One day in 1776, a famous Vietnamese scholar-official named Le Quy Don approached a Chinese merchant named Chen, who sailed between Vietnam and China. Le asked him: “What is the lay of the sea routes?” Chen responded: “The sea routes are like the rim of a pan. Hainan Island. . . is exactly in the pan's center.” Junks could sail the pan's north or south edge. They could also sail across the pan, if the touchy winds allowed. Inside this imagined pan lay the Sino-Vietnamese “water world” that Dian Murray introduced to English-language scholarship many years ago in Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790–1810 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987, p. 17) but that few since have endeavored to describe. Here, fisherfolk, sea traders and pirates shifted through a littoral maze of countless islands, impenetrable mountains, unpredictable winds, and endless waterways, eluding the efforts of outsiders to subjugate and...

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