This article proposes a methodological framework for writing a bottom-up history of maritime China by confronting the structural silences of the imperial archive and foregrounding the counter-archives preserved in coastal memory, vernacular practice and embodied knowledge. Drawing on Michel Rolph Trouillot, Ann Stoler and Saidiya Hartman, it shows how official documents simultaneously record and distort the lives of sailors, fisherfolk and seafaring women. Treating the sea as a counter-archive – one that stores memory through circulation, performance and environmental attunement – reframes the South China Sea as a dynamic socio-cultural realm shaped by ordinary people rather than imperial policy alone. By integrating oral histories, genealogies, temple inscriptions, rutters, songs and material culture, the article expands the evidentiary terrain of maritime history and challenges land-centred epistemologies that have long structured the historiography of late imperial China. It offers a model for reconstructing maritime pasts from the perspectives of those who went to sea.
Robert J. Antony (Fri,) studied this question.