Marks on Shinan wreck's rosewood reveal vast 14th-century Asian trade network

The wreck of a 14th-century trading vessel discovered off the coast of Shinan, South Jeolla, in 1975 marked a new chapter in Korea’s underwater archaeology. The ship, which departed Qingyuan — present-day Ningbo — in China in 1323 bound for Hakata, Japan, was dubbed the “Shinan ship.” Underwater excavations conducted from the following year through 1984 uncovered some 26,000 artifacts.

Among the large quantities of artifacts, including ceramics, coins, wooden tablets, medicinal and aromatic materials, metalware and wooden lacquerware, around 1,000 pieces of rosewood stood out. The sheer volume of high-end timber, sourced from regions as far away as Southeast Asia and India and transported aboard a trading ship traveling between China and Japan, offers a glimpse into the vast scale of the Maritime Silk Road at the time.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the underwater archaeological discovery, the "Rosewood: Timber That Crossed the Sea" exhibition will open on Tuesday at the National Research Institute of Maritime Heritage in Mokpo, South Jeolla, which operates under the Korea Heritage Service.

Running through Feb. 14 next year, the exhibition will present new findings from analyses of writing and markings found on rosewood recovered from the Shinan wreck.

The rosewood aboard the vessel was more than simply high-end timber produced in South and Southeast Asia and transported to Japan via China, according to the latest research. Researchers have focused on the various characters, symbols and patterns written in ink or engraved on the wood.

Until now, 364 wooden tablets, or pieces of wood bearing written records, have served as key evidence for understanding the Shinan ship’s journey and how its cargo was managed. The tablets were tags attached to bundles of cargo, with some bearing the year 1323, providing an exact date that has made them particularly valuable to researchers.

A detailed three-dimensional digital examination of the about 1,000 pieces of rosewood, however, has led researchers to newly decipher some surface markings previously thought to be numbers or Roman alphabet letters. Researchers identified the Phagspa script, the official script of the Yuan Empire, on six artifacts. Some pieces were found to bear cargo-management codes based on the Thousand Character Classic — a basic text used to teach Chinese characters.

Among roughly 160 pieces of rosewood bearing Chinese characters, or hanja, researchers took particular note of markings such as those read as cheonsam, cheonyuk, hwango and juchilho.

The characters representing cheon, hwang and ju correspond to characters at the beginning of the Thousand Character Classic. Their combination with numbers or the character that is pronounced ho in Korean — which means a number or designation — indicates that the text was used to systematically manage cargo through classification codes and serial numbers.

Researchers also found marks on the rosewood that matched handwritten signatures or names appearing on the wooden tablets. Such marks, known as sugyeol in Korean, refer to handwritten marks placed beneath a person’s name or title in place of a seal.

On artifacts from the Shinan ship, Japanese names, including Makosaburo and Iyajiro, appear in matching pairs on both the wooden tags and the cargo itself.

“This provides evidence of a system for cross-checking information during the inspection and receipt of cargo and is a new finding showing that people connected to destinations in Japan, including Tofukuji, the Shinan ship’s final destination, were deeply involved in the loading and distribution of the cargo,” the institute said.

Based on the newly deciphered characters and patterns, the Shinan ship should be understood not as a vessel operated exclusively by a single country or group, but as the product of a complex trading network involving numerous actors, Chong Soon-il, a professor in the Department of History Education at Korea University, said in a recent paper on the Shinan wreck. The network included Chinese ports and merchants, trading groups in Hakata, Japanese Buddhist temples and powerful warrior families.

These findings will be among six presentations by researchers from Korea and abroad at an international academic conference titled “The Rosewood of the Sinan Shipwreck and Maritime Exchange in East Asia,” to take place Wednesday at the National Research Institute of Maritime Heritage.

The conference will examine the rosewood from multiple angles, including its species and places of origin, distribution and trade networks, interpretations of its markings, consumption patterns in medieval Japan and techniques used to imitate the prized timber.

“By examining where rosewood, which was used for high-end furniture at the time, came from and how it was classified and managed, we can gain an understanding of the global distribution network for luxury goods across the Indo-Pacific region at the time,” an institute official said.

BY KANG HYE-RAN [[email protected]]