The Maritime History of Late Imperial China: Observations on Current Concerns and Recent Research

Vol. 6, No. 2 Late Imperial ChinaDecember 1985 THE MARITIME HISTORY OF LATE IMPERIAL CHINA: OBSERVATIONS ON CURRENT CONCERNS AND RECENT RESEARCH Robert Gardella* Interest in Chinese maritime history has heightened both in China and abroad over the past several years. Perhaps this reflects the realization that, after a lapse of some five and a half centuries since Zheng Ho's flotillas plied the oceans of Asia, both the People's Republic of China (hereafter PRC) and Taiwan are playing increasingly active roles in world maritime affairs. As if symbolically to confirm a renascence of nautical consciousness, the PRC in July, 1985, celebrated the 580th anniversary of the first Ming expedition of 1405-07. Several important scholarly compilations concerning Zheng and his voyages were published in conjunction with this event, and a new museum commemorating the great navigator was inaugurated in Changlo ^. ¿ -ft), have for centuries played important roles in Chinese domestic and overseas trade. The Miaodao Archipelago ; Amoy was not a Venice or an Amsterdam. "13 Although idiosyncratic power structures centered on one or another extraordinary individual could and did arise along the coast as continental power waned during the late Ming, they proved evanescent in the face of the revived central power of the Qing conquerors. 14 8Fairbank, 1983: 9-16. 9Dian Murray, 1979: xvi-xxi. 10Fairbank, 1983: 9-10. 11As the location of numerous relics of Chinese navigation and overseas trade, in July, 1985 the Miaodao Archipelago became the site of China's first maritime history museum. This is located in the harbor area of Miaodao Tang, the main anchorage for this chain of over twenty-one islands. 12WiUs, 1979: 203-238. 13WiUs, 1979: 234. 14WiUs, 1979: 203-204, 234. 52Robert Gardella As Wills himself has been the first to recognize, the availability of new European and Asian archival resources and the findings of recent monographs promise greatly to extend our knowledge of maritime China from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. 15 To cite two recent examples, Lynn Struve's account of the Southern Ming has substantially clarified the sequence of events by which southeastern coastal provinces became involved in the anti-Manchu resistance of 1644-1662, including the Zheng family's creation of a tenacious maritime power base in the region (1984). Ng Chin-keong's pathbreaking study of Amoy's rise to prominence in China's overseas trade from 1683 to 1735 explores the local bases for that port's success. Ng traces the institutionalized networks of profit linking Amoyese merchant-shippers and their official collaborators with Taiwan and Southeast Asia (1983). While not a mirror image of the Mediterranean maritime tradition, China's own seaborn heritage arguably deserves to be accorded greater significance. The originator of the Mediterranean maritime paradigm himself has lately come to acknowledge the Far East as the "greatest of all the world-economies. " In the concluding volume of his Civilization and Capitalism, Fernand Braudel declares that "we are gradually becoming more clearly aware of a 'network of maritime traffic comparable in volume and variety to that of the Mediterranean or of the northern and Atlantic coasts of Europe'" which extended from Egypt to Japan. 16 Braudel locates the axial focus of this Asian. . .