聞分館君 Ask BunKanKun

海國聞見錄

10 min read

Text ID
KR2k0152
Date
1730–1730
Dynasty
清

Hǎiguó wénjiàn lù 海國聞見錄

Record of Things Seen and Heard about the Maritime Countries by 陳倫炯 (Chén Lúnjiǒng, zì Zīzhāi 資齋, of Tóng’ān 同安, Fújiàn; d. 1751) — zhuàn 撰

About the work

A two-juan early-eighteenth-century maritime treatise on the coastal geography, sea-routes, foreign countries, and seafaring conditions of the Chinese littoral and the wider Asian maritime world, by the Qīng naval officer Chén Lúnjiǒng. Juàn shàng contains eight prose pieces — Tiānxià yánhǎi xíngshì lù 天下沿海形勢錄 (a continuous coastal-defence survey running clockwise from Tiānjīn round to Guǎngdōng), Dōngyáng jì 東洋記 (Japan and the Ryūkyūs), Dōngnányáng jì 東南洋記 (the Philippine archipelago and the eastern islands), Nányáng jì 南洋記 (the western Southeast-Asian shore from Champa and Cochin-China to Siam, Malaya and Sumatra), Xiǎoxīyáng jì 小西洋記 (the western Indian Ocean rim — Bengal, the Indian coasts, Persia, Arabia), Dàxīyáng jì 大西洋記 (Europe), Kūntún jì 崑屯記 (Borneo), and Nánào qì jì 南澳氣記 (the South China Sea reefs and the Wànlǐ chángshā 萬里長沙). Juàn xià is a portfolio of six maps: a world chart (Sìhǎi zǒngtú 四海總圖), a chart of the entire Chinese coast (Yánhǎi quántú 沿海全圖), a Táiwān chart, a chart of the Táiwān back-mountains (Hòushān tú), a Pénghú chart, and a Qióngzhōu (Hǎinán) chart. In the WYG-Sìkù transmission, the maps are not preserved as renderable text and the juàn xià file is effectively empty. The work is the principal Qīng-period Chinese-language treatise on maritime Asia before Wèi Yuán’s nineteenth-century Hǎiguó túzhì.

Tiyao

We respectfully note: the Hǎiguó wénjiàn lù in two juan is by Chén Lúnjiǒng of our state. Lúnjiǒng’s zì is Zīzhāi; he is a man of Tóng’ān. His father Áng, in Kāngxī 21 (1682), followed the Jìnghǎihóu Shī Láng (施烺 — preserved as printed; for 施琅, see 施琅) in the pacification of Táiwān; Láng further dispatched him to mop up the surviving partisans, in and out of the eastern and western seas for five years. For these merits Áng received office, rising to Guǎngdōng fùdūtǒng. (Note: the fùdūtǒng post is normally a Manchu-banner appointment; that Chén Áng was given it must have been by special dispensation.) Lúnjiǒng from his youth followed his father, becoming intimately acquainted with the configuration of the sea-routes; and inheriting his father’s yīn (hereditary office), he likewise rose by way of the imperial guard (shìwèi) successively through Pénghú vice-commandant, Táiwān regional commander, and on to the Guǎngdōng commands of Gāo, Léi and Lián, the Jiāngnán commands of Chóngmíng and Lángshān, and was further appointed Zhèjiāng Shuǐshī tídū — all littoral posts. Hence on the basis of his lifetime’s hearing-and-seeing he composed this book.

Juàn shàng records eight pieces: the Tiānxià yánhǎi xíngshì lù; the Dōngyáng jì; the Dōngnányáng jì; the Nányáng jì; the Xiǎoxīyáng jì; the Dàxīyáng jì; the Kūntún jì; and the Nánào qì jì. Juàn xià contains six map-plates: the Sìhǎi zǒngtú; the Yánhǎi quántú; the Táiwān tú; the Táiwān hòushān tú; the Pénghú tú; and the Qióngzhōu tú. The strategic chokepoints of mountains-and-rivers, the distances of roads, the safety-or-hazard of sands and reefs and islands, the reading of winds and clouds and weather, and likewise the popular customs and products of foreign domains — all are fully written out. Though the work is small in compass, it accumulates the experience of two generations, father and son, with cross-checking and personal verification: every word is grounded in evidence. Compared to those who copy-out hearsay and dress it up as novelty, or who consult old books and so discourse upon strategic configurations, this is plainly a work of a different order.

In the Nánào qì jì, the so-called Wànlǐ chángshā — what the Lièzǐ calls the Guīxū (Returning-abyss), what Zhuāngzǐ calls Wěilǘ, what the Bàopǔzǐ calls Wòjiāo (Fertile-burning), what the Sòngshǐ Liúqiú zhuàn calls Luòjì: the various books all say the waters pour into it without filling. Lúnjiǒng, by contrast, infers that as the tide rises this current ebbs, and as the tide ebbs this current rises — knowing that the water enters from above and emerges from below. His words are exact and close to reason, sufficient to settle the millennia-old doubt of those who have only listened with their ears. Again, the histories speak of those who luòjì (fall into Luòjì) as not returning; Lúnjiǒng says that if one tries to put out at flood-tide the current is high outside and low inside, and one cannot escape — but at ebb-tide, riding the south wind and poling-out, one may yet escape. In the Yōngzhèng bǐngwǔ year (1726) a Mǐn (Fújiàn) ship that had fallen into Luòjì did indeed return as he describes: this too is what former men had not disclosed.

Only in his record of the Qīzhōu sea (七洲洋) — that the arrow-bearing birds (dàijiàn niǎo) are so called because Zhèng Hé summoned the birds and stuck arrows in them as markers, to guide his sea-ships; and in the record of the Siamese ghosts contesting magic with Zhèng Hé and building a temple-stupa overnight, still standing today — these are simply the foreign customs’ belief in spirits, attaching to such hearsay-fables; that Lúnjiǒng did not refute them is somewhat careless. Yet this book is principally about recording sea-routes, not about investigating ancient matter; since the people of those countries say so, that he records it accordingly is no real injury to the larger purport.

[Submitted on the Qiánlóng 46th year, eleventh month (1781), respectfully collated.] Chief Compiler-in-Chief: Jǐ Yún 紀昀 (note: appears as 紀均 in the Sìkù text — a typographical slip), Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅; Chief Collator: Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.

(See person notes 紀昀, 陸錫熊, 孫士毅, 陸費墀 for the editors’ biographies.)

Abstract

The Hǎiguó wénjiàn lù is one of the most consequential Chinese-language works on maritime Asia composed before the Opium War. Written in 1730 by Chén Lúnjiǒng — a FújiànHàn naval officer who had personally commanded squadrons in the Táiwān strait, the South China Sea, and along the entire Chinese coast — the work is a synthesis of two generations of first-hand experience (his father Chén Áng having cleaned up the maritime remnants of the Zhèng Chénggōng régime in the 1680s under Shī Láng) with hearsay collected from Fújiàn merchants, ships’ compradors, and the Western captains and Catholic missionaries known to Chinese coastal officials in the early Yōngzhèng decade.

The eight prose pieces of juàn shàng and the six maps of juàn xià are organised by a coherent geographical schema that orders the maritime world as a series of yáng 洋 (oceans) radiating outward from the Chinese coast: the Dōngyáng (Japan / Ryūkyūs / Liúqiú), Dōngnányáng (the Philippines and Borneo), Nányáng (mainland and insular Southeast Asia), Xiǎoxīyáng (Indian Ocean rim), Dàxīyáng (Atlantic / Europe), with Kūntún (Borneo) and the South China Sea reefs (the Wànlǐ chángshā / Qiānlǐ shítáng zone, sometimes glossed as Nánào qì) handled separately. This yáng-system terminology was widely adopted by later Qīng writers and remained in semi-official use into the late nineteenth century.

The work is significant for several distinct strands of scholarship: (i) Qīng-period coastal defence (hǎifáng), since the opening Tiānxià yánhǎi xíngshì lù is one of the earliest comprehensive coast-defence surveys after the lifting of the qiānjiè sea-ban; (ii) the historical hydrography of the South China Sea, since Chén Lúnjiǒng’s analysis of the tidal regime at the Wànlǐ chángshā (his rebuttal of the classical Guīxū myth, and his account of the 1726 vessel that escaped Luòjì) is one of the first sustained empirical treatments in Chinese; (iii) early Sino-European maritime geography, since the Dàxīyáng jì records the Qīng court’s emerging knowledge of European trading nations on the eve of the Canton-system consolidation; (iv) the Qīng prehistory of the Spratly / Paracel question, since later Chinese government claims have repeatedly invoked the Wànlǐ chángshā and Qiānlǐ shítáng terminology of this work and its successors. Wèi Yuán’s Hǎiguó túzhì 海國圖志 (1843) draws extensively on Chén; so do the maritime sections of the late-Qīng Sìzhōu zhì 四洲志 compilation.

The composition date is fixed by the work’s own preface and by Chén’s career: 1730 is the date Wilkinson and most modern bibliographies give for the completed text; first publication is generally placed at 1744. The Wényuāngé Sìkù version is the WYG redaction, transmitting only the prose text (juàn shàng) and a juàn xià preserving the map-titles but not the cartographic content (the maps were colour-painted in the Sìkù manuscript and are not legibly transmitted in the WYG print sequence). The Sìkù tíyào dates the editorial submission to Qiánlóng 46/11 (December 1781).

The catalog meta gives Chén Lúnjiǒng’s floruit as 1721–1730 (essentially his peak naval career window); CBDB (no. 58797, under the variant graph 烱) gives a death year of 1751; Wilkinson gives a floruit of 1703–1730. These are not strictly contradictory and have been preserved as cited.

Translations and research

  • Wilkinson, Endymion. Chinese History: A New Manual (6th edn, 2022), §75 (Asia and the Wider World), where the work is the headline pre-modern Qīng entry.
  • Chén Lúnjiǒng. Hǎi-guó wén-jiàn lù jiào-zhù 海國聞見錄校註 (annotated edition by Lǐ Chánghóng 李長弘, Beijing: Zhōngyāng mínzú dàxué chūbǎnshè, 2010); a fully annotated modern critical edition.
  • Léonard Aurousseau, “Sur le nom de Champa”, BEFEO 14 (1914) — uses Chén’s Nán-yáng jì.
  • Pelliot, Paul. Notes on Marco Polo (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1959–1973), volumes 1–3, passim — repeatedly cites the Hǎi-guó wén-jiàn lù in identifying Southeast-Asian toponyms.
  • Roderich Ptak, China, the Portuguese and the Nanyang: Oceans and Routes, Regions and Trade (c. 1000–1600) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), and a long series of passim essays — Ptak draws on the yáng-system schema of Chén throughout his work on Sino–Southeast-Asian maritime exchange.
  • Yáng Wǔquán 楊武泉, Hǎi-guó wén-jiàn lù xiào-zhù 海國聞見錄校注 (Beijing: Zhōnghuá shūjú, 1985) — the standard PRC critical edition with extensive textual notes and place-name index.
  • John E. Wills, Jr., Pepper, Guns, and Parleys: The Dutch East India Company and China, 1662–1681 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1974), and his subsequent essays on early-Qīng maritime relations, draw on Chén for the Fújiàn-coastal context.
  • Marwyn S. Samuels, Contest for the South China Sea (New York: Methuen, 1982) — the Hǎi-guó wén-jiàn lù’s Nán-ào qì jì features prominently in the discussion of historical Chinese cognition of the Spratlys/Paracels.

Other points of interest

The Sìkù editors flag Chén’s uncritical reproduction of two folkloric anecdotes — the arrow-bearing pilot-birds of the Qīzhōu sea (made into Zhèng Hé’s navigational aids) and the Siamese ghosts who built an overnight stupa to challenge Zhèng Hé in magic — as a methodological lapse, but pardon him on the grounds that his book is a manual of sea-routes, not a kǎojù (evidential investigation). This is one of the relatively rare moments in the Sìkù tíyào corpus where the editors articulate a generic distinction between practical maritime know-how and scholarly geography.

Chén’s coining (or at least his consolidation) of the Dàxīyáng / Xiǎoxīyáng binary — Atlantic Europe vs Indian-Ocean rim — would have an extraordinarily long afterlife in Chinese geographical vocabulary, persisting as the ordinary Chinese term for “Atlantic” (Dàxīyáng) into the present day.

Graph View

Backlinks