Far from turning its back on the sea, the fate of Qing China was tied as much to tides and storms as to cavalry and walls

Besieging the pirates in Lantau, Hong Kong; detail from a scroll entitled ‘Pacifying the South China Sea’ (1810). Courtesy the Hong Kong Maritime Museum

is associate professor of Chinese studies and maritime history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. His books include The Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire (2019), Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (2024), The Camphor War: Taiwan in the Age of Imperial Realignments (forthcoming, 2026) and The Silver Thread of the Deep: A Cultural History of Shark Fin in China and Beyond (forthcoming, 2026).

To live with the sea as an empire means not to conquer it. It doesn’t necessarily mean sending fleets to dominate far-off waters. It means waking up every morning understanding that storms, smugglers, merchants and fishers alike operate beyond the reach of authority. The ocean is untameable. It unites and separates nations simultaneously. Empires have known this for centuries, from Britain to Spain. Their power on the sea has always been precarious. Late Imperial China understood that as well.

Few historical figures are as admired in China today as the Ming dynasty admiral Zheng He (1371-1433). For generations, he has been celebrated at home as the leader of seven epic voyages between 1405 and 1433 through the Indian Ocean. Overseas, Zheng He has often been portrayed as a rival of sorts to his contemporaries Christopher Columbus or Vasco da Gama. Whether or not he qualifies as an ‘explorer’ like his European counterparts or exactly how far his ships sailed are questions still hotly debated today. What is certain is that, for better or worse, Zheng He has for centuries been seen as a link between China and the maritime world.

But what else do we find besides Zheng He? To many observers, the next few centuries appear as if China turned its back on the ocean. The traditional narrative portrays the Qing dynasty that ruled from Beijing from 1644 to 1912 as a land power obsessed with the grasslands and continental growth. Within this framework, China’s absence of naval power explains how the dynasty came to be beaten, soundly and humiliatingly to many contemporaries at the time, by Western imperial powers starting in the 19th century. The Great Wall is the symbol of this era, not the blue frontier. The sea is relegated to little more than a Ming dalliance with overseas exploits; temporary, aberrational, and then deserted.

But empires do not simply turn away from seas that lap at thousands of miles of coastline. The question is not whether the Qing cared about the ocean. It’s how they lived with it.

It is true that the 18th century saw no Chinese fleets on the scale of Zheng He’s sailing across the Indian Ocean. Yet this did not mean the Qing empire had turned its back on the sea. Along its coasts, officials had a tough time with pirates and smugglers who made it hard to tell the difference between business and crime. People who lived along the coast prayed to sea gods for safe passage, built temples on high ground, and held ceremonies to remember shipwrecks. In the banquet halls of Canton, Suzhou and Beijing, shark fin and sea cucumber became fancy foods that gave people status, bringing the ocean into the heart of high society.

To focus only on the absence of such outward engagements, if I can put it this way, is to miss the more complex reality. Across the early modern centuries, the Qing empire remained closely tied to the sea. It was not a place to conquer, but a place to establish authority, a place to find faith, and a place to satisfy certain desires. To recover this history is to move beyond Zheng He’s iconic image and see a China whose fate was tied as much to tides and storms as to cavalry and walls.

Territory under the control of the Qing empire in 1832. Courtesy Wikipedia

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The Qing empire took over from the Ming both the throne in Beijing and the problem of the coast. Seeking to cripple the Zheng family’s power base on Taiwan and starve out the last pockets of Ming loyalism, early Manchu rulers reinstated draconian maritime prohibitions (haijin). Entire coastal villages were uprooted and moved inland; their homes burned, their boats destroyed. The bans were designed to prevent contact between Qing subjects on China’s coast and foreign traders beyond. Lives were upended, but goods kept moving. Rival smuggling networks arose to meet the demand of foreign merchants eager to trade. In effect, the haijin mainly served to penalise villagers.

Smuggling networks adapted; foreign merchants still found eager partners.

By 1683, when the Qing conquered the Zheng regime and took Taiwan, prohibition had already proved impracticable. The empire could not seal off the sea but had to learn to control it. Offices were opened to oversee customs, shipping rules formalised, and maritime trade slowly brought back under control. Something that had previously been seen as endangering the dynasty was transformed into a vital source of revenue.

A reverse-glass export painting of the Thirteen Factories in Guangzhou, China, c1805. Courtesy Wikipedia

The most significant aspect of this new system was the Canton System, which was formalised beginning in 1757. Long caricatured as a ‘one-port policy’ that confined foreign merchants, in the West it is usually described as myopic and hopelessly behind the times of international trade. However, the system worked because both sides recognised the rationale behind it. Foreign merchants themselves liked Canton: they were protected there not only by batteries and patrols but also by stockpiles of human capital necessary for trade. Cohong guild merchants offered credit; interpreters were readily available; and brokers knew the intricacies of necessary rituals of negotiation. The system was a compromise, but it was compromise enforced with both hardware and software. For decades, it worked exceedingly well. Silver flooded in from Mexico and Japan; tea, silk and porcelain flowed out.

Pirates roamed the seas, smugglers plied their trade in the shadows

Business at Canton was........

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