board and lodging. Then he is given a vacation of three months to visit his family, who in the meantime have arranged his marriage for him. When he returns to his master he leaves his wife in his old home. Every three years he is allowed a three months’ vacation with pay which he spends at home.
This strategy to acquire wealth, which was pursued by territorially based lineage systems in inland China, operated as well in the coastal villages and towns of southern Fujian, and later in Guangdong. In this coastal region, embayed river ports and their hinterlands were the principal homelands for peasants, laborers, and traders who set sail in junks along the coasts and across the seas into what was for some terra incognita, but for many others parts of well-known trading networks.
Beyond the borders of imperial China, no area of the world experienced more sustained contact with Chinese or in-migration of Chinese over a longer period of time than the region referred to today as Southeast Asia, and which the Chinese have historically called the Nanyang or Southern Seas. Characterized by landmasses, peninsulas, and islands of many sizes, this is a region of great complexity and vast expanses, yet significant interdependence. Most of the maps of Southeast Asia show the region as a pendulous outlier of mainland Asia at a substantial distance from both China and India. Yet, from a Chinese perspective, the Nanyang was a sea-based region where even the most distant islands could be reached by sailing along well-known and charted routes. The maritime system within which Chinese coastal traders operated actually spanned an area greater than that of the Mediterranean Sea. Including both the East China Sea and the South China Sea, the immense maritime region stretched 5000 kilometers from Korea and Japan in the north to the Malay Archipelago in the south, and 1800 kilometers from coastal China eastward, beyond Taiwan, to the Philippines. Perhaps as many as 80 percent of the 35 million who trace Chinese ancestry and live beyond the political boundaries of China reside today in the crossroads of Southeast Asia.
Topside activity on a Chinese junk as depicted in a circa 1880 engraving.
Although this colorful view of a Fujianese junk is off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, similar vessels plied the routes throughout the Nanyang.
Arab, Indian, Japanese, and Chinese merchants arrived in the regional trading ports of Southeast Asia more than a thousand years before the appearance of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and English. Raw and processed silk was carried from China along the Maritime Silk Road westward through the Indian Ocean where it was exchanged for exotic items from Europe. Among the earliest concrete evidence of the direct trade between China and the western Indian Ocean was a ninth-century Arab or Indian shipwreck filled with Chinese ceramics that was excavated in 1998–9 off Beitung Island between Sumatra and Borneo (Flecker, 2001: 335ff). Moreover, beginning in the eighth century, residential quarters called fanfang for foreign traders from Western Asia were located in Chinese port cities, including Guangzhou (Canton) in Guangdong and Quanzhou (Zaytun) in Fujian as well as farther north in Ningbo (Mingzhou) and Hangzhou in Zhejiang. Exotic commodities such as ivory tusks, gold, silver, pearls, sandalwood, kingfishers’ feathers, pepper, cinnabar, amber, and ambergris, among many other precious goods, found their way to China from the distant lands via the southern sea trade.
In time, the polities within the Southeast Asia region increasingly were brought within the Chinese tribute system that peaked during the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth century. Zheng He, the Muslim Chinese mariner who carried out seven fabled expeditions between 1405 and 1433, traversed the region, reaching some forty destinations that stretched from the Horn of Africa eastward along the southern, southeastern, and eastern shores of Asia. Over the following centuries, many of the ports visited by Zheng He became hubs for Chinese trading networks as well as sites for Chinese settlement and development. Even today, many of these places recall in their historical narratives the visits by Zheng He six centuries earlier.
The South China Sea as well as the East China Sea to its north had well-charted and well-traveled routes—a veritable maritime system of trade routes—that linked small and large ports across a vast region.
Sometimes sojourning resulted simply because Chinese traders were forced to stay for many months at a time at distant emporia waiting for the seasonal shifting of the monsoon winds. Indeed, over the centuries, the seasonal reversal of monsoonal winds was critical in establishing the trade patterns of Chinese traders. From September to April, the winds blew from the northeast to southwest carrying sailing ships from China southward. From May to September, the flow was reversed with the arrival of the southwest monsoon. Following these same routes, Arab traders took as long as two years for a round trip to China. From the fifth to the twelfth century, “the skippers trusted—when venturing out of the sight of land, to the regularity of the monsoons and steered solely by the sun, moon and stars, taking presumably soundings as frequently as possible. From other sources we learn that it was customary on ships which sailed out of sight of land to keep pigeons on board, by which they used to send messages to land” (Hirth and Rockhill, 1911: 28). By the twelfth century, maritime navigation improved with the introduction of a “wet compass” or yeti luojing, a magnetic piece of metal floating in a shallow bowl of water. Zhao Rukua, also known as Chau Ju-kua, a customs inspector in Quanzhou during the Song dynasty, chronicled in his book Zhufan Zhi (Records of the Various Barbarous Peoples) the places and commodities known to peripatetic Chinese during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It was in this way that Chinese sojourners and settlers populated distant lands in increasing numbers as both sojourners and settlers. Their tales of prospects and opportunities no doubt infiltrated the outlooks and hopes of others in their home village.
The greatest flow of Chinese migrants by sea occurred from the mid-eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. While Wang Gungwu describes four overlapping out-migration patterns from southern China to Southeast Asia, only two will be discussed (1991: 4–12). Huashang, Chinese traders/merchants/artisans, comprised the dominant and longest lasting pattern. Huashang during the early periods generally settled down and married local women even when they had a wife in China. As their businesses became more profitable, other family members might leave China and join them. Some Huashang returned to China, according to the rhythm of trade, chose a spouse, and then maintained separate households for their different families. The Huashang type of migration pattern was employed especially by Hokkien migrants from southern Fujian to the Philippines, Java, and Japan; the Hakka on the island of Borneo; and those originating in the Chaozhou region of northeastern Guangdong province. It is both a fact and a curiosity that the Huashang pattern of migration had been practiced for many centuries within China.
Huagong were Chinese contract workers who arrived between the 1850s and the 1920s, usually as sojourners who intended to earn money and then return to their home villages to live out their remaining days. Unskilled contract workers were usually referred to as coolies, an English loanword whose roots reside in many Asian languages, including the Hindi word for laborer, qūlī, and the Chinese term kuli, meaning “bitter work.” Huagong especially played important roles in the opening up of rubber and palm plantations in Sumatra as well as tin mines and plantations along the Malay Peninsula. Substantial numbers of Chinese contract workers/coolies or Huagong also migrated to North America and Australia where they worked as laborers in mining enterprises and in railway construction. As opportunities arose, some of those who arrived as coolies or traders eventually became storekeepers or artisans, while others became farmers or fishermen. Patterns of settlement and return, living and working, varied from period to period. Indeed, as described by Anthony Reid, “It is the curious reversals of the flow southward, periodically running evenly, occasionally gushing, sometimes tightly shut, more often dripping like a leaking tap, that provide the rhythm behind the historical interaction of China and Southeast Asia” (2001: 15). While many other broad and complex topics—the history of migration, reputed business acumen and entrepreneurship, acculturation
