Abstract
How did Hà Tiên, today a sleepy town on the Vietnam– Cambodia border, flourish as an enclave of Chinese commercial cosmopolitanism in maritime East Asia during the eighteenth century? The port’s prosperity rested upon a confluence of regional and global economic trends. These include commercialization in China, fueled by population expansion and resource shortages, and Southeast Asia’s sparse demographic density and abundant endowments. Chinese merchants and settlers, taking advantage of the Qing Dynasty’s (1644– 1911) relaxed policies on trade and travel abroad, flooded into Southeast Asia in numbers unprecedented in past history. Their reach extended from bustling port cities to the remotest jungle, and their junks connected different parts of the region with each other and China. They mingled and, in some cases, intermarried with the native population. Their commercial preeminence has led scholars, such as Carl Trocki and Leonard Blussé, to speak of the eighteenth century as a “Chinese century” in maritime East Asia. 1 Yet warfare and geopolitical competition threatened to upset or redirect trading networks and goods. So did conflicts among Chinese immigrants from different provinces, classes, and occupational groupings, and interethnic strife with natives and European colonial authorities.