ANTHONY FARRINGTON
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A NEW SOURCE FOR CHINESE TRADE TO JAPAN IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
ANTHONY FARRINGTON*
I must confess that the word 'new' in my title is a slight exaggeration; 'neglected' might be more accurate, because the source which forms the basis of this paper has been known from at least the beginning of the twentieth century.1 But my contention is that one of its more interesting features has been overlooked and the general context has been partly misinterpreted.
India Office Records: G/12/17 comprises the diary and consultations of the English East India Company's factors in Tongking from 25 June 1672 to 30 November 1697. The volume is a composite one, made up in the nineteenth century from ten separate 'books' representing the sequence of transmissions back to London, and it contains some 500 folios of varying size. Neither a calendar nor a transcript of the text has been published, and I can claim to be one of the few to have read through it.
Cromwell's charter of 1657, broadly confirmed by Charles II in 1661, rescued the East India Company from a period of financial confusion and commercial difficulties.2 The 1660s then saw the growth of serious interest in the possibility of reviving trade to Japan. The subject was discussed by the Company's Directors at the end of 1658, a report was compiled for the Deputy-Governor in 1661,3 and in 1664 a plan was put forward. A ship would leave London in September with a cargo of English manufactures, take in pepper and Indian piece goods at Bantam, call at Cambodia for any suitable commodities, sail on to Japan and finally, leaving there in November 1665, return to England via Bantam.4 The plan had to be shelved with the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1665, while in any case the Agent at Bantam pointed out that a base in Tongking, not Cambodia, to secure raw and finished silks for the Japanese market, would be
* Mr. Farrington is Curator, India Office Records, London.
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