It is commonly assumed that the Qing Dynasty possessed a weak and ineffective navy, that its rulers neglected the sea, and that China was, at its core, a land-based civilization. Ronald C. Po, however, argues that this perception needs to be re-examined. In his earlier monograph, The Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire (2018), Po revealed that during the eighteenth century—the High Qing period—the empire was, in fact, involved in maritime management, and that it actively cultivated its own maritime power. He demonstrated that emperors such as Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong actively engaged in the management, governance, and supervision of the sea through their political vision, military deployment, and administrative practice. Thus, Po not only provided new insights into the nature of the Qing Empire but also prompted a critical reconsideration of the reasons behind China’s defeat in the nineteenth century.

In his most recent book Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (2024), Po extends his inquiry to the Ming Dynasty, demonstrating that late imperial China was by no means isolated from the sea, nor was the maritime world absent from Chinese history. This “blue” dimension formed an integral part of the many colors that composed late imperial China. Like a great “blue dragon,” the Chinese Empire once roamed the seas. Po further argues that twenty-first-century China has inherited this maritime legacy from the Ming and Qing dynasties. Certain maritime practices and institutions from the late imperial period continue to shape the geopolitical and socioeconomic dynamics of contemporary maritime China. Acknowledging this historical continuity allows for a more nuanced understanding of China’s present-day maritime position and claims.

Then what was the relationship between the Chinese Empire and the sea, or more broadly, the maritime world? The author asks, “how the maritime world mattered to China as well as how China mattered to the maritime world” (16)? As Po points out, on the one hand, marginalized groups living along the coast—those involved in smuggling and piracy—were excluded from both the state and the world order. Yet these individuals constantly sought strategies to survive and adapt within that exclusion. On the other hand, the state maintained an ambivalent attitude toward the sea: Qing rulers were at once anxious and wary of maritime disorder, yet also eager to exploit overseas trade for profit. Within this relational field—between the state and the sea, and between marginalized groups and Confucian literati—bureaucracy, governing philosophy, and Confucian models interacted to shape a maritime world. In Shaping the Blue Dragon, Po focuses on individuals who inhabited this field during the Ming and Qing dynasties, including pirates, cartographers, administrators, naval generals, maritime writers, emperors, visionaries, envoys, and travelers, analyzing their diverse relationships with the maritime world. Po argues that this is a process of “shaping and being shaped” (19): individuals’ lives, identities, and worldviews were shaped by a maritime China, while regional dynamics were, in turn, shaped by the people who co-existed with the sea. These individuals actively contributed to shaping a maritime China that reflected their own aspirations and goals.

The book is organized into nine chapters. Apart from the introduction as the first chapter and the conclusion as the last chapter, the remaining seven chapters each center on an individual or a group of maritime actors. The figures discussed include the Ming-Dynasty pirate king Chen Zuyi, the private advisor Zheng Ruozeng, Qing cartographers, the admiral Shi Lang, the “master of the sea” Lan Dingyuan, the envoy Zhou Huang, and the traveler Xie Qinggao.

Po begins by examining the life and activities of Chen Zuyi, a prominent pirate king active during the Hongwu and Yongle reigns of the Ming Dynasty. He situates Chen within the maritime policies of the time and discusses the choices and actions Chen pursued in that context. Through Chen’s interactions and confrontations with the Ming court, we glimpse the early Ming court’s attitude toward the sea. The court sought to control maritime routes, reinforce the tributary system, and incorporate coastal communities in Southeast Asia into its sphere of governance. At the same time, the court displayed ambivalence toward permitting Southeast Asian merchant communities to trade along China’s southeastern coast. Chinese diasporic communities in Southeast Asia often flouted dynastic laws while simultaneously seeking protection from the Ming court as a means of defending themselves against threats from rival communities in the region.

Po then turns to the example of Zheng Ruozeng, a so-called “maritime theorist from the lower class” (buyi junshi xuejia) of the Ming Dynasty, to explore how his identity as a Confucian scholar and his direct experience with the maritime world shaped both his thought and his writings—particularly the Chouhai tubian. Po examines debates among scholar-officials such as Tang Shunzhi, Tang Shu, Wan Biao, and Zhang Shiche concerning the causes of the wokou and whether the state should continue to enforce maritime prohibitions or adopt a more open maritime policy. Zheng advocated for a distinction between tribute ships and trading ships. While he remained committed to defending the tribute system, he also supported the revival of a freer maritime trade—regulated through more effective supervision and administration. His position reflects an effort to integrate the tribute system into the broader balance of power and order in the maritime world, thereby highlighting how Confucian values and maritime realities jointly shaped the intellectual world of a Ming scholar.

The author then shifts his focus to the Qing Dynasty. In Chapter Four, he examines the “diagrams of coastal garrisons” (yingxun tu). They not only contained relatively detailed and accurate information for the management and regulation of maritime activities, but also facilitated navigation, serving as one of the crucial tools through which the Qing rulers exercised control over the seas. These maps reveal the Qing court’s careful investigation of the micro-ecologies and micro-geographies of its maritime frontiers, its conceptual division of the sea into “inner” and “outer” oceans, its use of cartography as part of a land–sea defense strategy, and its efforts to secure strategic locations and efficient maritime routes to bolster naval activities (94). Po argues that the production of these maps represented an expression of Qing maritime power. While David C. Gompert has associated sea power primarily with naval expansion,Footnote ¹ Po extends the notion further, suggesting that sea power also entails the “willingness and ability to manage maritime affairs in peacetime” (105). From this perspective, Po contends that Qing rulers devoted considerable attention to maritime administration, thereby challenging the influential interpretation of John K. Fairbank, who framed China within a land–sea binary and characterized the Qing Dynasty as a continental empire whose maritime activities were severely restrained.Footnote ²

In Chapter Five, the author examines the “legacy” of the Qing admiral Shi Lang, tracing its reception and reinterpretation across different regions—mainland China and Taiwan—and successive periods, including the Qing Dynasty, Republican China, the PRC, and the ROC. Shi Lang’s reputation shifted over time: from an outstanding naval general to a national hero, then to an omitted figure, and later to a traitor. These varying narratives reflect the influence of official ideology as well as the political orientation of scholarly research. Shi Lang, as a historical figure, connected the maritime world with China’s southeastern coast and Taiwan, illustrating how China’s premodern history intertwined with the blue frontier. In Chapter Six, Po shifts to the life and writings of Lan Dingyuan, the “master of the sea,” particularly his role in suppressing the Zhu Yigui rebellion in Taiwan. This experience highlights how Lan’s time along the coast served as a pivotal moment in his life, shaping both his ideas and actions.

In Chapter Seven, Po focuses on the envoy Zhou Huang and his work, History and Customs of Ryukyu (Liuqiuguo zhilüe). As an “envoy’s account,” Zhou’s work moves beyond the traditional China-centric framework. Rather than merely reinforcing the dichotomy of civilization versus barbarism, Zhou Huang’s detailed observations of the Ryukyu Kingdom’s history and customs reveal that, as a tributary state, Ryukyu was not merely a passive recipient of Chinese cultural and political influence but actively shaped its own developmental path. Zhou’s account demonstrates that the Qing tributary system was sustained not solely through Confucian values and Han-centered supremacy but also through the geopolitical context and the maintenance of connections with tributary states (234).

Finally, Po examines the traveler Xie Qinggao, who spent ten years in Europe (1782–1793), and his work Hailu (Record of the Sea), which offers extensive observations of “geographical landscapes, political dynamics, and trading conditions across Southeast Asia and the vast expanse of the Western Ocean” (247). Xie’s account of Western Europe, particularly Portugal, the Dutch Republic, and England, reveals how Chinese observers perceived the “Large Western Ocean” prior to the First Opium War. Some of his insights went beyond the traditional tianxia worldview, symbolizing a nascent perspective on understanding the Western world: distant and previously barbarous maritime states were now recognized as active participants within a globally interconnected order. Po contends that Xie’s travels, writings, perspectives, and mindset were shaped by the maritime world, while his records subsequently influenced figures such as Wei Yuan, Lin Zexu, and Xu Jiyu.

Po’s contribution lies in portraying late imperial China as a “blue dragon,” thereby demonstrating how an empire often characterized as land-based was, in fact, actively engaged with the maritime world in the early modern period. In this study, Po examines diverse maritime actors, including pirates, scholar-officials, cartographers, generals, envoys, and travelers, exploring how a maritime consciousness and maritime experiences shaped their perspectives and writings, and how these, in turn, intersected with the traditional Confucian worldview of tianxia and the tributary system. By directing attention toward the individual, Po significantly extends the study of the maritime consciousness beyond the regulations of the court to the realm of personal experience and perspective. This pathbreaking approach provides a productive analytical framework for examining representative figures of the maritime world.

At the same time, Po’s research leaves important questions open for reconsideration and further inquiry. What exactly does Confucian ideology or Confucian orthodoxy mean in Po’s analysis? Does it necessarily privilege continental development, agriculture, and ritual learning while discouraging maritime activities or the development of sea trade (89)? Did the literati’s concern with and discussion of maritime affairs truly conflict with Confucian values, or might such attention also be seen as an expression of the Confucian commitment to statecraft (jingshi)? And while Po emphasizes the historical continuity between the Ming and Qing dynasties in their relationship to the sea, how should we understand the differences in their respective maritime politics, consciousness, and practices? Such questions indicate new directions for further research, showing the book’s potential to stimulate broader debate. Undoubtedly, this is an insightful and significant work that deserves close reading not only by scholars in the field of maritime history but also by students and researchers engaged in global history and the relationship between state and sea.