junco

The word junk for a type of flat-bottomed Chinese sailing vessel entered English from Portuguese junco, which was borrowed from Malay jong or djong (a large sea-going vessel). The Malay jong referred to large vessels used throughout the maritime trade networks of Southeast Asia — Chinese, Javanese, and Malay traders all used large multi-masted vessels across the routes connecting the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. Portuguese sailors encountered these vessels from the moment of their first contact with the Malay maritime world in the early sixteenth century, and junco became their standard term for the large Asian trading vessel. The Malay word may itself derive from the Javanese djong, and may be related to other Austronesian words for boat in the same family. The English form junk, adopted from Portuguese (and also possibly from Dutch jonk), appears in English texts from the mid-sixteenth century onward as the standard word for Chinese and Southeast Asian sailing vessels of a particular type.

The Chinese vessels that Europeans most typically called junks were the large ocean-going trading ships of the Chinese merchant marine — vessels that had been sailing between South China, Southeast Asia, the Persian Gulf, and the East African coast for centuries before European contact. These ships were remarkable by any standard: flat-bottomed, with multiple masts carrying battened sails of woven bamboo or matting, divided internally into watertight compartments (a design principle that Chinese shipbuilders had developed centuries before it appeared in European vessels), and capable of ocean voyages of thousands of miles. Zheng He's famous treasure fleets of the early fifteenth century — the series of diplomatic expeditions that ranged from Southeast Asia to the Persian Gulf and the East African coast between 1405 and 1433 — were composed of junks on a scale that dwarfed anything European maritime power could field at the same period. The largest of Zheng He's treasure ships, if the historical records are accurate, were nearly five times the length of Columbus's Santa María.

The junk's design features — its flat bottom, its compartmentalized hull, its battened sails — represented independent solutions to the same engineering problems that European ship design addressed through different means, and European observers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were sometimes admiring and sometimes dismissive of these differences. The flat bottom, which made junks look ungainly to European eyes accustomed to the deep keel and curved hull of the Atlantic sailing ship, was actually a rational adaptation to shallow Chinese coastal waters and river mouths where deep-keeled vessels could not go. The battened sail, which European sailors found inelegant, was in fact easier to handle with a smaller crew and more adaptable to varying wind conditions. The watertight compartment system was far in advance of European practice — European ships routinely sank when hulled by collision or cannon fire in a way that a compartmentalized junk would not.

The relationship between junk (the ship) and junk (worthless refuse) is one of the genuine etymological puzzles of English. The refuse-junk — old rope, worn-out material, rubbish — appears in English texts from roughly the same period as the ship-junk but has a different and contested etymology. It may derive from Old French jonc (reed, rush, low-value material), or from the Dutch and German terms for old rope (junk was specifically nautical slang for old rope ends). The two words — the impressive Chinese trading vessel and the worthless discarded material — have coexisted in English since at least the sixteenth century, and the coincidence of their identical form has created the persistent false impression that the Chinese ship was named for worthless material. The junk was not, in origin, a junk in the refuse sense; it was a vessel that commanded the great commercial sea-lanes of Asia for centuries before European ships appeared in the same waters.