In 1643, a sea battle was waged near the coast of Guangnan Province (present-day Vietnam). At that time, the Dutch VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, 1602–1800) was the strongest sea power in Asia and South-East Asia. However, while three Dutch ships stoped near the Guangnan coast, as the sailors aboard began their morning prayers, forty to fifty small local ships were swiftly moving towards them. Since the Dutch ships were armed with powerful cannons and the sailors were accustomed to attacks of far more mighty enemies, the Dutch sailors did not worry much about those small ships that could not cause, they naively believed, any damage to them. Yet the small ships launched an attack against the Dutch, at the end of the battle, one Dutch ship was sunk, and the other two barely escaped. What did those local ships look like? During the Chinese Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) there were at least two kinds of galley-like ships, the pictures of which can be found printed in contemporaneous books. One can find depictions of ships that look like galleys, representing an old Chinese and Southeast Asian shipbuilding tradition. There are additional numerous other pictorial representations of them in a number of books. However, there were also ships that looked very different. These were called “centipede-ships” (wugongchuan蜈蚣船). These “centipede-ships” were quite different form the galley-like ships that belonged to the Chinese shipbuilding tradition, and I will explain the major differences between these two kinds of ships and advance a new hypothesis concerning the origin of these centipede-ships. My study is based on pictorial representations of these two kinds of ships found in medieval Chinese treatises, as well as on the shipyard records. I have also compared these images with those of contemporaneous ships developed in countries outside of China in order to find out where the design of the “centipede-ships” may have come from.