57ĈčĆĕęĊė 2
Maritime Frontiers, Territorial Expansion
and Haifang (Coastal Defense) during the
Late Ming and High Qing
Introduction
China’s perceptions of its maritime frontier during imperial times are
often dismissed as passive and monotonous. The story that the imperial
governments imposed restrictions and prohibitions to prevent their own
people from putting out to sea and outsiders from coming at will to visit
the China coast is uncritically repeated without any further reβlection.
Furthermore, although for centuries China had been concerned with
military threats from the northern and Inner Asian steppes, it was only
in the nineteenth century that China βinally faced a major challenge from
the sea mounted by the Western powers. Prior to this change, there were
indeed maritime disturbances such as those caused by the arrivals of the
Japanese and Western intruders in the sixteenth century, but the coastal
boundary was considered relatively secure and did not require urgent
attention or projections of state might. Consequently, imperial China
failed to develop active policies toward its maritime frontier and instead
was caught up in illusions, unable to rationalize beyond a certain point.
Hence it became an empire without empire builders.^1
The story is not so simple. The apparent inertia in China’s long
maritime history is deceptive. For more than two thousand years,
imperial governments had in fact been responding to coastal conditions
in rational and pragmatic ways. During the Qin Dynasty (221‒207 ćĈ)
and the early stage of the Han Dynasty (206 ćĈ‒Ćĉ 220), a uniβied China
expanded to establish a natural coastal boundary from the Liaodong
- John E. Wills, Jr., Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K’ang-
hsi, 1666–1687 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 188; and
James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney
Embassy of 1793 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 15.