Integrating the Sea, Littorals, and Land: Hong Kong as a Piratical Nexus in South China, 1861–1898

Principal Investigator

LUK Chi Hung

Total Fund Awarded

HK$468,311

Funding Source

RGC General Research Fund
(2024/2025)

Abstract of Project

A top-down approach that problematizes piracy as a threat to trade and land-based regimes has dominated much scholarship on piracy related to British Hong Kong. In contrast, this project explores how maritime raiding was intertwined with the society of colonial Hong Kong and its neighboring Guangdong region. Combining a bottom-up approach with a regional perspective, the project examines the roles of Hong Kong as a node of piratical assaults, hijacking, and their associated activities from the British occupation of Kowloon in 1861 to the eve of the lease of the New Territories in 1898. Drawing on British colonial records, newspaper materials, Qing archival documents, and other sources, it explores the pattern of pirates’ attacks and the distribution of their haunts across Hong Kong and its adjacent coast, islands, and passages. The evolution of piracy around Hong Kong is largely a function of British colonial and naval power, Qing state capacity, regional conflicts, and the development of maritime transportation. A pivot of South China piracy, late nineteenth-century Hong Kong provided shelter, intelligence, and a “black market” for piratical chiefs, ordinary pirates, and their watercraft. Familial, kinship, native-place, occupational, ethnic, and sworn-brotherhood connections tied together many pirates, who were simultaneously associated with smugglers, receivers of plunder, and various other Chinese and non-Chinese groups in Hong Kong and its environs across the Pearl River Delta. In sum, colonial Hong Kong was a “piratical nexus” in modern-era piracy in South China that contributed to the social integration of the sea, littorals, and land territories in the region. Put in perspective, maritime raiding around late nineteenth-century Hong Kong was both a departure from and a continuity of piracy in China in the early modern and modern eras. The advent of the British in Hong Kong and along the China coast at large transformed the equilibrium of power between Qing forces, foreigners, and local armed groups—including pirates. At the same time, similar to their late imperial antecedents in South China, those engaged in piracy around colonial Hong Kong were so mobile that they could shift between legal and illegal occupations and traverse across administrative-political boundaries. From a transregional angle, some intrinsic features of piracy in Hong Kong and its surrounding areas—such as its inseparability from smuggling and secret societies—are also found in maritime Southeast Asia and other South China Sea regions in the nineteenth century.