Hi! I’m Ronald Chung-yam Po, though most people call me Ron or CY. I’m writing out my full name here simply to make it easier for search engines, and hopefully, for anyone trying to find me! This is meant to be a small, up-to-date corner of the internet about what I’m working on, especially if my institutional webpage takes a little while to catch up.
With a relatively uncommon surname, being born and growing up in Hong Kong but having studied and worked in the UK, Germany, Japan, the US and Canada, I am currently Associate Professor of Chinese and Maritime History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where I have been based since 2016.
I am the author of the award-winning The Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018), translated into traditional Chinese as Lanse bianjiang: Dongya haiyu zhongdi Qingchao fanglüe by National Taiwan University Press, and of Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Liverpool University Press, 2024). I have also published two books in Taiwan with China Times Publishing Co., namely The Placid Ocean: Qing China and the Asian Sea (shortlisted by the International Convention of Asia Scholars for the ICAS Book Prize) and Turning the Tide: Historical Actors and Social Memory in Late Qing China, the latter appearing in simplified Chinese with the Social Sciences Academic Press.
My next books will be The Camphor War: Taiwan in the Age of Imperial Realignments with Columbia University Press and The Silver Thread: A Cultural History of Shark Fin in China and Beyond with Harvard University Press. I am currently working on a few book projects, including a popular one, A Sea Made into Empire: China and the Sea from the First Emperor to the Last Dynasty (under contract with Reaktion Books).
I was educated at Universität Heidelberg, receiving my D.Phil. in History, and at Hong Kong Baptist University, earning my M.Phil. and BA degrees. I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2019 and have since held appointments as a Research Fellow in the International Institute for Asian Studies in the Netherlands, an APC-CCK Visiting Scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, a visiting professor at Leiden University, a JSPS Fellow at Tohoku University, and a Ying-shih Yü International Centre Visiting Fellow at National Taiwan University. For the academic year 2025-26, I am a resident fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
Ron Po
A historian of maritime China by training.
I study how the wider world shaped early modern China,
and vice versa.
The Blue Frontier:
Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire
- Proposes a fresh interpretation of Qing history from the perspective of oceanic studies, as well as Chinese, trans-regional, and global history
- Demonstrates the Qing Empire's multi-faceted strategies toward the maritime world
- Updates our knowledge of the nature of the Qing imperial polity and its continental and maritime frontiers
Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties
Examines China’s relationship with the maritime world from the Ming through the Qing by following the stories of ordinary and extraordinary people engaging with the blue domain.
The Placid Ocean:
Qing China and the Asian Seas
The book will take the reader on a journey revealing how the maritime world has mattered to China, as well as how China the maritime world.
Turning the Tide:
Historical Actors and Social Memory in Late Qing China
Through microstudies of late Qing figures, this book reveals their convictions and longing for peace and stability, capturing in their lives a reflection of the era’s changing tides.
