In the literature about the history of Chinese of Southeast Asia, there is a small but important sub-category of studies that address the region’s Sino-indigène sub-cultures. The best known groups include: the Peranakan of Indonesia; the Baba of Malaysia; and the Mestizo/a of the Philippines. Collectively, they have been known by many names. Past works often employed the term mestizo, while more recent works have attempted to fit these groups under rubrics such as creolized or hybrid.Footnote 1 No history of Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, or the Philippines would be complete without an account of these intermediate social groups, given the role they often played as entrepreneurs; as governors of Chinese commerce and community; as brokers of capital (in all its forms); and, as translators of languages, cultures, and technologies. In their heyday, they exerted a great deal of influence on the economic, political, and cultural development of their host societies and Chinese society—in both Southeast Asia and the world at large.
This kind of Sino-indigène community existed in Vietnam, too. It still does, although its distinctive features have all but vanished through assimilation into Vietnamese society so that, by all appearances, it exists in name only. The pattern of this community’s evolution appears to parallel that of the Mestizo: Having creolised in the seventeenth century, it rose to prominence in the eighteenth century, suffered decline in the nineteenth, and then finally met its end in all but cultural identity as the twentieth century approached.Footnote 2 Obscure outside their country, this group is still well known within Vietnam and by those who study it. The people of this community are called Minh Hương (pronounced approximately “ming hung”), typically known in Western languages as the “Ming Loyalists” or “Ming Refugees.”
Vestiges of Minh Hương villages (called Minh Hương xã)—including inscriptions, placards, bells, urns, and written records—can be found in or around the towns once active in the sea trade that thrived along the Vietnamese littoral during the early modern era. Such relics are especially abundant in places like Huế, Hội An, Qui Nhơn, Chợ Lớn, Hà Tiên and other seaport centres in Central and Southern Vietnam where Minh Hương first settled. Scholars once thought that these villages were peculiar to the old southern domain of Cochinchina (V: Đàng Trong), one of two powerful domains that one of two powerful Vietnamese warlord clans, surnamed Nguyễn, ruled on behalf of Đại Việt’s powerless Lê emperor from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. In recent years, however, scholars have acknowledged the presence of villages like Phố Hiến and Phú Thạch in the northern domain of Tonkin (V: Đàng Ngoài), ruled by the Trịnh clan, the rival of the Nguyễn.Footnote 3 Many of their temples, some Buddhist, others venerating Chinese deities like the God of War (V: Quan Công or C: Guangong or Guandi), Goddess of Mercy (V: Quán Âm; C: Guanyin), and Empress of Heaven sea goddess (V: Thiên Hậu Ma Tổ; C: Tianhou Shengmu or Mazu), continue to function; some still function as religious institutions, others as tourist attractions. People still claim Minh Hương identity or descent, however, the name appears to be their only distinguishing trait. Other traits, such as language, culture, and political identity, eroded in the waves of Vietnamese assimilation generations ago. Little remains to remind the world of the wealthy, powerful elite that shaped the evolution of Vietnamese commerce, society, and state on the threshold of the modern era, and its peculiar culture.
The very name Minh Hương implies the story behind their creation. It derives from a Sino-Vietnamese term—two Sinitic characters (明香—pronounced Mingxiang in Mandarin Chinese) that literally means “Ming incense.”Footnote 4 The name invites the memory of China’s Ming Dynasty, whose fall in 1644 compelled many loyalists to flee overseas, in particular to the Vietnamese domain of Cochinchina. Given the connotations of incense with ritualized fealty in Chinese culture, many people have preferred to translate the name as “Ming Loyalist.” This makes sense. Chinese who remained loyal to the vanished Ming dynasty set themselves apart from the majority of Chinese who accepted the new Qing dynasty by wearing Ming-style hair and dress and adopting the two-character name. Many of these loyalist exiles lived along the southern Chinese seaboard or in the Chinese merchant colonies that proliferated overseas during the seventeenth century. Other people prefer to translate the characters as “Ming Refugees,” based on the accepted tale of Minh Hương origin, in which an exodus of “Ming vassals, … unwilling to be vassals in service to the Qing,” are said to have landed on the shores of Cochinchina in 1679 and appealed to the compassion of Cochinchina’s Nguyễn lord, who permitted them to remain as his subjects.Footnote 5
Scholars who study the Minh Hương commonly belong to one of three disciplines—Vietnamese, Chinese, or Overseas Chinese studies—all of which either accept the community’s self-identity as Chinese political exiles or refugees intent on eventual return or identify them by one of the Sino-indigène labels (mestizo, créole, hybrid, etc.) that fall under the Overseas Chinese rubric. This uncritical acceptance of the group’s self-identity, assumptions about the group’s ethnicity, and the urge to categorize has ensured that the true measure of Minh Hương wealth, power, and influence, manifested through the functions that made them essential to Vietnamese elites and maritime entrepreneurs, remains unrecognizable or misunderstood. That’s because, to put it another way, the historical significance of the Minh Hương did not depended on who they were, but rather on what they did. Indeed, there is more to the name Minh Hương than meets the eye.
This article consults the literature and published sources relevant to the Minh Hương community of southern Vietnam, in order to analyse their changing norms and functions over a long period of time and within the fluctuating context of their social world. What we find is that behind the Minh Hương appellation, the group’s cultural norms, social networks and functions, political loyalties, and other traits that underlay their identity (as defined by self and others) continually changed. This continual change in cultural content frustrates attempts to arrive at a singular definition of the Minh Hương, which may explain why historians have failed to notice them and recognise their significance to several streams of history. Minh Hương redefined their identity in this way as part of a set of adaptive processes that changed cultural content in response to environmental change, a typical cultural strategy among several merchant elites in world history. Ultimately, I hope to attract attention from beyond the conventional niches of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian history or Overseas Chinese studies by demonstrating the group’s value to the comparative study of early modern merchant cultures in world history.
The following section reviews the extant literature on the Minh Hương in order to get beyond the creation story and flat categorisations that overlook the subtle complexities of identity, historical nature of ethnic heritage and cultural content, and shifting parameters of social context. Doing so reveals the important function of identity as part of the group’s overall cultural strategy for capturing and preserving the interests that made them a powerful elite within Vietnamese society, in the face of profound environmental change, for over two centuries. The remainder of the article tests this assertion of strategic identity. The Minh Hương community evolved from four integrated networks that had developed before the 1650s: (1) militarised trading syndicates dominated by ethnically Min seafarers based in China’s Fujian and Guangdong provinces, which sustained (2) overseas merchant colonies of Tang or southern Chinese protected by (3) commercial warlords like the Vietnamese lord of Cochinchina, who by the 1650s provided a base for agents of (4) offshore Ming loyalist resistance centred in Fujian seaports and later Taiwan. By the end of the seventeenth century, Minh Hương identity had come into fruition. It continued to evolve, thanks to a series of adaptive social responses to changes in their field of interests, which included a set of cultural institutions whose networks spanned the East and Southeast Asian maritime world. By the nineteenth century, the localisation of their interests and the cataclysm of civil war in the previous century gave Vietnamese monarchs opportunities to undermine Minh Hương institutions and even change their identities. Only then did community members begin to assert themselves as a distinct ethnicity. But by then, it was too late, and Minh Hương power continued to decline until, by century’s end, their formal status ceased to exist, their wealth and institutional vigour dissipated.
Who Were the Minh Hương?
The literature about the Minh Hương is small. Scholars of Southeast Asia rarely mention them; Overseas Chinese historians hardly at all. Those who do reiterate the creation tale recited above.Footnote 6 Until recently, Chen Ching-ho’s superb studies of the Minh Hương, published from the 1950s through the 1970s, provided the bulk of our knowledge about the Minh Hương. Thankfully, the situation is changing. In the last decade, Claudine Salmon’s analysis of “Ming Loyalist” communities in Tonkin and Cochinchina during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Naoko Iioka’s fascinating studies of the loyalist-merchant-musician-Buddhist patron Wei Zhiyuan, and Li Qingxin’s burgeoning scholarship about the Minh Hương and the Ming loyalist fleets that helped create them have pushed scholarship forward substantially.
Understanding Minh Hương identity is important. Outside contemporary observers define them quite differently from each other, depending on their own vantage. European observers of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Vietnam, like John Barrow and Pierre Poivre, typically identified Minh Hương as “Cochinchinese,” having perceived no difference between the Vietnamese and Minh Hương with whom they transacted.Footnote 7 However, an early nineteenth-century European observer found it peculiar that a “Chinese” he met in Saigon wore Vietnamese dress; obviously, these people were Minh Hương.Footnote 8 Chinese authors, by contrast, did not see them as fundamentally different from Min back home (the Chinese dialect group from which most Minh Hương descend), even as late as 1835 when Cai Tinglan commented on the “strange” practice of Ming worship among the “Min” (Fujian Chinese) people of Hội An.Footnote 9 Different groups mislabel them differently, but they mislabel them just the same.
In Overseas Chinese studies, research on Vietnam’s Chinese generally treat Minh Hương identity superficially, as essentially Chinese exiles who “might consider themselves sojourners wishing one day to return to China permanently after the Manchus were overthrown.”Footnote 10 Such a thesis evokes the streams of Chinese exiles—officials, literati, monks, and others—who dispersed throughout Asia, primarily to Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, seeking refuge overseas after the Ming collapse in 1644 and, moreover, whose descendants still yearn to return three centuries later.Footnote 11
If Minh Hương considered themselves sojourners in Vietnam, however, they did so only rhetorically. The evidence all points to a long-term political commitment to Vietnam—first to the lord of Cochinchina, then the emperor of Đại Nam, and later the nation-state. The roster of loyal Minh Hương subjects of the Vietnamese empire dates back to the seventeenth century. Trịnh Hoài Đức, Hà Hỷ Văn, and Trần Tiễn Thành were just a few of many Minh Hương who were distinguished servants of Vietnamese monarchs during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 12 Phan Thanh Giản, the Nguyễn official who committed suicide in the face of defeat to French invaders in 1867, ranks high on Vietnamese lists of anticolonialist patriots; histories of Vietnam and the “Vietnam War” regularly recite his letter of surrender.Footnote 13 Châu Thượng Văn, the anticolonialist better known as Minh Hương, fasted to death during the Tax Revolt of 1908 against French colonial rule.Footnote 14 Ngô Đình Diệm, the first president of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) and a staunch anti-communist nationalist (who pursued policies bent on assimilating Chinese), descended from a lineage that traced back to one of the original Minh Hương villages near Huế in the 1600s. Trịnh Công Sơn, Vietnam’s beloved anti-war songwriter and poet, descended from a lineage that includes the famed nineteenth-century statesman Trịnh Hoài Đức.Footnote 15 Despite their invocations of fealty to the fallen dynasty, Minh Hương individuals repeatedly and explicitly demonstrated their de facto political allegiance to Vietnamese monarchs and, by the twentieth century, the Vietnamese nation. In contrast, Minh Hương names remain so far absent in the annals of anti-Qing and nationalist movements in China. Thus, the Minh Hương community was more complexly created than the current literature maintains.
Western- and Vietnamese-language studies of Vietnam’s Chinese, by comparison, acknowledge the tale of Chinese refugee origins but instead regard Minh Hương as a fundamentally ethnic label. These works refer back to a small but influential body of work produced by French scholars during the turn of the twentieth century that addressed the problem in order to help colonial policymakers resolve whether they were best categorized as either Vietnamese or Chinese.Footnote 16 These studies from the French colonial period tended to characterise the Minh Hương as “une race de métis,” defined foremost by their Sino-Vietnamese parentage.Footnote 17 Yet even works such as these, which cast Minh Hương as mestizo, metis, or “hybrid” offspring of both Vietnamese and Chinese parents, place emphasis on patrilineage over matrilineage; even as they acknowledge the complete shift of Minh Hương culture from Chinese to Vietnamese norms, they continue to categorise the them as a sub-category of Chinese in Vietnam—in conformity with the habit of analysts in Overseas Chinese studies. As Choi Byung Wook puts it, Minh Hương “showed their readiness to join Vietnamese society” in dress, language and lifestyle, “yet they still maintained their distinct origin and identity as Chinese.”Footnote 18 In other words, no amount of assimilation could ameliorate their primordial Chinese core.
This taxonomic impulse to lump Minh Hương among a generalised group of Chinese is easy enough to understand. The core stories and symbols of the Minh Hương community reinforce their self-identification, and their identification by others, as the descendants of Chinese refugees. There is nothing inherently wrong with this practice, of course, and it is interestingly common among communities that possess a refugee lineage. However, biological and cultural lineages diverged quite sharply as the effects of Vietnamese matrilineage took effect over the course of their history, despite the constancy of their communal identity. This is just one way in which the refugee characterisation can oversimplify a community’s complex past in ways that mislead historians.
In reality, Minh Hương families trace their heritage mostly to economic migrants, not political exiles. Historical and genealogical information supports this.Footnote 19 Scholars who identify the community as the descendants of political exiles typically point out Zhu Shunshui, the well-known Ming loyalist scholar who travelled to Cochinchina during the 1650s. But Zhu merely sojourned there.Footnote 20 More tellingly, membership in the Minh Hương villages remained open throughout most of their history. When the Tây Sơn Uprising decimated Cochinchina in the 1770s, it laid waste to most of the country’s Minh Hương villages. When rival Tây Sơn and Nguyễn rulers resurrected them in the 1780s, they used membership as a tool of recruitment (see below). This created a powerful incentive among Vietnamese and Chinese alike to obtain membership in Minh Hương communities, so much so that periodically community leaders sought help from the royal court in limiting access.
None of these facts diminish the importance of the Ming resistance against the Qing to the community’s genesis, in both its mythological and material forms. Nor do they negate the importance of the refugee ideal to creating and sustaining community solidarity. Indeed, the peculiar aspects of their identity offered Minh Hương an array of commercial and political strategies that produced prosperity, security, and power for themselves and maintained it for over two centuries. That identity rested upon their founding myth—a myth rooted in real events, but a myth just the same. It is a useful myth, however. When analysed in a different perspective, the refugee myth helps to make sense of the community’s complex evolution, which began with a convergence of interests in the maritime world of China’s Min people.
The Evolution of Minh Hương identity: A Convergence of Interests, 1550s–1650s
The currents that encouraged the creation of Minh Hương society trace back to the hemispheric ripple effects of a policy made in China. The Ming government’s ban on maritime commerce at the end of the fourteenth century encouraged the development of a large informally organized commercial shadow economy at sea, which brought fisher folk, officials, merchants, and gentry along the coast into cahoots with syndicates of military entrepreneurs—pirates, privateers, smugglers, and merchants—and greatly expanded subversive maritime trade.Footnote 21 When Ming court finally rescinded the state ban on maritime trade in 1567 and instituted state-sanctioned forms of Sino-foreign sea trade, these syndicates of military entrepreneurs and their supporting networks survived, and indeed grew, as a new age of commerce commenced and a complimentary realm of legitimate Sino-foreign trade developed.
Out of this smuggling economy, a dispersed network of self-sustaining settlements of Min-speaking Chinese from Fujian grew. It began first in Japan, where powerful domain lords or daimyō in Satsuma and Kyushu discovered mutually beneficial interests with Chinese syndicates in promoting the informal commercial economy at sea. They granted charters to Min mariners to build settlements in the harbours where they were based. One observer noted that, once established, these Chinese tended to “marry Japanese women, and raise children there.” They formed their communities around “the great boulevard named Great Tang” and the “Tang markets” where “those who have capital band themselves with the Japanese seafarers to conduct trade.”Footnote 22 The name of China’s ancient dynasty had long been a popular name for southern Chinese, like the Min, both at home and abroad. Japanese references to Tang settlements begin in 1523, and grow more frequent in the late sixteenth century, when commerce surged and merchant colonies proliferated throughout maritime Asia.Footnote 23
One of these places was Cochinchina. In 1558 and 1570, a lord named Nguyễn Hoàng, himself a navy man, assumed the governorship of Đại Việt’s two southernmost territories, located in what is today Central Vietnam.Footnote 24 By the turn of the seventeenth century, Lord Nguyễn initiated moves that transformed the kingdom’s southern frontier into the autonomous domain of Cochinchina. The success of the Nguyễn lord and his descendants lay partly in their commercial strategy, in which his new state tapped into Asia’s growing sea trade, in part as a source of revenue and in part as a way to secure access to arms markets in places like Macau.Footnote 25 To ensure this, the entrepreneurial warlord began to create policies and build strategic alliances that entrepreneurs turned to his fledgling domain as an offshore market for Sino-foreign, in particular Sino-Japanese, trade, which a number of syndicates served in defiance of China’s longstanding trade restrictions.
Before breaking out on his own, however, Nguyễn Hoàng developed a relationship with Japan’s new government under Hideyoshi Toyotomi, who (like Nguyễn Hoàng’s Vietnamese rival), wished to quash his sea-trading daimyō rivals (people just like Nguyễn Hoàng) by centralizing maritime trade under the Shuinsen or “Red Seal” system that he launched in 1592.Footnote 26 Under this system, the Japanese government annually awarded ship merchants licenses to trade in places like Cochinchina.Footnote 27 Once ships arrived in the Vietnamese domain, entrepreneurs encountered other, mostly Min, Chinese (among other groups, like Portuguese) ready to trade. Lord Nguyễn and his followers had secured an offshore source of wealth able to help them “resist the Trinh” and “build an everlasting fortune.”Footnote 28 It also led to the formation of prosperous, permanent Tang communities in Cochinchina.
Explicit references to a Tang (V: Đường) Street in Cochinchina appear in documents written as early as the early- to mid-seventeenth century, however, it seems more likely that they developed in tandem with Tang colonies that grew all over East and Southeast Asia during the late 1500s.Footnote 29 Sources confirm other Tang streets in other Cochinchinese seaport towns that formed as secondary, regional centres serving Hội An as both clearinghouses for imports and exports and centres for Cochinchina’s large coastal carrier trade. In addition to Hội An, early colonies during this phase include Thanh Hà, Nước Mạn, and Vũng Lấm.Footnote 30
As in Japan, Tang communities governed themselves informally. The Nguyễn court ruled foreign merchants indirectly through a headman or kapitan system that confined merchants to ethnic enclaves and assigned a reputable individual from among the quarter’s merchants to govern them on Lord Nguyễn’s behalf. In exchange for this autonomy, headmen accepted the responsibility of ensuring the steady flow of customs duties and other periodic tributes and taxes from their community to the Vietnamese court.Footnote 31 Given their autonomy and control over tax collection and local governance, the sea trade that moved through Cochinchina’s ports placed elders of Hội An’s Tang quarter in a powerful position. Institutions helped them to secure these growing interests.
Common cultural institutions reinforced the merchant-monarch relationship in Cochinchina, as part of the Nguyễn strategy to maintain trade relations and control Cochinchina’s foreign merchants through informal, parochial ties that encouraged fictive kinship, like their practice of adoption with members of the Japanese community.Footnote 32 As the Tang community introduced the cultural institutions of self-rule into their community, be they kin, native-place, or religious, the Nguyễn court sought to subsume them under their authority through a variety of institutional means, including the patronage of Buddhist or deity temples.Footnote 33 For example, a 1646 temple inscription located in mountains north of Hội An that Vietnamese called Phổ Đà Sơn, named after the Chinese coastal island of Putuoshan, a long-time hub for pirates, smugglers, merchants, and monks, lists among its donors subjects of the “Great Ming” (V: Đại Minh; C: Da Ming) and many wives of Hội An Chinese.Footnote 34 Temples provided the institutional nexus for creating a reinforcing web of relationships that wedded the interests of Cochinchina’s Tang community tightly to that of the Nguyễn. These bonds remained relatively weak until macroregional circumstances demanded greater integration, both locally with Vietnamese and across the seas with other Tang Chinese.
The most important of these Tang entrepreneurs in Cochinchina was the family syndicate that produced the famed merchant warlord Zheng Chenggong. During the Red Seal era between 1592 and 1639, sea traders who operated in Japan enjoyed a privileged place in Cochinchina. Historians have emphasized Japanese traders, but Chinese played important roles as well. In 1610, the Tokugawa court ”officially earmarked” the powerful Min sea trader Li Dan (“Captain Chyna”), who operated between Nagasaki and Macau, to receive the coveted licenses. He traded in Vietnam as well: his sons Zheng Zhilong (Iquan) and Huayu (Niquan) both won the coveted licenses to trade with Tonkin and Cochinchina between 1614 and 1621.Footnote 35
The Zheng clan was crucial to the smooth development of Đàng Trong’s commercial economy during the volatile late 1600s. Perhaps the best indication of this can be seen in what happens after the Red Seal system ends—which was nothing. In the 1630s, the Tokugawa bakufu eliminated the Red Seal system, banned all large Japanese ocean carriers, forbid Japanese to travel abroad, and cast out the Portuguese.Footnote 36 This raises the question: If Cochinchina was dependent on its position as an offshore base for Sino-Japanese commerce, why didn’t it fail? After all, the Nguyễn clan was at war with its northern Trịnh rival, and needed a steady supply of arms and cash to pay for them. Strangely, the domain did not fall. In fact, Japanese customs records verify the continued movement of the Chinese carrier trade between Japan, China, and Cochinchina throughout the volatile decades of the seventeenth century.Footnote 37 Why?
The answer lies with the Zheng clan. By 1628, patriarch Zheng Zhilong (Iquan) controlled the Taiwan Straits through which shipping to Japan passed; a few years later, the Ming government placed Fujian’s regional force under his control.Footnote 38 When the Tokugawa government resettled Japan’s Tang Chinese in Nagasaki in 1641, it placed authority over the Chinese community—and its trade—in his son, Zheng Chenggong, who continued to trade in Cochinchina.Footnote 39 This helped to guarantee shipping trade, which stabilized the commercial economy upon which the Nguyễn regime depended. Even as violence caused China’s sea trade to falter, however, the informal shadow economy prevailed, and Cochinchina grew. Soon, a new threat emerged: the 1644 collapse of the Ming Dynasty. Again, institutional responses maintained stability and helped coordinate strategic responses.
Development of Institutions and Identity, 1650s–1770s
In 1644, the Ming government collapsed, and with it whatever vestiges of centralised state power remained along China’s littoral. This event sparked an era of volatility and flux that vexed the East Asian maritime until 1683, when the Qing finally prevailed in their contest with the Ming Loyalist Zheng clan and thereby subjugated the Chinese maritime and the Taiwan Straits, a critical strategic chokepoint.
Allegedly, in 1646 a monk named Guangji sailed to Cochinchina and other Southeast Asian countries in order to help Ming loyalists raise an army to resist the Qing advance on south-coastal China.Footnote 40 Thus began a region-wide effort by the Zheng clan and their supporters to obtain the help of neighbouring countries and the leaders of Tang merchant colonies overseas. They dispatched loyal Ming officials, too, like Zhu Shunshui, who spent thirteen years sailing between Cochinchina and Japan on behalf of the cause.Footnote 41 Five years later, in 1651, Zheng Chenggong “personally led a fleet of 24 ships to various places in Southeast Asia, sending seven ships to Batavia, two ships to Tonkin, ten ships to Siam, four ships to Guangnan [the most common Chinese name for Cochinchina], and one ship to Manila, to pursue trade relations [emphasis added].”Footnote 42 This coincided with the organization of a system of sea-trading management under a “five bang” system of shipping firms.Footnote 43 At the same time, Zheng Chenggong and his followers created fleets charged with patrolling the seas to protect this maritime commercial base, including a “southern fleet” that patrolled the seas between Guangzhou and Cambodia. Only two years later, the earliest signs of Ming Loyalist identity in Cochinchina appeared: the placards that commemorate the Lâm clan temple, the newly constructed Quan Công temple (akaChùa Ông) and the nearby Quán Âm temple, all dated 1653.Footnote 44 All this was done to ally the interests of coastal elites, shipping syndicates and Tang colonies to the interests of Ming restoration under the banner of the Zheng. Political ambitions rested on the success of his commercial empire centred in the Taiwan Straits.
These events were part of an interfusion of networks that helped trade, diaspora, and local warlords like the Nguyễn survive the volatile environment of the late seventeenth-century, and flourish. People created these networks. As Ming Loyalist literati-officials, Buddhist monks, and armed traders circulated throughout the Min Stream, they helped to integrate Min-Tang inhabitants of diasporic settlements into an integrated, elastic unit under the new Ming Loyalist banner of Zheng Chenggong. The merchant-warlord controlled all Tang Chinese shipping that sailed into Nagasaki between 1647 and 1662, and continued to dominate it in the 1670s as his military power declined;Footnote 45 since Nagasaki customs reports usually identify Chinese merchants trading in Cochinchina with Zheng, we can speculate that the percentage was similar for the Vietnamese domain. This explains why Cochinchina’s shipping remained steady in the face of war, trade bans, and violent coastal evacuations that scourged seventeenth-century China.Footnote 46 Zheng ships guaranteed Cochinchina continued access to Chinese and Japanese markets, thanks to its connections with the elaborate smuggling networks and undertow shipping trade that survived the Qing conquest. Zheng fleets engaged Chinese smugglers, often with the help of Qing officials, and despite Qing coastal prohibitions and terror, just as they had done in Ming times.Footnote 47 The size of this shadow trading economy may seem small from the Chinese perspective, but it was enough to expand and maintain Cochinchina’s commercial base. From its perspective, the China pattern of carrier trade between it, Japan, and China continued almost unchanged from the Red Seal era.
Institutions enabled this process of adjustment and adaptation. Some of these institutions were purely economic, like the mint that Ming Loyalists established in Nagasaki in 1661 to manufacture Ming dynasty coins, and upon which the Nguyễn economy came to rely.Footnote 48 Most were cultural, and organized around temples, like the temple for the sea goddess Mazu (V: Ma Tổ) “made of wattle and thatch” in Hoi An’s Amitabha (Buddhist) temple, the clan halls, and the Quan Công and Quán Âm temples—Chùa Ông, “the lord’s temple” and Chùa Bà, “the lady’s temple.”—the latter two of which formed the core of every “Minh Hương community (xã)” that developed in Cochinchina.Footnote 49 Vietnamese and Min-Tang-Ming Chinese in Cochinchina continued to organize transoceanic community through institutions formed around kinship, native-place, and deities. This provided the stabilising functions that anchored a transoceanic network of Tang colonies more deeply into the fabric of Cochinchinese society and politics, wedding Ming Loyalist identity with the preceding facets of Min and Tang identity that had manifested in the sixteenth century.
This development began long before the arrival of the “original” Ming Refugees in 1682. In a memorial to the Kangxi emperor in 1669, a provincial censor named Yu Jin reported: “Millions of Chinese commoners have dispersed and remain abroad in [Cochinchina]… Among these refugees, there are some rascals who have submitted to the foreign state in order to survive.” He was referring to Chao Wenbo (Triệu Văn Bá), a Min Chinese official of the Nguyễn court, who escorted a Guangdong dusi (District Brigade Commander) named Liu Shihu and his soldiers back to Guangdong after their patrol ship drifted into Cochinchina during a storm.Footnote 50 At least that is what they reported—another passage on the incident in the Chinese imperial court record reports that Liu and his crew arrived home on a sea trader loaded with commodities, “disregarding the current sea ban” on travel and trade that the Qing were trying to enforce.Footnote 51 It is not clear why these émigrés chose Cochinchina; perhaps because more preferable countries like Japan discouraged immigration. In a letter to a merchant friend, the Confucian scholar Zhu Shunshui reported: “letting one [Tang person] stay [in Nagasaki] is ten times harder than passing the most advanced civil-service exam.”Footnote 52 In any case, the Chinese imperial record for that year reports that nineteen crewmembers “have not yet returned”.Footnote 53 “We can only assume,” as Yu noted, that these seafarers joined the “innumerable” compatriots that lived in Cochinchina.Footnote 54
Evidence supports Ch’en Ching-ho’s thesis that Ming Loyalist communities began to form in Cochinchina sometime between 1644 and 1653, three decades before the allegedly first “refugees” described above. Thus, the process of absorbing Ming Loyalist Chinese into Cochinchinese society was well underway, too.Footnote 55 This is significant. When the Zheng commercial empire and Ming resistance began to crumble in the 1670s, Ming identity and the collective institutions of Ming, Tang, and Min endured thanks to the elastic institutional web that gradually formed throughout the preceding century. With bonds this strong, Ming Loyalists and Cochinchinese elites found ways to adapt and restructure their interests when the Qing Empire defeated their proto-state in Taiwan in 1683 and began to impose order over its hard-won maritime dominion in 1684. In this context, the actual significance of the so-called original “Ming Refugees” becomes clear.
Typically, historians who have studied the Minh Hương refer to two early works. The most popular source appears to be the Đại Nam thực lục—the “Veritable Record of Dai Nam,” a chronicle of the empire that a Nguyễn clan scion founded in 1802, and written by court historians under his successors. Actually, these court historians drew from the second, earlier source, Gia Định thành thông chí (Unified gazetteer of Gia Định Citadel), a small gazetteer of the Saigon region compiled by Trịnh Hoài Đức, the statesman and a Minh Hương mentioned above, which he completed in 1820. This work relied on a much earlier source, Nguyễn Khoa Chiêm’s Nam Triều công nghiệp diễn chí (Historical romance about the achievements of the Southern court), written in the early 1700s, about thirty years after the alleged Minh Hương arrival.Footnote 56 Historians do not consult this source, perhaps because the author modelled the book on the classic Chinese literary genre of historical romance—pronounced yanzhi in Chinese, diễn chí in Vietnamese. Despite its fictional appearance, the work contains reliable, verifiable, data.
The conventional sources mentioned above say little about the conditions under which the original Ming refugees arrived in Cochinchina. Nguyễn Khoa Chiêm, in contrast, paints an elaborate but bleak picture of their plight. In his version, Yang Yangdi, “a quelled pirate general from Longmen,” a city and island on the Gulf of Tonkin in China, led his fleet of 200 ships and 40,000 troops away from the Qing forces that had seized his base.Footnote 57 Becalmed for a month and then ravaged by typhoons, the Longmen Fleet shrank to a mere fifty ships, and its crew was decimated to a mere 3,000 souls reduced to “drinking dew and raindrops” and “eating the leather hides of their shoes.” When a sailor finally spotted land, the “Longmen fleet sought refuge” in the domain’s estuaries, where the country’s harbours lay. Seeing the ships, the harbour patrols notified the lord, who, “alarmed, ordered his admirals to lead warships stealthily into each harbour, in order to plan an attack to annihilate” them. Instead, one of his officers approached Yang’s ship, and initiated negotiations. As a result, Yang dispatched one of his officers to the capital, where he submitted to Lord Nguyễn on behalf of the emaciated crew. In the midst of this meeting, the author claims, the lord hatched a plan: he would send the Longmen fleet “to settle in the Kingdom of Cambodia.”Footnote 58
Yang Yandi agreed. Actually, however, it is unlikely that the choice of refuge in Cambodia was entirely the Vietnamese monarch’s idea, because Yang and his Longmen fleet knew Cambodia well. After all, they had operated there since at least 1647.Footnote 59 Japanese customs reports about Yang and his confederates sailing the waters of “Cambodia”—interestingly, as marauders, rather than merchants or naval guards—date back to the 1660s.Footnote 60
Yang’s Longmen fleet was part of a much larger force of thirteen smaller fleets that together formed the “Southern Fleet,” organized by the Zheng government in Taiwan to secure ports, islands, and sea-lanes strategic to Zheng commerce, and based in Longmen.Footnote 61 The city offered Yang a vantage from which he could control the shipping traffic between Southeast Asia and China as it moved along the Vietnamese coast. Cambodia lay only a few days away by sail—weather permitting—which placed the Longmen fleet almost exactly between three of its most important interests: the Pearl River Delta that served Guangzhou and Macau; the Vietnamese kingdoms of Tonking and Cochinchina, important trade partners; and the Lower Mekong Delta, still then a part of Cambodia, but quickly succumbing to Cochinchinese conquest, colonization and incorporation.
To be precise, Yang and his confederates now settled in a territory that Vietnamese were only beginning to subjugate and colonise. This is evident in a memorial written in 1683 by the admiral who defeated the Zheng clan and captured Taiwan, Shi Lang, who reported to the emperor: “The ships of Yang Yandi are now in Cambodia [Jianbuzhai] in Cochinchina [Guangnan].”Footnote 62 By “Cambodia,” Shi meant southern Cambodia, which in the 1600s meant the region surrounding the Mekong Delta, which included the nearby Saigon River where the Minh Hương settled. The admiral’s choice of words—Cochinchinese Cambodia—belies the transitional condition of the region. Growing military power in Cochinchina and weak state power and internecine struggles in northern Cambodia had emboldened the Nguyễn lords to make southern Cambodia Vietnamese.
However weak Yang and his crew were when they arrived in Cochinchina, their strategic position in Cochinchina was actually quite strong. Ming loyalists already populated Cochinchina’s urban centres, ran its sea trade, and filled positions in its government. At some point between the first signs of Minh Hơưng identity in Cochinchina in 1653 and their final and formal incorporation into the Nguyễn state in 1698, the Ming loyalists won a host of liberties from the Nguyễn court that far exceed anything one would expect to find even among a merchant elite, much less a band of starving refugees. The list of privileges included the right to manage overseas shipping, port management and trade customs. They governed the foreign merchant community in the kingdom’s sea-trading cities. Moreover, members of Ming Loyalist villages enjoyed a host of liberties that normally were reserved for Vietnamese: They could legally marry Vietnamese, own land, take the civil service examinations, hold government office, and hold royal titles. Taken altogether, the new Ming Loyalist subjects enjoyed privileges that surpassed even the privileges of Lord Nguyễn’s Vietnamese subjects. Still, the advantages did not end there, because Minh Hương retained their informal status as Chinese, too. They used this privilege to maintain memberships in the key cultural institutions of trade and merchant society within the Tang Chinese colonies proliferating everywhere—namely clan halls, spirit temples and monasteries (the same is true for the first Fujian Guild Hall or hội quán in the town, created sometime before 1695). This compact between Nguyễn court and Ming Loyalists that institutionalised a bureaucratic-mercantile “minority elite” hardly suggests the kind of marginalized, disempowered exiles that typically characterizes refugees. It was not a gift, but rather the outcome of competition and negotiation that placed them there in the last decades of the seventeenth century.
Indeed, the process of transforming Ming loyalists into Minh Hơưng had only begun. Two facts suggest that Yang’s arrival marked the beginning of a period of competition and renegotiation of status that ended only in 1698 with the Nguyễn court’s formal incorporation of the Minh Hơưng as a minority elite. First, the Longmen Fleet’s formal incorporation into Minh Hơưng villages does not appear to have happened until 1698, almost sixteen years after their arrival.Footnote 63 Almost as soon as they settled in Đồng Phố, Yang’s allegedly malnourished soldiers broke apart into rival factions and quickly jumped into the internecine conflicts then raging all over Cambodia. During this interlude, these same Ming “refugees” came into regular contact with the Nguyễn as both allies and foes.Footnote 64 Until 1698, then, the fealty of many of the Ming Loyalists living in southern Cambodia—perhaps all over Cochinchina—must have been in doubt. The Nguyễn court’s formal incorporation of both the Minh Hơưng villages and Saigon region into the Cochinchinese state and creation of a Minh Hơưng village in 1698 marked a watershed in the evolution of Minh Hơưng community and identity.
The Longmen Fleet’s arrival in Cochinchina thus marks the beginning of a critical reorientation and incorporation, when the institutions of Vietnamese state, Tang merchant diaspora and Minh Hương community began to respond to the Qing victory over the Zheng. With maritime resistance vanquished, Qing control of the coast was complete. Throughout maritime Asia, state responses to the new Qing order differed, forcing Tang communities and their Ming loyalists to adapt differently as well. In Japan, for example, the Tokugawa court overhauled Nagasaki’s Chinese quarter and the rules governing Chinese ethnicity in 1689, formally erasing Ming loyalist identity.Footnote 65 In Cochinchina, the opposite happened: the court recognized Minh Hương community and raised it to elite status. Here, cultural institutions like temples continued to play an important role in managing adaptation. It deepened the commitment between Tang colonies and their local sovereigns and solidified the elevated status they had won.
Temples helped to sanction these new commitments. Across from Hội An’s Quan Công hall, merchants sponsored a monastery dedicated to the Amitabha, whom Vietnamese call Di Đà. Local lore credits the widow of a wealthy Ming Loyalist merchant for the land and funds to build the monastery 1688.Footnote 66 It is not entirely clear who oversaw the development of the temple and its grounds, however, sources suggest a master from Guangzhou named Xinglian Guohong, a disciple of Shilian Dashan (V: Thạch Liêm Đại Sớn) with strong Minh Hương connections to Minh merchants in Hội An who had restored another monastery in the mountains north of Hội An. A few years later, Hội An patricians also raised funds to build three Zen Buddhist monasteries: Chúc Thánh in 1694–5, Kim Sơn in 1696–7, and Phước Lâm in 1698.Footnote 67 This wave of Buddhist temple building was not confined to Hội An, of course. At the same time that the Fujian merchants sponsored temple-building enterprises in Hội An, their compatriots funded building activities in Đàng Trong’s other port towns, wherever Ming Loyalist villages formed: in Thanh Hà, Hội An, Quang Nghĩa, Qui Nhơn, Nha Trang, Đồng Nai, and Hà Tiên.Footnote 68 These were done with strong merchant support.
The period between the Longmen Fleet’s arrival in 1682 and the formal incorporation of Minh Hương into the Cochinchinese state in 1698 also turns out to be one of intense religious development, led by Buddhist masters. In the midst of the Longmen Fleet’s arrival in Cochinchina, Lord Nguyễn expelled the quốc sĩ or “Royal [Buddhist] Master” from his capital.Footnote 69 He replaced him with Yuanzhao (known popularly among Vietnamese as Nguyên Thiều)—a Chinese monk from a monastery in the western suburbs of Guangzhou where sea traders gathered, and who had migrated to Cochinchina in 1677 aboard a merchant ship and built a monastery there with merchant donations. Like his monastic brethren in Japan, Yuanzhao sought to spread the values of Hoàng Bích (C: Huangbo, most widely known by the Japanese name, Obaku), a form of Zen Buddhism that venerated both Min and Ming cultures in their practice. Twelve years later, Yuanzhao moved south to Đồng Nai in “Cochinchinese Cambodia,” to settle among the Minh Hương. Dashan himself sailed to Cochinchina the following year in order to formally bestow his dharma lineage on Lord Nguyễn Phuc Chu (Dashan claimed authority over both schools). The lord then appointed Chinese disciples of both Yuanzhao and Dashan to monasteries throughout Cochinchina, while Yuanzhao oversaw the creation of new temples in the old Cambodian territories of the Lower Mekong. At the same time, Dashan promoted the elevation of the sea goddess Mazu, which the Qing court had recently elevated to imperial status and Tang merchants had embraced as the benefactor of the new institution of sea trade, the huiguan (hội quán) or merchant guild, which was created Hội An sometime before the master’s visit in 1695. He also called for the strengthening of orthodox sinitic institutions, including “proper” cemeteries.Footnote 70
At the dawn of the eighteenth century, Minh Hương enjoyed an ubiquitous presence in the institutions of political, commercial, and religious power in Cochinchina. Internationally, Minh Hương played important functions as political, cultural as well as commercial brokers for the Nguyễn, leading diplomatic missions, offering intelligence, and acting as cultural emissaries to Buddhist temples and other cultural institutions in China. They continued to control the foreign trade customs and their near monopoly in the country’s overseas commerce. However, their seventeenth-century control over Chinese shipping and shipbuilding gravitated toward the expatriate Qing subjects who flooded the ports of maritime Asia in 1684, a year after the Zheng surrender, including those in Cochinchina. At the same time, the Minh Hương community appears to have grown more deeply invested in the domestic business of the Đàng Trong realm, much of it export-oriented, especially rice.Footnote 71 Their position at the apex of the sea trade gave them advantages in the growing commerce in forest and sea products for export, while their right to own land would have given them a central role to play in the development of commercial agriculture.
Temples stabilized, but continued to adapt when necessary. Sometime during the 1710s or 20s, for example, a second guild hall was built for members of the Merchant Mariner Guild (V. Thương Dương hội quán; C. Yangshang huiguan). This temple’s origins remain vague, but its timing suggests that it owed its genesis in some way to changes in trade policies in China (1717, 1727) and Japan (1715), which had the effect of encouraging greater interest in Southeast Asia. This makes sense, because the Sino-Japanese entrepot trade that once had been Đàng Trong’s mainstay had faded away by this time and the economy now depended upon export production, mainly to China.Footnote 72 Mazu was installed here, signalling the migration of the goddess temple from Buddhist monasteries to merchant guildhalls, a clear indication of the changing relations between monks and merchants.Footnote 73
Institutional Decline and the Survival of Identity, 1773–1898
The third long century under study, from 1773 to 1898, reveals a wholly different set of circumstances and content that the formal resurrection of Minh Hương identity in Tây Sơn and Nguyễn Vietnam belie. Here, we see that culture comes to play the predominant role in maintaining group integrity in the face of a cataclysm. In the end, however, changes to their political status and economic roles in Cochinchina undermined their old interests, which encouraged a new Vietnamese dynasty to take steps to undermine their institutional power. At this moment in their history, we see the community turn to identity in order to prevent this erosion of status.
The Tây Sơn Uprising decimated Minh Hương communities in its early years. Curiously, Minh Hương played a key role in fomenting the rebellion in the first place. The early successes of the Tây Sơn brothers depended upon the support of Qui Nhơn’s “Qing (V. Thanh) merchants,” sources say. Two merchants stood above the others: Li Cai (V. Lý Tài; AKA Li Azhi) and Ji Ting (Tập Đình; AKA Li Aji), who raised the Chinese land and naval force that was critical to initial Tây Sơn successes.Footnote 74 Li was from Fujian, Ji from Min-speaking Chaozhou Prefecture in Guangdong. Both had migrated as youths to Hội An to become merchants, and later settled in Qui Nhơn where they became leaders in the community. It is not clear whether they became members of the Minh Hương, but other Minh Hương participated in the civil war, on both sides.Footnote 75 Trịnh Hoài Đức served Nguyễn Ánh. The genealogy of a nineteenth-century official named Trần Tiễn Thành, a Minh Hương, lists family members on both sides of the conflict.Footnote 76
During this war, both sides used Minh Hương identity as a means for recruiting and rewarding military assistance from a new generation of Chinese “military entrepreneurs,” or pirates. When Qing authorities interrogated Wang Guili, the Chinese leader of a fleet of “Vietnamese pirates,” they remarked on the long hair he wore, different from the shaved head and queue mandated for all Qing subjects. Wang reported that after he had joined the naval forces of the Tây Sơn, and rose to the ranks of duke and brigadier general, he took a Vietnamese wife and adopted Vietnamese customs, including hairstyle.Footnote 77 Hà Hỷ Văn (C. He Xiwen) started out in landlocked Sichuan as a member of a White Lotus band, a Buddhist millenarian school whose uprising threatened the stability of the Qing, and somehow ended up in a pirate band that belonged to the Tiandihui secret society, where he “raided the coasts of Fujian and Guangdong.”Footnote 78 By 1786, he had joined Nguyễn Ánh in his effort to return to power.Footnote 79 Nguyễn Ánh, like his adversary, used titles to encourage loyalty and military service. Apparently, it worked. He distinguished himself in battle, securing critical naval victories that led to Nguyễn Ánh’s victory over the Tây Sơn in 1801 and his subsequent creation of the Nguyễn dynasty (1802–1945).Footnote 80
After the apocalypse of the war’s early years the Tây Sơn began resurrecting devastated Minh Hương communities from the ashes. In Hội An, for example, a 1783 inscription memorializing the town’s restoration of its Quan Công hall reveals the first sign of Minh Hương resurrection.Footnote 81 Foreign accounts and a village register show that by the 1790s the city’s Minh Hương were “beginning to breathe” and their commerce revive.Footnote 82 Curiously, this commercial revival appears to coincide with the spike in Tây Sơn-sponsored piracy. Given the Qing court’s designation of the old Cochinchina as the piracy’s “rat hole,” one can only wonder whether the community’s early and quick resurrection derived from commerce in pirated goods. In any case, the Tây Sơn resurrected the old Nguyễn system of Minh Hương status and reconfirmed their rights.Footnote 83
Like his Tây Sơn rivals, and like past warlords, Nguyễn Ánh looked to combine commercial and military means to his political goal of Tay Sơn destruction and Nguyễn restoration. Chinese and Minh Hương mariners and merchants proved crucial to his efforts. For example, a number of rice merchants led missions to Siam to buy rice on behalf of Nguyễn Ánh in the 1780s and 90s.Footnote 84 He did not restore the system of his ancestors, however. After conducting a census of the Mekong, in 1789 he divided Chinese and Minh Hương; first into Đường (C: Tang) and Minh Hương, then in 1790 into Thanh nhân (Qing compatriots) and Minh Hương.Footnote 85 Minh Hương governed themselves as before. Thanh or Qing expatriates ruled themselves according to bang, or cliques based on dialect group, with each clique governed by a bang trưởng or headman. This laid the foundation for the system of rule that governed expatriate Chinese and Minh Hương under the empire that followed, and it also appears to have set the stage for the Minh Hương’s demise.
The empire that emerged in 1802 after Nguyễn Ánh defeated the Tây Sơn does not appear to have taken any immediate action to dilute Minh Hương power. In 1814, Nguyễn Ánh, now the Gia Long Emperor, mandated that the bang system he created in 1789 be instituted nationwide. Any group of thirty Chinese had to form a bang under one of seven identities. This now included Minh Hương.Footnote 86 Minh Hương protested loudly, arguing their Vietnamese matrilineage distinguished them from expatriate Chinese, and the plan was halted. This marked the first time that Minh Hương leaders began to use explicitly ethnic identity as a defensive political strategy. It did not work. Gia Long’s successor, Emperor Minh Mạnh, imposed it several years later, with one exception: Minh Hương did not have to join the bang system, but did have to reorganize as a Vietnamese style village, complete with a Vietnamese style đình village temple, administrative structure, and periodic compilation of a village census.Footnote 87 In 1827 the emperor further ordered that the Chinese characters used to symbolize Minh Hương xã̃ be changed, replacing the word hương, “incense” with its homophone hương, “village”. This changed the meaning of the community’s name from “Ming Incense [Loyalist] Community” to “Ming Village Community,” which removed the political loyalist signifier at the core of its identity.Footnote 88 Two years later, he went even farther. He ordered a reclassification of Minh Hương along ethnic lines. Redefining Minh Hương as the descendants of a Chinese father and Vietnamese mother, Minh Mạng forbid all expatriate Chinese to return to China with their wives or children, and forbid Qing dress. Furthermore, he reiterated: “each time a people comes to trade, then wherever there are people who want to come, they must have the elder [bang truong] of the Minh Huong write a letter of guarantee.”Footnote 89 At the same time, statues and edicts show that Minh Mạng preserved their separate tax status and corvee exemptions, and reaffirmed longstanding practices. For example, the new statutes confirmed the duty of Minh Hương to act as interpreters or as market supervisors regulating prices, coinage, weights, etc.Footnote 90 His successor, Thiệu Trị, mandated that Minh Hương communities should form throughout the empire wherever there were a sufficient number of offspring of Chinese fathers and Vietnamese mothers.Footnote 91
Whatever privileges still existed, an important shift had occurred. No longer distinguished by their political loyalty to a long-lost dynasty, Minh Hương now formally constituted an ethnic minority, rather than a minority elite set betwixt Vietnamese and expatriate Chinese.
We see the results of this policy change in the declining influence of the wider world on Minh Hương society. First, the Minh Hương decline seems nearly to parallel the decline of the junk trade in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Having lost their prized role as intermediary in the undertow Sino-Vietnamese trade as Japan and China patched things up in the 1700s, Minh Hương power continued thanks to their traditional role in governing the sea trade, cultivating domestic commerce, and staffing much of the Nguyễn government. All this changed with the rise of the Empire of Đại Nam in 1802. The bureaucratic order that Nguyễn monarchs envisioned had no room for the informal tax-farming style of customs governance, another longstanding domain of the Minh Hương. The incorporation of all Vietnamese-speaking peoples gave the Nguyễn emperors the opportunity to dilute the Minh Hương role in government. The imperial Nguyễn didn’t need Minh Hương to act as their go-between in diplomatic, political or even commercial affairs any longer. The scale of the Vietnamese economy had changed as well, shifting the proportional balance in the tax base between sea commerce to rice agriculture, and thus the political balance, evident in the Nguyễn shift to a more agrarian emphasis in their policies.
For the rest of the century, Minh Hương resorted to a defensive strategy of ethnic preservation as it fought the erosion of its community from Vietnamese imperial then French colonial governments. The interest to preserve Minh Hương identity increasingly came solely from within the community, and as the last Minh Hương institutions faded, identity increasingly asserted itself purely on an ethnic basis.
Minh Hương powers began to erode quickly after the French conquests. The category was eliminated in the French colony of Cochinchina in 1871; Minh Hương were given the choice of registering as Vietnamese or Chinese, and were accorded the rights of colonial subjects, even the right to apply for French citizenship.Footnote 92 In 1898, the Thành Thái Emperor formally abolished the Minh Hương in the remnant empire, transferring the identity of these people to Vietnamese status.Footnote 93 Why it was done is not clear, and has never really been explored. Perhaps the French, deeply concerned about Vietnamese ties to China, saw the Minh Hương as a potential subversive threat. The French did wish to marginalize the Chinese community as much as possible, and eradicating a potential mediator between Chinese and Vietnamese would have been a logical decision. Therefore, unlike other colonies who exploited hybrid or creole Chinese groups, the French eliminated theirs.
Conclusion
Minh Hương were a powerful merchant-bureaucratic elite, far from the ragged refugee or recalcitrant political exiles that its name or mythology suggests. The community and its ethnic identity developed in response to events that began with the convergence of interests in the dynamic world of maritime Asia that happened over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It began in the streams of a seafaring Min social world, with groups of militarized trading syndicates whose convergence of interests with local, entrepreneurial warlords in Japan and Vietnam encouraged the creation of permanent Tang communities in the late 1500s. In the Tang communities developed a set of institutions, parochial to Min Chinese culture, that formed an elastic network of transoceanic community that empowered members to coordinate their large-scale and local interests, yet also adapt to local exigencies, and even integrate into local society, when the situation demanded it. Anti-Ming politicization and shifting commercial interests in the Tang community helped to create the commercial network that supported the Zheng sea-trading proto-state in the late 1600s. In the Tang enclaves of Cochinchina, a new Ming loyalist identity grew. Indeed, they thrived so much that, when a Zheng fleet based across the Gulf of Tonkin in Longmen sought exile in Cochinchina, they had already developed into a powerful elite whose status the domain’s Nguyễn lord had to recognise. In this context, Minh Hương identity evolved.
Minh Hương society flourished for the next century as a powerful mercantile and bureacratic elite in Cochinchina, profiting from its strategic position in Cochinchina, the Min sea world, and the Tang colonies. Strong institutional structures protected them. Inevitably, the situation changed. Qing victory reshaped the Chinese maritime, producing local responses throughout maritime Asia that more narrowly localised Minh Hưng interests over time. Identity proved a handy tool in defining corporate rights and institutional norms in order to protect the community from attempts to undermine their privileged status in Vietnamese economy and politics during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Eventually, external forces would have their way, and the Minh Hương would gradually disappear as a formal institution. Even still, identity proved a useful tool in asserting historical privileges when their formal political-economic status eroded.
