Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521 brill.

com/jemh

Identity and Function in Sino-Vietnamese Piracy:

Where Are the Minh Huong?

Charles Wheeler
University of Hong Kong

Abstract
In 1773, a group of rebels sparked a civil war that disrupted the Vietnamese-speaking world
for thirty years. Historians recognize that Chinese pirates played a key role in the cam-
paigns of the Tay Son, after whom the war was named. This article attempts to clarify
Chinese participation by analyzing a little-known Sino-Vietnamese community named
Minh Huong or Ming Loyalists, who evolved from the same water world as the Chinese
pirates, yet appear absent from the conflict. Findings suggest that we have overlooked the
depth and complexity of Chinese and Minh Huong involvement.

Keywords
Pirates, Vietnam, Cochinchina, China, Ty Son, Minh Huong, Nguyn Hong, Nguyn
nh, Hi An, Lun Guili, Li Cai, Ji Ting

Introduction
One of the most fascinating phenomena of Ty Son era piracy remains a
mysteryhow the Ty Son linked up with the Chinese pirates who served
them. In exploring how this relationship emerged, this article suggests that
it was facilitated in no small measure by the little-known Minh Huong
community of the Sino-Vietnamese sea frontier. The Minh Huong first
appeared during the mid-1600s, when Chinese merchant colonies across
Asia began to assimilate Chinese exiles of the Ming dynasty, which had
fallen to Qing conquerors in 1644. The name Minh Huong literally means
Ming incense, and refers to the loyalty they maintained toward their
vanquished emperor. Some of these loyalists settled in central and south-
ern Vietnam, where they offered their allegiance to the Vietnamese sover-
eign, who located them in separate Minh Huong villages in or near
important seaports. Allowed to marry Vietnamese, the group quickly
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/15700658-12342338
504 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521

metamorphosed into a bureaucratic-merchant elite and, within a few gen-

erations, a distinct Sino-Vietnamese ethnicity.1
Minh Huong evolved within the same maritime milieu as their Viet-
namese rebel and Chinese criminal cousins. On the one hand, they were
largely integrated into Vietnamese society through intermarriage. On the
other hand, they remained embedded within Chinese society through kin-
ship, marriage, native place, occupational guilds, and other institutions
that spanned the Asian maritime. They used their ambiguous identity to
their advantage, capturing powerful positions in Vietnamese government,
diplomacy, and economy and dominating Vietnamese seaborne trade.
Enterprises like trade and shipbuilding made their interactions with pirates
and smugglers inevitable. At the same time, Minh Huong lived among
Vietnamese, fought with them throughout the Ty Son war, and exerted a
profound influence on the wars outcome. Geographically speaking, they
all inhabited the same port cities of Vietnams central coastwhat one
Qing official identified as the rat hole of Chinese piracy in the 1790s.2
The Minh Huong relationship to maritime outlaws deserves consideration.
The following discussion divides into three sections. First, through the
example of the Chinese pirate Lun Guili, it describes the relevance of Minh
Huong to the piracy crisis in South China during the turn of the nine-
teenth century. Second, it explains the evolution of the Minh Huong com-
munity, its identity and its complex web of relationships within the context
of the same transoceanic society that produced the pirates. Last, it analyzes
two Chinese pirates situated at different times and/or places in the his-
tory of the piracy crisis, their role in the conflict, and the probability of
Minh Huong identity.
Bringing this overlooked elite ethnic group to light reveals an interesting
complexity to both Chinese piracy and Vietnamese rebellion, and reminds
us that the societies of the Sino-Vietnamese maritime frontier were far
more deeply intertwined, the boundaries between their identities far more
blurry, malleable, and situational than conventional categorical frame-
works can allow. The regional, inter-sea perspective of this article illustrates

1
On the early history and ethnography of the Minh Huong, see Charles Wheeler,
Buddhism in the Re-ordering of an Early Modern World: Chinese Missions to Cochinchina
in the Seventeenth Century, Journal of Global History 2 (2007): 303-324; and Li Qingxin,
Binhai zhi di: Nanhai maoyi yu Zhongwai guanxishi yanjiu [The seaside world: studies on
the history of trade in the South China Sea and Sino-foreign relations] (Beijing, 2010).
2
Wei Yuan, quoted in Li Guangtao, Ji Qianlong nian pingding Annan zhi yi [An obliga-
tion to record the pacification of Vietnam in the Qianlong years] (Taibei, 1976), 5.
 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521 505

just how fuzzy this could become when applied to the lives of the pirates
analyzed below.

Capturing Lun Guili

In the Spring of 1800, Ruan Yuan, the governor of Zhejiang province,
petitioned the Chinese emperor about the case of a pirate he had sentenced
to death.3 A storm had destroyed a large pirate fleet as it anchored off the
provinces coast. Four or five thousand sailors drowned; imperial soldiers
rounded up more than 800 survivors. Among them stood a man who
pretended to be mute, with short hair, named Wang Guili.4 Soon after,
interrogators discovered that he was actually Lun Guili, the fleets leader.
Luns story fits a regular pattern for pirates of Chinas southern coast at the
time. He blamed his life of crime on Vietnamese pirates who snatched
him up in 1794, while he was out chopping wood near his village in
south-coastal China and forced him to become a pirate. Apparently, he
accepted his fate, and soon caught the attention of Chen Tianbao, a pow-
erful brigand who operated within the water world of the Tonkin Gulf.5
Before long, Lun commanded his own fleet.
Chen Tianbao certainly shaped Lun Guilis fate. Chen worked for the
Vietnamese King of Annam, Nguyn Vn Hu, who gave the Cantonese
pirate money, arms, royal title, a Vietnamese wife, and most importantly,
safe haven and bases of operation in Vietnamese seaports in exchange for
his political allegiance. The king needed Chen and more like him. Two
decades earlier, the king and his brothers launched a rebellion that engulfed
the Vietnamese-speaking world for almost thirty years. Both the brothers
and also their rebellion came to be called Ty Son, after the Western

3
Unless otherwise noted, the following description of Lun Guilis case comes from the
following sources: Robert Antony, Like Froth Floating on the Sea (Berkeley, 2003), 40-1;
Chung-shen Chang, Tsai Chien, the Pirate King Who Dominates the Seas, (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Arizona, 1983), 57-9, 66-7, 69, 191; Jiao Xun, Shenfeng dang kou ji [A
record of the destruction of pirates by divine wind], and Shenfeng dang kou houji [An
afterword on the destruction of pirates by divine wind], in Diaogu ji wenlu, in Xuxiu xikuquan-
shu (ca. 1820; repr. Shanghai, 2002),1672: 116-118; Liu Ping, Qing zhongye Guangdong
haidao wenti shensuo [The problem of mid-Qing piracy], Qingshi yanjiu 1 (1998), 39-49;
Dian Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790-1810 (Stanford, 1987), 39-45; and Ruan
Heng, comp., Yingzhou bidan [Writings from Yingzhou] (n.p., 1820), 1: 9-15; 2:1-14.
4
Jiao, Shenfeng dang kou ji, 1672: 116.
5
Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast, 36. The term water world comes from Murray.
506 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521

Mountains overlooking the Vietnamese seaport of Qui Nhon where it all

began. From 1773 to 1789, Hu and his brothers destroyed their rivals
and crushed an invasion by the Qing emperor, who accepted his fate and
recognized the new Ty Son state. However, the child of one rival house
survived; Nguyn nh rose from the ashes and in 1789 seized Saigon.
With his powerful navy, he threatened the entire Vietnamese coast, expos-
ing the countrys urban centers. Suddenly disadvantaged, the Ty Son
court turned to Chinese pirates like Chen Tianbao, who in turn recruited
Lun Guili and others.6
In the spring of 1800, Lun sailed his fleet to Zhejiang in order to help
his Vietnamese lord. Since this unholy alliance began, Chinese pirates like
Lun seasonally raided Chinas coast for booty, part of which they handed
over to the Ty Son, who used the proceeds to sustain their war against
Nguyn nh.7 Nature turned against Lun, however. Once in Zhejiang, he
anchored his fleet of twenty-eight ships offshore and prepared for his raid.
Suddenly, a great wind struck the sea, and tore the ships apart. His fleet
destroyed, Lun clung to a piece of wood and drifted with the current to
a nearby island, where he hid.8 It did not take long for soldiers to find him,
or for the governor, Ruan Yuan, to decide his fate. Granted summary pow-
ers to deal with pirates, the governor ordered Lun to suffer execution by a
thousand cuts, a gradual flaying and dismemberment meant to maximize
Luns suffering in both life and afterlife.9
What did collusion with the Ty Son give Lun Guili in order for him to
risk so much? Lun has grown familiar to historians who study Chinas
piracy crisis during the turn of the nineteenth century.10 Altogether, this
literature straightforwardly explains the cause of this relationship: it was
part of a bargain. Chinese pirates like Lun had engaged in a swap with the
Ty Son. Hu granted pirates a package of incentives and in return the

6
George Dutton, The Ty Son Uprising: Society and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century
Vietnam (Honolulu, 2006), 222, 268. For Dutton and many scholars the Ty Son Uprising
marks the start of modern Vietnamese history. The massive civil war lasted for almost thirty
years before the Ty Son insurgents were crushed and replaced by the new Nguyn regime
in 1802.
7
Chang, Tsai Chien, 57-8.
8
Ruan, Yingzhou bidan, 2: 8.
9
On dismemberment and its multiple meanings in Chinese culture, see Antonys
article in this issue.
10
See studies by Antony, Chung-shen Chang, Dutton, Murray, Liu Ping, and Zheng
Guangnan cited in this article.
 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521 507

pirates offered their naval services, their political loyalty, and changed their
hair and attire to Vietnamese style. How you wore your hair and clothes
mattered greatly to the Ty Son, for dress had long served as an indicator
of social class, political station, and even political loyalty in the Vietnamese
states that preceded them.
It mattered to the Qing government, too, for the same reasons. Sumptu-
ary codes date back to the dynastys very originthe government intro-
duced the distinctive queue almost as soon as the Manchus founded the
dynasty in 1644. Standing on Vietnams shore, long hair signified loyalty
to a Vietnamese monarch, while on Chinas shore it branded a person a
traitor. Therefore, his Vietnamese hairstyle helped to seal Luns fate. Of
course, piracy was a capital crime under Qing law, but during the 1790s
foreign dress aggravated the crimes severity. Worried about the security
threat that pirate collusion with the Vietnamese posed to their southern
maritime provinces, in 1795 the imperial court declared that any Chinese
pirate arrested in foreign attire would be executed summarily by slow
slicing.11 Lun could jettison his clothes, but his hair presented a problem,
for every Chinese male knew that he must wear the Manchu queue or suf-
fer execution. Fearing interrogation by others because of his long hair [ital-
ics added], Lun immediately used his own knife to cut [his] hair to half
its original length.12 Many pirates wore long hair, but the governors report
specified that Lun married a Vietnamese wife and kept long hair according
to local custom.13 Another pirate, Liang Guixing, actually bore a Ty
Son-issued seal with the words allowed to grow hair (xuyou toufa).14
The fact that Lun Guili wore Vietnamese attire, however, does not mean
that he had integrated into Vietnamese society. Even during the chaotic
decades of civil wars, various Vietnamese governments implemented poli-
cies that sought to control Chinese immigration to Vietnam, their status
and the terms of their integration into Vietnamese society. Chinese who
sought to live in Vietnam during the 1790s had to choose from one of two
options. In the first option, they could live in one of the many expatriate
enclaves established in or near the countrys key trading centers. Following
precedent, the Ty Son government named these people uong Nhn,

11
Guangdong haifang huilan [Conspectus on Guangdongs coastal defenses], published
in early 19th century, as cited in Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast, 45.
12
Jiao, Shenfeng dang kou ji, 1672: 116.
13
Ruan, Yingzhou bidan, 2: 8.
14
Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast, 36.
508 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521

meaning Tang people, while their Nguyn rival labeled them Thanh
nhn or Qing people.15
In the second option, people like Lun who opted to become Vietnamese
subjects sought permission to join one of the countrys Minh Huong vil-
lages. To summarize, for Lun and other Chinese, there were many good
reasons to join these communities. They originated in the mid-1600s,
when Ming loyalists organized their maritime resistance against the Man-
chu conquerors.16 As the Ming resistance broke down, recalcitrant loyalists
migrated from their bases in South China to Cochinchina.17 There they
joined tens of thousands who had previously settled in seaport towns
along the Vietnamese coast.18 The towns began to assume a Minh Huong
identity around 1651. By 1698, a network of Minh Huong villages spanned
southern Vietnam, and the Nguyn lords of Cochinchina incorporated
them into their state.
During their formative years at the end of the seventeenth century,
Minh Huong extracted a host of privileges from their new Nguyn lord
that transformed their identity from political exiles into an elite class of
foreign trading merchants, royal bureaucrats, and cultural authorities
within Vietnamese state and society. Their privileges included the right to
own land, to run Cochinchinas ports and customs, and to govern the for-
eign merchant community. In fact, their combined privileges exceeded
those held by both Vietnamese and other Chinese in the kingdom, because
they also continued to enjoy status within the kingdoms expatriate Chi-
nese communities, giving them access to the important institutions of
Chinese trade in Cochinchina. The lords of Cochinchina also granted
them the right to hold positions of state and nobility and to intermarry
with Vietnamesea privilege that the Ty Son continued, and extended to
15
See the discussion in Wheeler, Buddhism in the Re-ordering of an Early Modern
World, 308-11.
16
For a summary history of early Minh Huong villages, see Claudine Salmon, Rfugis
Ming dans les Mers du sud vus travers diverses inscriptions (ca. 1650-ca. 1730), Bulletin
de lEcole franaise dExtrme-Orient 90 (2003): 177-227.
17
Chen Chingho, Qingchu Zheng Chenggong zhibu zhi yizhi [The migration of the
Zheng partisans to southern borders (of Vietnam)], Xinya xuebao (Singapore) 5, no. 1
(1960): 449-50, 454. Cochinchina refers to the name for the de facto kingdom that spanned
the territory of todays central and southern Vietnam, and which Nguyn nhs ancestors
governed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; see Li Tana, Nguyen Cochinchina
(Ithaca, 1998).
18
Yu Jin, Shuguo xiaoshun shu [Memorial on a vassal states effective obedience], in
Daguan tang wen ji (repr. Beijing, 2009), 2: 37.
 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521 509

men like Lun Guili, Chen Tianbao, and the other so-called Chinese pirate-
admirals loyal to them.19
Such privileges made the Minh Huong quite wealthy and powerful as a
merchant-bureaucratic elite and cross-cultural broker between Vietnamese
and Chinese societies and states. Ambitious Minh Huong invested their
energies into advancing along Vietnamese, not Chinese, hierarchies: many
in Luns day held high-ranking bureaucratic and military positions in both
the Ty Son and Nguyn states. Many became well-respected scholars
and poets. Some served as diplomats to the Qing court, and in one case
Minh Huong served as intelligence gathers.20 Despite their ambiguous
positionneither fully Chinese nor Vietnamesemembers of the Minh
Huong community were essential to the function of the Vietnamese body
politic and to the function of Chinese overseas trade in the Vietnamese
kingdoms.
The Minh Huong also developed a distinct Sino-Vietnamese culture by
Lun Guilis time. In part, this had to do with their open membership. To
join a Minh Huong village, a person had to be Chinese and male, but
nothing more. Culturally, the community integrated so intimately with
Vietnamese society that they took on the attributes of a crole-like Sino-
Vietnamese ethnicity. Intermarriage with Vietnamese greatly changed the
communitys ethnic content, even if they maintained their identity as
political exiles. As a result, Minh Huong assimilated many facets of Viet-
namese culture thanks to intermarriageincluding language and dress.21
These features of Minh Huong culture explain why Qing interrogators
described turncoat prisoners like Lun as dressed in Vietnamese attire.
From the perspectives of Chinese pirates and Ty Son leaders, Minh
Huong membership would have created a powerful incentive to join the
rebels. Membership meant wealth and power to someone like Lun Guili.
Many Chinese wished to join a Minh Huong villageso why not a pirate
boss? This would have catapulted him from the lowest rungs of Chinese
society to the apex of Vietnamese social and political hierarchies. He could
transform himself into a respectable man. Membership offered opportunities

19
Wheeler, Buddhism in the Re-ordering of an Early Modern World, 311.
20
See John E. Wills, Great Qing and Its Southern Neighbors, The History Cooperative,
conference proceedings, http://www.historycooperative.org/proceedings/interactions/wills
.html#_ftn12 (accessed March 27, 2011).
21
Choi Byung Wook, Southern Vietnam under the Reign of Minh Mang (1820-1841)
(Ithaca, 2004), 38.
510 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521

for great wealth and political power, maybe enough to risk death by
slow cuts.

Piracy, Society, and State in the Water World of the Minh Huong
The Minh Huong of Vietnam evolved within the same human ecology
that produced the pirates of the South China Sea. Chinese pirate fleets
anchored in the seaports of Central Vietnam where Minh Huong lived.
They also shared the same languages, customs, religious practices, and
skills. Reviewing this maritime environment and its long-term history rec-
reates the context within which the intermingling societies of Minh Huong
and Chinese pirates evolved.
Geographically speaking, the people of Lun Guilis world developed
from two interconnected streams of maritime transhumance that ran along
the coast of southern China and converged at the center of what today is
called Vietnam. Along this stream, ships moved commerce between North-
east, Southeast, and South Asia and the world beyond. Most of these ships
were Chinese from Fujian.22 Sailing along this ocean stream, ships anchored
at major seaports along the South China coast, intersecting with an even
greater stream of inter-coastal trade that integrated Chinas coastal urban
centers. From Guangzhou the great stream continued, tracing the coast
until it reached Hainan Island, where the stream split in two. One stream
took ocean-going vessels to the southern tip of the island and from there
they hopped across the open sea to Vietnams central coast. The other
stream took coasters through the narrow straits between Hainan and the
Leizhou Peninsula and then into the Tonkin Gulf and Vietnamese waters.
Many vessels continued on into Southeast Asia. In the water world that
this coastal stream created, many notorious figures circulated.
Both streams converged along the central coast of todays Vietnam.
Here, shipping traffic merged and hugged the coast in order to avoid the
dangerous shoals of the Paracels. This effectively concentrated coasters and
ocean vessels into a single stream along one of the worlds largest sea-lanes.
Here, piracy perennially thrived. In fact, the piracy crisis that spanned the
turn of the nineteenth century represents one among many reiterations of
Asian piracy and smuggling in which the central Vietnam coastal region
played a key role. Maritime predation and contraband commerce were as

22
See Jennifer Cushman, Fields from the Sea (Ithaca, 1993).
 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521 511

familiar to the people of that central Vietnam coast as they were to the
people of the south China coasttwo societies with a long history of social
interaction.
Like other littoral societies, the early inhabitants of todays Vietnamese
coast developed raiding as part of a larger habitat strategy of harvesting and
gathering that used boats to move resources and themselves across the
landscape, or rather, seascape.23 This strategy for capturing, accumulating,
and redistributing material wealth underlay the chiefdom political econ-
omy that took form along the coast of Central Vietnam under the Champa
kingdoms during the first millennium CE.24
The Vietnamese, who gradually replaced the Cham as the political
elites of central Vietnam during the first half of the second millennium,
allowed some forms of raiding to continue in a limited and covert fashion
among their coastal subjects. During the era of the Nguyn lords of
Cochinchina, a de facto kingdom that ruled central Vietnam from 1600 to
1775, the royal court organized brigades sanctioned to collect salvage
on the thrones behalf. The court granted select coastal villages to recover
shipwrecks found off the Cochinchina coast or in the Paracels and Spratley
Islands. Each year village leaders who enjoyed this charter traveled to
the lords court and submitted their reclaimed cargo in tribute to Lord
Nguyn. For his part, the lord returned a portion of the gift to the village
elders so they could sell it on the open market. This opportunity for
the kingdoms seafaring communities to profit from a ships misfortune
arose often, given the kingdoms proximity to the dangerous Paracels and
Spratleys.25 This made travelers nervous, and rightly so. Villagers appar-
ently interpreted the definition of salvage liberally. Gemelli Careri com-
plained: The Cochinchinese galleys seize not only the goods, but even the

23
Kenneth M. Ames, Going by Boat, in Beyond Foraging and Collecting, ed. Ben Fit-
zhugh and Junko Habu (New York, 2002), 21.
24
Kenneth Hall, The Politics of Plunder in the Cham Realm of Early Vietnam, in Art
and Politics in Southeast Asian History (Honolulu, 1989), 5-16. For a summary of this era,
see Charles Wheeler, One Region, Two Histories, in Viet Nam: Borderless Histories, ed.
N. Tran and A. Reid (Madison, 2006): 163-93; and William Southworth, The Coastal
States of Champa, in Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History, ed. Ian Glover and Peter
Bellwood (Routledge, 2004), 209-33.
25
See Charles Wheeler, Re-thinking the Sea in Vietnamese History: Littoral Society in
the Integration of Thuan-Quang, Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries, Journal of Southeast
Asian History 37, no. 1 (2006): 148-50.
512 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521

very vessels, [even those] that only lose or spring a mast.26 In Cochinchi-
nese littoral society and the Nguyn brigades, we see an old practice con-
tinue to benefit regional political economy in a new Vietnamese form.
Along the ocean stream, the Nguyn lords of Cochinchina took a simi-
lar stand, turning against overt piracy as it had been practiced by their
Cham predecessors, while allowing other aspects to continue and even
support their new regime. The wako piracy crisis in China during the mid-
1500s also disrupted Vietnam, if for no other reason than that pirate bands
sometimes took refuge there. The situation appears to have changed, how-
ever, as early as 1555, when Fernao Mendes Pinto discovered sixty-two
bodies hanging from some trees that ran all along the beach of an off-
shore island with a warning to would-be pirates.27 Three years later, the
Vietnamese warlord Nguyn Hong, ancestor to Nguyn nh, assumed
the governorship of one of the two provinces of central Vietnam. Sixteenth-
century Vietnamese sources are rare, but nonetheless suggest that he and
his followers sought to quell the sea bandits in their midst.28
Nguyn Hong, however, was not averse to smuggling. In fact, it became
his path to power. He forged alliances with many of the Fujianese armed
traders who began to use central Vietnam as an offshore base where they
could conduct trade between Japan and China.29 They were part of a large
informal commercial economy in which fleets of armed traders collabo-
rated with a dense network of local fisherfolk, officials, elites, and mer-
chants that penetrated the Chinese coast.30 Once again, a local political
power offered sanctuary and other perquisites in exchange for services.
While the Nguyn lord did not depend upon them to provide military
services, he did use them to help finance and supply his military enterprise,
using commercial means to amass armaments, ships, cash, and other
items needed to defeat his political rivals. As the political climate in China

26
See Carreri (ca. 1709), A Voyage Around the World, in A Collection of Voyages and
Travels (London, 1744-46), 4: 283-4.
27
Fernao Mendes Pinto, The Travels of Mendes Pinto, trans. and ed. by Rebecca Catz
(Chicago, 1989), 507.
28
For example, see ai Nam thuc luc [Veritable Record of ai Nam], ca. 1840s, quc
ngu translation (Hanoi, 2002), 35.
29
On the commercial strategy of the Nguyen lords, see Li, Nguyen Cochinchina, chapter 3.
30
See, for example, Lin Renchuan, Fukiens Private Sea Trade in the 16th and 17th
Centuries, in Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the 17th and 18th Centuries,
ed. E. Vermeer (Leiden, 1990), 163-215.
 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521 513

worsened in the 1600s, however, the Sino-Vietnamese water world once

again turned chaotic and violent.
The Manchu destruction of the Ming Dynasty exerted a profound effect
on commerce and politics in maritime East Asia. Chinas collapse led to
the confederation of merchant, military, and political powers under the
Ming Loyalist banner of Zheng Chenggong. Part merchant, part pirate,
part warrior, Zheng was literally the child of this growing transoceanic
society, overseeing a massive international maritime empire, and better
suited than anyone to attempt building a Chinese political order at sea. In
order to create a sustainable political economy, Zheng launched embassies
to overseas countries like Cochinchina to establish trade relations and
organized a system of merchants dedicated to nurturing inter-sea com-
merce, and fleets to both protect them and also destroy competitors. Zheng
confederates soon dominated Chinese merchant enclaves in the seas
between Nagasaki and Melaka. His fleets used violence to enforce their
own system of taxation and permits in the seas between Japan and South-
east Asia, and dealt ruthlessly with competitors. As Zheng fortunes waned
in 1670s, his fleets turned to outright raiding. That is just what the Zheng
southern fleet under Yang Yandi, based in Longmen on Chinas portion
of the Tonkin Gulf, did along the coast of Cambodia and the Mekong
Delta.31
Out of this turbulent world of armed trading developed the Minh
Huong villages of Vietnam. The key processes of social, political, and iden-
tity formation sparked in the wake of the Ming collapse grew from the
transoceanic diaspora that Chinese trade, raiding, and smuggling created,
and reached fruition in 1698, when the Minh Huong had fully assimilated
into the Cochinchinese state. The earliest evidence of this process bears the
date 1653, on a plaque commemorating the creation of a Chinese God of
War or Guangong temple in Cochinchinas main seaport of Hi An, which
bears the term Minh Huong on an inscription.32 The process was well
under way in 1669, when an official memorialized the Qing emperor
about the millions of Chinese commoners [who] have dispersed and set-
tled overseas in Cochinchina, in flight from the revolt by Ming dynasty
thugs, namely Zheng Chenggongs Ming loyalists. Among these refu-
gees, some rascals have submitted to the foreign state of Cochinchina,

31
See Hayashi Razan (17th c.), Kai hentai [The transformation from civilized to barbar-
ian], ed. by Ura Ren-ichi (Tokyo, 1958-9), 1: 327, 338, 351, 367, 398, 422, 439.
32
Chen Chingho, Notes on Hoi-an (Carbondale, 1974), 40, 60, 61.
514 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521

probably out of need to survive.33 This included the merchants who ran
the countrys seaports, such as Hoi An and Qui Nhon. To this we can add
bona fide refugees like the Zheng confederate Yang Yandi, who settled the
remnants of his Longmen fleet permanently in Cochinchina in 1682, and
other transplants from the northern Tonkin Gulf region, like Mo Jiu (Mac
Cuu), who became a Nguyn vassal in 1700.34
When the Zheng regime on Taiwan collapsed in 1683, self-identified
Minh Huong were already deeply invested in Cochinchinese commerce,
state, and society. In addition to their intermediary role in sea trade and
control of state customs, they staffed the Nguyn bureaucracy and often
acted as cultural, religious, and diplomatic intermediaries, both within
Cochinchina and with China.35 By the end of the 1600s, the Ming Loyal-
ist communities extended into Cochinchinas own water frontier that
stretched from the Mekong Delta to the Gulf of Thailand.36 Their influ-
ence spanned beyond the Vietnamese world into the larger maritime
world. Out of this milieu of armed traders came a new and powerful mer-
chant-bureaucratic elite.
Cochinchinas Minh Huong community reached the peak of its power
in the 1700s, before the Ty Son wars destroyed it, but soon resurrected to
resume much of its former influence. In the central region, which the Ty
Son controlled for nearly three decades, Minh Huong leaders resurrected
their villages, some of which had been destroyed during the initial phase of
the war between 1771 and 1775, most notably Hi An.37 The Ty Son reaf-
firmed Minh Huong status and privilege as it existed during the Cochinchi-
nese era, and apparently extended the system into the old territory of

33
Yu Jin, Shuguo xiaoshun shu, 2: 37.
34
Chen Chingho, Mac Thien Tu and Phraya Taksin, in Proceedings, Seventh IAHA
Conference, 2226 August 1977 (Bangkok, 1979), 1536.
35
See Wheeler, Buddhism in the Re-ordering of an Early Modern World, 307-15.
36
The term water frontier derives from Nola Cooke and Li Tana, eds., Water Frontier
(Lantham, MD, 2004).
37
Inscriptions and local documents (now lost) suggest that the Hi An community
restored its community by 1778. Chen Chingho (Trn Kinh Ha), My iu nhn xt v
Minh-huong-x v cc c-tch tai Hi-an [Some observations about the village of Minh-
huong and the monuments at Faifo, Central Vietnam], Khao-c tap-san 1 (1962-63),
14-16. See also o Duy Anh, Pho-lo, premiere colonie chinois de Thua Thien, Bulletin
des amis du vieux Hu 3 (1943): 253. In the 1790s, the number of registered males in Hi
An reached to 250 persons, according the village register. Nguyn Thieu Lau, La forma-
tion et volution du village su Minh Huong (Faifo), Bulletin des amis du vieux Hu 28,
no. 4 (1941): 365.
 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521 515

Tonkin in the north.38 The same holds true for the villages of the South or
Mekong region, where Minh Huong were most numerous.39 After their ini-
tial decimation at the hands of Ty Son soldiers in 1778, Minh Huong com-
munities quickly resurrected. When Nguyn nh secured permanent power
over the region and formed a government there in 1789, he fully restored
the political and commercial status of Minh Huong, and placed them in
high positions within his government and military. Minh Huong stood on
both Ty Son and Nguyn sides of the war, even within families. Whatever
the long-term outcome, Minh Huong had fully regained their powerful
position as the broker between Vietnam and its maritime neighbors.

Complicating Case Scenarios of Li Cai and Ji Ting

This section profiles two Chinese of the Sino-Vietnamese water world who
probably belonged to the Minh Huong community and participated in
piracy and warfare. The names of both men commonly appear in studies
of Chinese piracy and the Ty Son uprising, and both men decisively
shaped the events and outcomes of the Vietnamese war. Li Cai and Ji Ting
lived in Cochinchina before the Ty Son uprising began and helped the
early rebels to transform their local rebellion into a massive cataclysm. One
of them ended his life as a pirate off the coast of China. Their status as
Minh Huong does not become clear, but the search for clues leads to new
insights that reveal that the relationship between Chinese pirate and Viet-
namese rebel proves more complicated than it has appeared to scholars,
just like the water world itself.40
Li Cai (Vietnamese L Ti, alias Li Azhi) helped start the Ty Son
Uprising. Typical among Minh Huong, Li was Fujianese and had migrated
to Hi An as a merchant. He must have been successful, because he report-
edly conducted business with important members of the seaports Minh
38
Trn B Ch, Ph c Ph Thach [The ancient quarter of Ph Thach], Nhng pht
hin moi v Khao c hoc (1992).
39
Choi, Southern Vietnam, 38.
40
Unless otherwise noted, all information in this section comes from Choi, Southern
Vietnam, 36-7; ai Nam thuc luc, 177-8, 182-5, 187-9; Dutton, The Ty Son Uprising,
200-1; Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast, 35; Zheng Ruanming, Shilun Yuenan
Huaren zai Xin-Jiu Ruan zhi zheng zhong suo panyan di jiaose [A discussion about the
personalities among Vietnamese Chinese who acted in the War between the New and Old
Nguyen], in Yuenan, Zhongguo yu Taiwan guanxi chuanbian [Changes in relations between
Vietnam, China and Taiwan], ed. Xu Wentang (Taibei, 2001), 5-6, 26-33.
516 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521

Huong leadership. This being the case, Li may have belonged to a Minh
Huong commune before he encountered the Ty Son, if not in Hi An
then elsewhere. While the timing remains unclear, sometime before 1771
he moved to Qui Nhon. Soon after, he helped the Ty Son spread disaster
throughout the Vietnamese-speaking world.
In 1771 the three Nguyn brothers launched their uprising in the hills
west of Qui Nhon. Two years later, they seized the port city. According to
the Vietnamese court historians, the brothers, once traders themselves,
won the support of the ports Qing merchants.41 At some point during
the next year and a half, Ty Son leader Nguyn Vn Hu recruited Li and
another Hi An merchant named Ji Ting (Tp nh) to mobilize a Chinese
land and naval force that they could lead north in a combined offensive
against the Nguyn lord of Cochinchina. Like Lun Guili, Ji Ting came
from Chaozhou prefecture in Guangdong.
Like Li Cai, Ji Ting migrated to Vietnam to become a merchant, not a
pirate, traveling there in 1759 and settling in the port city of Qui Nhon.
He too appears to have been successful and made friends with other mer-
chants from Chaozhou and Huizhou prefectures in Guangdong. By the
time the Ty Son seized Qui Nhon in 1773, the towns Chinese merchants
reportedly regarded Ji as their leader. This would explain why the Ty Son
approached him to raise an army and navy. According to a report to the
Qing Grand Council, Ty Son brother Nguyn Nhac hired Chinese Li
Aji and Li Azhi, that is, Ji Ting and Li Cai, and gave them official titles,
and asked them to manage their navies and ships in the northern offen-
sive against the Nguyn lord. Li and Ji began at once to mobilize, with the
help of the Chinese community. Ji named his force the Trung Ngha or
Loyal and Righteous Army; Lis became known as the Hoa Ngha or Har-
monious and Righteous Army.42
In May-June 1775, Li Cai and Ji Ting joined the Ty Son and headed
north with their armies and fleets. Nguyn defenses fell into disarray and
retreated, all the way to Hi An. Disasters began to compound for the
Nguyn court. Hearing the news of the Nguyn defeat, the Trinh lords of
the north seized their historic opportunity to destroy their longtime rival.
They invaded Cochinchina, swept south, and snatched the Nguyn capital

41
ai Nam thuc luc, 178.
42
On organizing merchant support, see the Grand Council report in Gudai Zhong-Yue
guanxi shi ziliao xuanbian [Selected materials on the history of Sino-Vietnamese relations]
(Beijing, 1982), 655.
 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521 517

Ph Xun (near todays Hu). The Nguyn armies began to collapse. The
royal court fled by boat to the distant South. Two Nguyn princes stayed
behind, and with the support of another expatriate (or Qing) Chinese
merchant, they raised an army to defend Hi An against the Ty Son
advance. Their resistance held for two months, but finally crumbled.43
Trinh and Ty Son forces met at the Hai Vn Pass north of the port city,
and the two sides settled on a kind of detente. Ten years later, however, the
Ty Son toppled the Trinh too. They would control the Vietnamese central
coast until the lone survivor of the fallen Nguyn house, Nguyn nh,
returned to seek his revenge.
Li and Ji clearly influenced this convulsive event in Vietnamese history.
But their role was brief. Nguyn Nhac held Ji Ting responsible for the Ty
Son failure to advance against the Trinh, so he removed Ji from leadership
and placed Li Cai in command of all Chinese forces, which Li banded
together into a single Hoa Ngha Army.44 Ji Ting fled to Guangdong and
was later arrested by Qing officials as a pirate.45
Lis fortunes soared only a little bit longer than his compatriot. With Ji
gone, Li now presided over an army that comprised nearly two-thirds of
the entire Ty Son military. In fact, most of the Ty Son army comprised
Chinese. By the end of the year, however, Li Cai turned on his Ty Son
overlord, fled south, and surrendered to a Nguyn general.46 Li arrived in
time to help the Nguyn repel the Ty Sons first attack on Gia inh in
1776. Sources state that Li organized the Tang Chinese merchants into
a defending army, and specifically cites the role of both Minh Huong and
Thanh H communities there.47 Apparently, his betrayal proved so upset-
ting to the Ty Son brothers that when they finally succeeded in seizing
Gia inh in 1777, they unleashed their soldiers against the Chinese popu-
lations in and around Gia inh, massacring thousands.48 Soon after, Li
was killed during a feud with a pro-Nguyn rival.49
One finds no evidence that Li had ever been a pirate. The same cannot
be said for Ji, however. The official history of the Qing dynasty reports

43
ai Nam thuc luc, 185.
44
Choi, Southern Vietnam, 36.
45
Qing Gaozong Shilu, 996: 12-13; 998: 15-16; 999: 6-7; 1004: 31; see also Gudai
Zhong-Yue guanxi shi ziliao xuanbian, 656.
46
Zheng Ruanming, Shilun Yuenan Huaren, 26.
47
Ibid., 27, 28 n.63.
48
Choi, Southern Vietnam, 36.
49
Dutton, The Ty Son Uprising, 202.
518 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521

that, in 1776, Qing officers arrested two Chinese pirates, Ou Shengzu and
Lun Sihai, in Fujian. Both men confessed that they were accomplices of
Ji Ting. Among their possessions, investigators found a Jade Talisman
that belonged to Ji, clearly a gift that he received from his former Ty Son
overlords. In another memorial submitted to the Qianlong Emperor, a
Qing general reported that he had arrested several pirates and confiscated
their properties. Interrogating their chief, Hong Ahan, he discovered that
the Ty Son had offered Li Aji (i.e., Ji Ting), an official title, a bribe, and a
Vietnamese wife.50 Ji, whom sources consistently identify as a Qing sub-
ject, accepted.
While the Ty Son did not organize a deliberate campaign to raid China
using Chinese pirates until 1792, the strategy to recruit Chinese leaders
began nearly two decades earlier with Ji Ting and Li Cai, who had clear
connections with pirates. The move fit into a larger pattern that encour-
aged collaboration between warlords on land and merchants cum pirates
along the seacoast that dates back millennia on the Vietnamese central
coast. Whatever their direct connections to piracy, the actions of Li Cai
and Ji Ting clearly helped to catalyze piracy as the Cochinchinese state
vanished and social order disintegrated.
The case of Li Cai and Ji Ting present several important facts that point
to the probability of Minh Huong involvement. Here we find Chinese
merchants at the birth of Vietnamese rebellion. Without Li and Ji, it is
quite possible that the Ty Son brothers might never have advanced beyond
their base at Qui Nhon and transformed their local uprising into a coun-
trywide cataclysm. Li and Ji mobilized not only an army but a fleet as well,
for the Ty Son war was a littoral conflict, like most pre-modern Vietnam-
ese wars.51 Such enterprises required men, elephants, guns, and ships. While
the Vietnamese sources identify the main Chinese culprits as members of
the Thanh or expatriate Chinese merchant community, Minh Huong lived
among them and governed them. They also dominated the markets and
shipbuilding that would have supplied the Ty Son enterprise. Yet no Minh
Huong are linked to the rebels in the sources written about the uprising.
What explains their apparent absence from the Ty Son ranks?

50
Qing Gaozong shilu, 998: 15-16, quoted in Li Guangtao, 4; Yuenan, Zhongguo y
Taiwan guanxi de zhuanbian [Changes in Vietnamese, Chinese, and Taiwanese relations],
ed. by Xu Wentang, et al. (Taipei, 2001), 5.
51
Charles Wheeler, The Case for Boats in Vietnamese History, in Ships and Men, ed.
Paola Calanca, et al. (Paris, forthcoming), s.n.
 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521 519

One plausible explanation for the lack of Minh Huong in the story of
Ty Son rebellion may have to do with the fact that many of the authors
of the main Vietnamese sources for histories of the war were written by
Minh Huong servants of the victorious Nguyn. For example, Trn Tin
Thnh, who served on both sides of the conflict at one time or another,
participated in the compilation of the imperial histories from which we
have drawn most of our information about Ty Son rebels and Chinese
collaborators like Li Cai and Ji Ting. Minh Huong elites like Trn seem
likely to have avoided attention to their Ty Son past whenever possible.
To that end, they may have wished to identify Chinese collaborators as
Qing Chinese rather than Minh Huong.

Conclusion
A closer study of the interrogations of captured pirates in the Qing archives
should help to clarify the exact role of Minh Huong in the larger Sino-
Vietnamese piracy crisis. The case for further research is compelling. For
one, both groups lived along the Vietnamese littoral. It is hard to imagine
how such large fleets could have avoided the countrys largest merchant
class, simply from the standpoint of economics. From a geographical
standpoint, it would have been impossible; for piracy was seasonal, and
pirates like their merchant counterparts spent portions of the year anchored
in safe havens, which in this case meant the rat hole of Vietnams central
coast, where Minh Huong lived and worked. Furthermore, large-scale
piracy of the kind that developed during the 1790s in the waters of Viet-
nam and China required a large investment of capital to launch and sus-
tain. Large pirate fleets grappled with the same challenges that any large
and complex organization faced. As David Starkey points out, throughout
world history, substantial investments were needed to mount large-scale,
deep-water ventures of the kind mobilized by the Chinese pirates described
above. The capital necessary to purchase and equip vessels, procure arma-
ments and provisions, and recruit labor came in some cases from legiti-
mate mercantile and government sources. Algerian merchants funded
Turkish corsairs, and American colonial governors backed Atlantic bucca-
neers.52 Who besides the Ty Son state funded Chinese pirates?

52
David J. Starkey, Pirates and Markets, in Bandits at Sea, ed. C.R. Pennell (New
York, 2001), 115-6.
520 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521

As we have seen, Chinese and Minh Huong merchants supported the

Ty Son rebellion in its early years. It seems quite probable that their sup-
port continued, and extended toward the Chinese pirate-admirals as well.
Underneath the pirates age-old alternative job as privateer, the work of
capturing and redistributing goods continued, as it did every raiding sea-
son. If they did not rely on merchants for cash, they certainly depended
upon them for supplies. The Minh Huong were an unavoidable intermedi-
ary. Soon after he seized Gia inh in 1789, Nguyn nh discovered that
he could not import rice from Siam to supply his troops unless he went
through the Minh Huong community.53 The populations of central and
northern Vietnam relied heavily upon outside sources of rice; perhaps this
explains in part why the central seaport of Hi An resurrected so quickly,
in 1778, only a few years after the rebels razed the city to the ground.
One must not forget the role that shipbuilding communities play in the
pirate economy. Chinese from Fujian had encouraged an earlier Chinese
piracy crisis in the sixteenth century by building large-hulled ships out of
self interest and selling them on the black market.54 Vietnam had become
a large source of raw materials for shipbuilding in China by the late 1700s.55
Perhaps Minh Huong shipbuilders, most of whom claimed Fujianese
ancestry, were doing the same.
The economics of piracy help blur the lines of identity that state inter-
rogators and present-day historians would like to enforce for claritys sake.
Their variety makes them hard to categorize, not so much because of their
complexity but because the human ecology of the Sino-Vietnamese littoral
in which all these people evolved possesses none of the geographical
characteristics of the boundary-conscious analysts who study them today.
H.A. Ormerod, taking a cue from Aristotle, got it right when he likened
the pirate to the nomad, the product of fisherfolk people who live by
hunting. Piracy was in fact a manifestation of a regions ecology, a mode
of redistribution. For both Braudel and Ormerod, it was simply a way of
making a living. This mode of production suggests a process. Given its
dynamic character, the form predation takes can vary constantly in both
time and space.56
53
Choi, Southern Vietnam, 41.
54
Zheng Guangnan, Zhongguo haido shi [History of pirates in China] (Shanghai, 1998),
376-379.
55
Wheeler, The Case for Boats, s.n.
56
J.L. Anderson, Piracy and World History, Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995):
194.
 C. Wheeler / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 503-521 521

As occupations varied, so too could identity. In Lun Guilis case we see

an example of someone furiously working in vain to shed one identity for
another, in response to the geographic and political predicament he faced
on the shores of Zhejiang. The greater connectivity of the sea relative to
land offered seafarers such advantages. Over time, an identity could quickly
adapt to suit new exigencies. We see this in the heritage of the Minh
Huong, as they metamorphosed from pirates to armed traders to armed
insurgents to a merchant-bureaucratic elite, in a way reminiscent of the
Swahili of East Africa.
These are not far-fetched speculations to make. Chinese pirates, Nguyn
lords, Ty Son rebels, and Minh Huongall evolved from the same water
world where predation functioned intrinsically in everyday life. It thrived
when sea commerce was good, and it thrived when it was bad. It always
adapted, however.57 Minh Huong, having themselves descended mostly
from men who were at best armed traders, at worst pirates, understood this
ambiguous world, and how to adapt to it in order to prosper within it.

57
Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London, 2003), 126-7; and Anderson, Piracy
and World History, 181, 185-6.