Cai Tinglan's journey into the annals of history began quite by accident. On November 21, 1835, while he was sailing home to the Penghu Islands after taking the provincial-level examination in Fuzhou, a typhoon struck and damaged his ship. The vessel drifted along the South China Sea for a week until it landed off the coast of the Quang Ngai province of Nguyen, Vietnam. A Vietnamese naval patrol spotted the hapless castaways and, reassured that they were neither pirates nor opium smugglers, directed them to civil authorities on land. These officials compelled Cai to take a “mock civil service examination” to determine the validity of his claims to shengyuan degree status. Once established, his scholarly bona fides gained him entrée to elite political circles throughout his sojourn across Vietnam. His status as a son of southern Fujian ensured that his fellow Hokkienese financially and emotionally supported him in his quest to return home by land. After arriving back home by June of 1836, the ambitious young scholar decided to publish a record of his overseas adventures, and the result was this miscellany, Hainan zazhu 海南雜著, which first appeared in print in 1837.

References to the miscellany are scattered across a range of scholarly works on Chinese international history. In Matthew Mosca's study of the transformation of the Qing geopolitical “information order,” for example, we find Cai admiring the astronomical expertise of Ding Gongchen in Guangdong in 1836. In Jinming Li's more recent analysis of China's maritime geography, we encounter Vietnamese fisher folk marveling that Cai and his fellow travelers had survived the treacherous waters off Quang Ngai, speculating that “he must have been protected by gods, otherwise he never would have survived!” The work also appears in a host of bibliographies in books on the larger history of the South China Sea region, attesting to its scholarly influence.Footnote ¹ Does the field need a translation of this source? Is it worthy of enjoying a wider, more popular readership? This reader answers these questions with a resounding “Yes!”

This excellent translation by Kathlene Baldanza and Zhao Lu is simultaneously a pedagogical tool and a work of scholarship that contributes to our understanding of the historical connections between East Asia and Southeast Asia, specifically China and Vietnam. The book is highly recommended for undergraduate classroom use. It includes an extended introduction that offers lucidly written and succinct accounts of Cai's life; the textual history of Hainan zazhu; the challenges of sailing along the tempestuous South China Sea; the overseas Chinese experience in Vietnam, in particular the experiences of the Ming loyalists who had settled as refugees in the realm; the political history of the Nguyen dynasty, then in its fourth decade; and Vietnamese social history. The introduction thus offers the reader the contextual background necessary to assess the translated primary source. The translators also offer references for further scholarly reading on all of these topics. At a time when the costs of higher education are increasing and daunting, the Departments of History and Asian Studies as well as the Library at Penn State University should be commended for making this book available as an open access publication (https://uw.manifoldapp.org/projects/miscellany-of-the-south-seas).

Beyond the contribution of the introduction, the translated miscellany itself is full of useful information on these subjects. The first section, Cai's terrifying account of the violent storm and its aftermath, is riveting and attests both to his own narrative abilities and to the translators’ skill in presenting it to an English-speaking audience. The next section, titled a “Travelogue of the Fiery Wasteland,” is a somewhat repetitive record of places passed and people met. Most intriguing in these accounts is the way Cai and Vietnamese officials communicated directly through “brush writing,” making use of commonly used Chinese characters to exchange information and write poetry in celebration of their encounters. As the translators note, these “brush conversations” reflect what Alexander Woodside once described as an “international Confucian commonwealth” of intellectual elites across East and Southeast Asia (p. 27).Footnote ² The travelogue is also significant for demonstrating the extent to which Cai relied on people from Fujian (and elsewhere in China) for material support and occasional translation services. Significantly, however, some of these sojourning merchants were fluent only in the “common street language” of Vietnam and unable to contend with the more literary language of Vietnamese officialdom (pp. 30, 71). In spite of his many struggles, it is clear that Cai journeyed comfortably in the two worlds of scholarly fellowship and Chinese commercial transnationalism.

The third section, “Vietnam Chronicle,” is perhaps the most historically useful. The translators observe that the accounts of Vietnamese political history were entirely from a Chinese perspective and probably derived from existing Chinese historical sources. After a few initial pages, however, Cai begins to recount information conveyed to him by Vietnamese people, as well as his personal observations concerning aspects of Vietnamese society. Here the reader is treated to colorful and informative summaries of life in early nineteenth-century Vietnam: the strict prohibition against the sale and use of opium; the absence of brothels; the workings of the criminal justice system; the ways in which villagers resolved their disputes; the threat of tigers (and the way elephant herds were used to crush them); marriage practices; the domination of Chinese in the fields of medicine, divining, and mathematics; and so on. Here Cai offers interesting reflections on the similarities and differences between Chinese and Vietnamese cultural practices at the elite and popular levels. From this account, at least, one senses that official, intellectual, and commercial culture appeared to have been far more heavily influenced by the Chinese than popular social practices were.

In their introduction, Baldanza and Zhao rightly assert that Chinese trade in Vietnam benefited the realm and that the Nguyen dynasty fully participated in the interrelated commerce of the South China Sea and retained control of the economy in the 1830s. For these reasons, the economic dynamic between the two peoples should not be construed as the sort of quasi-colonial territorialism one sees elsewhere in Southeast Asia (p. 25).Footnote ³ In Cai's miscellany, one certainly does not see, for example, the militarized, Chinese gongsi settlements of a place like West Borneo or the Malay Peninsula in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote ⁴ On the other hand, in these and other regions where Chinese people eventually achieved economic dominance over some economic sectors, historians have similarly observed that Chinese settlers originally were invited by and thrived at the sufferance of indigenous leaders in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Malay rulers welcomed and benefited from the economic dynamism fostered by Chinese trade, for example. This sense of ownership nevertheless dissipated by the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the sheer scale of Chinese migration and investment expanded exponentially and indigenous leaders became increasingly sidelined in the process.Footnote ⁵ Chinese domination of sectors of the economy increased over time, and this affected their relations with indigenous Southeast Asians. A similar historical process probably occurred in Vietnam. Anh Sy Huy Le has been showing how some Vietnamese nationalists in the early twentieth century believed that southern Vietnam was turning into a “semi-colony” of Chinese migrants by the turn of the twentieth century. The question for these nationalists was, how might the Vietnamese become economic sovereigns over their own territory?Footnote ⁶

This nationalistic reaction seems a far cry from what we see in the early nineteenth century, but Cai's miscellany at least hints that this sort of thinking already was percolating in royal minds in the 1830s. He writes, “For the past several years, officials have forbidden the private export of cinnamon, raw sugar, and other commodities; set official prices; authorized the royal house to trade [these goods]; and increased the taxes on merchant ships. Because of this, Chinese ships are increasingly rare, down by forty or fifty percent, and the people are very resentful about it” (p. 125). Cai does not clarify whether these “people” are Chinese or Vietnamese merchants or both (the Chinese-language version simply states 民甚苦之).Footnote ⁷ We nonetheless see that the royal house sought to benefit from overseas trade more directly. The increased taxation of Chinese merchant ships seems like an implicit effort to diminish the Chinese role in the commodities trade in a way that served the financial interests of the Vietnamese court. When considered in tandem with the massacre of thousands of Chinese people during the Tay Son Rebellion in 1782, one wonders if Vietnamese relations with the Chinese were as friendly as those experienced by Cai Tinglan, who was, of course, a scholar who, unlike merchants, shared a classical sensibility with the Vietnamese officials he encountered on his long journey home.Footnote ⁸

A short review will not resolve this question, of course. One of the many benefits of this exceptional translation and scholarly analysis is that it makes another primary source concerning these issues available to a wider, non-specialist readership, ensuring that many more voices will be added to scholarly debates about the interrelated history of the Nanyang region at this time. This book is highly recommended to specialists and non-specialists alike.