Located in the Yangtze River Delta and the coast of the East China Sea, Ningbo has a long history of boat culture, from the Xiaoshan cross-lake bridge, the canoes and wooden oars unearthed from the Hemudu ruins to the Song Dynasty Guoxin sea boats, which can show the high level of ancient Ningbo shipbuilding technology. However, in the Age of Discovery, ancient China's shipbuilding and navigation technology seemed to have lost its former glory. Academic research on China's ship technology and sailing industry since the 16th century has more or less views of technological stagnation or institutional obstruction, that is, to a certain extent, Joseph Needham's assertion that the achievements of the Chinese in the 15th century did not form a revolutionary breakthrough in technology is reasonable. However, looking back at the history of Ningbo shipping from the Tang and Song dynasties to the Ming and Qing dynasties, the development of its technology cannot be regarded as stagnant, it is a complex historical process of communication, combination and debugging of knowledge and technology. In fact, to understand the role of shipbuilding technology in Ningbo society, it is necessary to look beyond the purely technical field and consider the interaction between them as a set of technologies or technological systems. If we take Ningbo shipping as a research clue and investigate the development of Ningbo's shipping technology and business operation since the Ming and Qing dynasties in the historical process of institutional change, we will find that Ningbo has inherited the shipping technology tradition since the Tang and Song dynasties. Ships continue to provide technical support for the business operations of Ningbo merchants, and the merchants, as carriers of skills and experience, create an internal impetus for the improvement of ship and shipping technology. In other words, shipping technology itself is not a closed system, and its evolution also implies institutional changes in commercial institutions and trade networks. It can even be said that the selection and improvement of technology is the proper meaning of business practice, so shipping technology is also contained in the overall historical practice of commercial system changes. It is the complex relationship between technology and business operation that enables ships and shipbuilders to flexibly adapt to changes and seize the opportunity in the wave of turning to a modern shipping industry.