History has many untold stories. In Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes the author provides glimpses into China's hidden past through the native's point of view. Rather than simply writing about ordinary people, this book is written from the perspective of ordinary people, how they told their own stories about themselves, their communities, and their pasts. The author examines historical consciousness as revealed in people's everyday lives and as expressed through customary rituals, sociocultural conventions, language, and the complex symbolism of common human experiences. The focus is on ethnic groups and individuals who have been routinely discriminated against in mainstream society and treated by officials as rogues and criminals. They were denizens of the underworld of "rivers and lakes" (jianghu), a sociocultural category that includes bandits, sorcerers, conmen, and prostitutes. To get at their silent history the author spent decades conducting field research in rural areas of southern China, collecting rarely used unconventional sources-folklore, legends, myths, rumors, and hearsay-that reveal nuggets of new information and insights not found in the conventional sources in libraries and archives. This book challenges many commonplace assumptions about how academics write history by offering alternative possibilities for China's past.

The Golden Age of Piracy in China, 1520-1810 exposes readers to the little-known history of Chinese piracy in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries through a short narrative and selection of documentary evidence. In this three-hundred-year period, Chinese piracy was unsurpassed in size and scope anywhere else in the world. The book includes a carefully selected and wide range of Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Japanese sources-some translated for the first time-to illustrate the complexity and variety of piratical activities in Asian waters. These documents include archival criminal cases and depositions of pirates and victims, government reports and proclamations, memoirs of coastal residents and pirate captives, and written and oral folklore handed down for generations. The book also illuminates the important role that pirates played in the political, economic, social, and cultural transformations of early modern China and the world. An historical perspective provides an important vantage point to understand piracy as a recurring cyclical phenomenon inseparably connected with the past.

The Golden Age of Piracy in China, 1520-1810 exposes readers to the little-known history of Chinese piracy in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries through a short narrative and selection of documentary evidence. In this three-hundred-year period, Chinese piracy was unsurpassed in size and scope anywhere else in the world. The book includes a carefully selected and wide range of Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Japanese sources--some translated for the first time--to illustrate the complexity and variety of piratical activities in Asian waters. These documents include archival criminal cases and depositions of pirates and victims, government reports and proclamations, memoirs of coastal residents and pirate captives, and written and oral folklore handed down for generations. The book also illuminates the important role that pirates played in the political, economic, social, and cultural transformations of early modern China and the world. An historical perspective provides an important vantage point to understand piracy as a recurring cyclical phenomenon inseparably connected with the past.

History has many untold stories. In Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes the author provides glimpses into China's hidden past through the native's point of view. Rather than simply writing about ordinary people, this book is written from the perspective of ordinary people, how they told their own stories about themselves, their communities, and their pasts. The author examines historical consciousness as revealed in people's everyday lives and as expressed through customary rituals, sociocultural conventions, language, and the complex symbolism of common human experiences. The focus is on ethnic groups and individuals who have been routinely discriminated against in mainstream society and treated by officials as rogues and criminals. They were denizens of the underworld of "rivers and lakes" (jianghu), a sociocultural category that includes bandits, sorcerers, conmen, and prostitutes. To get at their silent history the author spent decades conducting field research in rural areas of southern China, collecting rarely used unconventional sources-folklore, legends, myths, rumors, and hearsay-that reveal nuggets of new information and insights not found in the conventional sources in libraries and archives. This book challenges many commonplace assumptions about how academics write history by offering alternative possibilities for China's past.

Dragons, Tigers, and Dogs is a tightly-focused collection of studies that explores how Qing governing institutions and strategies worked in actual practice to address the practical problems and needs of a regionally diverse and culturally complex empire from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It highlights the Qing regime's ability to accommodate an astonishing variety of local governing environments in the management of short-term contingent crises and long-term evolutionary problems caused by changes in the social-economic fabric of Greater China during the Qing period. It argues that the Qing state should be viewed as a system of indirect rule because of its accommodative strategies of governance and its reliance on sub- and extra-bureaucratic power groups at the local level. Dragons, Tigers, and Dogs makes an important contribution to our understanding of the practical operation of Qing government, and its readability, thematic coherence, and inclusion of professionally-drawn maps and enhanced Chinese woodblock illustrations make this work attractive and accessible to students of late imperial China as well as Qing specialists.

Dragons, Tigers, and Dogs is a tightly-focused collection of studies that explores how Qing governing institutions and strategies worked in actual practice to address the practical problems and needs of a regionally diverse and culturally complex empire from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It highlights the Qing regime's ability to accommodate an astonishing variety of local governing environments in the management of short-term contingent crises and long-term evolutionary problems caused by changes in the social-economic fabric of Greater China during the Qing period. It argues that the Qing state should be viewed as a system of indirect rule because of its accommodative strategies of governance and its reliance on sub- and extra-bureaucratic power groups at the local level. Dragons, Tigers, and Dogs makes an important contribution to our understanding of the practical operation of Qing government, and its readability, thematic coherence, and inclusion of professionally-drawn maps and enhanced Chinese woodblock illustrations make this work attractive and accessible to students of late imperial China as well as Qing specialists.

Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai traces the roots of modern global East Asia by focusing on the fascinating history of its seaways. The East Asian maritime realm, from the Straits of Malacca to the Sea of Japan, has been a core region of international trade for millennia, but during the long seventeenth century (1550 to 1700), the velocity and scale of commerce increased dramatically. Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese smugglers and pirates forged autonomous networks and maritime polities; they competed and cooperated with one another and with powerful political and economic units, such as the Manchu Qing, Tokugawa Japan, the Portuguese and Spanish crowns, and the Dutch East India Company. Maritime East Asia was a contested and contradictory place, subject to multiple legal, political, and religious jurisdictions, and a dizzying diversity of cultures and ethnicities, with dozens of major languages and countless dialects. Informal networks based on kinship ties or patron-client relations coexisted uneasily with formal governmental structures and bureaucratized merchant organizations. Subsistence-based trade and plunder by destitute fishermen complemented the grand dreams of sea-lords, profit-maximizing entrepreneurs, and imperial contenders. Despite their shifting identities, East Asia's mariners sought to anchor their activities to stable legitimacies and diplomatic traditions found outside the system, but outsiders, even those armed with the latest military technology, could never fully impose their values or plans on these often mercurial agents. With its multilateral perspective of a world in flux, this volume offers fresh, wide-ranging narratives of the "rise of the West" or "the Great Divergence." European mariners, who have often been considered catalysts of globalization, were certainly not the most important actors in East and Southeast Asia. China's maritime traders carried more in volume and value than any other nation, and the China Seas were key to forging the connections of early globalization-as significant as the Atlantic World and the Indian Ocean basin. Today, as a resurgent China begins to assert its status as a maritime power, it is important to understand the deep history of maritime East Asia.