Six centuries ago, a mighty armada of Chinese ships crossed the China Sea, then ventured west to Ceylon, Arabia, and East Africa. The fleet consisted of giant nine-masted junks, escorted by dozens ...

Furthermore, European observers in medieval-era Chinese ships, including Marco Polo, were characteristically impressed by their seaworthiness but at the same time described them in Eurocentric ...

This story appears in the March 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine. Technically it’s ancient technology. But now the two-millennia-old principle of the Greek mathematician Archimedes has ...