“Gum, pepper, lumber, lacquer, smoked beef, and fish, lobster, and various species of fish” were among the export commodities. Artisans were encouraged to emigrate to Hà Tiên to ply their skills, and various handicrafts were introduced, including processed tortoise shell objects and woven mats.⁴³

     Mạc Thiên Tứ gathered a large coterie of scholars at his court, including literati from Guangdong, Fujian and Zhejiang, and from Vietnam itself, and also Buddhist monks and Daoist priests.⁴⁴ According to Qing sources, the residents of Hà Tiên retained the clothes, home furnishings and other aspects of material culture of the Ming, and its political institutions and culture were based on Ming models. Despite the deviations from Qing practice, the Manchu Dynasty praised Hà Tiên for maintaining Confucian temples, charity schools, and Chinese rituals.⁴⁵

     With its own government, army, and coinage, Hà Tiên under Mạc Thiên Tứ had a high degree of autonomy. He paid tribute to the Nguyễn court only irregularly. In addition to maintaining diplomatic relations with China, Mạc Thiên Tứ also sent official missions to promote international trade to Japan, to the shogun of which he represented himself as the “King of Cambodia.”⁴⁶

     The Burmese sacking of the Thai capital of Ayuttaya in 1767 provided opportunities to Mạc Thiên Tứ to expand into the eastern shores of the Siam Gulf.⁴⁷ But what proved to be the decisive development that undermined the Mạcs, ironically, was the emerging power of the Teochiu (Chaozhou) émigrés at Chantaburi under Taksin, who was the progeny of a Teochiu father and a Siamese mother. Instead of forming alliances, the Chinese were split along linguistic/regional lines and competed against each other.⁴⁸

     After King Taksin had consolidated his power in Siam, he sought to reassert Siamese hegemony over neighboring states. His ambitions were opposed by Mạc Thiên Tứ, who offered asylum to Taksin’s enemies (including two Ayutthayan princes), made an attempt to capture Taksin by a ruse in 1768, and attacked Chantaburi and Trat by sea unsuccessfully in 1769. Mạc Thiên Tứ even tried to convince the Chinese court not to recognize Taksin as the ruler of Siam, again unsuccessfully. He banned trade between Siam and Hà Tiên. Despite Mạc’s lack of military success against Taksin, his diplomatic and economic policies threatened Taksin’s program to rebuild the Siamese economy following its devastation by the Burmese in 1767, since Taksin needed to revive the Sino-Siamese tribute trade and commercial connections with the Water Frontier coast.⁴⁹

     Taksin was further embroiled in a struggle with Mạc Thiên Tứ over the succession of the Cambodian king. Taksin invaded and captured Hà Tiên in 1771 and razed it to the ground, a blow from which the Mạcs never recovered.⁵⁰ The throne of Cambodia passed on to the pro-Siamese king Ang Non (also known as Vinh). Although Taksin’s forces were forced by the Vietnamese to retreat from Hà Tiên in 1773, Mạc Thiên Tứ never returned to Hà Tiên.⁵¹ Instead he transferred his capital to Cần Thơ.⁵²

     The heyday of Hà Tiên as a “prosperous and sophisticated Chinese kingdom”⁵³ was essentially over by 1771.⁵⁴ Due to the confused political conditions in Vietnam (where the Tây Sơn wars began in 1771), Siam and Cambodia, the Gulf of Siam trade suffered a severe decline in the 1770s. “By the end of the eighteenth century, the historical role of Hà Tiên , as an emporium for trade between the South China Sea and the Gulf, had disappeared completely.”⁵⁵

     As the Nguyễn court came under increasingly severe military pressure by the Tây Sơn, Mạc Thiên Tứ continued to provide military support and political refuge to surviving members of the royal family. In 1776, the Tây Sơn exterminated the Quảng Nam Nguyễn house, with Nguyễn Phúc Ánh as the only survivor. They went on the defeat the Trịnh in the North, unifying Vietnam in 1786 for the first time in two centuries. The Mạc family had to abandon Hà Tiên and took refuge in Siam. Unfortunately, in 1780 King Taksin was deceived into thinking that Mạc Thiên Tứ and other Vietnamese representatives were plotting against him. He arrested the entire Mạc family and Vietnamese notables in Bangkok. Mạc Thiên Tứ committed suicide, while his family was put to the sword.⁵⁶

     Fortunately, a Siamese minister took pity on three infant children of the Mạc family and hid them for safekeeping. After King Taksin was killed in a revolt in 1782, the new Siamese king Phat Vuong or Rama I offered support to the last surviving prince of the Nguyễn royal family, Nguyễn Phúc Ánh, in 1784. Nguyễn returned from Siam with his supporters to Vietnam in 1787, when he would begin his amazing political comeback with many reversals of fortune and eventually reunified Vietnam in 1802 as Emperor Gia Long.⁵⁷

	Image 3. Mạc Cửu Temple & Mausoleum, Hà Tiên , Vietnam (photo by author).

     Mạc Tử Thiêm (鄚子添), son of Mạc Thiên Tứ, was restored to the hereditary governorship of Hà Tiên by Nguyễn Phúc Ánh in 1788. When he died in 1809, the court take direct administrative control of Hà Tiên. Mạc Thiên Tứ’s grandsons Mạc Công Du (鄚公榆) and Mạc Công Tài (鄚公材) were implicated in a revolt against Emperor Minh Mạng in 1833, arrested and died in prison, thereby ending the Mạc family’s political eminence in Vietnam.⁵⁸

The Lanfang Republic (1777-1884)

     West Borneo (now Kalimantan), where the Lanfang Republic was located, was called “Little China in the Tropics” by Mary Somers Heidhues for its history of Chinese gold-mining kongsis (公司) that came into conflict with the Dutch from 1820 to 1856 and for its substantial Chinese population which has retained its language and culture up to the present day.⁵⁹

	Map 3. Mandor, where the Lanfang Republic was founded in 1777, is located near Pontianak, West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Map prepared by the author with Google Maps. Used under permission from Google at google.com/permissions/products/.

     The history of Chinese emigration to Borneo dated back to the mid-18th century, when some local chiefs recruited Chinese miners to develop gold mines.⁶⁰ The Malay rulers forbade the miners to engage in agriculture, so that they could sell rice and other imported necessities to them at highly inflated prices. In exchange, the Chinese would pay tribute in gold. They were also charged entry and exit taxes upon entry into and departure from Borneo. However, farming prohibitions were ineffective, as land was abundant, and the Chinese and the Dayaks had different land preferences, the Chinese for wet lowland and the Dayaks for dry land on hilly terrain. The Chinese also evaded buying from the sultans by circumventing their ports and using parallel rivers to bring in men, supplies and weapons, and to export gold.⁶¹

     The region was rife with conflicts among and between Malay chiefs, the indigenous Dayaks, and Chinese dialect groups. For protection and expansion, Chinese formed numerous kongsis, usually based on regional ties or dialect groups. The early mining kongsi in West Borneo was typically “a group of a few to as many as several dozen members, who agree to contribute capital or labor, each member having a share (hun, Mandarin fen), and to divide profits among themselves.” Unlike kongsi in China or other overseas regions, the mining kongsi in West Borneo could also be an association or federation of mining kongsis: the first such kongsi federation was Heshun (Fosjoen 和順十四公司), an alliance of 14 kongsis in the Monterado area, formed in 1776.⁶²

     While it was neither the largest nor the most influential of the gold kongsis, Lanfang kongsi (蘭芳公司) was by far the most well-known.⁶³ The reason for its fame and continued fascination lies in its designation as a “republic” (蘭芳共和國) by contemporary Dutch observers and a surviving history by the son-in-law of its last leader, which provided considerable historical and institutional details. Historian Luo Xianglin (Lo Hsiang Lin 羅香林) has described Lanfang’s political system as a “presidential regime” based on democracy or direct election of the “president” by plebiscite, though not representative government.⁶⁴ Luo and many others have proclaimed the Lanfang Republic to be Asia’s first republic (or even the world’s first republic) and compared it favorably with the American republic that was founded at roughly the same time. They argued that founder Luo Fangbo’s achievement was all the more remarkable since he did not have the help of “philosopher-statesmen or learned legalists, like Hamilton and Jefferson of America.”⁶⁵

     In 1772 Luo Fangbo (Lo Fong Pak 羅芳伯 1738-1795), a Hakka from Jiaying Prefecture (later Meixian), Guangdong, migrated to Pontianak in West Kalimantan (Borneo), working first as a teacher and then in gold mining.⁶⁶ With his administrative skills, Confucian education and knowledge of martial arts, Luo Fangbo soon emerged as a leader of Chinese miners in Mandor. Inspired by the success of Heshun kongsi in negotiations with the local sultan through unified organization, Luo Fangbo formed Lanfang kongsi, an alliance of 14 kongsis at Mandor in 1777. It was second in scale only to Heshun kongsi. ⁶⁷ Luo set up a government headed by a president (datang zongzhang 大唐總長), which he held from 1777 till his death in 1795. The president and other official posts, however, were to be elected by the people, though for unspecified lengths of office. Under Luo’s rule, the government set up arsenals, ran gold mining, stimulated economic growth through the promotion of agriculture and markets and through the building of roads. Scholars were recruited from China to promote schooling. Eleven elected presidents would succeed Luo.⁶⁸

	Image 4. Luo Fangbo’s Portrait, Lo Fang Pak Temple, Pontianak, West Kalimantan, Indonesia (photo by author).

     By the end of the 18th century, there were reportedly about ten thousand Chinese miners in West Borneo.⁶⁹ Over time, the kongsis did more than running the mines; they “governed extensive territories with all the trappings of independent states, including a kind of democratic governance that gave much of the community its say in political decisions.”⁷⁰ Early in the nineteenth century, the larger federations, including Lanfang, broke the sultans’ monopoly over goods and port controls and become virtually independent of them. They accomplished these by smuggling goods through rivers outside the control of the sultans, by organizing their own food production, and by building up their military capacity.⁷¹ Their control of territory contrasted with Malay sultanates which “were not territorial realms; they controlled not land, but people and revenue.”⁷² The period from 1777-1839 is characterized by Yuan Bingling (袁冰陵) as an era of almost unchecked development of the kongsis, a golden age when the Chinese communities were free of their Malay overlords and external threat from the Western powers (at least until the return of the Dutch in 1818), and strengthened their ties with the indigenous Dayaks through intermarriages and the division of labor. However, internecine warfare between the kongsis and internal conflicts strengthened the power of the stronger federations including Heshun and Lanfang, but eliminated or put to flight some of the smaller kongsis. The decade of the 1840s would mark a time of decline due to constant warfare and mine exhaustion.⁷³

     The Dutch East India Company had withdrawn from West Borneo in 1781, and had gone bankrupt in 1800. The British occupied Java and other Dutch outposts in the Indies during the Napoleonic Wars, but withdrew thereafter. When the Dutch returned in 1818, they discovered that much of the territory that they had claimed through agreements with the sultans were now controlled by the kongsis. Between around 1820 to 1884 the Dutch East Indies Company fought a series of wars to subdue the Chinese kongsis.⁷⁴ However, it was not uninterrupted conflicts between the Dutch and the Chinese. Rather, it was uneasy peace punctuated by three periods of warfare (1822-24, 1850-54, and 1884-85).⁷⁵

	Image 5. Luo Fangbo’s Altar, Lo Fang Pak Temple, Pontianak, West Kalimantan, Indonesia (photo by author).

     Lanfang made a peace agreement with the Dutch in 1823, and paid a regular tribute to the Dutch thereafter, but remained otherwise autonomous for another six decades. The kongsi collected taxes, and maintained external relations as if it were a sovereign statelet. Its officers exercised considerable judicial authority, and few Dutch colonial officials visited it. The economy was diversified. Lanfang’s culture was a replica of that of Southeastern China, for the majority of the Chinese were Meixian or Dapu Hakkas from Guangdong Province.⁷⁶

     Between 1850 and 1854, the Dutch warred against and destroyed all the other kongsis in West Kalimantan, leaving Lanfang as the only surviving kongsi until it was dissolved by the Dutch in 1884. The last decades of the Lanfang Republic was a period of population loss and economic decline due to the exhaustion of the gold mines. In its heyday, the Lanfang kongsi governed over 20,000 people, the majority miners with a non-mining population engaged in farming, handicrafts and commerce.⁷⁷ Lanfang’s population was around 7,500 in the first half of the century. In the 1860s, just over 4,000 inhabitants remained in Mandor. In 1880, the aging Kapthai Liu Asheng (Lioe A Sin 劉阿生) made an agreement with the Dutch that Lanfang would be dissolved upon his death. Liu died on September 22, 1884. However, in dissolving the kongsi, Resident Cornelis Kater desecrated Lanfang’s deities by removing the effigy of the kongsi’s patron god Guan Di and the tablets of Luo Fangbo from the kongsi headquarters, thereby provoking an uprising that ended only in September 1885.⁷⁸

	Image 6. Interior of Lo Fang Pak Temple, Pontianak, West Kalimantan, Indonesia (photo by author).

Kokang (c. 1740-1962)

     Kokang is a mountainous region located in the northeastern sector of the Shan State, bounded on the West by the Salween River and from the East by the Burmese border with Yunnan Province in China. Kokang’s population is estimated to be about 200,000 in 2010, 90% of whom are ethnic Chinese while the rest belong to various ethnic groups including the Lisu, Miaozi, Kachin, Palaung, Shan and Wa.⁷⁹ However, the Chinese from Kokang are to be distinguished from the ethnic Chinese from other regions of Burma. They constitute an officially recognized ethnic minority in Burma and are classified in official records by the name of Kokang since 1947, when Kokang was elevated to full statehood by the newly independent Burmese government as one of the Shan states.

	Map 4. The former Yang satrapy of Kokang is now Kokang Self-Administered Zone, located near the border with China in the north of Shan State, Myanmar. Map prepared by the author with Google Maps. Used under permission from Google at google.com/permissions/products/.

     In 1958, the Burmese government dispatched officials to the remote regions of the Shan State to register the population and issue national identity cards to them. But even today only 60% of Kokang residents have a national identity card; many did not receive one until the national elections in 2010.⁸⁰ The language spoken there is the Yunnan dialect of Chinese. Since China’s deepening of relations with Burma from 1988, Chinese from China have been hired as teachers in Kokang, Chinese is the language of instruction in schools, China Mobile provides the phone services, and the Chinese reminbi is used as the official currency.⁸¹

     The Kokang may appear to be an atypical minority living in the uplands of James Scott’s Zomia. But Scott reminds us that “colonizers of the highlands included not just “aboriginal peoples,” but also valley peoples fleeing taxation, corvée conscription, wars, rebellions, and raids by slavers and bandits.”⁸² Indeed, many Kokang families state that, according to family tradition, their ancestors “arrived in Burma four centuries back fleeing their country in catastrophic economic situation,” and constituted the first wave of Chinese immigration at the end of the 17th century.⁸³ Kokang culture today remains more similar to Chinese culture than to Burmese culture or Shan culture, and some re-sinization is occurring as there has been an influx of Chinese immigrants particularly from neighboring Yunnan Province since 1989, when the Burmese government signed a ceasefire with the Kokang-led National Democratic Alliance Army (which had split from the Communist Party of Burma): some Kokang are re-emphasizing Chinese identity and language in order to do business or trade with the Chinese.⁸⁴

     Nonetheless, despite a long-standing family tradition of many Kokang claiming Ming loyalist ancestry, preservation of Chinese language and customs, and re-sinicization as a response to China, many of James Scott’s generalizations about highlanders in Zomia still hold, given centuries of the Kokang living and interacting with Shan neighbors and other ethnic groups in Burma, and the impact of the highland environment. For example, while some Kokang emphasize their Chinese cultural identity, other Kokang “speak different languages, such as Shan, Kachin, Palaung and Burmese, have changed their names to the Burmese style, attend Burmese schools and have switched from their traditional ancestor worship beliefs to Buddhism, as they tried to integrate into the host country.” Assimilation into mainstream can also have economic benefits. This have given rise to multiple identities for the Kokang, with social relations dynamically adapting to which of the multiple ethnic groups who live along the Sino-Burmese border they are interacting with.⁸⁵ As James Scott observes, hill peoples maintained oral cultures and fluid ethnic identities so that they could have the cultural flexibility and maneuverability to reinvent themselves, their histories and their traditions as changing circumstances might dictate as advantageous.⁸⁶

     Generations of the Yang family ruled Kokang as a hierarchical feudatory, at times paying tribute to both China and to a more powerful local Shan state.⁸⁷ The Yang family traced its roots back to 1642, when their ancestor Yang Gaoxue (楊高學) was a 22-year old military juren at Nanjing. As a “fierce Ming loyalist” in 1644 when the Ming fell, Yang Guoxue followed the Southern Ming entourage from Nanjing to Zhejiang to Guangxi and Guangzhou, and finally settled in Yunnan. Yang arrived in Dali in 1657 and married a tea merchant’s daughter there.⁸⁸

     In 1662, the Burmese turned over the Yongli Emperor of the Southern Ming to Qing general Wu Sangui who had him strangled in Kunming, thereby ending the Southern Ming resistance to Manchu rule. Yang Gaoxue’s eldest son Yang Ying (楊映) had prospered in the tea trade in Yunnan, but was forced to flee when he was denounced to the authorities as a descendent of Ming loyalists in 1682. The refugee Yang family ended up in Kokang.

	Image 7. Myanmar-China Border Yanlonkyine Gate, near Laukkai, Kokang, Myanmar (photo by Paingpeace). Source used under Creative Commons License at https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9E%9C%E6%95%A2#/media/File:Myanmar-China_Border_Yanlonkyine_Gate.jpg.

     In 1739 Yang Xiancai (楊獻才), Yang Ying’s second son, demonstrated leadership qualities in an area wracked with tribal rivalries and banditry by saving several villages along the Salween River threatened by bandits. He was then acknowledged as local leader of Xingdahu, starting a line of hereditary rulers in Kokang who reigned until 1959.⁸⁹ Yang Xiancai “introduced organized administration and set the standards of government which were to be followed by successive rulers of the House of Yang.⁹⁰

     The Yang house expanded its territory through military action and offering of security. As their power and territories expanded, the Yang rulers took increasingly grander titles, and legitimized their rule through tributary connections to Chinese and Burmese authorities. When Yang Yougen (楊有根) became chief of Xingdahu in 1795, he self-styled himself as Heng (district official) and renamed the region Kokang. In 1840, Heng Yang Guohua (楊國華) was designated as magistrate by the Chinese government, and allowed to use a copper seal for the exercise of his authority.⁹¹ Officially Kokang was under the jurisdiction of Yongchang Prefecture (present-day Baoshan, Yunnan). Kokang paid tribute to China annually and was liable for military levies.⁹² At the same time, Kokang also paid annual tribute to the Shan state of Hseinwi, though the two were often in military conflict during the 19th century.⁹³

     After the British annexed Upper Burma in 1886, the Yang house built relations with the government of British India. By then Kokang had expanded to its maximum size. Although officially designated by the British as 1 of the 49 mongs (districts) of Hseinwi, Kokang often ignored Hseinwi’s authority and dealt directly with the British authorities.⁹⁴ Kokang provided mules to the British for their campaigns against the Kachins who resisted British authority. Kokang also helped to maintain border peace, demarcate the boundary between Burma and China with border posts, and adjudicate civil and trade disputes.⁹⁵

     In 1894, the Beijing Convention assigned Kokang to China, but in 1897 Kokang was reassigned to British India, and shortly thereafter placed under the jurisdiction of the Shan state of North Hseinwi.⁹⁶ In 1916 Yang Chunrong (楊春榮) took the title of Myosa (duke or chief of town).

     Kokang was involved in the anti-Japanese resistance during World War II. Kokang was under the operational command of Kuomintang (KMT) forces, as China and Britain were allies. Myosa Yang Wenbin (楊文炳) was appointed the Kokang Self-Defense Force by the KMT.⁹⁷ In 1947, for its services during the war, Kokang was elevated to the status of a state (no longer a sub-state under North Hseinwi) and its ruler a Saopha (king for a Shan state).⁹⁸ Kokang participated in the Panglong Agreement of 1947 made by independence hero Aung San and the rulers of various ethnic minorities. The promise of autonomy for the minorities however was not kept by the Burmese government after the assassination of Aung San in 1947, thereby provoking armed resistance by various ethnic minorities. The situation in Kokang was complicated by the incursions of the remnants of the KMT forces that were driven from China after Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, and that took control of large areas of the Shan states.⁹⁹

     In 1959, Yang Zhencai (楊振財) and other Saophas surrendered their hereditary power.¹⁰⁰ However, his half-sister Yang Jinxiu (Olive Yang 楊金秀) became the de facto ruler of Kokang from 1960 to 1962.¹⁰¹ After the military coup of 1962, Yang Jinxiu was arrested,¹⁰² thus ending almost 170 years of rule over Kokang by the Yang House.

     Despite Kokang’s geographical isolation, it was connected to trading networks. As Bin Yang has demonstrated, in addition to the overland Silk Road and the maritime Silk Road that served as the communication routes for Eurasia, a third and lesser-known route, the Southwest Silk Road, extended from Southwest China via Burma to India.¹⁰³ Yang further argues that the three Silk Roads not only functioned for over two thousand years, but also constituted together a network or web of connections that promoted interactions between East and West.¹⁰⁴

     Even a small locale such as Kokang in mainland Southeast Asia was plugged into this Southwest Silk Road network. As Jean Michaud observes,

For centuries, trade in [the highlands of mainland Southeast Asia] has been conducted on all scales: from one valley to the next, from one fiefdom to others around it, and at the macro scale through long-haul trade including intercontinental exchanges such as those popularly associated with the idea of the Silk Road. Though never really central to the trade linking the Far East to South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, these highlands have been an integral part of trading patterns, because of the caravan trails crossing them, and the provision of prized and rare items.¹⁰⁵

     Liu Zhi of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies of Yunnan adds:

. . . the first half of the 19th century saw tens of thousands of horse caravans (reaching eighty or ninety thousand at its height) carrying goods of Yunnan, Sichuan and inland China into the markets of Southeast Asia, South and even further to the West . . . In 1826 China imported as much as 12.4 million pounds of cotton from Burma. At the same time gem traders of Yunnan set up more than 100 firms in Burma, transporting jade to Tengchong for processing, and sold it to inland China or Southeast or South Asia . . . In the 20th century, by 1924-25, the value of land trade between China and Burma exceeded 26 million rouble or 15 times that of 1890-91.¹⁰⁶

     James Scott further notes that the highlanders gained comparative advantages for smuggling, contraband, and opium production from their relative autonomy from lowland state centers, and from the location of the highlands “athwart state borders where multiple competing sovereignties abut one another.”¹⁰⁷ The British and the French secured opium supplies in China’s southwest through Burma and Indochina, and shipped them through Saigon and Calcutta to the China coast and to ports around the world.¹⁰⁸ Although Yunnan and Sichuan in Southwest China had become large producers of opium by the late 19th century, demand outstripped supply, and Yunnanese traders looked for alternative sources of opium.¹⁰⁹ In Burma the opium poppy plant had for centuries been cultivated by farmers in the northern highlands for medicine and as a cash crop.¹¹⁰ Kokang quickly became a leading producer of opium that was purchased by Yunnanese merchants for the Chinese market before World War II.¹¹¹ After Burma gained independence in 1948, Burmese minorities became wholesalers who sold the bulk of their poppy crops to ethnic Chinese merchants and international syndicates located in Thailand, and more recently, in China.¹¹²

Conclusion: Historical Paradigms and Historical Memory

     This paper has demonstrated the relevance of applying the Water Frontier and Zomia paradigms to Chinese pioneer societies in littoral and highland Southeast Asia respectively. The Mạc family of Hà Tiên and the Yang family of Kokang first found their way to Southeast Asia as Ming loyalists fleeing from Manchu rule. They, along with the founders of the Lanfang Republic, started as pioneers in frontier environments and succeeded to take advantage of economic opportunities offered through maritime/riverine or overland trade networks and the local, regional and international markets during the age of China-oriented trade. All three also succeeded in establishing and expanding territorial control and exercising considerable political autonomy through the exercise of violence and negotiations.

     How are these Chinese principalities remembered today? Kokang natives continue to celebrate their linkages to the Ming loyalist tradition and Yunnan culture. The oral traditions of many Chinese of Burma, including the Yang house of Kokang, state that their ancestors “arrived in Burma four centuries back fleeing their country in catastrophic economic situation,” and constituted the first wave of Chinese immigration at the end of the 17th century.¹¹³ Some Kokang families are able to document their presence in the region for over fifteen generations.¹¹⁴ Many Kokang natives insist that their ancestors were Nanjing natives who had followed the Yongli Emperor of the Southern Ming in his flight from Nanjing westward, ending eventually in Burma. Probably many of those Ming loyalists had come from other regions of China, but because the Southern Ming first established its capital at Nanjing, their purported descendants claimed Nanjing ancestry.¹¹⁵

     Kokang was little known to the world and indeed to most Chinese until August of 2009, when armed conflict between the forces of Burma’s ruling junta and the militia of the Kokang Special Region resulted in the flight of tens of thousands of refugees into neighboring China and a temporary crisis in Sino-Burmese relations. Kokang became a hot topic of conversation on Chinese cyberspace for some time thereafter, with Kokang’s people being lauded as Chinese compatriots for their past roles in fighting foreign invaders from the Manchus to the Japanese.

     As for Hà Tiên, its contributions to Vietnam’s state formation were celebrated by Vietnamese poet Đông Hồ (1906-1969), who was from Hà Tiên and wrote profusely about the Mạcs and the town’s ten sights eulogized two centuries earlier by Mạc Thiên Tứ in his collection of poems, The Ten Songs of Hà Tiên. As Đông Hồ put it, although Mạc Cửu was Chinese, “ … his history is connected with the history of our Southern Country. His undertakings were executed in our Southern Country, his work strengthened our Southern Country, and the Mạcs became a family of our Southern Country.”¹¹⁶

     The significance of Hà Tiên is debated in Vietnamese historiography in the context of interpretations of Vietnam’s southern advance (nam tiến), or the spread of the Việt people from the Red River Delta heartland to the Lower Mekong Delta. For historians in the Republic of Vietnam or South Vietnam, the nam tiến narrative can serve either the notion of a shared historical destiny as a reaction to the threat of Chinese domination dating back to the time before China’s incorporation of Vietnam in 111 BCE, or the idea that nam tiến really began in the seventeenth century with the end of the Trịnh-Nguyễn conflict (1627–1672) when the Vietnamese people must move southwards to a region of “plentiful lands and few people” in order to recover from the ravages of civil war, first by conquering Cham territories, and then by annexing Khmer lands. The second view promotes the idea of a distinct Việt historical experience in the south that culminates in the reunification of Vietnam under Nguyễn Phúc Ánh, thereby proclaiming the political legitimacy of the Republic of Vietnam over the Democratic Republic of Vietnam or North Vietnam.¹¹⁷

     The role of Hà Tiên comes up over the question whether ethnic groups other than the Việt could be agents of the nam tiến. Hãn Nguyên argues that the Chinese made a positive contribution to the nam tiến, as Mạc Cửu, by making Hà Tiên into a port-city, and by submitting to the Nguyễn lords at a critical moment in the competition over the Lower Mekong Delta between the Vietnamese, the Siamese and the Cambodians, helped secure the Delta for Ðàng Trong. Sơn Nam, however, argued against the Mạc, claiming that while they might have promoted agriculture and the export economy, they did not “break fresh ground” or reclaim new land.¹¹⁸

      As noted earlier, the Chinese valorize Mạc Cửu as a colonizing pioneer, one of the Chinese counterparts to Western explorers and colonizers. Perhaps no Chinese scholar has done more to recover and reinterpret the historical memory of Mạc Cửu than Chen Jinghe 陳荊和 (1917-1995),¹¹⁹ a Taiwanese scholar educated in Japan, Vietnam and France. Chen saw the Mạcs as “part of a larger world of overseas Chinese” who “were not just living in Southeast Asia but were actually governing autonomous realms there” during the 18th century.¹²⁰ Chen Jinghe’s observation about Mạc Cửu as a pioneer who founded an overseas polity can also be extended to the Yang family of Kokang and to Luo Fangbo. In West Kalimantan today, the historical memory of Luo Fangbo and the Lanfang Republic remains strong. Temples memorializing Luo Fangbo are common in the Pontianak region, while in Mandor there is a school named after him, and public celebrations of his birth and death anniversaries are held.¹²¹ When historian Xing Hang visited Kalimantan for field work and went to a temple dedicated to Luo Fangbo, he met a descendant of Luo who claimed to be a psychic who could connect with Luo’s spirit. After the descendant was possessed, he spoke in Luo’s voice expressing regret about having blood on his hands for all the wars that Lanfang inflicted on other Chinese groups.¹²²

     Was Lanfang kongsi a true democracy? Dutch Sinologist J. J. M. de Groot (高延) thought so. So did Chinese intellectuals such as Liang Qichao and Luo Xianglin. Mary Somers Heidhues disagrees. She argues instead that its kapthay ruled the kongsi in an authoritarian fashion and in addition was a major investor in the gold mines. The kapitans or lower officials served in their posts because of their status as wealthy merchants and investors in the mines. While the mine bosses were elected for four-month terms, they lacked true political authority.¹²³ Similarly, Ying-kit Chan is critical of de Groot for his exaggeration of the “republican” aspects of the kongsis, overlooking the fact that “kongsis were first and foremost economic enterprises and farmers were second-class members, as were indigenes.” Moreover, political leadership was restricted to a few families, often held for long periods, and passed to sons or sons-in-law.¹²⁴ After a careful examination of available sources, Zhang Wei’an and Zhang Rongjia concludes that there is insufficient primary evidence to determine whether Langfang Kongsi constituted a country or a true republic comparable to the United States.¹²⁵

     More important is the fact that the Lanfang Republic continues to be a source of fascination for the Chinese in China and overseas, since its myth is an affirmation of not only the pioneering spirit but also the capacity for democracy of the Chinese people, and, in particular, the Hakkas who constituted the majority in the mining populations of West Borneo. Luo Fangbo and Lanfang Republic/kongsi continue to be hot topics on the Chinese Internet, and while some netizens have expressed doubts on Lanfang’s existence as a country or as a democratic republic, many more praised Luo Fangbo’s invention of the “presidential system” and the democratic nature of Lanfang’s government.¹²⁶

     In recent years the Lanfang Republic has been reimagined as a utopia in several works of popular culture in Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Chinese Indonesian author Zhang Yonghe (張永和) did field research and interviews with local elders in Mandor in 2001 before co-authoring a fictional biography of Luo Fangbo with Zhang Kaiyuan (張開源). This 2003 reimagining of Luo’s establishment of the Lanfang Republic was a sensation in Indonesia,¹²⁷ with former president Abdurrahman Wahid contributing a preface in which he praised Luo Fangbo for establishing the presidential system for Lanfang in 1777, ten years before George Washington was elected the first president of the United States.¹²⁸ Significantly, this novel emphasizes Luo Fangbo not only disseminating Chinese culture among the Chinese and the Dayaks at Mandor, but also identifying with local society and culture and learning the Malay language from the natives. Intermarriage between the Chinese and the Dayaks was celebrated as emblematic of the friendship and unity among the various ethnic groups in Kalimantan.¹²⁹

     In 2007, the Hakka Affairs Council (客家委員會) of the Republic of China on Taiwan produced a Hakka opera about Luo Fangbo, which enjoyed many public performances and a DVD release. Similar to the fictional biography of Luo Fangbo by Zhang Yonghe and Zhang Kaiyuan, this production juxtaposes the preservation and propagation of Hakka language and culture with Chinese commingling with the Dayaks, learning the Malay language and participating in local celebrations.¹³⁰

     In 2010, Singaporean artist Choy Ka Fai initiated research in Indonesia, China and the Netherlands for a multi-disciplinary project based on the history of the Lanfang Republic. Disappointed with his meager findings—“a temple, a descendant and a handful of documents”—Choy filled in the blanks and created artifacts in putting together his “Lang Fang Chronicles 2012,” a set of installations and performances for the Singapore Art Festival. In reconstructing and recovering the lost history of Lanfang, Choy noted the similarities between the Lanfang Republic and the Republic of Singapore: “Not only were they alike in size, government structure and an active citizenry, but they were both also home to a mix of cultures and races . . . [which] collaborated together [and] made use of each other.”¹³¹ Significantly, “Lang Fang Chronicles 2012” was mounted in Ying Fo Hui Kun Ancestral Temple, founded by Hakka who had escaped from Lanfang after Dutch annexation in 1884.¹³² Thus, Singaporeans’ fascination with Lanfang may have something to do with the fact that many of them were descendants of refugees and migrants from West Kalimantan after the decline of the gold kongsis in the first half of the nineteenth century, and especially after the extermination of the kongsis by the Dutch in the kongsi wars. There may also be an awareness of the close economic connections between West Kalimantan and the entrepȏt of Singapore that was founded in 1819. Kongsis in Sambas, Mampawa and Pontianak in the nineteenth traded gold dust, camphor and rice with Singapore for opium, weapons and salt. Imported weapons including heavy Arab cannons enabled the kongsis to continue their resistance against the Dutch, whose salt and opium monopolies were also badly hurt. More broadly, Singapore also profited economically from the growing appetite of the Chinese for Southeast Asian forest and marine products and spice, which the Borneo Chinese became successful traders of.¹³³

     While the primary sources indicate a history of violent confrontations between the Chinese and the local peoples of Southeast Asia and between different Chinese dialect groups, popular culture in Southeast Asia today emphasizes racial harmony and cooperation, as countries from Taiwan to Indonesia to Singapore have to manage potential conflicts among multi-ethnic and/or multilingual constituencies.

     Robert Y. Eng is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Redlands, where he taught courses on East Asian history and world history. He is the author of Economic Imperialism in China: Silk Production and Exports, 1861-1932 (Berkeley, 1986). His recent publications focus on Sino-Japanese relations, China-Korea culture wars, cinematic representations of Chinggis Khan, China historians’ contributions to world history, and reframing Confucianism for a global Singapore. His essay on views of world history in Chinese television documentaries is published in World History Connected’s Forum on Film and World History at https://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/16.2/index.html.