Wei’s fourth and final major work focused on the maritime powers that were encroaching upon China. In Illustrated Treatise on Sea Powers, the Hai guo tu zhi (海国图志), Wei begins to look at what can be learned from the Western seafaring nations. Drawing from work by Lin Zexu and from conversations with Peter Anstruther, a British POW whom Wei interrogated personally, he put together as much information as he could on nature of the new threat.

Wei’s work was remarkable in part because of his lack of resources. Lacking the ability to travel to the West or speak its languages, and looked upon skeptically by Confucian scholars who dismissed and derided “barbarian studies”, Wei compiled one of the first pieces of Chinese scholarship on Western technological advances. As historian Matthew Mosca argues in From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China, through his innovative approach, “Wei was able to devise an overarching ‘foreign policy,’ a program of action connecting all corners of the Qing realm from the Pacific to Central Asia.”

Scans of 40 volumes of this work (in Chinese) are available online, including illustrations. Visit part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

A map of the world in Wei Yuan’s time