Boundaries and Beyond: China's Maritime Southeast in Late Imperial Times

by Ng Chin-keong

Overview

Using the concept of boundaries, both physical and cultural, to explain the development of China’s maritime southeast and its interactions across maritime East Asia and the broader Asian Seas, this book offers a new way of understanding Chinese history in the late Imperial period. Ng Chin-keong examines social boundaries between “us” and “them;” challenges to rigid demarcations posed by the state; movements of people, goods, and ideas across borders and among cultures; and the line between tradition and innovation. The result is a novel way of understanding China’s relations with neighboring territories and people as well as the nature of tradition in China and its persistence in the face of changing circumstances.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789814722018
Publisher:	Nus Press Pte Ltd
Publication date:	04/15/2017
Pages:	568
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Ng Chin-keong was professor of Chinese history at the National University of Singapore until his retirement in 2006. He is the author of Trade and Society: The Amoy Network on the China Coast, 1683-1735, also published by the National University of Singapore Press.

Table of Contents

List of Maps vii

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xi

Part 1 Maritime East Asia in Historical Perspective

1 Commodity and Market: Structure of the Long-distance Trade in the East Asian Seas and Beyond Prior to the Early Nineteenth Century 3

Part 2 Between "Us" and "Them"

2 Maritime Frontiers, Territorial Expansion and Haifang (Coastal Defense) during the Late Ming and High Qing 57

3 Trade, the Sea Prohibition and the "Folangji", 1513-50 101

4 Treaties, Politics and the Limits of Local Diplomacy in Fuzhou in the Early 1850s 147

5 "Shooting the Eagle": Lin Changyi's Agony in the Wake of the Opium War 175

6 Information and Knowledge: Qing China's Perceptions of the Maritime World in the Eighteenth Century 191

Part 3 Pushing the Traditional Boundaries

7 The Changing Landscape in Rural South Fujian in Late-Ming Times: A Story of the "Little People" (1) 207

8 Gentry-Merchants and Peasant-Peddlers in Offshore Trading Activities, 1522-66: A Story of" the "Little People" (2) 242

9 Managing Maritime Affairs in Late-Ming Times 261

10 Liturgical Services and Business Fortunes: Chinese Maritime Merchants in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries 292

11 The Amoy Riots of 1852: Coolie Emigration and Sino-British Relations 316

Part 4 Transcending Borders

12 Expanding Possibilities: Revisiting the Min-Yue Junk-trade Enterprise on the China Coast and in the Nanyang during the Eighteenth to the Mid-nineteenth Centuries 345

13 The Case of Chen Yilao: Maritime Trade and Overseas Chinese in Qing Policies, 1717-54 415

14 "Are These Persons British or Chinese Subjects?"-Legal Principles and Ambiguities Regarding the Status of the Straits Chinese as Revealed in the Lee Shun Fah Affair in Amoy, 1847 444

Glossary of Chinese Characters 469

Bibliography 474

Index 496

Editorial Reviews

Throughout his career, Chin-keong has been a bold crosser of borders, focusing on geographical boundaries, approaching them through one discipline after another, and cutting across the supposed dividing line between the domestic and the foreign.’ He demonstrated his remarkable versatility as a scholar in his classic book, Trade and Society: The Amoy Network on the China Coast, 1683‒1735, which explored agriculture, cities, migration, and commerce. His new book deepens his research on these topics but also ventures farther afield, pursuing the history of diplomacy, technology, and culture.

Sherman Cochran

Chin-keong brings together the work of forty years of meticulous research on the manifold activities of the coastal Fujian and Guangdong peoples during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Since the publication of his classic study, Trade and Society: The Amoy Network on the China Coast, 1683-1735, he has been pursuing deeper historical questions behind their trading achievements. Here he deals with many vital questions that help us understand the nature of maritime China, and puts his answers in a longer perspective. With China once again fully engaged with the ocean, this volume makes compelling reading.

Wang Gungwu

Ng Chin-keong and NUS Press are to be commended for making available this fine and useful collection of essays by one of the doyens of Asian maritime history. This book should be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of East Asian maritime commerce, international relations, and transnational migrations, and required reading in graduate courses dealing with those subjects.

New Books Asia

This collection of 68 essays spanning some four decades is a convenient collection for anyone interested in this topic. The collection is especially useful because it includes some works difficult to access.

Choice

Ng brings a rich range of experiences and resources to a discussion of Chinese maritime consciousness along the coastal region of Southeast China. In this collection of his scholarly pieces we shall be able to dissect the distinctiveness of his point of view. . . . Ng’s summary and analyses on the historical patterns of maritime development in China is nuanced and grounded in excellent textual scholarship.

Journal of World History