Southern Seas

A sweeping new history of Chinese diasporas in Southeast Asia.

Lying at the center of trade routes connecting China to the Indian Ocean, the Southern Seas have always been a cauldron of diasporas. For centuries, Chinese migrants have crossed these waters. We know them chiefly as protagonists of trade and commerce—and also as a people defined by their ties to a distant homeland.

In Southern Seas, historian Rachel Leow tells a different story. Through the lives of intellectuals, feminists, poets, and exiles, she recasts this vibrant region as an incubator of ideas and alternative politics. Adopting the many languages of the Malay world, these figures imagined futures that were bound to neither the nation-state nor a politics of blood and ancestry. 

Today, as the rise of China reconfigures what it means to be Chinese, this book recovers a more fluid history of migration and belonging—one in which Chinese migrants did not simply look back toward a homeland but created new communities, identities, and possibilities wherever they went.