The Ming World by Kenneth M Swope;

Author:Kenneth M Swope;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2019-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE ZHENG FAMILY’S MARITIME SPHERE OF INFLUENCE

Resistance was one of many strategies adopted by Chinese elites when faced with disorder and the undesirable specter of alien rule. The dynastic transition also prompted a mass exodus of refugees to Japan and Southeast Asia. In their newly adopted lands, these exiles initially expressed their political loyalties in public. As a highly formal means of honoring deceased relatives and ensuring an accurate calendar of rituals in their memory, ancestral tablets found in shrines and temples placed great emphasis on the precision and legitimacy of dates, including the reign name. By examining them, one can acquire a sense of the prevailing conceptions of imperial time among a particular diasporic community.32

Hibino Takeo has done extensive work with the tablets stored at the Pavilion of Azure Clouds (Qingyunting) at Melaka. Among the many that he has examined, the one belonging to Zheng Zhenshu (1586–1648) particularly stood out for him. Hibino notes with surprise the date of his death, “Longwu wuzi, intercalary third month, third day, wei time” (early afternoon of April 25, 1648). It was inscribed by his son Zheng Fangyang (1632–77), the first kapitan of the local Chinese community appointed by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the colonial authorities in charge of the port. This reign name refers to a Ming loyalist regime established at Fuzhou in 1645 with the military support of Koxinga’s father, Zheng Zhilong (d. 1661). Only a year later, however, Manchu forces seized the city, carried off Zhilong to Beijing as a hostage, and hunted down the imperial pretender.33 So why use the Longwu reign name to mark 1648, after the court had already ceased to exist? Certainly, two years would have been sufficient time for news of its collapse to travel to Melaka.

Hibino believes that Zheng Zhenshu, a native of Zhangzhou, within the sphere of Longwu control, had fled his home to avoid the Manchu onslaught and continued to uphold the reign name out of sentimental political attachment to the regime. I would like to introduce another possible reason that has little directly to do with the hapless pretender himself. In fact, Koxinga continued to use the Longwu reign name until 1648, the year of Zheng Zhenshu’s death, when the mogul dropped it in favor of recognizing the Yongli court. Moreover, the Zhangzhou area served as a first line of defense and sphere of influence for Koxinga’s island base at Xiamen.34 Thus, it is very likely that Zhenshu and his son participated as intermediaries in the Zheng family’s vast maritime trading network, responsible for handling commercial interactions between Melaka and the China coast and ensuring smooth ties with the Dutch. For Fangyang, this position would overlap with his appointment by the Dutch as kapitan of the Chinese community. As Tonio Andrade has shown, double allegiances proved to be a common arrangement for prominent Chinese throughout the VOC’s possessions in maritime East Asia.35 It worked so long as relations with the Zheng family remained amicable.

Likewise, we can safely assume that

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