Translating Authority: British Hydrography and Qing Claim to the Southern Seas, 1907–1910

In the early twentieth century, entrepreneurs from France, Britain, and Japan began to perceive Pratas Island and the Paracel Island group in the South China Sea as islands of economic opportunity. Long considered perilous features and barriers to China’s riches, these islands transformed into useful sites of commercial and strategic value, and competition for them escalated. The Qing, aware of encroaching foreign powers, joined their competitors in turning an imperial gaze toward distant waters. Despite a robust heritage of hydrographical knowledge production off the southern coast, provincial officials found little in the Qing archive that placed the distant islands under local administration. Cantonese fishermen protested a loss of fishing grounds, but their oral testimony bore little weight in the new international contest for maritime power.

To bolster maritime claims, Qing officials turned, in part, to foreign documentation. A Chinese translation of The China Sea Directory, a maritime guide published by Britain’s Hydrographic Department, suggested a Chinese presence on the islands. The translated directory supported China’s case for Pratas Island and initiated the Qing’s own hydrographical expedition to the Paracel Island group. In deploying The China Sea Directory and mirroring British hydrographical practice, Qing officials evoked an intellectual authority recognized by France and Japan, China's most pressing maritime competitors at the time. Not only that, but the Qing also integrated British authority into their own heritage of knowing the seas. Provincial actors produced hydrographical documentation in Qing format that placed the Pratas and Paracels squarely under local jurisdictions. These twentieth-century events reveal how the Qing adapted British knowledge production on their own terms to meet state imperatives. They also provide much-needed historical insight into China’s contemporary controversial views on their southern maritime world.