Overview

Generations of Chinese scholars have made China synonymous with the Great Wall and presented its civilization as fundamentally land-bound. This volume challenges this perspective, demonstrating that China was not a “Walled Kingdom”, certainly not since the Yongjia Disturbance in 311. China reached out to the maritime world far more actively than historians have acknowledged, while the seas and what came from the seas—from Islam, fragrances and Jesuits to maize, opium and clocks—significantly changed the course of history, and have been of inestimable importance to China since the Ming. This book integrates the maritime history of China, especially the Qing period, a subject which has hitherto languished on the periphery of scholarly analysis, into the mainstream of current historical narrative. It was the seas that made Tang China a “Cosmopolitan Empire” (Mark Lewis), the Song dynasty China’s “Greatest Age” (John Fairbank), China at 1600 “the largest and most sophisticated of all unified realms on earth” (Jonathan Spence), and the reign of the three Qing emperors (Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong) China’s “last golden age” (Charles Hucker).

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Reviews

A useful guide for others wanting to explore an understudied subject, the book offers much fascinating information buttressed with an excellent bibliography, including many works in Chinese. Zheng interposes many questions...nicely illustrating the extensive but ill-defined reach of maritime history. J.C. Perry, Tufts University, Choice (July 2012) The author is to be lauded for having flagged both the importance of maritime trade to Qing China and the consequent boom in consumerism. It will be of interest mainly for historians of global economic and consumer history and of relations between China and Europe. Joanna Waley-Cohen, New York University, The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 71, No. 4 (November 2012)

Author Information

Zheng Yangwen is Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. She is the author of The Social Life of Opium in China, which has been translated into Italian and Korean. She is also the editor of Negotiating Asymmetry: China’s Place in Asia (with Anthony Reid); The Body in Asia (with Bryan S. Turner); Personal Names in Asia: History, Culture and Identity (with Charles J-H Macdonald); The Cold War in Asia: the Battle for Hearts and Minds (with Hong Liu and Michael Szonyi); and The Chinese Chameleon Revisited: from the Jesuits to Zhang Yimou.

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