Unable to defeat the Zheng maritime regime at sea, the Qing court adopted in 1661 the most drastic internal displacement policy of the early modern world: the removal of the entire population of the southeastern seaboard behind an inland boundary, and the destruction of everything left behind. Villages, fishing fleets, salt pans and port towns were burned; people who crossed back over the line were liable to execution; and the evacuated population, dispossessed of the only livelihoods it knew, was largely left to fend for itself in already crowded interior districts. Contemporaries and later gazetteers describe famine, banditry and mass death among the evacuees, and substantial flight to Taiwan and to Southeast Asia. The policy was relaxed from 1669 in places and formally ended after the Qing conquest of Taiwan in 1683, after which the coast was resettled, in part by people from elsewhere. Dahpon David Ho, whose study of the Fujian coast is the fullest English-language treatment, describes it as one of the most devastating and sustained scorched-earth campaigns of its era, with hundreds of thousands killed and hundreds of thousands more uprooted.
The Qing state ordered the entire coastal population of the southeastern provinces moved inland and their villages destroyed, to starve the Zheng regime on Taiwan of supplies and recruits
No defensible denominator exists. The evacuation zone was defined as a strip measured in li inland from the shore across five provinces rather than by any administrative unit, so no register corresponds to it; and the Qing fiscal registers of the 1660s count ding, taxable adult males, not people. Contemporary and modern estimates of the numbers moved range from several hundred thousand to well over a million, and the deaths from the resulting famine are not counted at all.
No count exists. Ho characterises the toll as hundreds of thousands killed, on the basis of gazetteer and official accounts of famine, exposure and executions along the boundary; because the evacuation destroyed the very registers and communities that might have recorded deaths, no number can be established, and the phrase should be read as a historian's characterisation rather than an estimate with a method behind it.
The burning of coastal settlements, the destruction of boats and salt works, and the execution of those found seaward of the boundary are recorded in Qing edicts and provincial memorials and in the local gazetteers used by Ho.
Taiwan, China