'By presenting his work as laying the foundations for a new lens of analysis called 'New Qing Maritime History,' Po's book clearly demonstrates this historiographical power … His work means that the hackneyed narrative of the eighteenth-century Chinese empire as one of the great land empires that unfortunately turned its back on the maritime realm and refused to engage with anything that lay beyond the coastal boundary of the empire will have to be revised … Po convincingly shows that certainly between the annexation of Taiwan in 1693 and the end of Qianlong's reign in 1795, the Qing rulers did care about control over its inner seas.' Anne Gerritsen, The English Historical Review
Introduction; 1. Setting the scene; 2. Modeling the sea; 3. The dragon navy; 4. Guarded management; 5. Writing the waves; Conclusion; Appendix 1. 'Inner sea' and 'outer sea' in imperial documents; Appendix 2. A chronicle of sea patrol regulations in the long eighteenth century; Appendix 3. Glossary of Chinese characters.