Craft on the Yangtze

Usage examples of sampans.

The enormous harbor was choked with thousands of sampans and junks of all sizes lashed together to create an enormous floating slum.

Along the Whangpoo and up Soochow Creek, the sampan homes of the floating city are alive with dim lights, as old women with trousers tied at the ankle arrange stones to level cooking fires on the canted decks, for the river is at low tide and the sampans have heeled over, their wooden bellies stuck in the yellow mud.

Out in the floating city the orange and yellow lanterns are winking out, as people make up beds on the canted decks of sampans heeled over in the mud.

The idea being to keep the VC from running their sampans up and down the rivers, hauling troops, ammunition, all that.

All movement in the Mekong Delta at large meant boats-usually small sampans powered by ancient FRENCH outboards, which the VC piloted in the darkness through the twisting network of side streams and mud flats.