The Nanyang Storm of 1864

After transmigrating for no apparent reason to Tongzhou in the 1860s, Zheng Guohui, a militia commander, set his heart on doing something great: leading a hundred warships and over ten thousand soldiers south across the seas to carve out a new homeland for overseas Chinese.

Naval warfare in the age of sail and the fervent expansion of colonial settlements were the defining themes of the era.

Amid the upheavals of the nineteenth century, an epic panorama of overseas colonial expansion unfolds. As colonization and conquest advance, a grand vision of an empire in the South Seas gradually takes shape...