The setting

Shilian Dashan lived in Guangzhou, as abbot of Changshou Monastery (‘Temple of Longevity’ in Western accounts and built in Ming times), during the last decades of the seventeenth century. According to his memoir, two ‘familiar guests’ of the monastery came to call on him one day in the spring of 1694. Dashan claims that they were ‘officials of the King of Dai Viet’ (Dai Viet quoc vuong).Footnote ³ Merchant declarations given to Japanese customs officials in Nagasaki testify that these guests were maritime merchants from China’s Fujian province, part of a powerful network of Fujianese merchants and mariners who patronized Dashan’s temples in Guangzhou and Macau.Footnote ⁴ On this day, however, they did not come as merchants, but as representatives of the Dai Viet court. Prostrating themselves before the monk with high formality, the Fujianese envoys presented the abbot with two ‘golden missives’. The first was written by Dashan’s disciple, Xinglian Guohong, who wrote to his master as the kingdom’s Quoc su or ‘Royal Master’, the court’s highest religious position.Footnote ⁵ The ‘King of Dai Viet’ himself wrote the second gilded letter. In it, he recalled how others had tried to recruit the Chan master, but had failed. The young king persisted. ‘I now devote myself to burning incense and meditation’, that is to the habits of a monk, and ‘humbly beg the master of the Way (dao) to change his mind, and agree to travel. Only then will our kingdom prosper’.

This ‘king’, Nguyen Phuc Chu, was formally nothing more than a lord (chua) under the legitimate emperor of Dai Viet, whose palace lay far to the north in the city of Thang Long (Hanoi). There, a scion of the once mighty Le Dynasty functioned as a mere figurehead for the Trinh lord (chua Trinh), the power behind the throne and the enemy of the rival Nguyen clan. Thwarted by their foe’s rising power, Lord Nguyen’s forefather had moved to the kingdom’s southern frontier in the late sixteenth century, a region where he ‘might hope to re-establish his family’s fortunes from a new base’ in a place where he ‘was free to be the center of a new Vietnamese realm’.Footnote ⁶ There, he and his followers formulated a plan to exploit the territory’s commercially valuable raw materials, and strategic position along Asia’s maritime trade routes, in order to build ‘an everlasting fortune’ and a powerful stronghold ‘able to defeat the Trinh’.Footnote ⁷

A century had passed, and his successors had yet to fulfill their ancestral ambition to overthrow the Trinh, but while ‘holding their ground, and waiting for opportunities,’ the Nguyen lords had created a powerful and prosperous state, built on military and commercial foundations.Footnote ⁸ As their northern front against the Trinh settled into a de facto boundary, Cochinchinese fleets and armies expanded Nguyen rule far beyond the historical limits of Dai Viet. By the time Nguyen Phuc Chu ascended to the throne in 1691, his dominion was independent in all but the formal sense. The Chinese emperor recognized the Le emperor and Trinh king in the north, but could not restrain the Chinese who wished to do business with Nguyen subjects in the breakaway south. The rest of the world treated Cochinchina as independent, distinct from Trinh-ruled Tonkin (Dang Ngoai, the ‘Outer Region’ to southerners). This probably explains why the southern lords periodically elevated their status by creating new titles. Lord Nguyen outdid his predecessors when he declared himself ‘Lord of the Realm’ (Quoc Chua), in 1693, only two years before Dashan’s visit.Footnote ⁹ This gradual self-elevation reached its apotheosis when the lord’s grandson would assume the title ‘King of Dai Viet’ in 1744.Footnote ¹⁰ Lord Nguyen risked nothing so bold, although he tested political and diplomatic waters with the title ‘King of Dai Viet’ on the occasional local inscription or letter abroad.Footnote ¹¹

In February 1695, the first month of the lunar year, Shilian Dashan and an entourage of one hundred disciples emerged from the gates of Changshou, and proceeded through a crowd of celebrants to the city’s harbour. From there, they set sail on two large ocean-going merchant ships bound for Cochinchina. After his arrival, Dashan performed the rites of initiation for Lord Nguyen, taking the lord as his first Vietnamese disciple. He also initiated the lord’s family and high officials, and, over the coming days, thousands of others.Footnote ¹² In the following months, the Chan master claimed to have presided over the foundation and renovation of numerous temples; offered advice and assistance to Chinese merchant leaders eager to strengthen their community; administered the monastic precepts to royal subjects who sought him out from all over the Vietnamese realm; and successfully summoned rain. He regularly corresponded with court elites about Buddhist doctrine, and tutored his royal disciple on principles of statecraft. Eighteen months later, his work complete, Dashan returned to Guangzhou, in August 1696.Footnote ¹³

The problem

The scenario is a curious one, with familiar actors showing up in unexpected places. Cochinchina’s Vietnamese ruler sought religious instruction from a master of Chinese dharma (Buddhist law) through the monk’s disciple, another Chinese monk. The disciple held the court’s highest religious position, Quoc su or Royal Master, indicating a privileged role in royal and religious circles in Cochinchina.Footnote ¹⁴ Apparently, it placed him in mercantile circles as well: Chinese traders, like the two Fujianese envoys, patronized Xinglian’s monasteries in Cochinchina, just as they supported Changshou Monastery in Guangzhou. Yet these merchants came not as peddlers or patrons, but rather as couriers and escorts of a foreign king and his religious teacher. Having accepted the invitation, Dashan and his large entourage boarded two large merchant ships, and returned to be congratulated by many of Guangzhou’s famous artists, wealthy merchants, and powerful elites for ‘teaching the [true] dharma’ and ‘spreading the moralizing influence of the Son of Heaven’, the emperor of China.Footnote ¹⁵ Dashan’s story seems strangely out of step with conventional ideas about the detachment of Chinese monks and monasteries from the mundane affairs of economy and politics in the post-ancient world, at home or abroad.

Contrary to expectations, this study finds nothing eccentric or momentary in the abbot’s mission overseas. During the seventeenth century, coming from a place of weak state authority, monastic communities in south-coastal China organized missions to port cities in the Asian maritime zone, where they built temples and monasteries with the material wealth and political sanction of Chinese merchant colonists and local elites in host societies. They were inspired by the renewal of Chan Buddhism from the sixteenth century, which gradually took on an evangelical aspect.Footnote ¹⁶ These missions exemplify facets of Buddhism thought to have vanished with the Silk Road: a missionary religion propagating branch temples through long-distance networks of merchant colonies; forming satellite monastic communities within host societies; weaving its institutions into the social fabric of the social groups it encountered; and influencing economic, cultural, and political activities. The monk’s place in markets and courts recalls models of religious strategy in merchant ‘diasporas’ and state formation that revolutionized historical research on the origins of the modern world, even though Buddhism is absent from this general literature.Footnote ¹⁷

Buddhism was important to the formation of Chinese merchant colonies overseas during the seventeenth century. Chan institutions provided maritime merchants with a cosmological map of political-economic order that helped them solve ‘many of the basic problems of the trade’ by encouraging flexible, adaptive, and ‘multilateral’ responses to different circumstances.Footnote ¹⁸ In a world at sea, this helped Chinese colonists bind their inchoate social geography into a durable, integrated whole, at a critical, mercantile-driven stage in the development of transoceanic Chinese society during the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹⁹ Monastic power increased whenever their mercantile disciples settled in areas where Chan already held sway. There, monks wielded a religious authority that transcended cultural boundaries and harmonized ‘common and competing interests’ between their local patrons and the Chinese merchant quarter, which in turn divided into an expatriate ‘guest merchant’ class and a ‘minority elite’ of ‘creolized’ Sino-indigenous middlemen.Footnote ²⁰ In return, Chan missionaries won the patronage of seafaring merchant communities. This provided the material, social, and even political capital that they would need to undertake their own expansion overseas. Once settled, they could leave the merchants’ quarter, and migrate into local societies on their own.

The merchants

To locate the first targets of Chinese monastic expansion overseas, one can simply follow the merchants. For example, the Nagasaki ship affidavits identify Dashan’s Fujianese envoys as Chen Tianguan and Wu Ziguan, shipping merchants who sailed a triangular itinerary that included Japanese, Cochinchinese, and Chinese southern ports.Footnote ²¹ The geographical logic of their circuit was clear: draw a straight line between the ports of Nagasaki and Hoi An and it forms a tangent with Fujian’s curved coastline. As shipping merchants, captains Chen and Wu necessarily belonged to the Fujian bang that operated in most major ports of the East Asian littoral during the seventeenth century. Bang were merchant associations for mutual aid, organized around their native province in China, which emerged in Ming times (1368–1664).Footnote ²² Translator reports note that Chen was headquartered in Hoi An, Cochinchina’s main port of call for large Chinese ocean-going vessels.Footnote ²³ About Wu, little is known. Whatever their particular relationship to Hoi An, Chen Tianguan and Wu Ziguan represent an early mercantile phase of the soon-to-be global Chinese diaspora.

Mercantile agents circulated widely, yet rooted deeply. Historical examples from Hoi An and Nagasaki illustrate this patterned mobility well. Nagasaki customs reports display the names of Hoi An merchants known to have operated in Nagasaki’s ‘Tang’ Chinese quarter. The term ‘Tang people’ (Chinese Tangren; Japanese Tojin; and Vietnamese Duong nhan) emerged in the late sixteenth century for Chinese who settled or sojourned on the Japanese coast.Footnote ²⁴ Such merchants included members of the Kong, Xu, Chen, Lin, and Wu clans, all of whom were longtime leaders of town and trade.Footnote ²⁵ Comparisons suggest that some clan members circulated regularly, while others remained anchored in an important site of clan investment, usually a port’s merchant quarters. For example, a 1688 Nagasaki customs declaration reports the voyage of ship captain Kong Tianyi of Hoi An, a brother or paternal cousin of Kong Tianyu, the clan patriarch, town elder, and longtime Cai phu Tau or Vice-Superintendent of Chinese [Ships] in Hoi An at the time of his death in 1694. Lord Nguyen donated some 2 hectares of land to the Ming Loyalist community in his honour.Footnote ²⁶ Sometimes merchants changed places or shifted roles. Two extant gravestones outside Hoi An dated 1696 display the names of Wei Yuanyu and Wei Zhifeng, almost certainly relatives of Wei Zhiyan, who ran a lucrative trade from Hoi An between 1654 and 1672 before moving to Japan, becoming a Tokugawa subject, and assuming control of the customs bureau that reported the Chinese carrier trade from Vietnamese ports.Footnote ²⁷ His nephew Oga Seizaemon (Wei Gao) inherited the position, and ran the office when it reported about Dashan’s voyage.Footnote ²⁸ When he left Hoi An in 1672, Wei Jiushi apparently took his nephew with him. He kept his Vietnamese wife in Cochinchina, however, just as he had done with his first wife in Fuqing eighteen years before.Footnote ²⁹ International shipping magnates like Wei often maintained a wife of local origin and her offspring in important commercial bases like Hoi An, ‘the better to facilitate business’.Footnote ³⁰ Dispersed relationships like these were both necessary and possible, as long as there was a regular circulation of merchant ships carrying agents, commodities, and communications. Members of the Fujian merchant group in Hoi An and Nagasaki did this quite regularly in the seventeenth century, regardless of the political chaos at home on the Chinese coast.

Captains Chen and Wu lived at the end of an era when weak state presence and global economic change produced maritime networks. Dispersed merchant colonies generated commercial capital that regional overlords of coastal domains in East and Southeast Asia used to finance political expansion. In the 1500s, syndicates of armed, Chinese-captained trading fleets established outposts all over the Asia’s eastern littoral. Soon, they established their first Tang colonies. By 1600 a network of stable Tang colonies had anchored themselves in the major ports of East and Southeast Asia, including Japan and Cochinchina.Footnote ³¹ Through these Tang communities, Tokugawa and Nguyen overlords tapped commercial revenues to finance military campaigns and state-building. At the same time, a Fujianese shipping merchant named Zheng Zhilong embarked upon some empire building of his own. From humble origins in the 1590s, Zheng built a merchant marine that thirty years later controlled Chinese commercial traffic passing through the Taiwan Straits off Fujian’s shores, and dominated traffic along the East Asian littoral. His power grew such that the Ming emperor appointed Zheng an admiral in 1628, giving political and military expression to his commercial wealth. The syndicate’s monopolizing force also extended overseas, so that the Tokugawa court granted monopoly rights over Nagasaki’s Chinese shipping to Zheng in 1641, after the shoguns ended Japanese-run trade overseas in the 1630s.Footnote ³²

When China’s Ming Dynasty fell to Manchu invaders, who declared a new Qing Dynasty in 1644, Zheng Zhilong’s sons, led by the elder Chenggong, mobilized merchant syndicates and political factions loyal to the Ming emperor to launch resistance under a Ming Loyalist banner. Soon this informal network coalesced into a kind of Chinese proto-state under Zheng Chenggong’s rule. Maritime commerce sustained the body politic, so dominion over the central thoroughfare of Fujianese shipping through the Taiwan Straits proved essential.Footnote ³³ However, the Qing gained the upper hand along the Chinese coast in the 1670s, and drove Zheng’s men from their coastal bases, ending Zheng power over the Taiwan Straits and destabilizing the commerce-dependent state. In 1683, the last significant Zheng outpost on Taiwan surrendered, and an era of autonomy for maritime Chinese ended.Footnote ³⁴

With the surrender of their government in Taiwan, Ming Loyalist merchants everywhere faced a choice between political loyalties that would shape future Chinese society overseas. They could accept an amnesty, shave their head as a sign of submission to the Qing emperor, and return to China. However, the amnesty also banned former loyalists from future maritime activity. Many found this unacceptable, and had already settled and intermarried in host societies for generations. As a result of this integration, Ming Loyalist settlers had produced a distinctly hybrid or mestizo culture underneath the formal trappings of Chinese identity. Some held powerful posts within port government, like the families of Wei Jiushi in Nagasaki, or Kong Tianyu in Hoi An. For many, the cost of return was too high, even if they could no longer continue to live overseas according to the status quo ante. If they stayed, they would have to offer their allegiance to local sovereigns, who adapted to accommodate the new regional political economy. In Japan and Cochinchina, this transformed the political status of longtime Ming Loyalists settlers, as well as the flood of Qing subjects arriving each year to do business.

Japan offered two choices to Nagasaki’s residents in 1689. Either, they could keep their ‘Tang’ Chinese identity and live as Qing expatriates in Nagasaki’s newly created ‘Tang Quarter’ (Tojin yashiki), or they could adopt a Japanese name and assimilate into Japanese society as Tokugawa subjects. Whereas Chinese of all kinds once interacted freely with Japanese, they now divided into two distinct classes, an acculturated minority within Japanese society and a segregated enclave of Chinese expatriates.Footnote ³⁵ Ming Loyalist identity survived, but informally.

The Nguyen court labelled all Qing expatriates as ‘Tang’ (Duong) Chinese and restricted them to ‘guest quarters’ in port towns, but took a different tack to their Japanese counterparts for Ming Loyalists. While the Zheng polity existed, it had exercised influence over the character of Tang Chinese merchant colonies in Hoi An and the secondary ports of Cochinchina.Footnote ³⁶ As the resistance collapsed, thousands of Ming Loyalists, mostly soldiers, immigrated to Cochinchina and settled in the Mekong Delta, a frontier region only recently seized from Cambodia.Footnote ³⁷ Informal bonds of vassalage governed the loyalist relationship with the Nguyen until 1698, when Lord Nguyen took the first steps to formalize the status of Ming Loyalist villages (Minh huong xa) throughout his kingdom, in an effort to consolidate Vietnamese military gains in Cambodia in the face of competition from the loyalists.Footnote ³⁸ In that year, he ordered all Ming Loyalists and other Chinese who wished to live permanently in the Mekong Delta to incorporate into Ming Loyalist villages that would hereafter submit to the rule of the Nguyen state.Footnote ³⁹ Loyalists retained their former privileges; they could own property, hold state offices, and avoid corvée labor and specified taxes. They also retained their Ming hairstyle and dress, and continued to pray for the resurrection of the fallen dynasty in their Guandi temples. Perhaps most important, they continued to manage shipping and trade for the country. Of course, the state denied these privileges to Chinese expatriates, who continually sought admission into the Ming Loyalist community, a privilege the loyalists jealously guarded. Thus, two Chinese political identities had come to fruition by 1698, expatriate ‘Tang’ (Duong) and Sino-Vietnamese ‘Ming Loyalists’ (Minh huong). The Ming Loyalists of Cochinchina had come to function as a ‘minority elite,’ set strategically at the nexus of interactions between their Chinese trading compatriots (still predominantly Fujianese) and Cochinchinese society and state.

The definition of individual social categories evolved, but the integrity of the dispersed transoceanic society held firm. When the Ming Dynasty fell, and the Zheng clan took up their banner, Ming Loyalism became synonymous with Tang and Fujianese identities. However, when the Zheng regime vanished in 1683, the meaning of Ming Loyalist, Tang, and Fujianese began to diverge. Fujianese identity signified only one among many Chinese regional constituencies, and included Ming Loyalists as well as Qing expatriates. The ‘Tang’ label regained its multinational and multicultural aspect among Chinese, but took on different political meanings in host countries. Ming Loyalists disappeared as a social category in Japan, but survived in Cochinchina, albeit transformed by transferring their political loyalties to Nguyen overlords. By the end of the century they emerged as a distinct class within Cochinchina, functioning in ways that resembled other intermediary ‘creole’ groups in Southeast Asia, or the middleman ‘minority elite’ in other parts of the world.

The diasporic community of Chinese seafaring traders survived greater local variation because a host of adaptable institutions and flexible strategies, evolved from a cultural locus in Fujian, held them together. Institutions of kin, native-place and belief bonded them, while relationships of trade, marriage, and patronage tethered them to their host societies. Theirs was a society far-flung across the map, but it was hardly fragmented, or detached from its host society, as the term often implies. It operated as a close-knit, well co-ordinated interest group, able to respond to varied exigencies through a culturally specific vocabulary. It was institutionally bonded, despite its dispersed structure.Footnote ⁴⁰ A web of trade and shipping networks, from Melaka to Nagasaki, subtended this social structure, through which circulated merchants, mariners, and even monks. Plastic and durable bonds of shared identity spanned vast distances, while allowing individual colonies sufficient flexibility to ensure local success. Thanks to these informal mechanisms, Fujian merchant networks, Tang colonies, and Ming Loyalist identity all survived the transition to the new Qing order after 1683.

Temples played a vital role in holding this society together, underscoring the importance of religion to the daily strategies of Chinese merchants overseas. Wherever they established settlements, Fujian’s merchant-mariners ‘sought common ground in religion and ritual’.Footnote ⁴¹ During the seventeenth century, Fujianese merchants patronized the construction of clan halls, deity temples, and Buddhist monasteries in the key port cities of their trade. Three deities came to be central to Chinese merchant society overseas: the god of war and wealth Guandi; the sea goddess Mazu, also known as the Empress of Heaven (Tianhou Shengmu); and the Buddhist goddess of compassion, Guanyin (Avalokitesvara). Many other deities also populated overseas temples during the seventeenth century, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike, but these three were vital to the success of merchant seafarers and the colonies they pioneered.Footnote ⁴² (Of course, this generalization weakens outside the Chan zone of influence.)Footnote ⁴³

Buddhist masters like Dashan offered religious authority that helped to legitimize institutional arrangements, both within merchant society, and between individual merchant colonies and their local sponsors. Sometimes, Chinese missions and their merchant patrons looked to Buddhism’s trans-cultural authority to enhance their prestige across cultural or political lines. In Guanyin, merchants found a useful medium. The Buddhist mercy goddess was a deity acceptable to all Buddhists, and thus able to legitimize trans-cultural agreements. In Hoi An, signs of cross-cultural patronage of the goddess among Chinese merchants and Vietnamese elites appear as early as 1640.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Vietnamese had used Guanyin to legitimize claims to holy sites of the Cham, who had earlier held dominion over Cochinchinese territory and whose cultural descendents still populated much of it.Footnote ⁴⁵ Merchants looked to monks to protect non-Buddhist deities by sanctifying them, thanks to the trans-cultural authority they enjoyed in Chan host societies, and a syncretic doctrine that permitted the integration of new forms. In Nagasaki, the leaders of the Chinese quarter patronized the construction of Buddhist monasteries around existing Guandi and Mazu temples to protect them from suspicious Tokugawa officials.Footnote ⁴⁶

This allowed opportunities for new relationships between merchants and deities to evolve. Thus, reports of Mazu altars in monasteries, and monastic worship of the sea goddess, grew as the seventeenth century progressed.Footnote ⁴⁷ As abbot of Changshou, Dashan supervised one of the most important Mazu temples in the Chinese sea trade, the A Ma Temple of Macau, and may have played a role in the ceremonies elevating the sea goddess to Chinese imperial status in 1684.Footnote ⁴⁸ When China instituted its new trade system, maritime traders responded by organizing a new institution, the guild or huiguan, and adopted Mazu as its patron deity.Footnote ⁴⁹ When Hoi An’s Fujian merchant group formed their guild, sometime before Dashan noticed it in 1695, they first headquartered in the town’s Guandi Hall.Footnote ⁵⁰ Two years later, however, they helped found a new monastery, named Kim Son, and installed the guild’s first Mazu temple there.Footnote ⁵¹ Within a decade or so, Hoi An’s merchants built a guild hall separate from the Guandi temple, and installed a new Mazu altar inside. Despite her apparent distancing from the monks, Buddhism continued to play a role in the life of the sea goddess.Footnote ⁵² Patricians in Chinese merchant colonies also promoted the construction of public cemeteries, and looked to Chan monks like Dashan whose deep concern with death ritual helped to ensure their orthodox construction.Footnote ⁵³ This is important, because standardized graveyard architecture and death rituals helped to give ‘representational shape’ to Chinese merchant society overseas, and more firmly anchor the community’s identity more firmly in the ‘soil of the ancestors’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Temple building in Nagasaki took place as Chinese trade under the Zheng clan grew. In 1602, Chinese merchants first obtained permission to buy land for a Chinese quarter in Nagasaki. Twenty years later, a merchant group from Nanjing obtained land for the construction of a Buddhist temple in Nagasaki, which they named Kokufu-ji. Zhang Dan, a Jiangsu native and a former merchant, became its first abbot. This same process of capital and institutional development repeated itself as merchant guilds sponsored the creation of Nagasaki’s ‘Four Chinese Temples’ between 1620 and 1688. Fujianese built the second and third temples in 1628–29. When Fujian merchants recruited Yinyuan to oversee Kofuku-ji in 1653, they had already appropriated the temple for their own use from the Nanjing merchants. Fujianese then built a fourth temple in 1688, controlling all the town’s Chan sites.Footnote ⁵⁵ Money was raised, land was appropriated, monks were recruited, temples and other structures were built, disciples were anointed, and traditions reified, bestowing legitimacy and status upon merchant and sangha alike.

Most of Hoi An’s monasteries were built within only ten years, between 1688 and 1698. The town’s Chinese merchants had sponsored two monasteries before that time during the Ming Loyalist period: Long An, founded sometime after 1653, and Quang Yen, founded before 1680.Footnote ⁵⁶ The town’s merchants built their next temple after the loyalist defeat, across from the Guandi hall. Its principal deity was not Guanyin but another bodhisattva popular among merchants, Maitreya, the Laughing or Future Buddha, called Di Da by the Vietnamese. It is unclear when patrons constructed Di Da Monastery, though local lore credits a Ming Loyalist.Footnote ⁵⁷ Dashan’s disciple Xinglian arrived in Cochinchina soon after Lord Nguyen’s father ascended to the throne in 1687, and began the restoration of Tam Thai, an ancient monastery in the mountains north of Hoi An.Footnote ⁵⁸ The patricians of Hoi An also raised funds for three more new monasteries in the 1690s: Chuc Thanh in 1694–95, Kim Son in 1696–97, and Phuoc Lam in 1698.Footnote ⁵⁹ A few years later, with the foundation of Van Duc, the principle monasteries associated with Hoi An were complete.Footnote ⁶⁰ This wave of temple building was not confined to Hoi An, but occurred in all the major ports of Cochinchina, wherever Ming Loyalist communities had formed, as well as the Nguyen capital, where the Dashan and Lord Nguyen built Thien Lam Monastery in 1695.Footnote ⁶¹

Monks helped merchants to build an elastic transoceanic society. Buddhism’s syncretic accommodation, and its trans-cultural reputation, lent religious authority to Fujian merchants seeking to safeguard patron deities in host societies overseas. By offering patronage in return for religious legitimacy, merchants handed growth-minded Chan evagelicals a tremendous opportunity. As Buddhists, Chinese monks could expand their authority across cultural lines in order to establish monastic branches beyond the merchant quarter’s walls in the seventeenth century.

The monks cross over

Ming Loyalist elders probably decided that the cost of investing so heavily in temple building was justified by the anticipated consequences. While Vietnamese sources are sparse, the literature on Nagasaki provides a clear illustration of what temple building demanded from merchants and monks, and how it changed society around them. Throughout the seventeenth century, patrician leaders of Nagasaki’s Chinese merchant community regularly recruited monks from China to oversee the design, construction and maintenance of temples, and to lead monasteries once construction was completed. They dramatically changed Japanese Buddhism as a result.

The monk Yinyuan Longqi (1592–1673) provides a famous and well-documented example of this phenomenon. Known to Japanese as Ingen Ryuki, he is credited as the founder of the ‘true Linji’ school of Chan Buddhism in Japan, known from 1874 as Obaku Zen.Footnote ⁶² Hailing from Fuqing Prefecture, Fujian, where he was abbot of the important monastery of Wanfu si, he travelled to Nagasaki in 1654–55. He came at the behest of a monastic brother and the town’s Ming Loyalist Fujianese merchants, who were the majority among Chinese settlers there, and was met by celebrating crowds of Japanese and Chinese. The patricians of Nagasaki’s Chinese community offered him the abbacy of the Nanjing temple, Kofuku-ji, now controlled by Fujianese. Yinyuan’s principal benefactor in Nagasaki was Wei Jiushi, from the shipping merchant whose family operated in China, Cochinchina, Tonkin, and Japan, worked with the Ming Loyalists, and hailed from Yinyuan’s home prefecture in Fujian, where it patronized his monastery.Footnote ⁶³ Like many of the Chinese religious, artistic, and other specialists, whom merchant leaders recruited to serve maritime colonies, Yinyuan elected to remain in Japan. By 1661, the master had founded a new monastery, Mampuku-ji, the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese characters for Yinyuan’s monastery in China. He obtained the support of Japanese patrons, including the Tokugawa shoguns, who provided funds as well as land. Not long after his arrival, Yinyuan began accepting influential Japanese disciples. By the time the post of abbot passed from Chinese to Japanese hands in 1736, the sect had firmly established itself within Japanese society. Today it is one of Japan’s largest sects.Footnote ⁶⁴

The voyage of a host of other Chinese Buddhist priests of the seventeenth century owed their significance not only to the leading monk himself but also to his entourage. The sheer size of the mission mattered. Unlike Buddhist missionaries of an earlier period, those of Yinyuan’s stature seldom travelled alone. Yinyuan reportedly had thirty followers, and Dashan claimed to have travelled with a hundred. Although these numbers are clearly figurative (and Dashan’s exaggerated), they make it clear that such missions involved more than the solitary itinerant that symbolized ancient Buddhist wanderings.Footnote ⁶⁵ These new masters travelled with an assembly of disciples and lay devotees who apparently remained abroad with their master, or in Dashan’s case, remained abroad even when their master returned home. Initially, Yinyuan promised his followers in China that he would return in three years, but once in Nagasaki he decided to remain, keeping half his disciples while ‘others returned to China after a year’ there.Footnote ⁶⁶ Later, he summoned ‘his most advanced disciples’ from Fujian, including Mu’an Xingdao (Mokuan Shoto) and Jifei Ruyi (Sokuhi Nyoitsu), who proved instrumental in creating further Obaku monasteries in Japan. Chinese Chan monks continued to come to Obaku monasteries in Japan, at least until Japanese masters took over in the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁷

A similar pattern can be detected among Chan lineages that migrated to Cochinchina. A Linji monk named Shi Geliang travelled from Kaiyuan Monastery in southern Fujian to Nagasaki to teach disciples at Fukusai-ji, supported by the merchants of the same region.Footnote ⁶⁸ Dashan acknowledges very few of the followers who accompanied him overseas, except for a few who stayed behind, to oversee road-building projects, serve Lord Nguyen in the capital, or undertake their own temple building projects.Footnote ⁶⁹ No other grand missions followed in Dashan’s wake. Although Chinese monks continued to migrate to the Vietnamese kingdom long after its demise in 1775, Dashan’s mission appears to have ended a wave of settlement and sojourning by Chinese monks that spanned the 1680s and ’90s.Footnote ⁷⁰

Such large missions reflected the technological complexity of building architecturally sophisticated temples, which required specialized artisans and technicians, especially as monks and their patrons placed a high premium on the reproduction of Chinese cultural forms. Monks who renovated a monastery’s buildings and grounds, organized an estate’s structure, or built sangha and patronage anew, also faced a complex set of organizational, fiscal, and, all too often, political challenges.Footnote ⁷¹

Yinyuan and his followers travelled as a kind of cultural junket aboard the merchant ships that carried them, bringing a complete package of Chinese, or really Fujianese, high culture, because the sect governed itself by a monastic code ‘that reflected Chinese practices of the day, and which sought to preserve the character of the group’.Footnote ⁷² Chinese and Japanese monks chanted sutras in Fuqing dialect, used Fujianese style music, prayed in Fujianese style halls, and wore robes and shoes reminiscent of the Huangbo monks of their principal monastery in Fuqing.Footnote ⁷³ Reinforcing demand from Japan was a sense of cultural mission among Chan monks and supporters in China, intent to ‘spread the moralizing influence of the Son of Heaven [the emperor of China]’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Specialists, then, had to come from China, preferably regions of Fujian. In addition, money had to be raised, land appropriated, sacred objects obtained, profanities expunged, structures built, patronage multiplied, support won, and potential opposition neutralized, and all according to expected standards. Small wonder that merchant ships transported such a large entourage. Institutions can be complex undertakings, especially when they involve cultural reproduction in new environments. Given such large scales of investment, the interest in the success of these missions must have been keen among patrons. This was particularly true for Cochinchina in the 1690s, when temple building and renovation reached its peak.

The practical and material demands of building temples and organizing religious communities heightened the importance of patronage resources that societies could offer. At the very least, monks perceived a need for religious services in merchant settlements that, once fulfilled, reinforced their legitimacy overseas. As caring for the dead in accordance with an imagined orthopraxy in China apparently grew important to merchant colonies, it provided more than a chance to enhance legitimacy or advance social control in merchant colonies and host societies. Quite simply, it offered a steady income through donations and fees. State policies could help in this area. Earlier in the seventeenth century, the Tokugawa state’s terauke system required Japanese subjects to register at Buddhist temples, increasing monastic wealth significantly. Some have argued that missionaries like Yinyuan travelled to Japan to tap that new wealth.Footnote ⁷⁵ Monks invested the proceeds of patronage in the construction or renovation of buildings, the purchase of religious commodities, and the cultivation of the sangha. Thus, Dashan renovated his monasteries in Macau and Guanzhou, including building the famed Liliu Hall (Cochinchinese Temple for Westerners) with cash and aromatic woods given to him by Lord Nguyen.Footnote ⁷⁶ As conversion enlarged their community, material patronage multiplied networks and expanded property holdings, strengthening the monastic economy.

By establishing branch temples overseas, Chan missionaries dredged a cross-cultural channel, through which religious commodities and specialists circulated between China and host societies, transported and mediated by their merchant patrons. Among the monks who moved, many possessed artistic and technical skills important to the missionary enterprise. But a host of skilled lay workers also travelled, including carpenters, sculptors, painters, cooks, tailors and shoemakers, some of whom sojourned, while others stayed. Temples also regularly ‘issued purchase orders for raw and cultural materials from China’ for consumption by the temple community.Footnote ⁷⁷ Among the most popular artifacts of Chinese material culture that were transported to Nagasaki and Hoi An were books. These included not only Buddhist classics, but also works of Taoist (Daoist) and Confucian learning, for both were popular in the renascent Chan of the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁷⁸ Ships provided the essential medium of transport, allowing merchants to participate in this religious commerce. In Japan, Chinese merchants directly traded in a variety of devotional objects for elite consumers, too, including the Tokugawa court. They helped procure Buddhist classical literature, ritual goods, religious art, and incense woods from places like Cochinchina.Footnote ⁷⁹

Indeed, exports constituted Cochinchina’s most significant contribution to religious commerce. For over a thousand years, the Chinese had extracted fragrant woods from the region, used for aromatic temple pillars and incense sticks. Woods were joined by gold, silver, crystal, lapis lazuli, carnelian, coral, and pearls. As for imports, they included gold and silver leaf, votive paper, incense burners, and joss sticks. As in the missionary heyday of antiquity, Buddhist temples and monasteries generated their own commerce, augmenting the flow of commodities along Asia’s eastern littoral.Footnote ⁸⁰

Sectarian feuds and royal frauds

Not every act of cross-cultural exchange bears good fruit. Merchant ships sometimes transported political conflicts from one region to another, along with their wares. For example, recently discovered letters reveal that Yinyuan couriered a diplomatic missive to the Tokugawa court on behalf of Zheng Chenggong. In that letter, the shipping magnate-turned-warrior asks his family’s longtime benefactor for help in the form of weapons provisions. The shogun declined. The court must have considered allowing Ming Loyalists to control their Chinese carrier trade as a tolerable risk, but arming them as inviting trouble.Footnote ⁸¹ The warlord did use his merchant agents to dispatch diplomatic missions to East and Southeast Asia in the 1650s, and established a Ming Loyalist presence in Tang merchant colonies there.Footnote ⁸² While seventeenth-century Chan monks rarely assumed this kind of diplomatic role, in contrast to their ancient forebears, many sympathized with the Ming Loyalist cause.Footnote ⁸³ The hagiographies of Chinese proselytizers reflect the strong Ming Loyalist element in the Chinese merchant communities at the time.Footnote ⁸⁴ Dashan’s Changshou monastery reportedly hosted gatherings of local literati that included well-known Ming sympathizers.Footnote ⁸⁵

Ships might transport sectarian conflicts overseas. Citing a contemporary of Yinyuan, Michel Mohr argues that his decision to establish a new branch in Japan had ‘nothing to do with a selfless desire to spread the dharma’, as popularly held. During the same year that Yinyuan sailed to Japan, controversy erupted in China over a new method that Caodong monks had devised for calculating lineages of Buddhist masters. Yinyuan’s Linji master, Feiyin Tongrong, lost a dispute with Caodong master Juelang Daosheng, whom Dashan claimed as his dharma master. After losing a magistrate’s ruling, ‘the wood blocks for [Feiyin’s] books were burnt’. Soon afterwards, Yinyuan departed for Japan, where he secured sponsorship to undertake ‘the reprinting of his master’s forbidden book’, a feat accomplished three years after he landed in Japan, in 1657. Four years later he founded Manpuku-ji, where he cultivated the ‘true lineage of Linji Chan’ (rinzai shoshu).Footnote ⁸⁶ Many Caodong monks came to study with Yinyuan and his disciples, but others opposed this ‘Ming Buddhism’, because they believed it threatened Caodong teachings.Footnote ⁸⁷ Mohr’s perception of a ‘hidden agenda’ accords with the broader view of sectarian politics known to have troubled Chan Buddhism in China and Japan during the seventeenth century, where rivalries grew bitter before rulers on both sides of the Sea of Japan took steps to quiet them. In this way, Yinyuan, like other Chan missionaries, ‘brought with him the distinctive contradictions and sectarian consciousness of the Chan world he left behind in China’.Footnote ⁸⁸

The ‘sectarian consciousness’ informing the rivalry between Caodong and Linji schools also migrated to Cochinchina. In 1677, a Linji monk named Yuanzhao, closely related to Yinyuan’s Buddhist lineage and sympathetic to the Ming Loyalists, gathered disciples, sailed to the Vietnamese domain, and set about realizing his missionary ambitions. In the short run, he succeeded, founding temples in Chinese quarters along the Cochinchinese coast, and capturing abbacies in some well-established Vietnamese temples. This group even replaced the Nguyen court’s principle Buddhist master and his disciples in 1683.Footnote ⁸⁹ A decade later, however, Yuanzhao disappeared from the capital. Lord Nguyen drove him from court, replaced him with Xinglian, and dispatched captains Chen and Wu to Guangzhou to recruit the Caodong master’s teacher, Shilian Dashan. Soon after the purge, the court dispatched captains Chen and Wu on a mission to China to recruit the new Royal Master’s teacher. Catalyzed by competition for patronage, and the potential of millions of new converts, sectarian factionalism inspired a series of events that produced Dashan’s mission.

To understand the intervention of monks and monarch into each other’s spheres, it is necessary to examine the sectarian subtext underlying the longstanding beliefs about the origins of Dashan’s Vietnamese adventure. Central to this convention is the story of Yuanzhao’s embassy to Guangzhou to seek out the abbot of Changshou and bring him to Cochinchina. Yuanzhao is best known today as the founder of one of Vietnam’s largest schools of Chan Buddhism, recognized by the Vietnamese pronunciation of Yuanzhao’s name, Nguyen Thieu. The story of his embassy features in the Biographies of the eminent in Dai Nam, completed by court historians working for Lord Nguyen’s imperial descendents in the 1840s.Footnote ⁹⁰ As the court’s story goes, sometime after Nguyen Phuc Chu’s father came to the throne in 1687, he commissioned Yuanzhao to sail to China, gather Buddhist sutras and ritual objects, and recruit ‘eminent monks’.Footnote ⁹¹ According to dynastic biographies, one of these ‘eminent monks’ was Dashan. Yuanzhao ‘persuaded Dashan to accompany him back to Vietnam’ along with other Chan monks. Based on this story, religious scholars and Vietnamese Buddhists today regard Dashan’s voyage as the catalyst for Chan ascendance in Cochinchina (central and southern Vietnam). What happened during the seven intervening years between invitation and acceptance was never explained.

The long bond between Yuanzhao and Dashan, alleged in Vietnamese sources, seems like a fabrication of Nguyen court officials in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After all, mutual antipathy between the Caodong and Linji schools of Chan plagued South China throughout the seventeenth century. Indeed, Dashan was at the centre of one of the worst storms, only a year before his voyage overseas. In 1693, he published the treatise that his alleged dharma master Juelang had begun decades earlier, the same Juelang responsible for the downfall of Yinyuan’s master, Feiyin, in 1654. The treatise advanced all Caodong monks five generations closer to the Buddha than their Linji contemporaries, thanks to a clever manipulation of Chan master-disciple genealogy.Footnote ⁹² This enraged Linji lineages, for the genealogical methodology would effectively raise Caodong status, and deny Linji monks access to Chan abbacies, congregations and properties. Ultimately, the scandal ended the monk’s career; but in 1695 the controversy was still a gathering storm. For Yuanzhao, Caodong’s arrival would have meant the demotion of his dharma status. Seen in this light, the close bond between Yuanzhao and Dashan implied in the Vietnamese historiography demands a good deal of credulity.

Sectarian rivalry between Linji and Caodong schools in China shaped religious developments in Cochinchina during the 1680s and 90s, where, unlike Japan, Chan missionary activities reached well into the political sphere. In his fine study of seventeenth-century Buddhism in Cochinchina, Nguyen Hien Duc argues that Lord Nguyen launched his Guanzhou embassy to purge Yuanzhao and his Linji following from his court, and to replace them with Dashan’s Caodong disciples.Footnote ⁹³ The thesis rests on the assumption that Lord Nguyen purged Yuanzhao (and his following by association) for suspected intrigues at court, and because he began to consider the Chinese in his realm as a political threat. True, Lord Nguyen encountered various political crises after rising to power in 1691, the worst of which constituted violent threats against the throne. In 1692, he faced a rebellion in Champa, a protectorate in the kingdom’s southeast, led by a man whom Vietnamese sources from the period name only as A Ban. Later scholars regarded him as a Chinese merchant, but his name translates as ‘sailor’. Less than two years later, during the lunar new year of 1694, two of the lord’s cousins plotted to overthrow him, though the conspirators were arrested and executed. Then in 1695 a Chinese merchant reported that a follower of Yuanzhao had led a failed revolt against Nguyen rule that spread to the region south of Hoi An, where Dashan was visiting.Footnote ⁹⁴ Perhaps Lord Nguyen saw regicidal or rebellious collusion in this religious connection, and turned against his principle religious authority.

At first glance, Nguyen Hien Duc’s thesis about Yuanzhao’s fall and Dashan’s rise seems plausible. His royal biography states that, after he returned from his voyage to Guangzhou, the court appointed him abbot of Ha Trung Monastery, and dispatched the monk there.Footnote ⁹⁵ One could interpret this as a sign of the monk’s declining status. Perhaps Lord Nguyen moved him there in response to the A Ban rebellion. If not, his sudden replacement by Xinglian in 1694 surely does. Perhaps, Duc reasons, Lord Nguyen suspected Yuanzhao of involvement. Imitating the reaction of his predecessor, Yuanzhao gathered his disciples and sailed for the Mekong frontier.Footnote ⁹⁶ Duc speculates that if he did not flee his monastery in the spring of 1694, he did so during the summer of 1695, when violence broke out in Quang Nghia.Footnote ⁹⁷ In this regard, Xinglian and Dashan acted on the same mix of evangelical, sectarian, and material ambitions that had brought Yuanzhao to the Nguyen court in 1683. Given the sectarian tensions between Caodong and Linji branches of Chan in China, Caodong’s missionary ambitions, and potential gains that royal patronage promised, such a scenario is possible.

However, there is every indication that, rather than purge or persecute them, Lord Nguyen solicited Yuanzhao’s sangha and the Ming Loyalist Chinese in his realm to work with him. No evidence exists that demonstrates that Lord Nguyen ever persecuted the Linji monk, his disciples, or any of his Ming Loyalist and expatriate Chinese followers for crimes of rebellion. If the available evidence suggests anything, Lord Nguyen appealed to the Chinese merchants and monks of his realm for help in recruiting a new wave of monks from China and, just as important, building new Chan temples. Yuanzhao’s departure from the Nguyen capital and apparent demotion from Nguyen politics coincided with a wave of temple building, renovation, and recruitment that lasted through the 1680s’ and ’90s, utilizing monks from both the Linji school of Yuanzhao and the Caodong school of Dashan. These religious activities centred precisely in the politically sensitive areas of the kingdom where rebellions had taken place. In Quang Nghia, in the aftermath of Linh and Quang Phu’s rebellion, patrons founded Thien An, and placed the Chinese Linji monk Minghai Fabao, a disciple of Yuanzhao, as its first abbot.Footnote ⁹⁸ Over the decade that followed Dashan’s mission, temple building and restoration activities thrived across Cochinchina, usually in the vicinity of Ming Loyalist villages.Footnote ⁹⁹ As major merchants, property owners, port administrators, and mediators between expatriate Chinese and the Nguyen court, Ming Loyalists most likely took a leading role in all these enterprises, as they did in Hoi An. Ming Loyalists could have most effectively obtained approval from Lord Nguyen and local Vietnamese officials when needed, to purchase land, build temples, and appoint abbots. The founding abbots of some of these temples were Linji monks, even disciples of Yuanzhao, like Minghai. None of this sounds like the acts of a sovereign bent on purging Linji monks and persecuting the Chinese.

A more plausible hypothesis envisions Ming Loyalist leaders investing their commercial wealth, and monks their religious authority, into temple building during a time of profound political change in the Nguyen domain of Cochinchina. If so, the Ming Loyalists and the monks appear to have co-ordinated well with Lord Nguyen’s own agenda. Nguyen lords had long embraced Buddhism as a source of their political ideology, and patronized temples for purposes of social control.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ However, Lord Nguyen appears to have taken this religious strategy a step further than his ancestors, by using Buddhism as a complement to traders and soldiers in strengthening institutional control over his expanding territory and his growing and diversifying population. Dashan offered the lord a means to do just that, by providing him with a degree of formal religious authority that other monks could not give. Only a year before Lord Nguyen sent his mission to China, in 1693, Dashan completed Juelang’s controversial treatise, which justified Dashan’s claim to rank in the twenty-ninth generation of Chan masters, rather than the thirty-fourth. Dashan’s suddenly ranked higher than Yuanzhao, a thirty-third generation master. By traveling to Cochinchina, and offering the precepts of Caodong to its sovereign, Dashan made Lord Nguyen a thirtieth generation Chan master. The lord thus ranked higher than all the other Chan masters in Cochinchina, except Xinglian, who conveniently disappeared from history in 1695. Religious authority now reinforced royal authority. This dharma status clearly mattered to the monk-monarch, who thenceforth often stated his credentials in these terms.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Dashan’s genealogical claims might have been controversial back home, but they helped a Vietnamese monarch to achieve his political ends.

Three things thus seem clear, even if the details are fuzzy: a monarch manipulated Buddhism for political ends, by seizing formal religious authority over his subjects; the Ming Loyalists used Buddhism to secure a privileged place in Lord Nguyen’s political order, and maintain their corner on Cochinchina’s sea trade; and Chan missionaries anchored themselves permanently in Cochinchinese society, thanks to sponsorship from Ming Loyalist merchants and the Nguyen. Any hypothesis about Dashan’s voyage to Cochinchina must consider the mission within the context of the political intrigues that inspired it, and the political consequences it created.