The junk-building yards present a vivid picture of a civilization in transition. At one yard, a workman is laboriously breaming the hull of a sampan—killing marine borers by passing bundles of burning hay beside and beneath it—and a workman or two in an adjoining yard are covering the hull of another boat with anti-fouling paint. The object of the two operations is identical, but the anti-fouling paint protects the wood about four times as long as breaming and takes no longer to apply. On the port side of an 86-foot trawler, a Chinese carpenter is using a half-inch electric power drill; on the starboard, another man is drilling holes with a steel bit spun by a leather thong with its ends fixed to a wooden bow.
Lu Pan, the Celestial master builder who transmitted the secrets of carpentry and shipbuilding to mankind, is honored with a tiny shrine in an obscure corner of every yard. Joss sticks are lighted before a statuette of this practical divinity, and his birthday observance on the 13th day of the Sixth Moon is a holiday in the shipyards. Lu Pan has not yet betrayed any overt sign of annoyance at the invasion of his domain by power tools and Diesel engines.
The timber that is cut for these all-wooden ships is tough and durable—China fir, teak, and various hardwoods chiefly from Borneo, like billian, kapor and yacal. The planks are hewn at mills near the yards, and bent to fit the curvature of the hull. The curving is accomplished by heating the center of the plank with a small fire and weighting its ends with heavy stones to set the curve. The 3-inch-thick planks are secured to the upright framing members with 14-inch steel spikes, and the main stringer, just below deck level, is fastened with threaded bolts. Despite the general disarray of the open yards and the lack of precise plans, the junk almost invariably turns out to be a nicely dovetailed, exactly balanced boat, good for twenty or thirty years of service in the rough weather of the China Sea.
The long-liner ranks as the giant of the junk fleet, having an overall length between 80 and 100 feet. Junks of this class fish from 20 to 60 miles south of the colony, cruising above a vast expanse of underwater flats where depths seldom exceed 90 feet and the muddy bottom makes other kinds of fishing unfeasible.