[9] Expansion of the Sinicized World
In Chapter 1 we identified the Vietnamese people as one of the major barriers to further expansion southward of the Chinese state and civilization. They controlled the most accessible land route into Southeast Asia, but absorbed enough of the military and bureaucratic lessons of the Chinese model to be able to hold expansionism back. Having learned these valuable lessons, and relearned them forcefully in the fifteenth century, the Viet were able to commence their own expansion south, which eventually brought them to the Gulf of Thailand. Chinese traders, meanwhile, expanded into all the areas of Southeast Asia where Indian and European trade was weakest. The great expansion in China’s population in the eighteenth century, and resource hunger, drove Chinese miners and agriculturalists southward, to become the region’s largest and most economically dynamic minority.
Fifteenth-Century Revolution in Dai Viet
In replacing an ailing Mongol Empire in China in 1368, the Ming Dynasty inherited some of its predecessor’s interest in world empire. A flurry of missions were sent out to Southeast Asia, and assumed gigantic proportions under the Yunglo Emperor (1403–24) in the form of Zheng He’s fleets. Gunpowder was one of the assets the Ming were able to use in their confrontations with southerners in this period, and played a particularly prominent role in the Chinese occupation of Dai Viet in 1406–7. Dai Viet itself was known to have used a new type of gun to save itself from what appeared certain defeat by an attacking Cham force in 1390, but the Ming forces ensured their victory by developing for the first time a firearms battalion employing various types of cannon and grenade. These innovations enabled the Chinese to conquer the difficult southern neighbor that had escaped its tutelage five centuries earlier, but not to hold it for long. The Viet proved quick learners as they seized more and more weapons in repeated rebellions. In 1427 the Viet troops of Le Loi captured the key remaining Chinese citadel, and a new Chinese emperor was unwilling to continue his predecessor’s adventures in the south when faced with serious threats in the north. Dai Viet was again independent, though careful not to alienate the northern dragon by triumphalism. It quickly returned to a familiar deference through the regular tribute missions on which the Ming set great store.
It was, however, a different Dai Viet. Its army became for a time the most effective in Southeast Asia, equipped with firearms and hundreds of galleys each armed with a simple cannon. This enabled Hanoi to expand its sway to the south and west. The Le Dynasty inaugurated by Le Loi also took advantage of the undoubted strengths of the Chinese system of direct bureaucratic control. Its adoption was regularized under the strongest of the Le rulers, Le Thanh Tong (r.1460–97), who had been educated in Confucian orthodoxy in the post-Chinese-occupation palace. The very Confucian literati on whom the Chinese had relied for their administration now became his state ideologists. He did his best to discourage Buddhism and curb the power of its monks, while extending to the provinces the Confucian “Temples of Literature” (Van Mieu), the oldest of which at the capital already went back to 1070. He established six ministries on the pattern of the Chinese court, and sought to transfer power outside the capital from hereditary war-leaders to Confucian-trained bureaucrats selected by competitive examination in the Chinese classics. Administrators were appointed by the court and rotated at regular intervals at three levels of provincial administration, the lowest of which (chau, or district chiefs) in turn appointed village heads also required to be literate in Chinese. Although Buddhism, spirit cults, kinship networks, and local customs remained popular and periodically challenged Confucian orthodoxy, fifteenth-century Dai Viet marked a Southeast Asian peak of bureaucratic control over an agricultural population. That population doubled or tripled in the fifteenth century to at least three million in Tongking (Dong Kinh, the broader Red River delta), as a consequence of enforced peace, favorable climatic conditions, and perhaps new rice strains. The Le kings were able to control this peasantry as other Southeast Asian rulers were not, and to extract enough tax and labor from it to provide for the capital’s needs. They thereby became less dependent than their predecessors or rivals on international commerce, and indeed more Confucian in giving it a low status in their official outlook.
Le Thanh Tong’s regime could be seen as a revolution as profound as the religious change affecting the rest of Southeast Asia in this and the following centuries. Rather than seeking continuity, Confucian literati of the period excoriated the pre-Ming-occupation regime as thoroughly reprehensible in its personal and public behavior. The Viet victory was justified by its great literati chronicler Nguyen Trai not by rejecting the Chinese model but rather asserting equality with it. “Mountains and Rivers have demarcated the borders. The customs of the North and the South are also different. We find that the Trieu, Dinh, Ly and Tran [dynasties] built our country. Alongside the Han, Tang, Song and Yuan [Dynasties of China], the [Viet] rulers reigned as emperors over their own part.” (Trai 1428 in Truong 1967). This Confucian revolution appears also to mark a vital break in the relation between Dai Viet and its neighbors. Where earlier regimes had fought with Champa and exchanged consorts with hill peoples as virtual equals, the fifteenth-century Le court insisted that it was equal to China in virtue and civilization, and thereby contrasted with its non-Sinified neighbors necessarily classified as “barbarian.” The literati justified the campaigns that Le Thanh Tong launched against Chams to the south and Tai people to the west in terms of civilized behavior and heaven’s mandate. Captured Ming soldiers were settled on the land as model subjects, but captured southerners were required to make more drastic adjustments, adopting the virtues, dress, language, and habits of the Han, not of course in its modern Chinese-ethnic sense but as the civilization with which the Le court identified.
Viet Expansion, Nam Tien
Under Le Thanh Tong the Viet held the upper hand against both Chams in the south and Lao-Tai peoples in the western hills. Dai Viet chronicles, confirmed to a degree by Chinese ones, relate that expeditions penetrated as far as the Mekong and extracted booty and tribute from the Lao princedoms. The Muong and Tai peoples up to the watershed between the Tongking Gulf rivers and the Mekong were no longer equals, but tributaries expected to recognize the superior virtue of the lowland civilization. Along the coast Dai Viet used its galleys and artillery to press southward to successive Cham centers. In the fourteenth century, coastal warfare had moved back and forth. Viet galleys reached as far as the Hai Van pass in 1308, but the Cham king Che Bong Na in turn attacked the Viet capital itself on at least three occasions. The expeditions of Le Thanh Tong were of a more permanent kind, designed to settle Han (“civilized” Viet or Chinese) in areas previously Cham, and to force the Cham to adopt similar norms. Champa was even less a united polity in this period than usual, and it is clear that the Dai Viet troops were able to overcome local resistance piecemeal. The lucrative Quang Nam area just beyond the Hai Van Pass was probably secured in a campaign of 1460–1, and the southerly center of Vijaya, in what became Quy Nhon, was taken in 1471.
The fall of Vijaya was a major event in Southeast Asian history. It was mentioned not only in Chinese and Viet chronicles but also in the Melaka annals (Sejarah Melayu) because a party of commercially oriented Cham refugees from this disaster played roles as China traders in Melaka and as commercial-military elites in the rise of Aceh in Sumatra. The most striking confirmation of this movement of Chamic peoples is that a hybrid variant of their languages, Acehnese, spread with the Aceh sultanate around the coasts of northern Sumatra to become the largest surviving Chamic language of today. The Cham of the coast had in fact four options, apart from capture or death in battle (some 60,000 were listed as killed in the Viet chronicle): to flee to the nearby hills where there had long been symbiotic relations with forest collectors; to flee further south to the southernmost holdout of a Cham polity (Panduranga) near modern Phan Rang; to join trading partners in Cambodia or the Malay-speaking world, an option taken by most of the Cham Muslim minority; or to stay and negotiate the pressures to assimilate as “civilized” Viet.
We must assume this last process to have been a long and complex one. Dai Viet fell into disastrous internal conflict in the sixteenth century, which appears to have coincided with a drying-up of the former arteries of trade along the northernmost outlets of the Red River and their replacement by the present main channel much further south. There were frequent famines, and the population appears to have been set back after the surge in the fifteenth century. The Viet state was not again in a position to dictate the terms of Cham or Khmer assimilation until the next great surge of Confucianization in the nineteenth century. Recent revisionist histories have replaced the nationalist narrative of continuously expanding Viet control in favor of a high degree of local agency and variation, and periodic reassertions of a separate polity in the commercially crucial Quang Nam area through most of the sixteenth century. In the longer term, hybrid southern patterns of ritual activity, domestic and gender relations, and music kept Cham influence alive up to the nineteenth century, by which time some of these were reinterpreted as Vietnamese. Further south the Panduranga Cham polity sent tribute to whichever Viet state demanded it, but also pursued its own foreign relations with China, with the Muslim Malay negeri to its south, and with the first Portuguese to pass that way, until prevented by tighter Viet control after 1611. The importance of Muslim traders in sustaining Panduranga was reflected in the steady Islamization of its elite, with the king following the traders into the faith in the seventeenth century.
In one sense the Nam Tien (lit. South marching) celebrated in nationalist histories represented an historic shift southward of the frontier of the Sinified world of Chinese writing, manners, and political ideals, at the expense of “Indianized” Southeast Asia. In another, however, it helped secure the long-term Southeast Asian identity of the Viet by enmeshing them not only in hybridizations with Cham and Khmer cultures, but also in negotiations with their now multiplied regional neighbors. Until the nineteenth century, indeed, it was far from clear that the long coastline today recognized as Viet Nam could ever be a single country. The eternal preoccupation of the north (Tongking) with its autonomy from and equality with China was a world away from the multiple ethnic, cultural, and political negotiations of the south, which we may begin to call Cochin-China from 1600.
The achievements of the Le Dynasty in the fifteenth century were sufficient to ensure it a nominal and ritual place for the next three centuries. Like Japanese emperors in the same period, however, the Le counterparts were rendered powerless by new forces that valued them only because of their historic eminence in Viet and Chinese eyes. The first such force into the field was the Mac family of military guardians of the weakened court, which claimed the throne in its own name in 1527. This inaugurated one of the most turbulent periods of Dai Viet history, when the population was significantly reduced by incessant warfare and instability. Mac rule was challenged by two military clans from the Thanh Hoa area, the same southern borderland of Tongking that had led resistance against the Chinese. The Nguyen and the Trinh jointly recovered a Le pretender from the Lao hills and fought the Mac in his name. Distrust between the legitimist allies was, however, intensified by the political assassinations of the two leading Nguyen figures, father and son, in separate incidents. Fearing for his safety as the Trinh gained the upper hand, a younger son, Nguyen Hoang, volunteered in 1558 to go to the newly conquered but contested south as Governor of the Quang Nam area in the name of the Le. Concentrating his forces there in relative safety from the fratricidal horrors of the civil war in Tongking, he gradually built up his power. He found abundant local resources to sustain a new state known to Europeans as Cochin-China, and to Vietnamese as Dang Trong.
Recent studies have emphasized that Nguyen Hoang by no means built this state in a vacuum. Vietnamese soldiers of or refugees from the various Tongking factions, Cham survivors, and foreign traders had continued to interact in this crucial stage on the route to China throughout the sixteenth century. Up until 1608, Japanese ships had continued to use the term Champa for what was probably the old Cham port and heartland on the Thu Bon River. By the 1620s this port emerges into Vietnamese usage as Hoi An and foreign usage as Faifo, and one assumes the Nguyen had gained control of it. An acute northern observer later noted that this “was a place in which ships gathered since ancient times. Since the Nguyen occupied the area, they gained much from the taxes on the shipping trade” (Le Quy Don 1776/1993, 26). Hoi An quickly became a center of choice for exchanges between Japanese traders (banned from direct access to China) and Chinese. Although drawing some of their power from Vietnamese-style delta agriculture further north in Quang Nam and Thuan Hoa, the Nguyen drew most of their wealth and military materiel from this port, in the manner of negeri in the Islands.
By 1600 it was becoming clear that Nguyen Hoang had given up ambitions for the center and was seeing himself as an alternative shogun-like lord (Chua), whose loyalty to the nominal Le emperors held little meaning as long as they were held hostage by the Trinh. Not until 1624, however, did Hoang’s son and successor formally reject a Trinh demand for tax revenues, precipitating a series of seven bitter wars between the two Viet states in the period 1627–72. While vastly outnumbered by Tongking troops, the southerners held their own through superior arms (many from Portuguese sources), organization, and perhaps motivation. Thereafter mutual exhaustion dictated a stalemate that became a permanent walled border to the south of Nghe An (Map 9.1). The following century was one of relative peace, allowing Cochin-China to expand its activities further south. In 1702 its ruler requested China to recognize him as king of Dai Viet, but received the reply that the Le were already so regarded. In practice the Nguyen were independent kings capable of innovative Confucian justifications of their virtue. Nguyen Phuc Khoat (r.1738–65), in particular, called himself not only king but “Grand Mentor,” in emulation of one of the virtuous small states admired by Confucius 2,000 years earlier.
Map 9.1 Viet expansion southward.
Debate will long continue on the extent to which the Nam Tien did shift the Indo-Chinese Peninsula in a more Sinified or Confucian direction and transform the lifestyle of the peoples who fell under Viet control. At the level of the literate elite on whose records we largely rely, ideals of correct behavior upheld by Tang and Song Dynasty writers in China became the standard, by which Southeast Asian practices like eating with the right hand, chewing betel, and dressing in simple wrap-around sarung were found wanting. More central is the position of Chinese women, whose bound feet and powerless transfer from control of the father to that of the husband and his family seems the antithesis of the Southeast Asian pattern we have sketched. The Nguyen legal code issued at the height of the late neo-Confucian reaction of the nineteenth century (see below) appeared indeed to seek to impose a replica of late Chinese Qing-Dynasty codes. It was a relief to nationalists when the older Le Code was found to embody more even-handed provisions on matters such as women’s inheritance. This was based on older Chinese models before Chinese inheritance had been adjusted by neo-Confucians to exclude female inheritance. Both codes probably encouraged literati families that read them to treat their women in a more Confucian way. But social practice diverged very profoundly from these norms on matters of marriage and inheritance. In the south and in the western hills, nineteenth-century visitors still found women conducting virtually all commercial transactions. Chapter 15 looks more carefully at the ways in which European, Chinese, Islamic, and otherwise “modern” gender relations tended to spread more restrictive female roles downward from the top, as an unfortunate aspect of status systems that privileged the foreign. But Viet interaction with the peoples and environment of the south made it far more difficult for these idealized Confucian models to impose themselves on social realities.
Cochin-China’s Plural Southern Frontier
Tens of thousands of Tongking-born Viet farmers came to the less-populated south in the seventeenth century, as soldiers of the Nguyen, captives and defectors from the Trinh armies, refugees from the incessant fighting in the north, or simply in search of more land. In mid-century over 20,000 captives were settled on land in Phu Yen alone, close to the northern border of the remnant Champa state of Panduranga at modern Phan Rang. In 1693, when the last of a series of Cham rebellions was crushed and Panduranga was reduced to a powerless tributary little different from a province, even that barrier was removed. Where they settled, the Viet adapted local Cham agricultural methods, but also added deltaic techniques of dykes and canals long practiced in Tongking. They did not always directly displace Cham farmers whose agricultural pattern was more dispersed. These pioneer settlers in turn colonized the immensely fertile Mekong delta in the eighteenth century, but there they faced bigger challenges of a landscape that disappeared entirely under water in the flood season. Keeping the family and the essential buffaloes alive through that season required the special skills the Khmer had long developed.
Cochin-China was already a player in the Mekong delta throughout the seventeenth century. Even if Cham, Malay, and Chinese pioneers were all initially more numerous than Viet, the Nguyen armed galleys had a military edge in many of the contests of that turbulent century. In 1616 a Cochin-China princess was married to the Cambodian king who was struggling to keep order on the lower Mekong. This alliance helped Cambodia defeat a Thai intervention in 1619, and probably established a Viet military presence in the capital at Phnom Penh. Cochin-China intervened again in 1658, to help a rebel alliance overthrow the Muslim king of Cambodia, after which the Buddhist replacement was expected to send tribute to Cochin-China. When the fighting with Tongking stopped in the 1670s Cochin-China was freer to pursue an expansionist policy in its open southern frontier, and intervened regularly thereafter in every Cambodian succession dispute. The shape of the future emerged as early as 1674 when Cochin-China supported a second Khmer ruler near modern Saigon, more of a Viet client than his Phnom Penh rival.
Cochin-China’s privileged relation with Chinese refugees and settlers was the key to its eventual success in the Mekong delta. The Nguyen rulers in the south were free to accept Chinese rebels and refugees, while Tongking shared a dangerous border with China and had to manage the delicate tributary relations in the name of the captive Le ruler. This became crucial when the Manchus conquered the China heartland in 1644, and struggled to gain control of the troublesome maritime provinces of Fujian and Guangdong with their many overseas connections. In its fight with the Fujian- and Taiwan-based Zheng family, which proclaimed continued loyalty to the Ming but operated an independent maritime empire with hundreds of ships, the Manchus banned seaborne trade altogether and tried to evacuate coastal trading centers. The maritime traders had little choice but to join the Zheng opposition, which itself was finally crushed in 1684, or to seek opportunities overseas. Cochin-China, and the “water frontier” of the Mekong delta and Gulf of Thailand, was a natural destination. By 1700 there were an estimated 30,000 such Ming loyalists in Cochin-China, and “Ming exiles” (Minh Huong) later became the standard way of referring to long-settled Chinese.
The balance of power in the Mekong delta area was tipped in 1679 by a well-armed flotilla of such refugees. Some 50 ships and 3,000 Chinese soldiers defecting from the losing battle being fought by the Zheng family in Taiwan arrived in Hoi An. The Nguyen ruler accepted them as civilized fellow Han but shrewdly sent them to settle the Saigon area at the northern edge of the Mekong delta. The squabbling Cambodian rulers had no such resources at their disposal, and, in effect, control of the vital maritime entries to the Mekong passed to this group of Chinese. Not until 1732 did a Viet administration in Bien Hoa end the virtual autonomy of their commercial center on the Saigon River, while the Mekong delta proper remained an ungoverned frontier for much longer. The Ming refugees formed a military vanguard for further Chinese and Viet settlers on Khmer territory, built the Saigon area into a major commercial center, and extended the frontier of Han civilization. A Vietnamese chronicler noted that after they arrived “the region around Saigon began to be more and more influenced by Han customs” (cited Choi 2004, 39). On the other hand, ethnic relations were particularly bitter in this frontier of “much yang and not much yin” (Trinh 1820, cited Dutton et al. 2012, 269). Catholic missionaries are the best source for outbreaks of appalling violence in which ordinary Khmer and Viet killed each other in their thousands, in 1730–1, 1750–1, and 1769. Chinese in turn were targeted by the Tay Son in 1782 (see below). As a frontier, the Mekong delta saw a great deal of intermarriage of immigrant males with local women, cultural and religious hybridity, and commercial interaction. In the absence of agreed norms of government, however, it also had a frontier fluidity that allowed conflicts to rage unchecked.
Mac Cuu was an enterprising Hainanese who left his native Guangdong as a teenager in the 1670s, and built up a following among fellow-Hainanese, Cantonese, and Teochiu in the frontier area of Cambodia’s coast on the Gulf of Thailand. In about 1700 he bought from the Cambodian king the monopoly license to farm gambling revenues in the small port of Ha Tien (Cancao to Europeans), and gradually built it into an autonomous port-state. He and his Sino-Viet son and successor minted their own coins, built temples and fortresses, and sought to uphold there the dress and rituals of the defeated Ming court. The port’s success drew repeated attacks from Siam, which led the Macs gradually to seek more protection from Cochin-China. It remained above all a frontier town throughout the eighteenth century, however, profiting from the absence of the suffocating embrace of any major state. It became a second Chinese-dominated but multi-ethnic commercial frontier for expanding Han culture. A third was the Bassac River, the southernmost navigable outlet of the Mekong to the sea, and therefore the furthest from the growing control of Cochin-China.
These three centers between them in the 1760s became the dominant hub for Chinese shipping in its expansive phase in Southeast Asia, replacing both Hoi An and Ayutthaya (Siam), and exceeding Batavia or Manila. With Siam on its knees from the Burmese invasion, tin, sappanwood, pepper, and other “Straits produce” from Siam, Cambodia, the Peninsula, and Sumatra was exported through these frontier entrepôts to China. The upheavals of the Tay Son followed by the rise of stronger Mainland states and of Singapore in the nineteenth century put an end to this phase and created other magnets for Chinese. Nevertheless, Chinese remained vital in the economy of this area as pepper and sugar cultivators as well as traders.
The Greater Viet Nam of the Nguyen
The independent history of a single Vietnamese state from the Chinese border to the Gulf of Thailand was of short duration, from 1802 to the French seizure of Saigon and the Mekong delta in 1859–61. The remarkable achievement of unifying this improbably long stretch of coastline was not in fact, and arguably could never have been, the result of a relentless “march south” from the historic Dai Viet state in Tongking. Rather it was the messy, multicultural dynamism of the south that managed to march north at the end of the eighteenth century. It was the product of an extended period of warfare, and imposed by one essentially military regime at the expense of another. Nobody can be sure how long the unified state that now called itself Viet Nam could have endured without the French intervention. But the cultural achievements discussed in Chapter 8 had laid the basis for a common sensibility among all who could read nom or enjoy the literature of performance in Vietnamese.
The destruction of the two-state model that had endured almost two centuries was brought about by the very success of the Nguyen in riding the commercial expansion of the southern frontier. By 1770 their original cash cow in Hoi An had become moribund, and the center of commercial exchanges had shifted to the Mekong delta area they were in no position to squeeze. The rice surplus on which the Cochin-China capital and army depended was now produced primarily in the commercial south, and had to be paid for by taxing some more vulnerable province. The heaviest burden in fact fell on cash-crop producers in the central highlands, from whom a new challenge suddenly developed. In 1773 a betelnut trader and minor official named Nguyen Nhac led a party of trained malcontents down from these highlands to capture the provincial capital of Quy Nhon. The movement became known by the name of their home village, Tay Son (western mountains). Having succeeded so easily, they quickly spread the movement north and south. As they went they adopted popular symbols of local Cham and highlander identity, as well as the soubriquet “virtuous and charitable thieves” given them by peasants happy to see them attack the unprecedented riches of the then regent and extortionist-in-chief of Cochin-China.
As the Tay Son began to challenge the Cochin-China heartland, Tongking saw its opportunity to attack from the north in 1774. This pincer pressure from north and south forced the Nguyen to abandon their capital by sea, and re-establish their base in the wealthy but turbulent south. The northern forces then advanced against the Tay Son, whose leader Nguyen Nhac cleverly submitted on the understanding that the Tay Son would continue the fight against the Nguyen in the south while the northerners held Phu Xuan and the center. Warfare then continued for a decade between the Nguyen and the Tay Son for control of the flourishing commercial centers of Gia Dinh and Saigon. These changed hands several times before the final victory of the Tay Son in 1785. In the process the Tay Son destroyed most of the Nguyen forces in 1777, killing all members of the ruling family except the 15-year-old prince Nguyen Anh. Although the Tay Son rise had been made possible by the support of Chinese armed brotherhoods (hui), relations worsened to culminate in anti-Chinese pogroms in 1782 when the Tay Son massacred all the Chinese traders they could find after taking Saigon. Victim estimates range from 4,000 to 20,000.
Nguyen Anh’s last stand of this phase of the war was virtually a Siamese incursion, as the prince-pretender fled to Bangkok and persuaded the soldier-king Taksin to back his bid to regain power. The first direct Siamese-Vietnamese confrontation ended in a complete victory for the latter, the Tay Son annihilating the Siamese navy of 300 ships in an ambush on an arm of the Mekong in January 1785. The Tay Son were now free to turn their attention north. Nguyen Nhac had already proclaimed himself Emperor in 1778, though symbolically using a former Cham center as his imperial capital rather than Phu Xuan, now occupied by the northerners. Profiting from a succession crisis in Tongking, he sent his brother north with an army that took Phu Xuan in June 1786, and Thang Long (Hanoi) only a month later as the Trinh regime disintegrated. Nguyen Nhac and his two brothers now divided into three the vast territory that had fallen to them, though the northern third was nominally under the authority of a restored Le emperor whose daughter one of the brothers had married. After a second round of fighting over the north, however, the Le emperor appealed for Chinese intervention. A vast Qing (Manchu) army occupied Hanoi in 1788 without resistance, but was expelled only a few months later as a Tay Son army fell on them unawares at midnight during the New Year holidays. Equally impressive was the skill of the second Tay Son brother in having the Chinese court recognize him as legitimate king of all Viet Nam. His Quang Trung Dynasty began to fall apart with his death in 1792, however. Brief, upstart, ad hoc, and bloody as it was, the Tay Son irruption of energy was celebrated by many nationalists and Marxists as a liberation, a peasant rebellion, a unifier of the country, and defender against foreign intervention. Its achievement in destroying the old system is more evident than in building the new, but it did begin an important experiment of translating the Chinese classics into nom so that examinations could be conducted in the vernacular.
It was Nguyen Anh who reaped the harvest of founding a new dynasty to rule an unprecedentedly large Viet Nam. He did so in a distinctly southern and pluralist way troubling to nationalist narratives. Desperate for allies to retake the very plural south, he reached out to hybrid southerners we might today label Siamese, Malays, Chinese, and Khmers, as well as Dutch, Portuguese, and French. He attempted alliances with Siam, vitiated by conflicts over Cambodia, and France and other European states, interrupted by the French Revolution. One of his most sustained supporters was the French priest Pigneau de Behaine, who befriended the desperate pretender in 1777 and shared his flight around islands in the Gulf of Thailand. He traveled to Pondicherry and France on Nguyen Anh’s behalf in 1786–7, and eventually returned without the promised royal support but with a collection of arms, four ships, and about 40 European mercenaries he had enrolled in the cause. Nguyen Anh’s other allies had enabled him to retake Saigon in 1788, but the subsequent arrival of Pigneau’s men undoubtedly assisted his subsequent strategic advances. Nguyen Anh eventually conquered the Tay Son stronghold of Quy Nhon in 1799, and the other major centers including Thang Long (Hanoi) in a rapid advance in 1802. A British visitor estimated that the king’s able deployment of his few European mercenaries helped produce “a more regular and effective military power than probably was ever before formed” in southern Asia (Crawfurd 1828/1967, 509). Even when the standing army was reduced after the conquest from 150,000 men to 50,000, it included 200 60-oared gunboats carrying up to 22 guns each, and 600 smaller armed galleys.
A new Nguyen Dynasty, Viet Nam’s last and most ambitious, thus began the mammoth task of seeking to integrate its entire S-shaped domains. Its roots were firmly in the south, and its military strength based on the battle-hardened southern warriors. Nguyen Anh ruled the center directly from his new capital of Hue near that of his ancestors in Phu Xuan, with the reign title Gia Long (1802–20). In the south he installed a governor necessarily tolerant of the Chinese, Christian, Cham, and Khmer diversities through which he had come to power. Only after his son succeeded with the reign name Minh Mang (1820–41) did sternly assimilationist policies produce a bitter Khmer rebellion in 1833, even sterner repression, and a legacy of ethnic hostility.
In the north the new administration had to rely on the literati elite then enjoying its most creative phase. Some of its greatest works had already been written as the Dai Viet state was disintegrating, but a new dynasty presented the challenge of an empty slate. In effect the Nguyen regime undertook a neo-Confucian redefinition of the state, beginning in Tongking where it had little other basis for legitimacy except that which was offered by its literati collaborators. These scholars had educated the second ruler Minh Mang, who sought in Confucian virtue a solution to the many challenges assailing the country. He attempted to impose this orthodoxy as a cure-all even in advancing the frontier of Han civilization at the expense of Cambodia. His neo-traditional reforms had a provisional quality not unlike the equally short-lived French regime that followed. Each was educating its future officials on radically new principles that were nevertheless unable to keep up with the pace of change. The Nguyen attempt at redefinition will be weighed in a broader context in Chapter 11.
The Commercial Expansion of a “Chinese Century,” 1740–1840
The Ming loyalist refugees of the seventeenth century had been exceptional in the long story of Chinese emigration. They consciously sought to use their muscle to build Chinese-style polities outside imperial control. The usual economic factors returned once the new Manchu government vanquished its maritime opponents in the 1680s and reopened its ports for business. There was still official hostility to leaving the Middle Kingdom to live abroad, but only a wealthy trader like Chen Ilao of Batavia would attract sufficient attention to be punished in returning to China. His exemplary trial and banishment in 1749 was the last, and five years later the judgement was effectively reversed by a decree that allowed Chinese males (women were still totally banned) to leave and to return with their foreign wealth. The population of the Manchu Empire as a whole grew from about 150 million in 1700 to 400 million in 1850, increasing its contrast with sparsely settled Southeast Asia, whose population was still below 50 million in 1850. The open frontiers of the south beckoned. The period 1740–1840 has been labeled Southeast Asia’s “Chinese century” in a corrective to Eurocentric histories, because of the dynamic role of southern Chinese traders, miners, craftsmen, shipbuilders, and agriculturalists in opening up its economic frontiers.
Europeans had contributed substantially to Southeast Asia’s age of commerce in the long sixteenth century, but the Dutch and English monopolies had a stultifying effect in the period that followed, reducing incentives for participation in the world economy. The new commercial dynamic evident in the late eighteenth century was carried by actors outside the mercantilist systems of states. Other Asian or Asia-based traders (including British and French “country traders” with Asian crews and home ports), and, after 1776, Americans from Boston and Salem, played a major part, but Chinese were the prime exemplars of the trend. If Newbold (1839/1971 I, 9) is right in estimating the total Chinese population of Southeast Asia to have risen to “nearly a million” by 1830, then their proportion of the total Southeast Asian population (2–3%) would then have been greater than in later periods, including that of the notorious “coolie trade.” The striking feature of this period is that Chinese enterprise focused on frontiers outside strong state control, such as the Mekong delta area just discussed.
In their early expansive phase as Asian trade hubs, Spanish Manila and Dutch Batavia had been the greatest magnets for Chinese traders and craftsmen, but this honeymoon soured as the European establishments felt their comfortable monopolies threatened by more dynamic and hungry Chinese. An anti-Chinese pogrom spectacularly marked the change of mood, though economic changes were more decisive. In 1740 some disgruntled Chinese who had lost their jobs on sugar plantations attacked the outskirts of Batavia, prompting a wave of paranoia among Dutch and other residents. Some 6,000–10,000 Chinese in the city were massacred and their goods seized, disastrously wounding the city’s economic lifeblood. The VOC was upset enough over this atrocity to imprison the Governor-General who had presided over it and to send a letter of apology to the Chinese court. The official reaction in Beijing appeared calmer, since the victims were in any case unfilial subjects who should not have left their homes: “Now that the King [Governor-General] of Java repented and wished to reform … the various barbarians in the southern oceans [should] be allowed to trade with us as usual” (cited Blussé 2008, 42). In Manila, pogroms had already occurred in the previous century without upsetting longer-term trade, but in 1755 the Spanish excluded non-Catholic Chinese from the Philippines altogether. A distinct overseas Chinese identity was for the following century less attractive in the Dutch settlements and virtually impossible in the Spanish. Chinese already in the Philippines became Catholic mestizo in the second generation, and were increasingly dominant in the economy until in the mid-nineteenth century they merged with the Filipino elite to become the landed aristocracy of the country. Chinese in Java were more inclined to assimilate into the indigenous states through Islamization. China-based traders and new migrants, on the other hand, shifted focus to Asian-ruled ports that became the new hubs of Chinese commerce in the Nanyang.
The long reign of the Qienlong Emperor (1736–95) was a final period of relative order and prosperity in China before its modern decline. It even renewed the policy, not seen since the fifteenth century, of intervention in the succession crises of its southern neighbors. There were short-lived and unsuccessful invasions by land into Burma in 1766 and Tay Son Viet Nam in 1788. Since the restorer of Siamese sovereignty after a Burmese conquest, King Taksin, was initially deemed a “usurper” in Beijing, there was a disruption even to this natural alliance. Exceptionally cordial relations followed these crises, however, as if all parties recognized the need for solidarity against greater threats from the West. Viet Nam and Siam sent missions almost every year from 1788 to 1830, more than at any time since 1460. Even the slave-raiding island negeri of Sulu, anxious for commercial relations outside the threatening Spanish embrace, sent seven “tribute” missions through Xiamen in 1727–66, something no Archipelago state had done for two centuries.
Chinese traders and migrants were an essential resource for Siam and many independent negeri of the Malay world in this period, providing precious revenue through export duties and opium and gaming monopolies. The heavily armed Ming loyalists of the seventeenth century had been divisively political, and their ambitions had fed directly into those of the turbulent frontier world of the Gulf of Thailand and Mekong delta. Whereas the Cantonese of Ha Tien assisted the rise of the Nguyen, the rival Teochiu of the Chantaburi area provided the initial military muscle for the half-Chinese King Taksin to establish Siam’s authority in the same disputed area. By contrast, later Chinese traders and migrants of the eighteenth appeared relatively harmless to Southeast Asian rulers. “The peaceable, unambitious and supple character of the Chinese [junk traders] and the conviction, on the part of the native governments, of their exclusive devotion to commercial pursuits, disarm all jealousy, and make them welcome guests everywhere” (Crawfurd 1820 III, 185).
The junk trade of Bangkok appears to have risen more than tenfold in the century up to the 1820s, most of the increase being under the auspices of the Chakri rulers from 1782. Bangkok was Southeast Asia’s principal entrepôt for Chinese shipping at the time John Crawfurd surveyed it in the 1820s, with about 80 sea-going junks based there and another 60 visiting each year from China (Crawfurd 1828/1967, 410–16). Saigon and other ports in the Mekong delta also had an extraordinary growth once Nguyen control became established, although most of the junks based there escaped official Vietnamese control and duties. Both Bangkok and the Mekong delta ports became great centers for Chinese shipbuilding at about half the cost of building in Fujian. The hybrid European-influenced ships of Nguyen Viet Nam quickly became both the most frequent visitors to Singapore on its establishment in 1819, and the most admired by European observers. Although the Vietnamese chronicles give little hint of such maritime dynamic, these neat “Cochin-Chinese” ships became an essential staple in the rise of Singapore in the period 1820–50.
In the Archipelago and Peninsula, too, Chinese demand for tropical products as well as staples such as rice and cotton increased strongly in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. The traditional attitude of the Chinese court that China needed nothing from abroad was broken as population increases and crop failures created a demand for the cheaper imported rice of the Chao Phraya and Mekong deltas. As early as 1722 the Imperial court ordered that 18,000 tons of rice be imported from Siam and the taxes on it waived to relieve shortages. Later in the century, rice exports to southern China became a major factor also for southern Viet Nam and Luzon (Chapter 11). But although the rice trade helped change official attitudes, more valuable items such as pepper, sugar, gold, tin, pearls, sea-slugs, sharks fin, birds’ nests, and tortoiseshell were more profitable for shippers. Ports outside the European networks proved the more enterprising in meeting this demand in the “Chinese century.” Sulu, a sultanate on the small islands between Mindanao and Borneo, was one example of the phenomenon, gathering sea-products to send to China and using this trade wealth also to fund a slave-raiding and marketing system. Trengganu and Kelantan on the Peninsula, the Riau-Lingga archipelago to the south of Singapore, and Brunei and Pontianak in Borneo were other ports which profited from the demand from China and the visits from its junks.
The trade and shipping indices make clear that it was not European stimulus that explains the return of export growth to Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth century after a long stagnation, but the Asian, and particularly Chinese, demand. Even in a European port like Dutch Melaka, Chinese and Malay ship calls more than doubled between 1761 and 1780 to become the dominant traffic of the port, while Dutch declined and only English rose to a comparable degree. The data compiled by Crawfurd show that only about one eighth of Chinese vessels trading to Southeast Asia visited the European ports, a striking contrast with a century or more earlier, when Manila and Batavia alone attracted more than half.
Chinese on Southern Economic Frontiers
The growth of China’s economy in the eighteenth century, and the lifting of restrictions on coming and going, stimulated a demand for minerals and tropical products that drove the frontier of Chinese economic activity southward. Colonies of Chinese miners were established in the northern tributaries of Dai Viet and Burma, and in western Borneo, Phuket, Kelantan, and Bangka. Chinese planters established new export industries of pepper in Brunei, Cambodia, and Chantaburi, gambir in Riau and Johor, and sugar in Siam and Cochin-China.
Yunnan was the Chinese mining Eldorado of the eighteenth century, attracting about half a million miners by the century’s end. The thirst for silver, copper, lead, iron, and tin did not respect any borders, however. Chinese miners would negotiate with any authority that claimed a share of the profits. Silver was a constant need of China’s expanding economy, and the miners followed the seams southward through the stateless highlands between China and Southeast Asia. The Bawdwin and Mawling mines in the northern Shan area tributary to Burma, one of Asia’s richest sources of silver and lead, had attracted Chinese miners since 1412, Ming records suggest, but malaria and the rugged terrain had protected it against imperial control. In the eighteenth century production was lifted to meet the Chinese demand, and tens of thousands of Chinese miners worked there. Having defeated four Chinese invasions of the area in the 1760s, the kings of Ava were able to extract a good revenue from the Chinese miners by the 1820s, reported to amount annually to about 160 kg of silver or 1,200 pounds sterling.
In the northern borders of Tongking, notably what is today Thai-Nguyen Province, there was also a great eighteenth-century expansion of copper and silver mining. Despite Dai Viet attempts to restrict them, by mid-century there were upward of 20,000 Cantonese at the Tong-tinh copper mining complex alone. By the 1760s the copper mines of this region were perhaps the largest complex in Southeast Asia, producing over 500 tons per annum and providing half the revenues of the Tongking court.
Tin was an export from the Peninsula to India from at least the fifteenth century. Attempts by the VOC and the rulers of Siam and Aceh to control and monopolize the trade in the seventeenth century forced it to migrate to new areas such as Phuket (Junk Ceylon), where for a time it was freer. The first Chinese involvement in mining the rich lode of the Peninsula may indeed have occurred in Phuket in the early eighteenth century. The systematic exploitation of tin to meet the burgeoning demand of China for the tinfoil burnt as joss paper in offerings to the ancestors, however, began with the introduction of Chinese miners to Bangka in the middle of that century.
The tin of Bangka had apparently been discovered only around 1710 by Muslim Sino-Malays familiar with mines on the Peninsula. In 1722 the VOC tried to monopolize its output through a contract with the Sultan of Palembang. Production by traditional Southeast Asian methods produced a few hundred tons a year until about 1750, when a local Chinese began systematically importing Chinese contract workers from Guangdong with their more sophisticated sluicing techniques. Production increased rapidly, so that deliveries to the VOC averaged 1,562 tons a year by the 1760s. The VOC monopoly was by no means effective, and English, Chinese, and other traders exported the lion’s share of the output in the later eighteenth century through independent ports such as Riau, Trengganu, and Ha Tien. By the 1770s about 5,000 tons of Southeast Asian tin a year was being exported to China, mostly from Bangka, making it the leading production center in the world.
At this point there were probably over 6,000 Chinese miners in Bangka, chiefly Hakkas from the Meixian area of Guangdong. They were organized in profit-sharing teams (kongsi, pinyin gongsi) of about 30 men, often indebted to a Sino-Malay trader in Palembang who provided the capital for their journey to Bangka. This teamwork made possible an altogether larger scale of operation. The ore was extracted to a depth of 10 meters with a chain-pallet pump and smelted with a superior furnace and bellows. Consequently “Banka tin” gained an unrivalled reputation for purity worldwide. Production faltered during the insecurity at the end of the century, but increased again once the Dutch after 1816 decided to rule the island directly and even supervise the importation of Chinese labor. Tin production was again around 3,000 tons a year in the 1830s, when demand was expanding through the rapid European advances in manufacturing tin plate. By the 1850s Southeast Asia was providing most of Europe’s tin.
Chinese mining gradually wrought the same transformation on the rich Peninsula tinfields as it had in Bangka, though with many initial setbacks from the lack of security, feuds among miners, and periodic pogroms against them. Clearing the forest and scouring the surface with their tin pits, they created a rugged frontier that attracted others to feed and supply them. The Sultan of Perak experimented with bringing in Chinese miners on the Bangka model in the 1770s, and his Selangor counterpart followed suit in 1815. In Sungei Ujung (modern Seremban area) there were said to be nearly a thousand Chinese working in 1828 when a massacre ended the experiment. Each time violence broke out new miners were induced to return a few years later. By 1835 the whole Peninsula was estimated to produce 2,050 tons a year, the largest amounts coming from Perak, Sungei Ujung, and Trengganu. The British Straits Settlements (Penang, Melaka, and Singapore) exported 3,750 tons a year of Peninsula tin by mid-century, keeping pace with the Bangka production. The modern tin industries of Malaysia and Indonesia were a creation of the “Chinese century,” not the colonial one.
Gold may have been the first Southeast Asian mineral to attract Chinese miners, with some local traditions suggesting the mines at Pulai, in upriver Kelantan on the Peninsula, go back to Ming times (pre-1644). Firm evidence only exists for the eighteenth century, however, when larger-scale sluice mining by experienced Hakka kongsis replaced the earlier individual initiatives. These cooperatives, some having secretive Ming-loyalist rituals since the seventeenth century, flourished most remarkably on the west Borneo goldfields where they became little republics. These were ritual brotherhoods in which capital and labor were shared in acknowledged portions. The capitalist who established the mine and funded the importation of workers of course had the largest share, and laborers still indebted for their passage had none, but older workers did share decision-making and often rotated the leadership among themselves. The social cement of the kongsi was its temple-like communal hall with the image of a patron deity at its center, where new migrants from China would be ritually initiated. In Borneo these buildings were typically also strongly fortified in keeping with their often-contested political role.
Borneo had long been known as a source of gold as well as diamonds, and the Malay negeri of its west coast river-ports had profited by exchanging salt, rice, and opium for whatever was found by upstream Dayak fossickers. Around 1740 or 1750 the rulers of Sambas and Mempawah learned of the more systematic methods of Chinese (mostly Hakka) miners and invited them to start work in the same areas. Some Hakka kongsis, perhaps initially financed by established Hokkien traders, began work with their chain-pallet pumps in similar areas the Dayaks had worked. Gradually the kongsis became autonomous by forming their own relations with interior Dayaks, farming the surrounding land, and smuggling their gold out through channels not controlled by the rajas. Though their institutions continued in the Borneo forest the familiar temple-centered village and communal life of rural China, they have been celebrated as Asia’s first republics, since they levied taxes, controlled land, and made war and peace. The wealthier Chinese were able to “buy” a Dayak wife by adapting local bride-price customs, and to educate the children of such unions to be literate in Chinese. Despite much initial violence, a degree of integration was achieved between Chinese and Dayak societies, and stories were exchanged attributing Dayak origins to ancient Chinese settlers in Borneo.
In 1776–7 two powerful federations of kongsis were formed, and constituted the most effective state-like entities of western Borneo. Their conflicts were chiefly with each other, as Luo Fangbo of the Lanfang kongsi reached a dominant position in Montrado, hoping even to turn it into another “outer country” (waifan) tributary to China. “In pacifying barbarians and routing bandits, three years were spent. Twice new regions were opened and frontiers established” (Luo Fangbo 1780, cited Yuan 2000, 54). The Dutch began attempts to control and tax them in 1818, but achieved little until an aggressive policy broke their armed resistance in the 1850s. As the gold began to be exhausted and the more established Chinese-Dayak families turned their attention to agriculture, the Lanfang kongsi was the last to be disbanded, in 1884.
An English visitor to Pontianak in 1811 was told that the Montrado kongsi had about 30,000 Hakka miners and associated farmers and craftsmen. He listed about 5,000 more Chinese miners scattered in other river valleys. In Pontianak town itself the 10,000 Chinese were the largest and most productive group. Many Chinese had by then become settled householders with local wives, farming, fishing, or engaging in various trades and crafts for the regional economy. Crawfurd’s survey of Chinese shipping about 1820 identified west Borneo as its busiest southern hub, with seven 500-ton junks each year (as against nine to the rest of the Archipelago) visiting the three ports of the goldfields (Pontianak, Mempawa, and Sambas), bringing men and supplies in exchange for gold and other tropical produce (Crawfurd 1820 III, 183).
In addition to mining, commercial agriculture drew thousands of Chinese to Southeast Asia’s less populated frontiers in the eighteenth century. Some of this was to supply the immediate needs of trading and mining communities for vegetables and fruit, but most was stimulated by China’s growing demand for imports of tropical crops such as sugar, pepper, and gambir. Chinese enterprise began with trading these items to China or Japan, branched into producing them in areas well placed for shipping to China, and sometimes ended by producing for the world market.
Pepper was perhaps the first of the cash crops to attract Chinese cultivators into new areas and technologies. Planting appears to have begun in Brunei where some thousands of Chinese pepper-growers were engaged in the 1760s until driven away by its insecurity. In mid-century there were already Chinese growers of pepper and gambir in Riau, and smaller settlements in Trengganu and elsewhere on the east coast of the Peninsula. The frontier in the eastern Gulf of Thailand provided another base for Chinese cultivation of pepper and sugar. When this production began to succeed, systematic immigration began in the late eighteenth century of Teochiu agriculturalists from the Swatow area, who extended the cultivation of pepper in what is today the coastal border area of Thailand and Cambodia, around Chantaburi. As full-time cultivators of the cash crops, the Chinese developed much more labor-intensive methods of growing pepper with high applications of fertilizer, clean-weeding, and support on cut stakes rather than the live chinkareen trees used in Sumatra. John Crawfurd (1828/1967, 17–18) praised the Chinese who pioneered pepper growing in the British settlement of Penang after 1786 as producing six times as much pepper per hectare as the moribund monopolies under British auspices in Bengkulu. “So neat and perfect a specimen of husbandry nowhere exists in the East as the pepper culture of Penang.” These methods eventually stimulated the more intensive modern industry centered in Sarawak and Bangka.
Gambir is an astringent obtained from the gum of a shrub (Uncaria gambir or terra Japonica) native to Sumatra. It had long been collected from wild plants and used in Java as an addition to the betel chew. In the later eighteenth century both demand and supply took off, as tanners in China discovered its use as the astringent for tanning leather and batik-producers in Java its value as a dye. The Bugis rulers of the Riau Archipelago contracted with Chinese traders to bring out Chinese laborers on the usual indebted basis to grow gambir as well as pepper in the late 1730s. After Singapore’s foundation as a British colony in 1819 the Chinese planters moved there, and to adjacent Johor on the mainland. Johor’s emergence as a modern state was largely built by contracting land to Chinese gambir and pepper growers. In the 1830s gambir was introduced to the expanding British leather industry as tannin, which thereafter became the principal source of demand. Britain already imported five million tons of gambir through Singapore in 1839. Much of the thick forest and mangrove of the coastal areas both north and south of Singapore was cleared for the first time by Chinese planters to make way for gambir and pepper cultivation and to provide fuel for the gambir cooking pots.
In the twentieth century, “Chinese” would be redefined as the entrepreneurial minority of Southeast Asia par excellence, and their relationship with majority nationalism was fraught by resentment and misunderstanding (Chapter 15). In the pre-nationalist age they must be understood very differently, as Southeast Asia’s major source of available skilled labor, and as pioneers of the economic frontiers of its underpopulated “empty center.” They were themselves divided by their spoken languages into Hokkiens, Cantonese, Hakka, Teochiu, and Hainanese, though their leaders shared a written language with elites of China and Dai Viet. They married locally, and local languages, as well as lingua franca such as Malay and Thai, became their means of communicating with their trade partners and even other Chinese. Like other adventurers from the Indian sub-continent, the Middle East, and Europe, they found many open frontiers in non-colonized Southeast Asia and contributed their share toward its many creative hybridities.