Writing Landscapes into Civilization: Ming Loyalist Ambitions on the Mekong Delta

Abstract

After the collapse of the Ming dynasty, a group of Ming loyalists settled in Hà Tiên (located on the Vietnamese side of the modern border between Cambodia and Vietnam) on the Mekong delta. On those frontier lands, they built a settlement around a port that maintained close connections with Guangdong and Fujian. This article examines an eighteenth-century literary project that took as its focus ten scenic sites in Hà Tiên. The poems were distributed via the coastal trading network to poets in Vietnam and the Chinese mainland, who composed matching poems and returned them with the next sailing season. These poetic compositions functioned as a medium through which the originator of the project rendered his domain civilized by giving pattern (wen 文) to Hà Tiên’s natural environment. Moreover, he encoded in them messages that urged dispersed Ming loyalists to make Hà Tiên their new capital. Close study of the ten original poems uncovers the motivations of a second-generation Ming loyalist, who composed landscape poetry to create a new home outside the Chinese mainland.