Cang hai sang tian: Chinese communities in the Mekong delta in the eighteenth century

This chapter aims to explore some puzzling questions concerning Chinese communities in southern Vietnam. It discusses Vietnam and particularly the eighteenth-century Mekong delta back into the larger world of Southeast Asia, and examine the topic in a more horizontal rather than vertical dimension. Parallel to the Chinese immigration to the part of Southeast Asia, there was a remarkable internal migration of Chinese within this Southeast Asian water frontier. The sudden rush of a relatively large Chinese population compared to the thin local population in the frontier areas, with their livelihood directly linked to overseas markets, made the new Chinese settlements much more autonomous than all previous settlements. The Chinese were more likely soldiers or potential soldiers of the Nguyen, than business rivals of the Vietnamese merchant class, as some scholars suggest. A relatively large number of Chinese fleeing from southern Vietnam settled in Terengganu in the Malay Peninsula.