㉘ Comparing the Warships of Joseon, Ming, and Japan in the Imjin War

In an earlier post, we talked about how the warships of the Joseon, Ming, and Japanese navies were each built around a different way of fighting: Joseon striking from a distance with cannon, Japan leaping aboard enemy ships to fight with swords, and Ming China designed for coastal defense. This time I want to go one step further and check, in actual numbers, how big those ships really were.

There is one thing I should say up front. Of the three countries' warships, the panokseon, the main Joseon warship, is the only one whose length, width, and height can all be confirmed in meters. For the Japanese sekibune and the Ming shachuan and huchuan, the figures differ from source to source, and in many cases the width or height has not come down to us at all. In this post, I have tried to separate what is certain from what is only an estimate.

The Joseon Navy's Panokseon: The Only Ship Confirmed in Meters

The size of the panokseon was given in fairly precise figures in an academic research report published in 2021 by the National Research Institute of Maritime Cultural Heritage:

Length 32.16 m, width 8.74 m, height 5.56 m, weight 140.3 tons

The research team arrived at these figures by taking a record in the Bibyeonsa Deungnok, the journal of Joseon's Border Defense Council, which says that "the great ship on which the Naval Commander rides has a bottom plank 70 cheok long," and converting it using the standard ruler of the time, the yeongjocheok (1 cheok = 31.2 cm). In other words, these figures are not an average for all panokseon; they are an estimate based on the large panokseon used by the Naval Commander of the Three Provinces. In practice, the size probably varied somewhat depending on the commander's rank and the ship's purpose.

During the Imjin War, a panokseon carried 125 or more men, far more than the 80-man crew of the daemaengseon, the main warship before it. Thanks to its flat-bottomed hull built thick from pine, it could turn a full 360 degrees in place, and its sturdy hull could carry heavy cannon, such as the Cheonja, Jija, Hyeonja, and Hwangja chongtong, in a stable way.

Japan's Atakebune and Sekibune

The Atakebune: The Commander's Flagship

The atakebune was the ship on which the highest commanders of the Japanese navy rode. It was a showy flagship with a tower built on its deck, but for that very reason there were few of them, and it is hard to regard it as a main warship that carried the regular fighting. So when this post compares the three countries' main warships, I leave out the atakebune and treat the sekibune as Japan's main warship.

For reference, I could not find a primary source that states the atakebune's length, width, and height specifically. The ranges given by various sources on the web are as follows:

• Length: roughly 30 m, the largest over 50 m
• Width: over 10 m
• Height: three-story structure (I could not confirm an exact figure)
• Cargo capacity: 500 to 2,000 koku (at about 150 kg per koku, roughly 75 to 300 tons)
• Crew: about 180

The Sekibune: The Real Main Warship of the Japanese Navy

The sekibune, the main warship of the Japanese navy

According to Technology, Ships, and Politics (pp. 295–297) by Professor Lee Sang-yun of Pukyong National University, the length of the sekibune varied over time from 36 to 69.5 shaku, and at the time of the Imjin War it was roughly 36 shaku. Converted at the Japanese shaku (about 0.3 m), that comes to about 10.9 m. It is estimated to have had 30 to 60 oars and a crew of about 100. I could not confirm its height from the sources, but my own guess is that it was probably under 3 to 4 m.

The sekibune was a sharp-bottomed ship built of light wood such as Japanese cedar, so it was fast, but its hull was weak enough to be easily smashed when hit by a panokseon's cannon.

The Ming Navy's Shachuan and Huchuan

During the second Japanese invasion of 1597–1598, the main warships of the Ming navy were the shachuan (沙船) and the huchuan (唬船). The Nanjung Ilgi, Admiral Yi's war diary, has this entry for October 3, 1598:

"Following a secret letter from Admiral Liu (Liu Ting), the Commander-in-Chief (Chen Lin) went out to fight just as it was getting dark and kept up the attack until the third watch of the night, and nineteen shachuan and more than twenty huchuan were burned. The Commander-in-Chief's anger was beyond words."

Since the Ming navy's losses are recorded only in terms of these two types, we can confirm that the shachuan and huchuan really were the main ships of the allied Joseon-Ming fleet on the Ming side.

• Shachuan (沙船): A flat-bottomed ship that developed in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions of China and was widely used north of the Yangtze. In the Ming period it came in large, medium, and small grades, with lengths of 100, 70, 50, and 30 cheok depending on grade (roughly 32 m, 22 m, 16 m, and 9.6 m in yeongjocheok). Which grade was actually sent to Joseon, however, differs by source. Kim Jae-geun's Further Studies in the History of Korean Ships estimates that they were of the 50–70 cheok (medium) class, given the terrain of Joseon's southern coast. But Yun Heon-sik, a researcher at the Yi Sun-sin Institute for Strategic Studies, points to the numbers of men aboard recorded in the Annals of King Seonjo and the Jinglüe Yuwo Zouyi (30 to 40 men per ship) and argues that the shachuan actually sent were probably closer to the small grade (the 30-cheok class, about 9.6 m) than to the medium.
• Huchuan (唬船, also called the balahu): A "relatively small warship" used in the Zhejiang and Fujian regions. Its size is recorded fairly consistently as 40 cheok long and 10 cheok wide (about 12.8 m by 3.2 m). Driven by both sail and oars, it was fast and used mainly for scouting and pursuit; in the sixteenth century it was a favorite of Qi Jiguang in his campaigns against Japanese pirates.

In short, as a type of ship the shachuan came in grades as large as 100 cheok (about 32 m), but the ships actually sent to Joseon may have been close to the small grade, so they may have been about the same size as the huchuan (40 cheok, about 12.8 m) or even smaller. Both ships, then, were not only smaller than the panokseon but about the same size as Japan's sekibune (about 11 m), or smaller still.

At first, the crew was reckoned at 20, or 15 to 16, men per ship. But the Annals of King Seonjo (entry for October 24, 1598) records that of the 23 Ming warships damaged at the Battle of Waegyoseong, the two large ones each carried about 100 men, while the other 21 small ships each carried 30 to 40. These "small ships" appear to have been the shachuan and huchuan, so we can take their actual crews to have been about 30 to 40 men.

Ming ships generally had a single deck and so sat much lower in the water than the panokseon, which left them with a weakness: Japanese soldiers, skilled at hand-to-hand fighting, could easily climb aboard. It says a great deal that when Admiral Yi gave one panokseon each to the Ming commander Chen Lin and his deputy Deng Zilong, Chen Lin was delighted.

A Side-by-Side Comparison

Comparing only the three countries' main warships gives the following:

	Joseon panokseon	Japanese sekibune	Ming shachuan / huchuan
Length	32.16 m	About 10.9 m (based on 36 shaku at the time of the Imjin War)	Shachuan about 9.6 m (estimate for ships sent) / huchuan about 12.8 m
Width	8.74 m	Not confirmed	About 3.2 m (huchuan)
Height	5.56 m	About 3–4 m (estimate, not confirmed in sources)	About 3 m (estimate, not confirmed in sources)
Crew	125 or more	About 100	30 to 40 (based on the Annals of King Seonjo)
Reliability of figures	High (2021 academic reconstruction study, based on the Bibyeonsa Deungnok)	Medium (cited from a published book; only length confirmed in sources)	Medium to high (cites primary sources such as the Nanjung Ilgi, the Annals of King Seonjo, and the Jinglüe Yuwo Zouyi)

Only the panokseon figures shown in bold are backed by both historical sources and modern academic research. In length alone, the panokseon, at about 32 m, was overwhelmingly the largest, while Japan's sekibune (about 11 m) and Ming's shachuan and huchuan (about 9.6 to 12.8 m) were in roughly the same weight class.

Closing Thoughts

Pinning down concrete figures for the three countries' main warships turned out to be very hard work. The reasons were records that were exaggerated, inconsistent, or simply too scarce. But from what I have been able to confirm so far, I have reached the following conclusions.

When comparing Japan's main warship, we should leave out the atakebune and look at the sekibune, because the atakebune was the ship the highest commanders rode, and is hard to regard as a main warship that carried the fighting. For Ming, the shachuan and huchuan were the main ships, and judging only by the ships actually sent to Joseon, these two were probably about the same as Japan's sekibune. In length, the panokseon was about 32 m, Japan's sekibune about 11 m, and Ming's shachuan and huchuan about 10 to 13 m. In height, the panokseon is confirmed at 5.56 m; I estimate the sekibune at around 3 to 4 m, and the shachuan and huchuan at around 3 m.

Laid out like this, it makes me think that without the help of the Joseon navy, the Ming navy might well have collapsed helplessly before Japan's sekibune. Joseon's panokseon had a clear advantage in size and height, and its ability to turn 360 degrees in place and fire its cannon would have overwhelmed the ships of both Japan and Ming.

When comparing the naval strength of the three countries, I think it is a mistake to put great weight on the number of ships. Admiral Yi's record of 23 battles and 23 victories was possible because he had the panokseon. And yet Won Gyun, who sailed out with 134 panokseon and nearly wiped out the Joseon navy at Chilcheollyang, can only be called a miracle-worker of a commander who achieved a defeat that should have been impossible.

👉 Next post: ㉙ Comparing the Weapons of Joseon and Japan in the Imjin War

— Momcheolhak