Kangxi

Kangxi was the Qing emperor who in 1661 ordered the population living along the coast from Vietnam to Chekiang to move seventeen miles inland. The measure, enforced by troops and followed by a ban on coastal shipping, made his reign a defining example of how the Qing state subordinated overseas commerce to political control and stability.

The Coastal Evacuation

The order reached across what was essentially China’s entire southern coast, once the country’s most commercially active region. Residents were required to move inland, while troops patrolled the coast to enforce the evacuation. The ban on shipping lasted until 1693, turning a vast coastal zone away from maritime trade for more than three decades.

Trade and Political Control

The prohibition was not an isolated interruption. The ban was periodically reimposed in the eighteenth century, leaving overseas commerce vulnerable to sudden reversal by the emperor. Even when trade developed, merchants had reason to hesitate before investing in ships, equipment, or trading relationships: a renewed prohibition could render those investments worthless.

The policy reflected a broader governing fear of creative destruction. Ming and Qing rulers regarded the wealth and influence that international trade could bring to merchants as a potential threat to political stability. The state permitted domestic markets and taxed the internal economy relatively lightly, but did little to support innovation and restricted overseas trade. Economic activity was tolerated so long as it did not threaten the state’s control.

Long-Term Significance

The coastal restrictions helped cut China off from a critical juncture at the time when international trade and the discovery of the Americas were transforming England’s institutions. The book presents the inward turn under the Ming and Qing as part of a larger exchange: political stability was prioritized over the development of mercantile and industrial prosperity.

The consequences extended well beyond Kangxi’s order. The book links absolutist control of economic activity and the suppression of overseas trade to China’s stagnation through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the time Mao established his communist regime in 1949, China had become one of the world’s poorest countries. Kangxi’s coastal policy stands within that longer account as a concrete instance of political authority constraining the opportunities and investments on which commercial development depended.