Shaping the Blue Dragon by Ronald Po is an episodic history of China’s relationship to the sea during the Ming and Qing dynasties, which spanned from the 14th through to the early 20th century. Po’s unique approach that zones in on individuals – from pirates to cartographers to naval generals – to illuminate broader ideas and events makes for a highly engaging contribution to the field of Chinese maritime studies, writes Ilay Golan.

Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Ronald C. Po. Liverpool University Press. 2024.

China’s historical engagement with the seas was not only intense but also crucial to the empire’s functionality and its integration into an emerging global network of commerce.

Excluding the introduction and conclusion, each of the volume’s chapters focuses on an individual involved in China’s maritime affairs. These stories are framed within a historical context, supported by background information and discussions of relevant historical terms, all connected to the empire’s views on coastal defence and overseas relations. As a result, reading a single chapter provides insight into the dominant discourse of its respective period. However, only when read from cover to cover do the chapters fully manifest the capriciousness that Po highlights, revealing how China’s rulers, elites, and merchants repeatedly shifted their stance on the proper approach to their surrounding waters, if they acknowledged them at all.

The selection of individual stories through which the author constructs his narrative is crucial. While these figures serve to illustrate a broader historical trajectory, they were explicitly chosen as protagonists due to their exemplary encounters with the seas. These include the pirate-king Chen Zuyi, the only figure to confront the Eunuch-Admiral Zheng He in naval battle; the imperial adviser Zheng Ruoceng, a mid-Ming strategist during the Wokou wars against the so-called Japanese pirates; the anonymous cartographers responsible for detailed Qing-era coastal defence maps; two prominent officials, Admiral Shi Lang and Lan Dingyuan; the envoy Zhou Huang, whose writings depict the imperial tradition of tributary embassies to the Ryukyu Islands; and finally, the Chinese traveller to Europe, Xie Qinggao.

[The book] examine[s] the diverse stories and linkages between China and the maritime world, featuring narratives that have been largely unheard in the Anglophone community.

In both scholarly and popular discourse, China has long been viewed as a land-based empire. In recent years, however, there has been a surge in research questioning this perspective, with an increasing number of scholars focusing on Chinese maritime history. Notable scholars such as Roderich Ptak, Angela Schottenhammer, Anthony Reid, and Xing Hang have demonstrated in rich detail that China’s historical engagement with the seas was not only intense but also crucial to the empire’s functionality and its integration into an emerging global network of commerce. Multiple actors participated in China’s maritime sphere, as official policy toward maritime affairs often diverged from actual practice in the commercial sector.

While previous scholarship has primarily explored questions of national maritime power, economic networks, trade flows, navigation, and shipbuilding technology, Shaping the Blue Dragon offers a different approach. It is “more inclined to examine the diverse stories and linkages between China and the maritime world,” featuring narratives that have been “largely unheard in the Anglophone community.” Indeed, Po’s protagonists are largely obscure. Perhaps the most notable exception is Shi Lang, the “legendary admiral” of Chapter Six, whose defection led to the Qing victory over the Zheng regime and the eventual annexation of Taiwan. His biography provides key insights into the turbulent Ming-Qing transition in China’s maritime sphere.

In other cases, the selection of protagonists raises questions about their relevance to the broader historical narrative. Chapter Two, for example, focuses on the pirate-king Chen Zuyi, a local naval commander of Chinese heritage who operated a fleet from Palembang until he was ultimately defeated by Zheng He. Chen’s historical footprint is minimal, consisting of only a few scattered references in primary sources. Given that even Zheng He’s own story suffers from a lack of documentation, one might question whether Chen deserves a dedicated chapter in a book on China’s maritime history. Nonetheless, the supplementary information in Chen’s chapter, which explores the genesis of Chinese overseas communities in Southeast Asia and situates Zheng He within this broader context, is unquestionably valuable and serves as a strong opening to the book’s overarching narrative.

Shaping the Blue Dragon makes a compelling contribution to the growing field of Chinese maritime studies, shedding light on the complex and evolving relationship between China and the sea

The sum of these seven episodes raises another question regarding the trajectory of China’s maritime history. Po successfully highlights the linkages between China and the sea and demonstrates a form of “maritime continuity” between the Ming and Qing periods through the experiences of his protagonists. However, the book deliberately avoids engaging with the larger debate on China’s maritime power – a topic Po has addressed in previous works, such as The Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire. Still, it is more than symbolic that Shaping the Blue Dragon begins with an episode set at the height of China’s maritime strength, when Chinese captains dominated their surrounding seas as both naval commanders and merchant pirates, and concludes with the drifting wanderer Xie Qinggao, a passenger on foreign vessels. His belated exposure to the Western world foreshadows the empire’s struggles in the Opium Wars.

Considering this meta-narrative, we may wonder what insights maritime history offers for understanding China as a modern sea power. Is China’s “present engagement with the maritime world” indeed an “extension of a long-standing relationship”? The vast amount of maritime experience depicted in this volume lends some credence to this claim. However, to fully grasp the nature of this extension, a similar examination of China’s modern maritime history is necessary. Hans Van De Ven’s Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China is one example for a valuable follow-up reading. Ultimately, Shaping the Blue Dragon makes a compelling contribution to the growing field of Chinese maritime studies, shedding light on the complex and evolving relationship between China and the sea, and serving as a useful companion for students and researchers alike in the fields of historical and contemporary China and maritime affairs.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image: A Qing Dynasty (1636-1912) illustration showing pirates attacking merchant ships in the South China Sea from the Qing Scroll. (Maritime Museum, Hong Kong) via worldhistory.org. License: CC BY-SA.

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