Session: Reshaping Sea and Hinterland: New Perspectives of Imperial China from the Southern Expanse
1: Cantonese Collaboration and Native Official Trade in the Early Modern Upper Tongking Gulf Region
Friday, March 13, 2026
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM PDT
Location: Pan Pacific Hotel, Oceanview Suite 4
Presenting Author(s)
JL
Joey Low (he/him/his)
Brandeis University, United States
Previous scholarship on early modern Guangxi usually focuses on the expansion of Han Chinese and the state, particularly the spread of Cantonese entrepreneurial merchants and local elites. There is a tendency to downplay the agency and transregionalism of the indigenous elites known as the native officials (tuguan). In an alternative remodelling of our understanding on southwestern Guangxi and its connection to South China, this paper focuses on the economic and political activities of the native officials in collaboration with southern Chinese actors. Rather than succumb to imperial bureaucratization (gaitu guiliu), the native officials employed the help of the Cantonese and often exploited minimalist imperial policies to increase their own power. In some cases, native officials were deeply involved in both the sea and Dai Viet politics. In one example, I show that the native officials in the China-Vietnam borderlands accelerated gun production in Dai Viet by hiring Cantonese traders to purchase gunpowder ingredients from Guangdong to smuggle into it. In another example, shipwrecked Cantonese off the coasts of An Bang province were converted to military farm laborers in the hinterlands before escaping into Longzhou and facing repatriation through an illicit deal between the Le court and a local headman in the late fifteenth century. By viewing the native officials from a maritime and transregional lens, I argue that the relationship between the native officials and the imperial state was rooted in partnership, raising questions on how state power maintained itself in southern China and the borderlands, both inland and coastal.
