User:Mhatopzz/Luo Fangbo
Luo Fangbo or Low Fang Pak (Chinese: 罗芳伯, 1738-1795) was a Hakka merchant who hailed from Meizhou, Guandong Province. He was the founder of the chinese kongsi mining company, the Lanfang kongsi in West Borneo in 1777. He was regarded as the founder of the world's first ever Chinese republic, also known as Kongsi republic when he converted his kongsi company into a polity known in history as the Lanfang Republic.
Life
Luo Fangbo was born in 1738 into a Hakka community in Qing dynasty China, where he is later known to have hailed from Meizhou county, Guandong province, modern day China. In 1772, in the 37th year of Qianlong Emperor's reign in the Qing Dynasty, Fangbao participated in a provincial imperial examination, in which he failed to pass, he then had the ambition to travel, so he gathered hundreds of relatives and friends to set sail through Humen and headed for the island of Borneo. In his later writings, he also recorded traveling to Jishan county.