This book revises earlier views of statecraft reformer Wei Yuan and of Chinese foreign relations during the last century. Approaching the history of nineteenth-century China from the perspective of Southeast Asian history, the author demonstrates the interaction, from Ch’in times onward, between China and the Southern Ocean or Nan-yang. In the process, she casts new light upon Chinese behavior during the Opium War and allows the reader to see that war in the context of a long history of Sino–Nan-yang relations rather than merely as a reaction to the West. In the past, Wei’s Hai-kuo t’u-chih (Illustrated Treatise on the Sea Kingdoms), 1844, has been understood in terms of China’s “response to the West,” and seen principally as a source of new information about Western geography. Jane Leonard identifies its main thrust as geopolitical, and its main purpose to describe Western expansion into maritime Asia and to analyze the dynamics of that expansion. Rediscovering China’s past relationships with the southern maritime regions, especially during the Yuan and Ming dynasties, Wei recommended dramatic changes in Ch’ing maritime policy and awakened his contemporaries to the importance of the Nan-yang.