In the southeast coast of China, there has always been a tradition of going to the South Seas. It's not that people here are inherently more adventurous than mainlanders – that's true, no one likes to leave their homeland and live in an unfamiliar environment for no reason. In fact, people close to the coastline in Guangdong and Fujian were completely forced to go to sea - in ancient times, the economy was dominated by small farmers, and here, especially in Fujian, there were almost no plains, so they could only go to sea to fish for a living, and occasionally work part-time as a side business for trade and piracy.

However, since the strict maritime ban policy of the Ming Dynasty, the private trade has been in the degree of petty fighting, until the Longqing period, the emperor thought that it was better to block, approved the maritime trade, known as the Longqing switch - since then, the silk fabrics in the Suzhou and Hangzhou regions departed from Guangzhou, through Macao, Luzon, by the Spaniards and the Portuguese to the world, at that time more than a third of the world's silver flowed into China.

How profitable is foreign trade? Selling Chinese silk to the Americas can make a 1,000 percent profit.

Such high profits led to an influx of Fujian merchants: in the fourth year of Longqing, there were only about 40 Chinese in Manila, but by the 16th century, there were 20,000 Chinese in Manila.

But the policies formulated by the power center of feudal society that changed day by day have always been the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of these merchants: sometimes business is doing well, and the imperial court suddenly bans the sea on a whim: for example, Kangxi once relaxed the sea trade policy in the 23rd year, and the scope of opening the sea was larger than that of Longqing, but within a few years, it was not allowed again.

Many businessmen were forced to stay in the local area, and many people were cunning and arranged their own back roads in Southeast Asia early to prevent the "liquidation" of the feudal regime.

Because of scarcity, so cherished, these uprooted businessmen, pay more attention to "family inheritance" and "traditional virtues of the Chinese nation", a little strength of the family will build ancestral halls, compile genealogy, and warn their ancestors and grandchildren "over time away from home is the hometown, morning and dusk must be on the ancestral incense". Compared with the mainland, many overseas Chinese families in Southeast Asia appear more conservative and stubborn, as if their values have not been updated since the moment they sailed offshore.

But for the feudal regime, this gang of "maritime merchants" is indeed a hidden danger, first of all, merchants are more difficult to control than peasants and scholars, you can deprive peasants of their land and deprive them of official positions, but what can you do with a merchant who is not slippery?

Second, they had huge financial resources, such as Zheng Zhilong, the great pirate of the late Ming Dynasty, who was also Zheng Chenggong's father, who was often considered the richest man in the world at the time. So on this question, whoever is the emperor of the Ming Dynasty is angry - who are you kid, why are you more arrogant than me?

Of course, the most important thing is that those Southeast Asian merchants are still in danger of interfering with the imperial power at any time, and they are the spokesmen of the uneasy and chaotic ministers and thieves - because in ancient times, wars were fought from north to south, so when the remnants of the royal family fled for their lives, they also fled from north to south (so the small court was usually named the Southern Song Dynasty and the Southern Ming Dynasty...... ）

The last battle between the Southern Song Dynasty and the Yuan Dynasty, the "Battle of Yashan", took place in the southernmost part of Guangdong, and it was also here that Lu Xiufu carried the young emperor and jumped to the sky.

When he arrived in the Southern Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yujian, the Emperor of Longwu, was supported by the great pirate Zheng Zhilong, and many remnants of the Southern Ming Dynasty also fled to live in Vietnam. In addition, many Han people couldn't accept the Qing Dynasty's rule of "keeping their hair and not their heads", so they simply entrenched overseas and never came back - then for the Qing court, isn't this an opposition force?

Later, after the defeat of the Taiping Rebellion, many generals were also exiled to Southeast Asia. Huang Huilan, the third wife of the well-known Chinese diplomat Gu Weijun at the Paris Peace Conference, was born in Java (present-day Indonesia) in 1893 to her father, the richest man in the overseas Chinese, and when she was 3 years old, she wore an 80-carat diamond ring — so much so that she left a mark on her chest.

But her grandfather responded to the Taiping Rebellion and fled to Indonesia after its failure.

In short, for the Central Dynasty, it would be good if these "traitors" were not caught, and if they wanted to support anything, don't think about it.

In 1740, the Dutch East India authorities massacred more than 10,000 Chinese in Batavia (now Jakarta), Java, known as the "Red Creek Massacre". And Qianlong's reaction can only be described in four words, that is, he does not speak human words, his original words are: "The Celestial Dynasty abandoned the people, did not hesitate to carry the tomb of the ancestors, went abroad to seek profits, and the court did not care." ”

In fact, this is almost the attitude of the rulers of the past dynasties towards the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, they believe that these overseas Chinese are "self-abandoning kings", and they deserve to die in a foreign land. At the same time, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom...... They are sparing no effort to support their own merchants to engage in ocean trade, so objectively speaking, the Chinese did not miss the turbulent Age of Discovery.

In the team that went to the South Seas, there were not only men, but also women. Around 1920, Guangdong had a group of "self-combing women" who vowed not to marry, and the reason why they could have "freedom not to marry" was also very simple: at that time, Guangdong had a textile industry, and women achieved economic independence for the first time.

In 1930, the United States raised tariffs on Chinese textiles, exports plummeted, raw silk prices plummeted, a large number of textile mills closed, and these women faced unemployment. In desperation, they took the ferry to "go to the South Seas", many of them became dusty women, but some became domestic workers, known as "Sister Ma" - this title is really sad and accurate, for thousands of years, many women are not "mothers and sisters"?

Among them, there is a Guangdong girl named Ouyang Huanyan, who first went to the home of overseas Chinese Chen Jiageng as a maid, and the Japanese army burned to Singapore. They hired Ouyang Huanyan, and it didn't take long for their second son to return to China, and Ouyang Huanyan stayed in their home for 40 years, watching him go from an ordinary lawyer to Singapore's founding father, and this person was Lee Kuan Yew.

Ouyang Huanyan took care of Lee Kuan Yew's three children to grow up, and for the three siblings Lee Hsien Loong and Lee Wai Ling, this "Ma Sister" with a Cantonese accent is the warmest memory of childhood.

Ouyang Huanyan later returned to Guangdong and bought a house, and her nephew hired a nanny for her to enjoy her old age, but such a lucky "mother sister" is a very few, and she is stained with the light of the Lee Hsien Loong family. The vast majority of "mothers" will remit their savings to their families one by one, first to their brothers and then to their nephews...... And they themselves waited to run out of strength, and then disappeared quietly in a foreign land like a leaf gently falling on the pavement.

Lin Mu didn't remember which book he had seen a similar record in, and he suddenly thought, could Zheng Qimin's mother be a "mother sister"?