In the early 15th century, the famous Chinese naval commander Zheng He鄭和 (Cheng Ho, 1371-1433) conducted seven expeditions to Java, Sumatra, Malacca, Aden, Hormuz, Mogadishu, and sailed as far as the East coast of Africa to visit the Red Sea and Mecca. It is known that for navigation Zheng He used, besides a compass, a particular instrument named qianxing ban 牽星板. The extant descriptions of this instrument mention twelve square boards of different sizes used to identify the location of the ship in the ocean on the basis of observations of stars at night. It is also known that during the Song dynasty (960-1279) another instrument named liangtian chi 量天尺 was used in China for the same purpose. This was an instrument including a ruler with marked scales used to measure the sun’s shadow and positions of the stars.

Why did Zheng He prefer to use the qianxing ban rather than the liangtian chi ? Did he do so because the the qianxing ban was superior to the latter, or for some other reasons? To answer this question it is necessary to reconstruct both instruments and then to compare them.

Attempts to reconstruct these two instruments have been made by several scholars, for example, by Wang Lixing王立興 and Yan Dunjie 嚴敦杰. In my paper I will critically evaluate their reconstructions, revisit the primary materials used by these two authors, and then propose my own reconstruction. In particular, I will explore the hypothesis of an Islamic origin of the qianxing ban used by Zheng He, since it is known that Zheng He was a Chinese Muslim and may thus have had strong connections with Islamic culture.