Writing Pirates Writing Pirates Vernacular Fiction and Oceans in Late Ming China Yuanfei Wang University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor Copyright © 2021 by Yuanfei Wang Some rights reserved This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Note to users: A Creative Commons license is only valid when it is applied by the person or entity that holds rights to the licensed work. Works may contain components (e.g., photographs, illustrations, or quotations) to which the rightsholder in the work cannot apply the license. It is ultimately your responsibility to independently evaluate the copyright status of any work or component part of a work you use, in light of your intended use. To view a copy of this li- cense, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ For questions or permissions, please contact [email protected] Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid- free paper First published June 2021 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication data has been applied for. ISBN 978- 0- 472- 13254- 6 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978- 0- 472- 03851- 0 (paper : alk. paper) ISBN 978- 0- 472- 90248- 4 (OA) DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11564671 This publication was made possible in part by an award from the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation. Cover: Cover image from Qiu Ying’s Wokou tujuan, stored at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, Tokyo University. Reproduced with permission. Acknowledgments This book could not have come into being without the generosity and help of many individuals and institutions over the past ten years. The SSRC short- term residency grant enabled me to be affiliated with the University of Southern California as a visiting scholar during the Covid-19 pandemic. I thank Brian Bernards for being my host at USC. I finished all the final revisions at home in Los Angeles. I was relieved of teaching duty to com- plete the manuscript, thanks to a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for Inter- national Scholarly Exchange Grant, a UGA Willson Center Research Fel- lowship, and a UGA Faculty Research Grant. A SSRC Postdoctoral Fellowship for Transregional Research at Columbia University helped with the early stages of this project. I thank the Nalanda- Sriwijaya Centre at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore for a Junior Fel- lowship. My fieldwork in Singapore, Cambodia, and Indonesia was crucial for this book and for expanding my scholarly purview. I thank the warm hospitality and tremendous help of Shen Lei, Shen Yang, and Zhao Shibin during my fieldwork in the Taizhou region of Zhejiang province. I am grateful to an AAS dissertation workshop, a Harvard- Yenching library travel grant, a UGA first- book subvention award, and a James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation Publication Subvention Award. I thank these people who have read and commented on my manuscript at various stages: Hang Xing, David Rolston, Chris Baker, Peter Shapinsky, Ann Walter, Tansen Sen, Geoff Wade, Robert Von Glahn, Ania Loomba, Tina Lu, Jessica Moyer, and Kaijun Chen. The work in progress benefited from conversations with Robert Batchelor, Antony Reid, John Miksic, Xiaojue Wang, Engseng Ho, Prasenjit Duara, Nianshen Song, Guojun Wang, Siyen Fei, and Shang Wei. I am indebted to my doctoral disserta- tion advisor Victor Mair, who enlightened me with his unusual insights into world history, Chinese language, and China’s literature. Discussions with Shu- mei Shih were highly valuable and constructive. Robert Hegel v vi | Acknowledgments always sends in unwavering support and offers good advice. Haun Saussy continues to be a source of inspiration with his brilliant scholarship in comparative literature, kindness, and incisive suggestions on the manuscript. I thank the anonymous readers of the University of Michigan Press who provided solid suggestions for revisions. It has been my fortune to work with the editor Christopher Dreyer, who advocated for my project from the very beginning. Melissa Scholke thoroughly page proofed the manuscript and communicated well with the typesetter. My gratitude goes to Qian Jiang for generously sending along a few important images. Jamyung Choi and Chen Yiyuan lent their time to find images for me. A slightly different version of chapter 2 was published as: “Java in Dis- cord: Unofficial History, Vernacular Fiction, and the Discourse of Impe- rial Identity in Late Ming China (1570– 1620),” in positions: asia critique, (2019) 27 (4), 623– 52. A section in chapter 1, in a revised form, was pub- lished as “Siam as Chinese Utopia: Overseas Chinese, Colonialism, and Race in the Seventeenth- Century Chinese Novel The Sequel to the Water Margin” in Journal of the Siam Society, vol. 108: 2 (October 2020), 1– 16. This book is dedicated to my family— my parents Yixian Wang and Rongyin Feng, my husband Kai Zhu, and my daughter Olivia Zhu—whose love is as deep as the ocean. Contents Introduction: Chinese Discourse of Pirates and the Early Modern Global World 1 I. Southeast Asia Chapter 1: The Sea and the Sequel 21 Chapter 2: Java in Discord 55 II. Japan Chapter 3: Learning the Barbarian Tongue 87 Chapter 4: Turning Pirates 109 III. Jiangnan, China Chapter 5: Historical Narratives of the Pirate Kings 139 Chapter 6: Publishing the Pirate’s Romance 167 Conclusion: Stories of the Sea 199 Index 205 Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11564671 Introduction Chinese Discourse of Pirates and the Early Modern Global World Between 1405 and 1433, the Ming dynasty emperor Yongle (1402– 永樂 1424) sponsored Admiral Zheng He (1371– 1433) to make seven voy- 鄭和 ages to the Indian Ocean.1 The Strait of Malacca, connecting the South China Sea with the Indian Ocean, became strategically important to the Ming empire and rose as the prominent seaborne marketplace. After the Ming state withdrew from the Indian Ocean, Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic seeking those same waters. His 1492 landing on a Caribbean island introduced Europeans to the Americas. The Age of Dis- covery thus began. The rapid growth of maritime trade connected East Asia and Southeast Asia with Europe and the Americas.2 In 1602, the Dutch founded the East Indian Company in Jayakarta on Java. In 1641, the Dutch captured Malacca from the Portuguese and came to dominate the eastern Indonesian archipelago trade. This period was also the age of Asian expansion. People from East Asia and Southeast Asia traded local products for foreign commodities such as porcelain, silk, spices, gold, sil- ver, and animals. When the Ming sea ban policy restricted maritime trade, these seafaring merchants became pirates and continued to seek fortune without official sanction. Unlike its European counterparts, the Ming state did not sponsor overseas colonialism, but diasporic communities emerged nonetheless, as thousands of Chinese people migrated to such countries as 1. Edward Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty 1405– 1433 (New York: Pearson, 2007); Wang Gungwu, “The First Three Rulers of Malacca,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 41, no. 1 (213; July 1968), 11– 22; Geoff Wade, “Melaka in Ming Dynasty Texts,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 70, no. 1 (272; 1997), 31– 69. 2. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450– 1680: Expansion and Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 19. 2 | Writing Pirates Ryukyu, Japan, Java, Manila, and Batavia.3 On the turbulent and fortune- bearing seas, the East and the West competed and collaborated. The Japa- nese daimyo Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598), launched the 豐臣秀吉 Japanese invasions of Korea in 1592 with an aim to eventually conquer China. The powerful Zheng family operated a multicultural and trans- 鄭 national maritime trade enterprise. They vied with the Dutch East India Company and seized the island of Taiwan from the Dutch in 1662.4 Economic historians have explored the connections, similarities, and differences between China and the West in the early modern world econ- omy. Immanuel Wallerstein, firmly rooted in a Eurocentric view, notes that capitalism came into existence when a European division of labor emerged after 1450.5 Completely dismissing China’s interaction with the premodern world, Wallerstein assumes that China as the static and archaic Orient would not emerge as a modern state until the West first evolved from a premodern “world- empire” into the modern “world economies” of capitalism.6 Janet Abu- Lughod proposes to view Europe in the context of the world trade system to allow for multiple centers and heterogeneous spaces. Believing that China could develop a parallel modern economy, in the European model, based upon overseas colonization, Abu-Lughod hypothesizes that the Ming empire’s maritime withdrawal by terminating Admiral Zheng He’s maritime expeditions came from an anxious desire to distinguish its imperial identity from that of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271– 1368).7 Attributing the Ming state’s sea ban as originating in Ming cultural identity and acknowledging the Ming tributary trade was only the 3. Wang Gungwu, China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2003), 84– 99; Kenneth R. Hall, “Multi- Dimensional Networking: Fifteenth- Century Indian Ocean Maritime Diaspora in Southeast Asian Perspective,” in “Mari- time Diasporas in the Indian Ocean and East and Southeast Asia (960– 1775),” ed. Nor- man Yoffee, special issue, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49, no. 4 (2006): 454– 81; Anthony Reid, “Hybrid Identities in the 15th-Century Straits,” in Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century, eds.