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announced a family's change in direction, these of father and son did. Zhang Ting-
bang'sfamilyclearlywantedhimtogettoBeijing,butTingbangdidn'timposethat
ambition on his son. Although he passed the provincial-level exams at the reason-
ablyyoungageoftwenty,ZhangXiehadnodesiretorepeathisfather'sexperience
and make the compromises required for getting ahead in a bureaucratic career. He
went travelling instead, visiting all the great sites throughout the country and hob-
nobbing with some of the leading lights of the age. Everyone who mattered got to
know Zhang Xie and count him as a friend. Once back in Zhangzhou, he took the
moniker Coastal Scribbler and turned to writing. He published fifteen books in all,
mostly poetry, all of it lost - with one startling exception, without which he would
have been entirely forgotten.
Dong xi yang kao
('Study of the Eastern and Western Seas') is the only account
wehaveofChinesemaritime endeavoursintheSouthChinaSea.Despiteitsinsip-
id, academic title, it is one of the remarkable books of the age. It started out as an
assignment. The county magistrate of Hai-cheng, Zhangzhou's port on the coast,
wanted some kind of record about the maritime world that started at the light-
house on Gui Island, beyond the far end of Moon Harbour, and stretched outward
to the world. A
gui
was an ancient jade object signifying imperial power, cosmic-
ally shaped round at the top and square on the bottom, as were heaven and earth.
The magistrate was about as far from being a seafaring man as any state official
could be, but he needed to know something about wherever it was that half of the
county population went and what they did when they got there. Zhang Xie could
have completed this assignment in a perfunctory way. Instead, he turned it into a
project that absorbed his immense energy, sending him down to the docks and into
the archives to assemble the knowledge he needed to compose a complete picture
of the maritime world. The manuscript might have languished unfinished and un-
published but for an enthusiastic prefectural official in Zhangzhou who found out
about it. As this official noted in his preface to the topic, Haicheng was a
shuiguo
- a water kingdom - where 'daily necessities come from across the sea, luxuries
are foreign products, and kids in the villages who can barely talk can translate for-
eign languages!' No county in China was quite like this, and it needed a record
that could attest to just how intimately the county was bound up with the maritime
world.
I think of Zhang as energetic, although it is not easy to catch a glimpse of the
man behind the topic. He writes in a straightforward style but occasionally turns
an elegant phrase as well, suggesting that he enjoyed the craft of writing. He states
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