancy of pattern over any given ten-day period. At an average voyage speed, which analysis of various Chinese sources suggests varied between 2.5 and 6 knots,11even the slowest 200 inm passage would only take three and a half days. A 650 inm passage, the longest single passage on the Selden Map for example, would take at most 11 days (2.5 kts average) and more probably 6-7 days (4-5 kts average). Even the slowest passage is still quite close to the basic sequence of the NE Monsoon weather pattern. The seas and swells the monsoons generate exhibit a similar constancy. Highly sensitized and experienced mariners, of the kind the typical junkmaster and junk navigator would have been, would have used such directional clues constantly in the course of any voyage, cross-checking them against each other. It would only have been in what would probably have been rare cases of significant disorientation caused by fog or storm that some other, artificial aid like a magnetic pointer may have been required not for course keeping or direction finding but for reorientation.

12Put together these aspects of Chinese voyaging make the need for a reliable, auxiliary direction-indicating and steering device a low priority. If we assume a maximum leg of any route that was not pure latitude sailing and had no locational reference for 300 inm, and if we also assume all the other direction indicators used in traditional navigation are helping, an error in mean course steered will seldom if ever be more than 150and usually between 50 and 100. It follows that at the end of that leg of the voyage, at most a ship will be 70 miles to one side or the other of its destination and most often more like ±30 inm.12 Navigation assisted by early forms of the magnetic steering compass was not conspicuously more accurate, as the fate of Admiral Shovell and his 17th century CE fleet attests.13

13In short, as I tried to understand the cartographic and related materials before me, I faced a significant question about the assumptions that are normally made as to the meaning of the directional data they contained. Were “needle paths” (zhenlu, 針路) indeed what they have always been assumed to be? That is, the familiar, present-day compass course indicated by the needle, or pointer of a magnetic compass? If they were not, then what were they about? The following analysis of traditional navigation in other non-Western cultures and of the magnetic direction indicator carried aboard Ming Dynasty junks in the light of the known history of the technology of the magnetic compass, combined with some careful thought about traditional Chinese navigational materials, suggests that there may be aspects of traditional Chinese navigating that an undue emphasis on a possibly exaggerated interpretation of this very early and dubiously reliable instrument has obscured.

14The critical distinction between what for the purposes of this discussion I designate a magnetic pointer and a steering compass comes down to their relative useability as navigational aids. This takes us to a key question. What are the essential elements of a reliably usable steering compass? Unless we understand the answers, we are in no position to make any valid claims about compass assisted navigation in any culture at any time.

15The development of a wholly reliable, accurate magnetic compass for use at sea as a wholly trustworthy direction finding, steering and position finding aid is the product of three interacting demands. There must be an adequate understanding of the directional properties of the Earth’s magnetic field in three-dimensions through time. Second, there must be an understanding of the local shipboard effects of these properties, and this must be widely enough spread amongst users, such that they are aware of how the effects interfere with the performance of a compass and how these may be compensated for. Finally, there must be a resultant compass technology that can reliably and accurately use the directional properties of the Earth’s magnetic field to enhance direction keeping and position finding in a ship at sea. This does not deny the usefulness of a magnetic pointer in an intermediate state up to a fully developed and understood steering compass, during a period when purely practical “tweaks” preceded any real theoretical grasp of geomagnetism. However, it does assert a developmental continuum from “usefulness only for reorientation in extremisand with good fortune” through various improved levels of helpfulness in steering and the identification of landmarks to a reliably useful navigational aid in all conditions.

16Meeting all the requirements is exacting but necessary for the compass-based navigation that had become commonplace in western voyaging by the end of the 17th century. A full technical response to the effects of Earth and shipboard magnetism on a magnetic pointer sufficient to turn it into a fully reliable navigational compass was nowhere fully provided until well towards the end of the 19th century. Magnetic pointers went to sea in China in the second decade of the 12th century CE, very possibly before. In Europe they were at sea by the end of the same century, probably copied from China, perhaps not.14 But extensive development was needed for the water-bowl and floating needle magnetic pointer, thought to have been used at sea by all 12th and early 13th century users, to begin to become helpful as a regularly used navigational aid, as opposed to an infrequent recourse in an emergency.

17The first step was the discovery of the dry pivot (c.1260 CE).15 Usability was enhanced when the dry pivot needle was fixed to a rotating compass card (c.1380 CE) and given a lubber line (c.1410 CE). But even with the addition of gimbals (before 1500 CE but not comprehensively used until the mid-17th century),16 accuracy to better than ±100 was the exception rather than the rule.17 By the end of the 17th century in Europe sufficient progress had been made for something approaching what we can call a magnetic mariner’s compass to be contributing to significantly accelerating improvements in navigational and hydrographic accuracy and, as a result, to a virtuous feedback loop.18 Before that date, magnetic pointer induced failures are as frequent as compass aided success, although by the beginning of the 17th century successes were increasing rapidly.19 Only towards the end of the 18th century were the final stages reached – better needles, improved understanding of variation and deviation – that helped achieve the goal (c.1780 CE).

18We can say that the development of the magnetic pointer into a useful navigational instrument was a long and laborious exercise in trial and error that took over half a millennium. From the first magnetic pointer in use at sea in China (c.1100) to an instrument used in western vessels that could act as an occasional aid to course keeping (c.1380) nearly two centuries elapsed. For that instrument to become a more user-friendly steering aid (>1410) took a further generation.20 For it to become reliably precise in a range of navigational and seamanship roles in all conditions at sea on any vessel and an essential instrument in the navigator’s tool kit took a further four and a half centuries (mid-19th century). In the early 20th century, after nearly eight centuries, genuinely excellent and exact, narrow or dead beat,21 liquid filled magnetic compasses were becoming common just as they were superseded by the gyro-compass.22

19The evidence suggests that the only magnetic pointer in use at sea in China, until the adoption in the 16th century, via the Japanese, of a European derived, ungimballed, dry pivot compass without a lubberline, was an instrument with a weakly magnetized, multi-pole needle floating on the surface of a bowl of water, subject to the potentially extreme and increasing oscillations known technically as an “amplifying beat”.23 Without evidence that our three demands were in the process of being met, such that a magnetic pointer was becoming a compass, it seems proper to conclude that for Chinese navigators, pressures to improve magnetic pointers had not been and, for most traditional junk navigation through until possibly as late as the early 20th century, were not being felt. For that reason we need to reconsider what the contribution of such an instrument could have been to Chinese navigation in earlier times. If the evidence suggests it may have been slight, we must then address the question of what the main sources of direction finding and direction keeping for traditional Chinese navigators were.

20It is now apposite to turn to the instruments that were used by China’s mariners in their wide-ranging voyaging in Asian Seas, to assess the extent to which they were genuinely useful and frequently used navigational tools and what the use was to which they were normally put. In the light of that assessment, we shall then consider the meaning of the written navigational material in Chinese in known sources.

21No one knows with any certainty what any pre-Qing magnetic pointers that were used at sea were actually like. There are hints and loosely formulated descriptions. There is nothing like a working drawing or exact specification. There is no surviving example or indicative surviving part of one. The consensus seems to be that they were probably based on a water-filled bowl on the surface of which a magnetized needle was floated. This is likely most often to have been a simple steel needle thrust through a raft made of rice straw, cork or wood, though more sophisticated floating needles are recorded. The needle is likely to have been magnetized either by thermoremanence or by being stroked with a piece of magnetite.

22The needle itself will have been marked in some way so that the polarities of each end (N & S) were distinguished. We do not know how this was achieved save in the cases where reference is made to encasing them in wooden turtles/fish, the “heads” of which pointed south, because that was the defining direction as the Chinese name “south pointing needle” (指南針) shows.24 With a needle through a raft of straws or cork the marking would probably have been done with a dab of colour, an asymmetry in the raft’s shape or color, or some such. The bowl itself either carried the markings of the initially 12, later 24 point Chinese compass rose around the rim, or it rested on a board with the rose marked on it. That is, the needle rotated independently of the compass rose markings.

23It is unlikely this would have been used by the helmsperson, who would rather have been focused on steering a steady course. The pointer would have been called into play by the navigator to check orientation. This would not have been easy in any sort of seaway in which, as the navigator tried to balance himself and keep the bowl steady, the surface of the water in the bowl would have been rolling from side to side in response to the ship’s roll, and from front to back in response to pitch and scend. Worse, as the vessel yawed, if the yaw was of any magnitude, the needle will have begun swinging about. Carrying a full glass of water across a level floor often results in spillage so imagine the task when the floor is pitching, rolling, yawing, heaving, swaying and scending.25 A skilled navigator would no doubt have derived some sort of a mean direction by inspection. Accuracy better than ±200 would barely have been possible, but knowing where south lay to within less than a quadrant would have been good enough for re-orientation.

24We have seen that the pre-Qing Chinese magnetic pointer is not likely to have been a reliable navigational instrument. As Eric Ash puts it in relation to the very similar early European compass,26

The first compass was little more than a magnetized needle piercing a piece of cork or straw floating in a bowl of water, in which the needle was free to spin toward the north. Such a device, however, would have been of very limited use at sea aboard a pitching and rolling ship.

25In short, the Ming Dynasty compass as described was almost certainly impossible to use for course keeping and would have been a very poor tool for direction finding in any conditions but a flat calm. Even in a flat calm its directional reliability is likely to have been poor, thanks to the iron fastened construction of traditional junks and the lack of understanding of deviation, shared with almost every contemporary mariner in the world, that the iron fastenings would have imparted, exacerbated by regular mistakes about placing iron and steel objects (cargo, swords, keys, knives, etc.) close to the compass. As W.E. May notes, citing Cook’s own narrative and Bligh’sBounty log,27

27It seems unlikely that skilled mariners of great experience, who had prosecuted long offshore voyages with success for generations would normally have relied on any so dubious a device for conducting their voyages. For steering and normal navigational work they would have looked to tried and tested methods, relying on them entirely until, as a result of stress of weather, they became disorientated. At that point they would have turned to the promise of their rudimentary pointer. Often it would have done what was asked of it – namely provided a sense of north and south.28 Sometimes it would have failed to do so.

28Like many a person in the pre-industrial world, especially one engaged in a high-risk activity, a traditional mariner whether European, Polynesian, Indian or Middle Eastern, no matter his skills and experience, will have believed in forces and spirits presiding over his fate. The capricious qualities of this rudimentary magnetic pointer that sometimes came up with an answer and sometimes did not, will have spoken to this way of seeing.

29A prayer from the 15th century, attributed to Zheng He, that prefaces what is known as the Laud Rutter (known in Chinese as 順風相送 (Shunfeng xiangsong) from its title page) reveals plainly that the compass was a quasi-mystical object the operation of which was, seemingly, subject to divine favour and the correct rituals.29

O! great guardian spirit generals of the 24 azimuth points of the patriarch of books, The Compass Classic, of zi, wu, you, mao, yin, shen, si, hai, chen, qu, chou, wei, qian, kun, gen, xun, jia, geng, ren, bing, yi, xin, ding, gui.

O! Page Boy Who Sets Compass Directions, O! Spirit of the Water Basin, O! Lord of the Changing of the Basin’s Water, O! Strong Man Who Puts in Place the Compass Needle, O! Spirit Soldiers Who Move the Compass Needle, O! Guardian Spirits of the Direction of the Needle, O! Master of the Lookout and Patron Deity of Carpenters, Luban, O! all of the other immortal masters, spirit soldiers and divine emissaries.

30The divine favour summoned by this invocation could evidently be and obviously had now and then been withdrawn. Sometimes, perhaps more often than would have enabled greater trust to be placed in it for the conduct of voyages, the compass did not do what those using it hoped for. As the prayer invokes in its penultimate trope,

Thus we hope and wish that when the compass needle is put in place in the bowl, it will always point true north and south and east and west. That from dawn to dusk the ship’s captain will be protected. That crossing the seas, coming and going, we follow the correct route. That men and ships be both content and at peace. That during our time on the high seas all goes well and is uneventful. That hidden shoals are not met and that the sails are set full forever without worry.30

31In his discussion of the Laud Rutter, in which he cites the same prayer, Timothy Brook translates the instructions to prepare the compass for use,31

To fill it with the water on which the needle is set down, it is essential to use yang water and not to use yin water. What are yin and yang water? Yang water is water that trembles when the wind brushes it. Yin water is water that subsides when the wind falls.

32Brook confesses himself a bit baffled as to what exactly could have been meant by these gradations of water, hazarding the guess that the distinction may have been between salt and fresh water. He does not even attempt to speculate what the significance of trembling when the wind brushes as opposed to subsiding when the wind ceases might portend. Whatever the distinction was, that what sailors told the landlubbers wasn’t very well understood is made plain by what the rutter tells us comes next,32

Lay the compass base level and orient it towards the south. Then it is necessary to set down the needle pointing to the mansion of Heaven…The mansion of Heaven is the chief of the twenty-four directions. Heaven governs the disposition of calamity, which is why it is necessary to start the needle from there. The needle should then indicate the direction, but don’t let it sink.

33Brook fails to note that if someone can orient the compass bowl to the south, then he already knows where south is and therefore can presumably have little need for a pointer.

34It is important not to ignore the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy involved in having to know the solution before you can set up the instrument that solves the problem. Brook’s naively functionalist assumption is that the apparent semi-religious ritual can be ignored. The idea, he contends, is to ensure that the needle is placed in such a way “to avoid laying the needle in the direction you think you are going,” thereby ensuring a consistent placing of the needle in relation to the N/S line.33 But, the imponderability of this explanation aside, in order to do what the instruction requires one would need to know in which direction South lay before one started, so that one knew the relative direction of the Mansion of Heaven. It follows that a naively functionalist explanation won’t do and we should instead take seriously the thought that the Ming Dynasty compass is to be understood as a religious or quasi-religious object and its use a religious or quasi-religious ritual perhaps turned to when things had gone wrong, not as a matter of daily routine.

35In short, this attempt to gloss over the ritualistic nature of the exercise, despite the prefacing prayer and the fact that the pilot and magnetic pointer bosun (火長, huozhang) of a junk also looked after the ship’s shrine, made sure that incense sticks were always burning and kept the magnetic pointer and associated materials in the shrine, seems disingenuous.34 It is perfectly intelligible in the context of such a vernacular navigational system simultaneously to believe that the magnetic pointer might save the ship, as from time to time no doubt such instruments may have done, that it was animated by the gods, or at least mysteriously animated, and that in order for it to work the correct rituals had to be followed and prayers made, and that as a ritual entity it should be kept in the shrine of the gods whose spirits would be needed to animate or to help animate it. Purely technically as we shall see below, if such a magnetic pointer worked, on the sorts of occasion it was likely to be most needed, it probably did so against the odds, so appealing to higher assistance made perfect sense.

36To conclude, we can say that the magnetic pointers that we are led to believe were what Chinese seafarers used to assist them in their venturesome and economically important trading voyages were not reliable or even minimally useful steering aids or navigational instruments. Such written evidence as we have seems to suggest that the simple and dubiously reliable instrument was a last ditch recourse, on what must have been the few occasions when everyone was utterly and completely disorientated, that re-orientated them and allowed them again to use their traditional course keeping and locational skills.

37Indeed, that the traditional Chinese compass did not work in any other way is strongly suggested by the features of its history we noted in the Introduction. There is the absence of technical improvement. There is the absence of commentary about dip or inclination. There is the absence of commentary about deviation.35 And there is the absence of any remnants or intact examples of improved models. Had the magnetic pointer been widely used by Chinese navigators for other than occasional reorientation, the skills and observational powers of those very same navigators would have led them to notice, just as they led western seafarers to notice, the factors that were affecting its accuracy. They would thus have begun devising – as their western peers began to devise – “tweaks” to try to deal with the problems. Equally some would have begun theorizing, as did some in the west, about the problems and made efforts to try to understand them. The result would have been a compass, not a magnetic pointer.

38Given the unquestioned achievements of traditional Chinese navigators and the zhenjing (針經, usually translated as “rutter”) (sailing directory) that have survived, that the Ming Dynasty compass was not a credible navigational instrument and thus was not used as one seems a very bold claim indeed. After all, literally zhenjing seems to mean “needle (path) book”.

39This apparent problem may be helpfully dissipated by a common distinction. On the one hand there is the circle of the horizon understood in orientational terms as having cardinal and intercardinal points, all of which long predate the use of a compass needle and are common to almost every culture. On the other there is the Johnny-come-lately of an instrument based on those points using a magnetized needle to indicate the direction of north or south.

40In the west as in China, the cardinal directions are amongst the first mental companions to daily life and appear in the earliest known human records millennia before anyone suggests any form of magnetic pointer had been invented.36 Depending on culture these were originally the four (Europe) or five (China,37 Arab, America) cardinal points – North, East, South, West and, where there were five, Centre. Come upon astronomically – the Sun rises in the East, is due south at noon (north in the Southern Hemisphere) and sets in the West, the Pole Star is approximately N at night, the zenith is above our heads and the centre at our feet – they were supplemented by other natural indicators like seasonal winds and, with the addition of the four intercardinal points (North East, South East, South West and North West), gave the classic Eight Winds, shared by western, Persian/Arab and Chinese cultures.38

41In short, from the very earliest times human beings, mariners amongst them, became accustomed to orientating themselves in terms of directions formed in reference to an imaginary circle delimiting the visual horizon and related to identifiable basic directions derived from naturally occurring phenomena. For everyday purposes on land (with the exception of desert or tundra travel), where paths are seldom absolutely straight, few things in day-to-day travel require directional accuracy much better than eight directions, as in “head north west until you see X”, each separated by 450 from the next. But once the need for greater accuracy arose, steadily the span between the main directions was narrowed. In the west, using the natural human ability accurately to halve spatial dimensions by eye, the horizon was progressively split from four, through eight to sixteen, thirty-two and finally sixty-four parts. From the original eight, however, the Chinese world seems to have taken the extremely unusual step of trisecting the angles between cardinal and intercardinal points.39 The explanation for this can probably be derived from the names of the Chinese compass points, which over time became the names of the hours of the day.40

42This is the signal difference between western and Chinese directional conventions. Namely that the Chinese system of directions is a solar clock that, by the Ming Dynasty, covered all twenty-four hours. The table below, taken from Endymion Wilkinson’s invaluable guide to the recondita of the Chinese world, shows how by the Ming Dynasty the compass points measured the passing day.41

43It thus seems quite probable that traditional Chinese sailors sailed the seas using as their mental reference a solar compass with which they “marked out” their horizon and, using the wind, the run of the sea and other natural clues, maintained their sense of direction. At night this will have been supplemented by the lore of the night sky we know to have been part of the traditional Chinese navigational repertory. Such techniques were used by Phoenician, Classical Greek, Arab, Indonesian and Polynesian navigators and, indeed, almost every traditional sailing culture.42 It is how many sailors still sail today and, as David Burch shows, as do the voyages of the replica Polynesian voyaging ship Hokulea, it still works fine.43 As Gene Amarell points out, traditional Bugis navigators orientated themselves – and still do orientate themselves – using a wind compass and a star compass in addition to their intimate knowledge of the waters in which they sail that allows them meditatively to “visualize” a passage such that they believe they can will their ship’s ability to find its way to its destination.44

44It follows that what land-based scholars tell us – and as Timothy Brook notes,45 virtually all we have about Chinese navigation is in digests and commentaries by land-based literati – is always mediated through the limits of their understanding; more specifically their classical Chinese education and vocabulary. What Chinese sailors called the courses they followed around Asian seas in their vernacular, we have no idea and will almost certainly never discover. They may have called them zhenlu, 針路. But it is equally possible they called them nothing of the sort and that zhenlu was the best approximation in written language to summarily express something that, perhaps, the land-based redactor himself but barely understood.

45Brook quotes the scholar Zhang Xie’s (張燮) Dong Xi Yang Kao (東西洋考, Study of the Eastern and Western Seas), published in 1617 in a way that is extremely suggestive of something a lot more like traditional, vernacular navigation than it is compass based navigation.46

Though the deeps across which he traces his watery course are vast, he is listened to in all things affecting the command of his ship…He knows there are regularities in cloud formations and the movement of the winds, and with this knowledge he ploughs through the waves for ten thousand li and is never once fooled into taking the wrong course.

46Zhang Xie then goes on to write about the magnetic pointer and its use. Given what we have seen is technically possible, what Zhang writes suggests he has credulously swallowed something very close to a fisherman’s story. After all, as Brook elsewhere notes, navigational lore and detail was an extremely closely guarded secret and what he calls “compass manuals” were “never leaked to outsiders.” He notes, “none survives in its original form.”47 But despite this he repeats Zhang Xie’s credulous and wildly exaggerated encomium about the compass that only someone with a desk jockey’s understanding of marine navigation and who had never been offshore in a relatively small vessel in rough weather trying to use a Ming Dynasty water compass could have written.48

Relying on (the compass, mariners) may grope their way forward in the gloom and yet have complete knowledge of whatever part of the ocean they are in and what dangers they may have to look out for. Indifferent to the storms buffeting them, they remain at ease in their places. Despite sharp winds and crashing waves, they voyage on as if everything were normal. With their long experience at doing this, they sail as though they are walking on level ground. At a glance they can figure out whatever it is they need to know.

47The land-based commentator will have known of the water bowl magnetic pointer and its later, slightly more sophisticated dry-point replacement on the still and steady surface of his writing table. He will have been able to see how it pointed the way such that for his mind to conjure an image of a mariner following the needle would have been but a step. It is quite possible that in the process an understandable conflation occurred between the mariner’s mental directional points and the actual magnetic pointer in the bowl that was turned to from time to time because everyone had become disorientated and didn’t know which way south lay. We shall never know.

48However, one of the best-known images of the Chinese compass from the Zhinan Zhengfa  (指南正法, The True Art of Pointing South),49 in fact very neatly illustrates exactly the point being made. It could be taken to be a representation of a Chinese compass card of the kind on the rim of the bowl, or on the board on which a compass bowl rested. It could as well be a representation of the division of the observed horizon. That is, it might be serving exactly the same purpose as the wind roses on early European portolan charts that preceded the use of the wind rose as a compass card. To those who have also seen the Yale Maps referred to above, it could equally be an excellent crib instructing the use of such a rutter and how the instructions on it were to be read. “Here’s how the horizon divides up and how the islands mentioned in the views are located around it.”

49This sort of “compass rose” is conceptually independent of any artificial means by which directions/bearings may be come upon, as is still the case today with the compass rose on a modern chart. A rose of this sort is a direction-giving or orientating device, not a direction-finding or course-keeping instrument.50 A good illustration of what this means, and of how orientating conceptions seem to have preceded and are in any case theoretically independent of magnetized pointers, is found in the development of the European portolan chart.51

50The means by which a navigator establishes the correct orientation for his mental directional rose does NOT have to be a ship’s magnetic, fluxgate or gyro compass. It could be the sun, the Pole Star or a known transit line between visible objects even, if super accuracy was not the issue as in early navigation it was not, the run of a regular monsoon sea or direction of a seasonal wind. Provided the navigator has a clear sense of a circle around his vessel orientated in relation to the source of the prime bearing, he or she can “see” the bearing of whatever it is that is of concern, like the bearing of a danger or course to a hoped-for destination. In the Qing Dynasty depiction of the compass rose with the islands around the horizon from the True Art of Pointing South it is exactly that way of seeing that is suggested.

51In short there is no necessary relationship between having a directional rose by which a navigator orientates his world and his routes, and having a magnetic pointer. Conceptually these are distinct. Calling routes established by orientations derived from the sun or the stars ‘needle paths’ does not strictly imply an actual magnetic pointer.52 It could be that a traditional Chinese mariner used some cognate term reflecting his intimate familiarity with the way he portioned out his navigational horizon such that the mental idea was of something pointing in each direction, whether the ‘ray’ of a conceptual directional rose, a finger or a needle.53 We know that exactly that way of seeing was what was involved in the European “winds”, as it was with the sidereal ‘compasses’ with which Arab54, Polynesian55 and Bugis56 navigators directed their paths across what were in some cases rather wider oceans than were habitually tracked by traditional Chinese mariners. Certainly by the late Qing Dynasty, as Granados’ work indicates, how users described their route guides made no reference to needles, using instead either genglu bu (更路簿 roughly book of watch period-measured routes) and shuilu bu (水路簿 water/sea route book).57

52In this context of the Chinese experience, we may accordingly now turn to the matter of what distinguishes between what I am stipulatively identifying here as a magnetic pointer on the one hand and a fully-fledged marine compass on the other.

53A compass needle at its simplest is merely a length of magnetized ferrous material so mechanically arranged that it can freely pivot to align itself with the local geomagnetic field. Organize something that satisfies that elementary description – a magnetized spoon on a plate, a magnetized needle suspended by a thread of silk, a magnetized needle in a bowl of water buoyed by a raft of rice straw – and one has a needle that, free of nearby sources of magnetic perturbation, will align itself magnetic N/S.

54Sadly this “scholar’s study” solution has significant limits to usability, and nowhere more so than at sea. Marine compass design must take on board that a ship is an unstable platform, that the Earth’s magnetic field is three, not two-dimensional, and that other local ferrous material also has a magnetic field. To work in its unstable environment as more than a magnetic pointer working as a momentary emergency recourse, a compass must respond to these perturbations in such a way as accurately to align itself magnetic N/S and stay so aligned in almost all states of wind and sea for the duration of a passage.

56The motions of translation are vertical heave, fore-and-aft surge and side-to-side sway. The axes of rotation are front-to-back pitch around the lateral or transverse axis, side-to-side roll around the longitudinal or roll axis and side-to-side yaw around the vertical or yaw axis. These are caused by the movement of a ship in a seaway and vary in period (the time between moving from one end to the other of an axis of movement), amplitude (the distance between extremes of movement) and regularity (how closely period and amplitude approximate to periodic motion). Those quanta depend on the sea and swell state58 and the size, displacement and point of sail of the ship.

57Basically the smaller the ship and the lighter its displacement, the more lively are all six of its motions in any given sea and swell states above zero. Most NE Monsoon voyages in junks on China’s coasts in the Ming Dynasty will have been in sea state 4 to 5 (mean wave heights 1.25-4 m) and swell state 4 to 5 (100 m-200 m crest to crest and <2> 4 m trough to crest). It is important to realise that a sea (a movement in the sea surface produced by local weather conditions) and a swell (a movement of the sea surface produced by weather conditions at a distance) are not necessarily, and indeed not often aligned. That is, the mean direction of advance of seas is seldom identical or even particularly close to the mean direction of advance of any swell (of which there may be more than one). The resulting irregular interference pattern of combined sea and swell states is also influenced by the depth of water, any reflected seas or swells from nearby shorelines, and whether any current or tidal stream is flowing with, against or across the run of sea or swell.59 Thus a vessel’s motion is almost always irregular both within any period of movement and between any two or more movement periods. The results are unequal movements either side of the centrepoint of any given axis and inconsistent amplitudes of movement through time.

58It follows that as a relatively small vessel (the average nanyang trade Ming Dynasty junk will have been around 30 m loa)60 steers through the sea, assuming that there is a quartering or beam wind typical of a standard voyage to or from the nanyang, it will have been lively. Its poop (the back of the vessel where the compass was housed, though possibly not used there) will have been moving in a complex, seldom regular manner covering considerable arcs.61 Any ship’s compass in the aft portion of a junk will therefore have been moving in a vertical arc <4 m top to bottom (a combination of heave and pitch). Depending on height above the hull’s centre of gravity, it will have been rolling in a shallow arc <1-3 m from side to side and shimmying as a result of sway. It will also have been yawing – swinging <300 either side of the mean track. It will have been accelerating and decelerating on the fore and aft line as the vessel surged down and up the seas as they rolled through – products of heaving and scending. It is hard to model this movement in your mind’s eye, but it will look something like the path of what mathematicians call a strange attractor.

59The conclusion must be that any magnetic pointer that is to work effectively as a marine compass must be able to cope with the natural motion of a ship in a seaway both in normal and in extreme conditions.

60Steering a sailing ship in a normal offshore sea is a delicate combination of movements somewhere between riding a horse and flying. The result is never a straight line but instead a sinuous but irregular progress in a general direction.

61The movement of a ship under sail at sea in anything other than a flat calm is complex and presents the helmsperson with a task requiring experience and skill as various interacting forces combine to push the ship off the straight-line course she or he is trying to steer.

62As the ship moves forwards, so the bow swings from left (port) to right (starboard) by 150 to 300 or more either side of the intended track depending on the sea state and the skill of the helmsman. As the ship’s head swings one way or the other, so the rate of swing accelerates and then decelerates. Skilled helmspersons smooth this constant alteration in the ship’s head, keeping its amplitude to a minimum, averaging the best course they can.62 As the ship’s head begins to swing, so a counteracting amount of rudder is applied to ‘meet’ the swing. It is eased as the ship responds and rapidly removed before the ship over-corrects in the opposite direction. Less skilled helms tend to be clumsy. Any steering system with much slack in the rudder’s control system or with much friction to overcome – in general the condition of most pre-19th century shipping and all traditional Chinese shipping63 – makes the helmsperson’s difficult task more so. The result will be greater and more erratic movement of the ship’s head and hence, if ideally, require a fast-responding magnetic pointer with minimal lag and overshoot.

63A compass is mounted in a ship. Two things about this can affect accuracy. The first is the location of and angle to the horizontal plane of the compass in relation to permanent or temporary magnetic fields on board the ship whether they are made of iron or steel or, if made of wood, have enough iron and steel fastenings and fittings to present a problem.64

64The 16th century CE Longjiang chuanchang zhi (龍江船廠志) points out that a 30m long ship required at least 750 kg of iron (nails and ironwork, >70% nails) to build.65 Prof. Shiba Yoshinobu confirms this by noting that in Song times a vessel was constructed using 3,685 nails for every 100 picul capacity.66 To get that in perspective, GRG Worcester noted that a Ningbo iceboat that had a capacity of 100 piculs was 21.33 m loa, 4.6 m beam and 2.44 m moulded depth.67 So a nanyang trader 30 m loa, 6m beam and 3.2 m moulded depth would have had 7,000-8,000 iron nails each weighing >150 grams or c.1.125 tons of iron. That meant some 230-265 nails (34.5-39.75 kg) fairly symmetrically placed in hull and bulkheads for every meter of the hull’s length. In addition, we know both from historical records and from various South China Sea wreck excavations that the carriage of scrap iron and other iron as cargo was common.68

65Over one ton of iron symmetrically placed throughout a vessel’s hull all magnetized to a common polarity by being hammered into place whilst the ship was on the building ways in a fixed orientation to the Earth’s magnetic field would inevitably have had a magnetic signature, albeit a relatively slight one.69 In terms of ship’s magnetism this is known as the ship’s permanent magnetism. The iron in a ship and any in its cargo also has what is known as induced magnetism caused by the Earth’s magnetic field that varies as the location and course of the ship vary. The resultant deviation of the compass (an effect additional to variation) can be very large.70 For example late 18th century Royal Navy sailing masters had an allowance called ‘in draft’, which they added or subtracted from the ship’s heading by compass to get a more accurate sense of where the ship was actually pointing. “In draft” could be as much as two points (22.50) and sometimes more.71

66The first known record of someone noticing these effects was in 1538-1539, by João de Castro (1500-1548), a Portuguese navigator.72 It was regularly noticed and commented on thereafter though not, as far as the record indicates, outside Europe. Meanwhile extensive observation began, all of which, most importantly, encouraged increasingly comprehensive data collection. By 1794, the first proposal to create “deviation cards” by swinging the ship was made by John Churchman73 and, following work by William Scoresby (1759-1857) and Matthew Flinders (1774-1814) a decade or so later, the beginning of a practical understanding of deviation had begun.74

67A compass is in principle a simple bar magnet that aligns itself with the local geomagnetic field. The field is conventionally represented as having two components: horizontal and vertical.75

68At any one point on the Earth’s surface the compass needle will align itself with the resultant of the two components. On a scale of 0 to 1, at the magnetic equator the horizontal component is 1 and the vertical component zero 0. At the north and south magnetic poles the ratio is reversed.76 Simply put, the greater the vertical component, the weaker the horizontal component, although we should note that the actual intensity of the Earth’s magnetic field even at its greatest is small. A normal fridge magnet has an intensity of about 100 Gauss (10,000,000 nT) (nanoTesla). The Earth’s magnetic field varies between 0.25 to 0.65 Gauss (25,000 and 65,000 nT). An important additional point to bear in mind in the context of Chinese directional pointers is that the intensity of the Earth’s magnetic field has often been at its weakest over the South China Sea (as well as Southern Africa) being at those times under 30,000 nT.77

69If we note that this period of magnetic field weakness was at its greatest during the Ming Dynasty – a highpoint in Chinese long distance voyaging – we can also note that during the same period dip (sometimes called “inclination”) – or the tendency of the compass needle to point downwards responding to the vertical component of the Earth’s magnetic field – was between 300 and 400 north-down along China’s south coast, with changes of greater than ±100 at the extremes of the Chinese trading area.78 It follows that compass needles will have been balanced to ensure they sat level for the inclination value and intensity of where they were made. Movement north to Japan or south to the nanyang with their different values and intensities of dip will have made the needle vulnerable to capsize in rough weather.79

70Chinese observers noted variation possibly as early as the 8th century CE and certainly by the 11th century.80 However, despite awareness that variation changed in geographical space and through time, there was neither a systematic understanding nor any record of values outside China that would have allowed any practices of median compensation to have arisen. There is no evidence that dip (inclination) was understood any more than deviation seems to have been.81 I shall come back to these two very important absences below.

71To work usefully on a ship a magnetic compass needle must have a number of properties. Without them the needle will not reliably point north/south. It will be hard or perhaps impossible to steer by or take bearings of distant objects from. It will work only over a certain range of latitude.

72First, the magnetism of the compass needle must be strong enough to respond to the weak geomagnetic force. That is, its magnetic moment (measured in A•m2)(amperes•metres squared) must be great enough to respond to the Earth’s relatively weak magnetic field.

73The primary source for magnetic strength is a permanently magnetized needle. Whilst it is thought to be the case that some Chinese compass needles had more durable magnetism thanks to thermoremanent magnetization and an early use of steel rather than iron, the magnetization was weak. Other needles were magnetized, like European ones, by use of a lodestone.82 No needles in any part of the world were both strongly and durably magnetized until the work of Gowin Knight in Britain in the mid-18th century. Knight did not fully understand why what he achieved worked – that came later – but he made two major breakthroughs.83 He was able powerfully and durably to magnetize steel, though exactly how he magnetized his magnetizing apparatus is still uncertain. Second, by experiment he showed that the commonly used soft iron wire needles and steel bar needles were weak, impermanent and, in the case of shapes that were not simple bars or pins and when pierced for or fitted with a pivot cap, multipolar.

74For example the Royal Navy’s double-trapezium type had six poles, the common compass maker’s, diamond-shaped bent and brazed wire type had at least four. Both were directionally unstable. Knight’s researches recommended a plain bar needle NOT pierced for a pivot cap, but attached to a thin, circular card surrounded with a brass rim in the centre of which the pivot cap was fixed.84 It should be noted that the needle most commonly associated with the Qing Dynasty, dry pivot compass used on Chinese vessels has at least six poles. The magnetized, floating ‘fish’ described in Zeng Gongliang (曾公亮), Ding Du (丁度) and Yang Weide (楊惟德), Wujing Zongyao (武經總要) in 1044 (of which an imagined reconstruction is illustrated in Needham and Ronan) would have had something like eight poles.85

75In general even after Gowin Knight’s work it was thought (rightly) that the longer a needle the stronger its magnetism would be. Needles up to 0.38m long were favoured. This was because such needles were thought to be more stable and to oscillate less (have a shorter beat as this is termed). In a scholar’s study or on a terrestrial surveyor’s plane table this is true. In a seaway aboard ship it is the converse. Long needles are chronically unstable as, in general, are single needles. Further research by Archibald Smith and FJ Evans in the 1850s showed that in fact multiple, parallel short bar needles, their lengths and the distances between them related to carefully calibrated angles between their tips, were the most stable configuration.86 Finally, each of the needles should be made of fine, laminated, tempered, hard steel.87 The apex of dry pivot design, Kelvin’s 1875 Dry Card Compass, had eight such parallel, precisely graduated needles, of carefully calibrated lengths to ensure the correct angle between their tips, slung by silk threads below and either side of the pivot to reduce beat.

77First, the compass must be so designed as to minimize the effects of the ship’s motion on its accuracy. This was tackled in four ways. We have noted that by the beginning of the 16th century in the West the gimbal mounting was in use. This simple device, if it is well-made and has freely moving pivots, keeps the compass level in all conditions but the most severe. In such conditions traditional ships of whatever nationality were surviving, not being steered, so we can consider gimbals to be generally useful in all less fraught conditions. However, although the gimbal was helpful, it was not absolutely vital for our conjectured water-bowl, floating magnetic pointer since a f