29
CANTON SYMPOSIUM: THE WORLD OF THE OLD CHINA TRADE:
THE LOCALES AND THE PEOPLE
JAMES HAYES
[This article was prepared for a day symposium, China Trade: Insights into a Commerce that Traversed Seas, Continents and Centuries, organized by The Asian Arts Society of Australia at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on Saturday, 1 November 2003.]
Introduction
The Old China Trade is a fascinating topic, in all its many aspects, broad and narrow. In all my years of study it has never lost this inherent attraction.
This paper, intended to serve as a backcloth to the others in this Symposium, deals with the places in which the Old China Trade was carried out, and with the Manchus and Chinese with whom the foreign traders and sailors came in contact during the last hundred years or so of China's foreign Trade, under the arrangements of what became known as the Canton System.1
It is essentially about the Chinese side of the Old China Trade. Besides listing the various functionaries and personnel connected with it, I shall also be describing the condition of the people and the behaviour of the mandarins, both factors which had much to do with the conditions under, and the way in, which the foreign trade was administered. It also takes in the mutual ignorance of the other's history and culture, not omitting the lofty disdain long felt by all Chinese for "outer barbarians" nor the robust, self-confident pride of the visitors to their shores.
The locales (see Map at Plate 1)
Macau
The Story of the China Trade begins in Macau. Until it reverted to Chinese rule, in 1999, Macau had been the oldest European settlement
29
CANTON SYMPOSIUM: THE WORLD OF THE OLD CHINA TRADE:
THE LOCALES AND THE PEOPLE
JAMES HAYES
[This article was prepared for a day symposium, China Trade: Insights into a Commerce that Traversed Seas, Continents and Centuries, organized by The Asian Arts Society of Australia at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on Saturday, 1 November 2003.]
Introduction
The Old China Trade is a fascinating topic, in all its many aspects, broad and narrow. In all my years of study it has never lost this inherent attraction.
This paper, intended to serve as a backcloth to the others in this Symposium, deals with the places in which the Old China Trade was carried out, and with the Manchus and Chinese with whom the foreign traders and sailors came in contact during the last hundred years or so of China's foreign Trade, under the arrangements of what became known as the Canton System.1
It is essentially about the Chinese side of the Old China Trade. Besides listing the various functionaries and personnel connected with it, I shall also be describing the condition of the people and the behaviour of the mandarins, both factors which had much to do with the conditions under, and the way in, which the foreign trade was administered. It also takes in the mutual ignorance of the other's history and culture, not omitting the lofty disdain long felt by all Chinese for "outer barbarians" nor the robust, self-confident pride of the visitors to their
shores.
The locales (see Map at Plate 1)
Macau
The Story of the China Trade begins in Macau. Until it reverted to Chinese rule, in 1999, Macau had been the oldest European settlement
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