414 Boundaries and Beyond
of the locality. The administrators welcomed the participatory and
mediating roles of the inβluential merchants in creating wealth and
pacifying the contesting parties in the port city. The Chinese merchants
βitted in well in the complex plural society in their role as mediators.^230
Similar in nature to the role of their gentry counterparts in Chinese
rural society, the Chinese merchants were facilitators in the building of a
functional business and social institution.
Discussing the penetrating power of Chinese junk traders and their
extensive trading networks in Southeast Asia during the eighteenth
century, Leonard Blussé has coined the term “the Chinese century” to
describe the predominant position of the Chinese in maritime trade in
the region.^231 In comparatively plain language, T’ien Ju-k’ang had earlier
painted a picture of the Chinese seafarers’ outstanding achievements. He
adopted a long view that covered the period of the seventeenth to mid-
nineteenth centuries to illustrate the trajectory of the Chinese junk trade,
although the period might also be extended to include the beginning of
the Haicheng-Manila trade in the late sixteenth century. The purpose of
the present chapter has been to highlight the golden age of the trade and
speciβically the “Min-Yue” people, rather than the more generic term, “the
Chinese”, in the narrative. Only then can the actual contributors to this
maritime achievement regain their rightful place in history.
The Min-Yue people’s enterprise was unprecedented in human history
in terms of its extensive scope, mass participation and socioeconomic
impact on local societies in the regions. The time period in question can
justiβiably be called an era of the Min-Yue seafarers on the China coast and
in the South China Sea region. Although the Nanyang-bound junk trade
of the Min-Yue people had lost its past glories by the mid-nineteenth
century, their maritime legacy that was born from the junk trade still
remains conspicuous in Southeast Asia even today.
- Citing J.S. Furnivall’s concept of plural society in the Southeast Asian colonial
context, Leonard Blussé elaborates on the kinds of accommodation and
cooperation that had been worked out “to effect a relatively stable society” in
colonial Batavia. See Leonard Blussé, Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo,
Women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Dordrecht-Holland: Foris Publications,
1986), pp. 4‒5. - Leonard Blussé, “Chinese Century: The Eighteenth Century in the China Sea
Region”, Archipel 58, 3 (1999): 107‒29.
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