Description: The Port (present-day Hà Tiên), situated in the Mekong River Delta and Gulf of Siam littoral, was founded and governed by the Chinese creole Mo clan during the eighteenth century and prospered as a free-trade emporium in maritime East Asia. Mo Jiu and his son, Mo Tianci, maintained an independent polity through ambiguous and simultaneous allegiances to the Cochinchinese regime of southern Vietnam, Cambodia, Siam, and the Dutch East India Company. A shared value system was forged among their multiethnic and multi-confessional residents via elite Chinese culture, facilitating closer business ties to Qing China. The story of this remarkable settlement sheds light on a transitional period in East Asian history, when the dominance of the Chinese state, merchants, and immigrants gave way to firmer state boundaries in mainland Southeast Asia and Western dominance on the seas.
Brief description: Xing Hang is Associate Professor at the Department of Chinese History and Culture at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Review Quotes: 'In The Port, Xing Hang provides a tour de force history of the rise and fall of Hà Tiên, a Chinese creole frontier entrepot on the Vietnamese-Cambodian border during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Based on meticulous research in multiple languages, this book adds significantly to recent scholarship on the New Qing Maritime History and the Chinese diaspora by skilfully analyzing the complex interconnectedness between Chinese officials, merchants, refugees and poets, pirates, Buddhist monks, and French Catholic priests, as well as indigenous Viet, Khmer, and Austronesian populations. The author writes in an engaging and thought-provoking style that will make this book a must read for students and scholars interested in Asian history and comparative studies.' Robert J. Antony, Guangzhou University