The Great Clearance and the Reopening of the Coast: A Social Upheaval in Early Qing Xin’an
War, Population, and the Reconstruction of Local Society in the Kangxi Gazetteer of Xin’an County
I. Introduction: The Disappearance of a County
By 1667, the sixth year of the Kangxi reign, the county government compound of Xin’an lay in ruins.
The county seat was located at Nantou, in present-day Shenzhen. Xin’an County had been established in 1573, the first year of the Wanli reign of the Ming dynasty, when it was separated from Dongguan County. Nantou became its administrative center. The county government compound stood within the walled town, with a ceremonial gate and watchtower at the front and offices and residential quarters behind. For nearly a century, this had been where county magistrates administered taxes, heard lawsuits, and handled local affairs.
Now most of the buildings had been destroyed. Only the main hall remained.
Volume Five of the Kangxi Gazetteer of Xin’an County, in its section on official buildings, records that Xin’an was incorporated into Dongguan following the coastal clearance, leaving the county government compound abandoned. When Xin’an County was reestablished in 1669, and Magistrate Li Kecheng took office the following year, he found the surrounding buildings in ruins. He had to obtain building materials, recruit craftsmen, and undertake repairs.
The account is brief, but it reveals a major upheaval in the history of early Qing Xin’an. In less than a decade, a county that had existed for nearly a century temporarily lost its independent administrative status. Its government offices fell into disrepair, numerous villages were forcibly evacuated, large areas of farmland went out of cultivation, and the local economy and social organizations suffered severe disruption.
The cause was not a natural disaster. It was a military policy imposed by the state.
This was the Great Clearance, known in Chinese as qianhai (迁海) or qianjie (迁界).
Beginning in 1661, the eighteenth year of the Shunzhi reign, the Qing government issued successive orders requiring coastal inhabitants to move inland. Its purpose was to sever connections between the population of southeastern China and the maritime forces of the Zheng family. Boundaries were established beyond which residence and production were prohibited.
Xin’an County, situated on the eastern shore of the Pearl River estuary, encompassed much of present-day Shenzhen and Hong Kong. It had a long coastline, numerous islands and bays, and many coastal settlements. The implementation of the clearance policy had particularly severe consequences for the county.
Yet the history of the Great Clearance is not simply a history of population displacement.
It also changed patterns of land use, the geographical organization of economic activities, relations between the state and local society, and the claims that different groups of inhabitants could make to their ancestral homes.
More importantly, the Great Clearance did not strike a society that had remained unchanged.
The preceding article, “Salt Fields and Salt-Trading Depots,” suggested that by the middle and late Ming period, coastal Xin’an may already have been experiencing continuing changes and tensions involving salt production, agriculture, market transactions, taxation, and labor obligations.
To understand what the Great Clearance actually caused, therefore, we must distinguish two questions.
Which changes were direct consequences of the clearance?
And which had already begun before the clearance, only to be intensified or redirected by it?
This article examines the upheaval from four perspectives: the military background of the clearance policy, its actual consequences for Xin’an society, the process by which the coast was reopened, and the ways the event was subsequently remembered and narrated.
Its central argument is that the Great Clearance caused a severe interruption of population settlement and productive activity in Xin’an. It also changed the conditions under which local society could be reorganized.
But the clearance did not completely erase the society that had existed before it.
The social order that emerged after the coast reopened resulted from several interacting processes: the return of former residents, the restoration and adjustment of existing institutions, and the subsequent arrival of new migrants.
II. Why Was the Great Clearance Ordered?
The Great Clearance arose from the prolonged coastal warfare that followed the fall of the Ming dynasty.
The end of Ming rule in Beijing in 1644 did not mean that military resistance immediately ceased throughout China. For many years afterward, Southern Ming regimes and their supporters continued to operate in southern China.
Among them, the maritime forces commanded by Zheng Chenggong, also known as Koxinga, and his successors posed a continuing threat to the Qing government.
The Zheng forces depended on maritime transportation, trade, and coastal bases to sustain their operations. Ships needed grain, fresh water, timber, and other supplies. Armies required intelligence, personnel, and provisions.
Various economic and social connections could exist between coastal inhabitants and these maritime forces.
The difficulty confronting the Qing government was that military operations on land alone could not easily sever such connections.
The Qing court therefore adopted an exceptionally harsh measure: coastal populations would be forcibly relocated inland, creating an uninhabited and unproductive zone between the shoreline and the areas where people were permitted to live.
This was the basic military logic of the Great Clearance.
From the state’s perspective, it was a means of weakening the enemy’s supply system by controlling population and resources.
From the perspective of local inhabitants, however, it meant abandoning their houses, farmland, fishing grounds, salt pans, and livelihoods.
The difference between these two perspectives was fundamental. To the court that formulated the policy, coastal inhabitants were first and foremost a population that might supply the enemy.
To the inhabitants themselves, the coast was the place where their families had lived for generations.
They cultivated land, fished, produced salt, and conducted trade there. They buried their ancestors, built ancestral halls, and established networks of kinship and neighborhood relationships.
A boundary drawn by the court on a map could suddenly deprive these relationships of the geographical foundations upon which they depended.
It is important to note that the Great Clearance was not identical to the maritime prohibitions commonly known as haijin (海禁).
The maritime prohibitions primarily restricted seaborne transportation and trade. The Great Clearance went further: it required coastal inhabitants to leave designated areas and prohibited residence and productive activities beyond the established boundary.
The two policies could operate simultaneously, but they were not the same institution.
This distinction is essential for understanding the subsequent reopening of the coast. Allowing residents to return to their former homes did not necessarily mean that restrictions on maritime trade and navigation were immediately and completely removed.
III. From the First Clearance to Further Evacuations: Xin’an’s Disaster
The Qing court began implementing the Great Clearance along China’s southeastern coast in 1661.
In Guangdong, the policy was carried out primarily during the early years of the Kangxi reign.
Volume Eleven of the Kangxi Gazetteer of Xin’an County, in its account of the clearance and subsequent reopening, records that officials surveyed the coast and established boundaries in the twelfth month of 1661.
In the second month of 1662, the first year of the Kangxi reign, the boundary was formally established. In the third month, soldiers enforced the order and drove coastal inhabitants inland.
Further boundary surveys and relocations followed over the next several years.
Local historical sources concerning Xin’an record that the first clearance required coastal inhabitants to move several dozen li inland. Subsequent orders pushed the boundary still farther from the coast.
The sources give different distances: thirty li, fifty li, and a further relocation of thirty li.
These figures should not be interpreted as meaning that a single, precisely measured distance was applied uniformly along the entire coastline.
The actual boundary was also influenced by mountains and rivers, military defensive requirements, and the ways local officials implemented the orders.
For Xin’an, the crucial issue is not exactly how many li separated a particular boundary from the coast, but the fact that much of the county’s land and many of its villages were affected.
Xin’an was, after all, a coastal county.
Its inhabitants lived not only on coastal plains but also around bays and river mouths, on islands, and among the hills.
Salt production, fishing, agriculture, and waterborne trade formed the economic foundations of different parts of the county.
The Great Clearance disrupted the geographical relationships upon which these activities depended.
Coastal residents were forced from their homes. Farmland could become overgrown when cultivators were no longer able to work it. Salt pans lost their producers. Fishermen could no longer use their customary harbors and fishing grounds. Merchants could lose established transportation routes and trading networks.
Such destruction did not necessarily mean that every productive facility immediately disappeared.
A field might still exist, but if its cultivators were prohibited from returning, it could no longer serve its former economic purpose.
A harbor might remain physically intact, but if boats could no longer anchor there and people could no longer inhabit its shores, it would cease to perform its former social functions.
What the Great Clearance altered, above all, was people’s right to use the land and the sea.
1. Forced Relocation Was Not Simply Moving House
There is a fundamental difference between forced relocation and ordinary migration.
People who move voluntarily generally have at least some opportunity to choose their destination and make arrangements for their new lives.
Under the Great Clearance, however, the state ordered inhabitants to leave designated areas under military compulsion.
Families had to deal with their houses, livestock, farming implements, and other possessions within a limited period, while attempting to find somewhere else to live.
Some may have sought refuge with relatives inland. Others may have stayed temporarily in neighboring villages. Still others may have lost any stable means of supporting themselves.
The experiences of individual families inevitably differed according to their wealth, kinship connections, occupations, and destinations.
We should therefore avoid presenting all displaced inhabitants as though they underwent precisely the same ordeal.
Families possessing land, savings, and relatives inland may have found it easier to survive than those who depended on coastal fishing or daily wage labor.
Even so, leaving one’s ancestral home meant disrupting established economic activities and social relationships.
For those who depended on the sea for their livelihoods, the disruption was especially severe.
Fishermen could be forced to leave the coast, but they could not simply carry their former livelihoods inland.
Registered salt-producing households could leave their salt fields, but they might have no means of continuing salt production in their new places of residence.
The impact of the Great Clearance cannot therefore be measured solely by the number of people displaced.
We must also ask what they lost and whether they could establish new livelihoods in unfamiliar surroundings.
2. The Disappearance of the County
The disruption caused by the Great Clearance was so severe that Xin’an could no longer maintain its independent county administration.
As large areas of land and substantial portions of the population fell within the clearance zone, the territory remaining under effective administration shrank.
The Qing government eventually incorporated Xin’an into Dongguan County.
Volume Five of the Kangxi Gazetteer of Xin’an County explicitly records that Xin’an was merged into Dongguan in 1667, the sixth year of the Kangxi reign, and that its government offices subsequently fell into disuse.
This event should not be understood merely as an adjustment of administrative boundaries.
The existence of a county meant that the inhabitants, land, taxation, and local affairs of a particular territory were incorporated into a relatively stable system of administration.
When Xin’an County was abolished, that system changed.
Taxes, lawsuits, household registration, and other affairs previously handled by Xin’an had to be transferred to other administrative institutions.
But while government offices could be merged, the existing social relationships of local inhabitants could not automatically be reorganized in the same way.
In this sense, the abolition of Xin’an County provides clear evidence of the severe disruption caused by the Great Clearance.
Nevertheless, the abolition of the county does not mean that every inhabitant had departed, or that all existing villages and lineage organizations had disappeared.
The interruption of an administrative institution and the complete destruction of social relationships are two different things.
We must be careful not to treat the former as proof of the latter.
IV. Inside and Outside the Boundary
One of the most distinctive features of the Great Clearance was its creation of an artificial boundary.
The boundary did not follow the existing divisions between villages, fields, or areas of economic activity.
It was determined primarily by military defensive requirements.
Inside the boundary lay the areas where inhabitants were permitted to settle and live.
Outside it lay a zone subject to strict control.
Local histories record that the Qing government demolished houses beyond the boundary, established guard posts, barriers, and defensive installations, and prohibited inhabitants from crossing the line to live, cultivate land, or fish.
The Great Clearance therefore did more than move people. It transformed the geographical organization of local society. Roads that had connected villages with their farmland could be severed by the new boundary.
Bays and waterways that had previously been open to local traffic could become subject to military restrictions.
Land and inhabitants that had once belonged to the same sphere of economic activity could be separated.
Such changes were particularly destructive to coastal society because the livelihoods of coastal inhabitants frequently depended on movement between land and water.
Farmers might cultivate fields beyond their villages. Fishermen needed access to bays and harbors. Salt-producing households required seawater and salt pans. Merchants depended on roads and waterways.
By establishing a boundary that inhabitants were forbidden to cross, the state effectively redefined where people could live, where they could work, and which resources they could use.
1. Abandoned Land
Large areas of land went out of cultivation following the Great Clearance.
But the abandonment of land and the disappearance of landownership are not the same thing.
The land might still have owners. Villagers might preserve memories of their ancestral homes. Lineages might retain documents concerning fields and houses.
The problem was that the original inhabitants could no longer occupy or use their property. This placed land within the clearance zone in an unusual position.
In terms of actual production, it might have become wasteland.
In terms of claims to ownership and use, however, it was not necessarily ownerless.
This distinction became extremely important when the coast reopened and the government began encouraging settlement and cultivation.
If we simply describe land abandoned during the Great Clearance as “vacant land,” we risk overlooking the rights and memories of its former inhabitants.
But it would be equally simplistic to assume that every piece of land could be returned to its original owner without dispute.
Migration, death, the loss of property, and the disappearance of written records could all make earlier land relationships difficult to restore.
The reopening of the coast therefore involved more than allowing residents to return home. It also raised the question of how rights to land should be recognized and reorganized.
2. Disrupted Social Relationships
The Great Clearance may also have changed the organization of villages and lineages.
Lineage organizations generally maintained their connections through ancestral settlements, ancestral halls, graves, collectively held property, and kinship networks.
When inhabitants were forced to move to different places, these relationships could be seriously affected.
Some families may have remained in contact and returned together when the coast reopened.
Others may have gradually lost their former connections because of migration, death, or prolonged separation.
Yet we cannot conclude from this that the Great Clearance destroyed every local lineage.
On the contrary, some lineages may have preserved their continuity precisely by maintaining memories of ancestral property, coordinating relocation, and organizing the return to their former settlements.
This raises a question deserving further investigation.
Did the Great Clearance weaken local lineage organizations, or did it, under certain circumstances, strengthen their role as organizations defending common interests?
These possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Different lineages, different villages, and even different families within the same lineage may have had very different experiences.
Answering this question requires genealogies, inscriptions, land documents, and other local materials.
General descriptions of the disaster in county gazetteers are not sufficient.
V. The Reopening of the Coast: What Awaited Those Who Returned?
After several years of enforcing the Great Clearance, the Qing government gradually came to recognize its severe consequences.
Coastal land had fallen out of cultivation, populations had been displaced, and local revenues and production had suffered.
At the same time, it was reasonable to question whether the policy had achieved its intended military objectives.
In Guangdong, officials including Wang Lairen and Zhou Youde played important roles in advocating the relaxation of the boundary restrictions and the reopening of the coast.
In 1668, the seventh year of the Kangxi reign, petitions and deliberations concerning the restoration of coastal settlement made progress.
In the first month of 1669, the boundary was moved outward in the Xin’an region, allowing inhabitants to return to their former occupations and property.
In the seventh month of the same year, imperial approval was granted for the restoration of Xin’an County.
Two dates must therefore be distinguished.
The year 1668 was primarily associated with petitions, deliberations, and preparations for reopening the coast.
The year 1669 marked important steps in the actual relaxation of the boundary, the return of inhabitants, and the restoration of the county administration.
Modern local histories sometimes date the reopening of Xin’an to 1668 and sometimes to 1669.
This does not necessarily mean that their accounts are fundamentally contradictory. They may refer to different stages of the same process.
The Kangxi Gazetteer of Xin’an County preserves descriptions of the circumstances in which displaced inhabitants were finally permitted to return to their homes.
For the gazetteer’s compilers, the reopening meant that people who had been separated from their homes for years were finally given an opportunity to rebuild their lives.
From the perspective of historical research, however, reopening the coast did not mean that society immediately returned to its former condition.
1. The Homeland Remained, but the Old Life Might Not
A family returning after years of displacement could face numerous difficulties.
Its house might have been destroyed. Its fields might be overgrown. Irrigation facilities might require repairs. Farming implements and livestock might no longer be available.
Even if the land still belonged to the family, restoring production required money, labor, and time.
More importantly, not everyone who had been displaced was able to return.
Some had died. Some families had established new homes in the places to which they had migrated. Others may have been unable to afford the journey because of poverty, illness, or other circumstances.
The population of Xin’an after the reopening could not therefore have been identical to the population before the Great Clearance.
One point deserves particular emphasis.
The failure of displaced inhabitants to return does not necessarily mean that all of them died during the Great Clearance.
Deaths, migration to other regions, permanent settlement in places of refuge, and changes in household-registration practices could all affect subsequent population records.
Even if a county gazetteer records a dramatic difference in population or household numbers before and after the clearance, we cannot simply interpret the entire difference as the number of deaths.
This is a fundamental principle that must be observed in studying the history of the Great Clearance.
2. Rebuilding the County Government
After the reopening of the coast, Xin’an County was reestablished.
In the seventh month of 1670, the ninth year of the Kangxi reign, Magistrate Li Kecheng assumed office.
Volume Five of the Kangxi Gazetteer of Xin’an County records that he found the former government buildings badly damaged and arranged for the reconstruction of the ceremonial gate, drum tower, official residences, and other facilities.
The account has particular symbolic significance.
Before the Great Clearance, the county government compound had served as the local administrative center of the state.
During the clearance, it fell into disrepair, and the county itself temporarily ceased to exist as an independent administrative unit.
After the reopening, repairing the compound became one of the concrete tasks involved in restoring local administrative order.
Yet rebuilding the county government meant more than restoring a collection of buildings.
The magistrate had to resume the administration of household registration, land, taxation, public security, and other local affairs.
All these matters were connected with the ability of returning inhabitants to establish stable lives.
Even after the compound had been repaired, however, its troubles were not over.
The gazetteer records that a typhoon in 1671, the tenth year of the Kangxi reign, again damaged the county government buildings, forcing the magistrate to undertake further repairs.
This detail reminds us that the recovery of local society was not an event completed on a particular day.
The reopening of the coast merely allowed inhabitants to begin rebuilding their lives.
The actual process of reconstruction could continue for many years.
VI. After the Reopening: Could the Old Institutions Be Restored?
If the Great Clearance represented an attempt by the state to reorganize the geographical foundations of local society through military orders, the reopening of the coast confronted the state with a practical question.
Could the institutions that had existed before the clearance continue to operate in their former manner?
For ordinary agricultural villages, the question concerned land, household registration, and taxation.
For salt-producing districts, the situation was potentially more complicated.
Salt production depended not only on land and labor but also on specialized household registration, salt-tax obligations, and systems governing transportation and sale.
The preceding article suggested that by the middle and late Ming period, salt-producing districts in the Pearl River estuary may already have experienced discrepancies between the registered status of salt-producing households and their actual economic activities, as well as conflicts between salt-tax obligations and the changing uses of land.
The Great Clearance added new difficulties to these existing tensions.
Registered salt-producing households were forced to leave their salt fields. Salt pans lost their producers. Established arrangements for production and tax collection may have broken down.
After the coast reopened, even if salt fields resumed operations, they could not necessarily recover their former output immediately.
More importantly, the original salt-producing households might have died, moved elsewhere, or adopted other occupations.
Who, then, was to bear the old salt-tax obligations?
How should abandoned salt pans be brought back into use?
What should be done with land and administrative facilities formerly associated with salt production?
These questions suggest that restoring the salt administration after the Great Clearance could not simply involve copying the regulations that had existed before it.
The institutions had to be reorganized under changed social conditions.
Chapter Four of Li Xiaolong’s Reconstructing Institutions: Salt-Production Obligations, Markets, and Order in the Pearl River Estuary during the Ming and Qing Dynasties examines changes in the fiscal and labor obligations of salt-producing districts during the seventeenth century.
Among the research topics identified in the book are the construction of narratives by local lineages concerning the destruction of salt fields during the early Qing Great Clearance, and the reconstruction of salt-field fiscal institutions afterward.
We have not yet read the book in its entirety and therefore cannot reproduce the author’s specific arguments on this basis.
Nevertheless, these research questions suggest that the relationship between the Great Clearance and salt-field institutions cannot be understood simply as a matter of warfare destroying production.
We must also investigate how later generations used the experience of the clearance to explain and address existing problems of taxation and labor obligations.
This brings us to a frequently overlooked dimension of the Great Clearance: historical memory.
VII. Remembering the Great Clearance: How Does a Disaster Become History?
The Great Clearance caused severe destruction in Xin’an. County gazetteers and other historical materials support this conclusion.
But when we read these accounts today, we must ask another question.
When did the people who described the clearance write their accounts, and why did they tell the story in the ways they did?
The Kangxi Gazetteer of Xin’an County was compiled in 1688, nearly twenty years after the coast reopened.
For its compilers, the Great Clearance was already an event of the past, although its consequences may still have been plainly visible.
Local officials might have needed to explain why taxes were difficult to collect.
Villagers might have needed to account for abandoned farmland.
Lineages might have needed to establish claims to ancestral property.
Registered salt-producing households might have needed to explain why they could no longer meet their former salt-tax obligations.
In each of these circumstances, the Great Clearance could serve as a historical event with considerable explanatory power.
This does not mean that accounts of the clearance were necessarily untrue.
It means that we must distinguish between the occurrence of a historical event and the ways later generations used that event to explain contemporary problems.
For example, a salt field might indeed have suffered serious damage from forced relocation.
But if production had already been declining, or fiscal obligations had become increasingly unbalanced during the middle and late Ming period, attributing the entire decline to the Great Clearance could conceal changes that had been developing over a much longer period.
Conversely, if a lineage acquired land or local influence after the reopening, we cannot conclude from that fact alone that it deliberately exploited the clearance to seize resources previously belonging to others.
We must examine the specific evidence.
Recent scholarship has begun to investigate how historical narratives concerning the Great Clearance and the reopening of the coast were formed.
This is an important direction of research because county gazetteers, genealogies, and inscriptions do more than record the past.
They may also help shape a community’s shared understanding of its history.
Historians must study these narratives without allowing themselves to be governed entirely by them.
Two oversimplified interpretations should be avoided.
The first portrays the Great Clearance as a disaster that completely destroyed local society, as though everything after the reopening had to begin from nothing.
The second discovers evidence of social changes already underway before the clearance and consequently underestimates the actual destruction caused by forced relocation.
Neither interpretation is adequate.
The Great Clearance may have caused a genuine and devastating disaster.
At the same time, its consequences were shaped by social conditions that already existed before it.
The disaster was real. The historical narratives constructed around that disaster are also worthy of investigation.
There is no contradiction between these two propositions.
VIII. Who Returned, and Who Did Not?
After the reopening of the coast, one of the fundamental problems facing Xin’an society was population.
Former inhabitants were permitted to return, but not everyone was able or willing to do so.
Meanwhile, the Qing government needed to restore agricultural production and local tax revenues.
Attracting settlers and bringing abandoned land back into cultivation gradually became important concerns of local administration.
This created conditions that encouraged migrants from other regions to enter Xin’an.
One point, however, must be emphasized.
The arrival of migrants after the reopening does not mean that all the original inhabitants had disappeared.
The reconstruction of Xin’an society probably involved several different population groups.
Some were former residents who had left during the Great Clearance and returned afterward.
Others were inhabitants who had never departed, or who had lived within the permitted boundary and were less directly affected by the policy.
Still others were newcomers who migrated into the county after the coast reopened.
These groups might settle in different places, pursue different livelihoods, and establish different relationships within local society.
We should therefore avoid interpreting post-clearance Xin’an through a simple model in which the original inhabitants disappeared and newcomers filled an empty space.
The more important question is how old residents and new migrants came to live within the same local society, and how their relationships developed around land, household registration, taxation, and other resources.
A later historical document is particularly important in this connection.
The Xin’an Case Records Concerning Guest-Registered Residents (Xin’an Keji Li’an Lu, 新安客籍例案录) preserves materials concerning legal disputes over the right of guest-registered residents to participate in the imperial civil service examinations.
Although compiled considerably later, the document looks back to the arrival of migrants in Xin’an during the Kangxi reign and describes subsequent disputes between these migrants and established local inhabitants over examination quotas.
Historian Bu Yongjian of the Chinese University of Hong Kong has edited and studied the document, drawing attention to its valuable evidence concerning the migration, settlement, and struggles for local rights of guest-registered residents.
Significantly, the ancestors of these residents had already lived in Xin’an for several generations.
Some families possessed farmland, houses, and ancestral graves.
Yet they continued to face restrictions on their eligibility to participate in the civil service examinations because of their status as people of outside origin.
This demonstrates that the society that emerged after the reopening of the coast was not one in which all inhabitants enjoyed identical identities and rights.
Even after several generations of settlement, distinctions between newcomers and established residents could persist.
These disputes, however, occurred primarily during the middle and late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, long after the Great Clearance.
We cannot simply project the later conflicts between guest-registered and native residents backward into the circumstances of 1669.
Nor should we automatically equate keji (客籍), a category of identity within Qing administrative institutions and local society, with the modern linguistic or ethnographic category of the Hakka people.
Both questions will receive particular attention in the next article.
For the present discussion, the importance of the Xin’an Case Records Concerning Guest-Registered Residents lies in what it reveals about the long-term consequences of the Great Clearance and the reopening of the coast.
The social changes set in motion by these events could extend far beyond the years during which the clearance itself remained in force.
A military policy lasting only several years could affect patterns of settlement, landholding, and social identity for generations afterward.
IX. Conclusion: Reopening the Coast Did Not Mean Returning to the Past
The Great Clearance was a major turning point in the history of early Qing Xin’an.
Its immediate purpose was to sever possible connections between coastal society and the maritime forces of the Zheng family by forcibly relocating coastal inhabitants.
But the consequences of this military policy extended far beyond the war itself.
The clearance drove large numbers of people from their homes and severely disrupted agriculture, fishing, salt production, and coastal trade.
Xin’an County even temporarily lost its independent administrative status.
After the reopening of the coast in 1669, residents were permitted to return, the county administration was restored, and local production gradually resumed.
Yet reopening did not mean restoring everything to its former condition.
The population may already have changed. Land had to be brought back into cultivation. Administrative institutions needed to be reestablished. Existing fiscal obligations and social relationships had to be reorganized.
Meanwhile, economic and institutional changes that had begun before the Great Clearance did not automatically disappear when the coast reopened.
For salt-producing districts, the clearance may have intensified existing difficulties involving production and taxation.
For villages and lineages, it may have disrupted some social relationships while encouraging residents to place greater importance on protecting ancestral property, land, and collective identity.
For local officials, reopening the coast meant not only restoring government administration but also confronting a society that had already changed.
The Great Clearance and the reopening of the coast should therefore not be understood simply as two opposite processes: first destruction, then restoration.
More accurately, together they constituted a major reorganization of local society.
The clearance altered the conditions under which people lived and worked.
The reopening allowed inhabitants to return to these places but could not guarantee that they would recover their former lives.
The return of established residents, the adjustment of existing institutions, and the arrival of new migrants all influenced Xin’an’s subsequent development.
At the same time, we must acknowledge the limits of the available historical evidence.
We cannot yet determine with precision how many people died because of the Great Clearance, how much land remained permanently abandoned, or how fully individual villages recovered after the coast reopened.
In examining historical accounts of the clearance, we must also distinguish records made at the time from interpretations developed later by local communities.
These uncertainties do not prevent us from reaching a basic conclusion.
The Great Clearance changed the conditions under which Xin’an society developed, and the local order that emerged afterward was not simply a restoration of the society that had existed before it.
In this sense, the Great Clearance was both a severe social disaster and an important historical turning point for understanding subsequent changes in Xin’an’s population, landholding, and local organizations.
But a historical turning point does not mean that history begins again from nothing.
The inhabitants who had lived in Xin’an before the clearance did not all disappear.
Nor were its existing institutions and social relationships completely erased.
The Xin’an that emerged after the reopening was gradually reconstructed upon foundations left by the society that preceded it.
During this process, migrants from northeastern Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, and other regions gradually became important members of Xin’an society.
Why did they come?
How did they acquire land, establish villages, and form lineage organizations?
Did they cooperate with the established inhabitants, or compete with them for resources?
And why, even after several generations of settlement, could they still be regarded as keji, or people of outside origin?
These questions will be examined in the third article, “Who Rebuilt Xin’an? The Reopening of the Coast and Hakka Migration in the Early Qing Period.”
Notes and Principal References
I. Primary Sources
[1] Gazetteer of Xin’an County (新安县志), edition published in the twenty-seventh year of the Kangxi reign (1688), Volume Five, “Official Buildings” (宫室志); Volume Eleven, “Coastal Defense: Clearance and Restoration” (防省志·迁复); and related sections.
This article draws upon the gazetteer’s accounts of the abandonment of the county government, the restoration of the county administration, and the implementation and subsequent lifting of the coastal clearance. Specific dates and stages of policy implementation require comparison with other historical sources.
[2] Xin’an Case Records Concerning Guest-Registered Residents (新安客籍例案录), compiled in 1810, the fifteenth year of the Jiaqing reign.
This article draws on the edition edited and introduced by Bu Yongjian, focusing on its accounts of government efforts to attract settlers during the Kangxi reign and subsequent disputes over guest-registered status. The surviving text used in the modern edition appears in the genealogy of the Chen lineage of Luk Keng Village, dated 1928.
II. Modern Scholarship and Historical Materials
[3] Bu Yongjian (卜永坚), “Xin’an Keji Li’an Lu” (《新安客籍例案录》), Fieldwork and Documents: South China Research Resource Station Newsletter (《田野与文献：华南研究资料中心通讯》), no. 58, January 15, 2010, pp. 24–35.
The Department of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong provides the text and accompanying historical-materials study.
[4] Li Xiaolong (李晓龙), Reconstructing Institutions: Salt-Production Obligations, Markets, and Order in the Pearl River Estuary during the Ming and Qing Dynasties (《重构制度：明清珠江口盐场的灶课、市场与秩序》). Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2024.
The present article relies on publicly available descriptions and the table of contents to establish the book’s research scope. Since the full text has not yet been read, no specific arguments that have not been independently verified are attributed to the author.
[5] Liu Xiaochun (刘晓春), “The Collaborative Construction of Collective Memory by Multiple Actors: The Formation of Historical Narratives of the Great Clearance and the Reopening of the Coast in North-Central Shenzhen” (《多元主体协同构建集体记忆——深圳中北部地区“迁海复界”历史叙事的生成机制研究》), Folklore Studies (《民俗研究》), no. 4, 2025.
At present, this article’s research questions have been examined only through publicly available descriptions and accessible reproduced materials. The full text and page references in the official journal edition have not yet been verified.
[6] Shenzhen Municipal Archives (深圳市档案馆), “Shenzhen Stories: Xin’an County, Lost in the River of History” (《深圳故事｜消失在历史长河中的“新安县”》), 2023.
This article summarizes the establishment, coastal clearance, abolition, and subsequent restoration of Xin’an County.
[7] Historical materials published by the Hong Kong Chronicles Institute concerning the Great Clearance, the reopening of the coast, and coastal defense in the Hong Kong region during the early Qing period.
III. Limitations of the Research
This article does not employ unverified figures for deaths caused by the Great Clearance, nor does it interpret differences in household-registration statistics before and after the clearance directly as population losses.
Regarding the differing dates of 1668 and 1669 for the reopening of Xin’an, the article distinguishes between petitions, official approval, and actual implementation.
In discussing migration after the reopening, the article examines only the relationship between the Great Clearance and population reconstruction. It does not presume to establish the scale, precise origins, or dates of arrival of Hakka migrants.
Concerning changes in the salt administration, the article proposes that the Great Clearance may have intensified existing institutional tensions. This interpretation requires further examination of late Ming and early Qing records concerning registered salt-producing households, salt taxation, and landholding.
The principal purpose of this article is to explain, within the limits of the available evidence, how the Great Clearance and the reopening of the coast transformed local society in Xin’an, and to establish the historical background for the next article’s examination of migration and local reconstruction.
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