So this question seemed familiar when it came up, and it turns out it’s been asked many months ago (now beyond the archive date) by /u/Wewatta, but never got an answer. At the time, I had neither the specific knowledge about the Keying nor the more general awareness of Qing maritime history needed to produce such an answer, but things have changed. Rather nicely, a recent Tuesday Trivia gave me the chance to talk about the Keying’s journey, so this question also lets me do a bit about the ship’s technical aspects. So, thanks for reposting it!
The latter part of the question is simple enough: as far as we know, the Keying’s basic design was effectively the same as larger examples of those built under the Ming in the fifteenth century, though of course with incremental alterations in the centuries since. So the Qing (in the general sense of the subjects of the Qing state as well as the Qing state itself) had been building these from the time when they had major shipyards capable of doing so during the conquest of the Ming in the 1640s-60s.
The first part of the question, however, the answer to which will be the meat of this post, carries a couple of assumptions, including that the reader will know what the Keying was. For context, the Keying, which set out from Hong Kong in 1846, was the first, and so far only, Chinese junk to successfully sail to the East Coast of North America and in turn Europe, reaching New York in July 1847 and London in March 1848. Keying is interesting precisely because of how unusual the feat she achieved was: a feat that, as noted, has never been repeated, though some trans-Pacific journeys have been attempted with almost complete success (the Taiping Gongzhu, which set out from Taiwan in June 2008, almost completed her return journey from San Fransisco when she was rammed by an oil tanker 42 nautical miles from Taipei in April 2009.) However, this feat was not an entirely Chinese achievement. Indeed, its very genesis was as a Western money-making scheme, where she was to be brought to London as a floating museum. While details of the trip itself are somewhat scant beyond what her captain, Charles Kellett, was willing to divulge, it seems that her journey would not have been possible without rigorously enforced onboard discipline in the style of Western seagoing vessels, which backfired heavily when her crew mutinied once in New York.
But to really give an answer to the question, it needs to be broken down into three parts:
Also, for the sake of convenience, we need to have a clearly-defined time period, given that the Qing spanned 276 years. As the question is asking about the Keying, it seems appropriate to go for the time of the Keying venture or thereabouts – roughly the period 1842-50.
We don’t really know the precise details of the Keying’s construction, but we can reach some reasonable conclusions.
Firstly, her dimensions vary between accounts, with the least uncertain dimension being her length, which was between 160’ and 165’ (48-50 m). All her other dimensions are up in the air: her beam varies between 25’ 6” and 35’ 4” (7.8-10.8 m), depth of hold between 12’ and 19’ (3.6-5.8 m), mainsail area between 9,900 and 11,000 square feet (920-1020 m^2 ), giving a tonnage of anywhere between 400 and 800 tons. For that reason, we can’t even be sure what size class she corresponded to – typically, she’s taken to be a B-class trading junk, which could vary between 85 and 127 feet (26-39 m) in length and 24 and 36 (7.2-11 m) feet in beam. But the actual length measurements suggest that she may in fact have been a somewhat narrow A-class, given how clearly the length is out of the range of a B-class. This is, of course, assuming that we can correctly convert Qing shipbuilders’ units of length into modern standardised ones, which we can’t with much certainty. Complicating this further, the total length of the Keying is being compared to the ‘length on deck’ of a B-class junk, which is only measured between the fore and mizzen masts and thus excludes parts of the bow and stern, so it is plausible that actually a large B-class could indeed have a total length of around 160’. I’m happy to end the discussion there and call the Keying something on the larger end of a B-class junk. In any case, it's her dimensions and tonnage, not the label we assign to her, that will be compared against other Qing-era ships later.
Just to restate here, the Keying was specifically a trade junk, not a military one – though the differences in design were not necessarily that major, at least in terms of core construction. But this has direct bearing on the final part of this answer, tackling the issue of how many the Qing state held.
Besides her size, there’s the question of the ship’s specific regional design variant. Stephen Davies, in his book on the Keying, notes that from our pictorial evidence, she seems to have been a hybrid of two styles: the Fuzhou style (fuchuan) and Canton (Guangzhou) style (guangchuan). Features of the former include her high forward wings at the bow, cambered (downward-curving) deck and elaborate recessed transom (windows) at the stern; features of the latter include her fenestrated (that is, perforated) rudder (see an example here) and apparent teak construction. However, looking at the textual evidence, contemporary comments from Hong Kong newspapers indicated that her design may have been Thai or Vietnamese (although both were derivatives of the fuchuan). There’s a whole host of possibilities at work, not helped by the rather murky question of whether, before its purchase by the Hong Kong consortium in 1846, Keying was actually commissioned for construction by an American investor in 1844/5, or an older ship (potentially a century or more) that he had purchased. Davies suggests – and I am inclined to agree – that the two most likely possibilities are that:
A: If the Keying was indeed an older ship, then she was originally a conventional fuchuan or one of its Southeast Asian imitators, explaining why her core construction (particularly the deck and transom) was of Fuzhou design. However, she was later based out of Canton, explaining the existence of guangchuan features on high-wear, replaceable elements like the rudder. It may also serve to explain why the construction was apparently teak: much of the original Fujian pine planking may have been replaced over time.
B: If the Keying was commissioned in 1844/5, it is plausible the American asked for a Fuzhou design from the Canton shipwrights, explaining the use of teak instead of hard pine and the coexistence of the fenestrated rudder with the otherwise fuchuan structure.
So, the basic conclusion would be as follows: the Keying was a B-class junk designed for the Southeast Asian monsoon trade, with a tonnage of between 400 and 800 tons. Her core construction is consistent with that of a fuchuan, but certain components, including quite possibly a large portion of the planking, are consistent with a guangchuan. In short, the Keying was a B-class fuchuan with some modifications.
