Nieuwe Narratieven van Guangdong: Het Schrijven van de Locatie en de Maritieme Wereld tijdens de Ming-Qing-transitie (1644-1680s)

Previous scholarship on the Ming-Qing transition has largely contributed to the extensively discussed narratives of Ming loyalism. As a result, local and individual initiatives have often been overshadowed by reconstructed grand narratives of national crisis—commonly perceived as the most momentous dynastic transition in Chinese history across the broader Sinosphere. This study, therefore, shifts the analytical focus away from dominant nationalist narratives and toward localized scenes of cultural production and interaction. It recenters Guangdong—a region geographically cast as peripheral to the empire, but which emerged as a critical zone of contestation and a dynamic meeting ground for imperial, regional, and maritime powers during this period of political instability. Cantonese literati, though burdened by traumatic memories, strove to reconstruct lost literary legacies by leveraging state sponsorship. By valorizing their newly produced local culture, they sought to rebrand the region, asserting its literary significance and cultural pride beyond the deep-rooted center-periphery paradigm. This cultural prestige was further reinforced through the collective efforts of Cantonese literati to claim a distinctive regional maritime tradition—an often-overlooked dimension in studies of Guangdong during the Ming-Qing transition. Amid the dynastic turbulence, local literati from Guangdong demonstrated a sustained and nuanced engagement with both their immediate locale and the broader maritime world. These Pearl River Delta-centered elite scholars cultivated a strong affinity for their littoral landscapes, conceptualizing their coastal communities as part of a distinctive maritime kingdom, shaped by the internal topography of rivers and estuaries and the external seaborne networks that extended beyond imperial borders. Their geohistorical texts, often centered on native-place themes, incorporated close observations of "Western Ocean" foreigners in Canton—such as Dutch envoys—alongside accounts of interactions with residents of the Portuguese enclave of Macao and reflections on maritime encounters and material exchange. In this sense, this study proposes a new interpretive model: to view coastal regions—including Guangdong—through a local-oceanic lens, a framework that repositions Guangdong within broader, polycentric, and interconnected maritime networks. This perspective futher highlights the region's shared trajectory with the increasingly global connectivity of the latter half of the seventeenth century.