[
    {
        "id": 204639,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1963",
        "page_number": 120,
        "title": "RAS-1963",
        "content_text": "107\n\nEUROPEAN NAVIGATION ON THE YANGTSE\n\nA. D. BLUE *\n\nThe Yangtse is the greatest river in China, and has been of much greater importance in the history of the world than the Amazon and the Mississippi, which are superior in length and volume. In this respect it ranks with the Nile and the Euphrates, but unlike them it has always had a much greater population living along its banks. The Chinese know the Yangtse as the Long, or Great, River. Marco Polo may not have been the first European to see the Yangtse, but he was certainly the first to appreciate its importance, and to bring it to the notice of the Western world.\n\nOf the Yangtse in general Marco Polo said \"the multitude of vessels that invest this great river is so great that no one who should read or hear would believe it. The quantity of merchandise carried up and down is past all belief. In fact it is so big, that it seems to be a sea rather than a river\". There is no doubt but at that time, the second half of the 13th century, the Yangtse carried a greater volume of traffic than any other river in the world. Marco Polo was correct in thinking that no one would believe his reports on the Yangtse, or on China, and it was left to later generations to appreciate the accuracy of his observations.\n\nIt was the missions to China of Lord Macartney and Lord Amherst in 1793 and 1816 respectively, that made Europeans realise the importance of the Yangtse. Then in 1842, during the First China War, a British naval force entered the Yangtse, and was on the point of attacking Nanking (182 miles from the mouth) when the Chinese sued for peace. Sixteen years later, after the Second China War, one of the clauses of the Treaty of Tientsin\n\n* The author served as an Engineer Officer with the China Navigation Company from 1928 until 1938, and was on the Yangtse in 1930 in the Shengking and again in 1934 in the Wuhu. He was captured by pirates in the Newchang river in Manchuria in 1933 and held prisoner for five and a half months. During and after the War he was in the Colonial Service in West Africa, but in 1958 he returned to service with the China Navigation Company, and this has enabled him to revisit a number of the former Treaty Ports.\n\n1 Chinese records mention the visit of a 'Roman merchant' to Nanking about 230 A.D. See G. F. Hudson, Europe and China (London, 1931), p. 90.\n\nPage 120\n\nPage 121",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v",
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    },
    {
        "id": 208939,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1980",
        "page_number": 101,
        "title": "RAS-1980",
        "content_text": "SILK & SILVER: MACAU, MANILA TRADE\n\n69\n\nthe imprisonment of Tomé Pires, whom they had sent as ambassador to the Emperor, and to the closure of Canton until 1530 to all foreign commerce. Henceforth the Portuguese had to trade clandestinely around the Bay of Amoy and at Ningpo in Fukien in the various goods, notably pepper and sandalwood, for which no amount of imperial prohibitions could lessen the demand in China.\n\nThe commercial losses suffered by the Chinese as a result of their isolationism and the prohibition of their own navigation were gains for the Portuguese. As the American scholar George D. Winius has aptly put it, \"in the Atlantic the Portuguese were explorers; in the Indian Ocean they were conquerors and in the Far East they were businessmen\". Before long their trading activities in the China Sea had developed sufficiently to make inadequate the temporary shacks and tents in which they stored and displayed their wares in such places as Shang-ch'uan (Portuguese Sanchao or São João, where St. Francis Xavier died of fever in 1552), and they began to press the Chinese authorities for a trading centre of their own. In 1555 the Jesuit Father Belchior Nunes Barreto described Shang-ch'uan as a centre for trade with the Chinese where \"silk, porcelain, camphor, copper, alum and China-wood are bartered for many kinds of merchandise from this land\" (i.e. Japan).7 In the previous year Leonel de Sousa had secured permission for regular trade with China on payment of customs dues and in 1557 the Portuguese were allowed to establish themselves at Ao-men (Gate of the Bay), otherwise known as Amacon, Macau or the City of the Name of God in China.8\n\nThere was no written agreement with the Chinese for the establishment of Macau as a Portuguese enclave in China and, though the Portuguese continued to pay rent to the Chinese government till 1849, their sovereign rights in Macau were not fully conceded till 1887. But from the outset, Macau's extra-territoriality was admitted in practice because it suited both parties to the agreement - the Portuguese because it gave them a secure place in a highly profitable commercial network and the Chinese because, as later with Hong Kong, they could now enjoy most of the benefit of foreign trade without having to abandon their restrictions on foreigners entering or Chinese leaving China.\n\nA gate was erected across the isthmus joining Macau with the mainland - the Porta do Cêrco - upon which the Portuguese placed a grandiloquent inscription: \"Dread our greatness and respect...\"",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207",
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    },
    {
        "id": 208940,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1980",
        "page_number": 102,
        "title": "RAS-1980",
        "content_text": "70 \n\nJOHN VILLIERS \n\n\"pect our virtue\". Through this gate the Chinese passed the food and other supplies needed by the inhabitants, but at other times they sealed the gate with strips of paper, allowing into China only those few Portuguese officials with authorisation and sending to Macau only customs officers. \n\nThe Portuguese in Macau were first given some official recognition by the Chinese government in 1582 when the new Viceroy of Canton and Kwangsi summoned Macau's chief officials to his court. They came with 4,000 cruzados worth of presents—velvets, crystals, mirrors and so on—and were informed that foreigners could continue to inhabit Macau provided they remained subject to the laws of the Empire.10 \n\nBy 1585 the settlement had acquired full city status with its own municipal council (Senado da Câmara). The Senado was dominated by the casados, Portuguese who had retired from the service of the crown, married and settled permanently in Macau. These acted not only as agents for the Chinese traders but traded on their own account in pepper, cloves, sandalwood and other goods from the Indonesian islands and financed voyages to Manila and to Japan in the so-called Great Ship from Amacon. Macau was not under royal control and was not ruled by fidalgos sent out from Portugal or Goa, so that the interests of the Portuguese government were seldom, if ever, allowed to prevail. The Crown had to be content with a share in the profits from the annual voyages that it financed and the revenues from customs, duties and license fees levied on the merchants.11 \n\nThe overall command of the government of Macau was in the hands of the Captain-major of the Japan voyage, who would spend some months in Macau each year en route to Japan from Goa via Malacca—from one end of the Estado da India to the other. As the Portuguese Crown seldom got more than the commissions and port duties paid in Goa and Malacca, the Captain-major was able to amass a large fortune for himself. He was, however, only permitted to operate a single ship during his term of office so he would ensure that it was the largest ship available. This ship he would load at Goa with Gujerati cottons, chintzes and other Indian textiles, woollen and scarlet cloths, wine, glassware, crystal and Flemish clocks. He would sail with the monsoon in April or May to Malacca, where much of his cargo would be traded for Indonesian spices, camphor and sandalwood and hides from Siam. Thence he",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207",
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    },
    {
        "id": 208941,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1980",
        "page_number": 103,
        "title": "RAS-1980",
        "content_text": "SILK & SILVER: MACAU, MANILA TRADE\n\n71\n\nwould go to Macau, where this cargo would be traded for Chinese silk, porcelain, gold, musk, rouge, and rhubarb. The ship would stay in Macau for almost a year if it missed the southwest monsoon or the silk fairs in Canton, held in June and January, where the finer silks from central China were sold. On the next monsoon, between June and August, the Captain-major would set out for Japan. In Japan, successively at Bungo, Hizen, and Omura, and after 1571 at Nagasaki, the Chinese goods would be sold for Japanese silver, gold, copper (which was chiefly used for casting cannon in the famous foundry of Manuel Tavares Bocarro in Macau), lacquer, painted screens, swords, and other weapons, and slaves, including Korean prisoners of war. In November, the ship would catch the northeast monsoon back to Macau, where the silver acquired in Japan would be exchanged for gold, copper, ivory, pearls, and more Chinese silk. From Macau, the captain-major would return to Goa. The bulk of the cargo from Macau to Japan was at first raw silk, but woven silks and damasks were increasingly exported during the 17th century. There was generally sufficient silk left over after trading in Japan to supply India, Europe (via Goa), and Spanish America (via Manila).12\n\nThe Chinese demand for silver was, as we have seen, insatiable. A factor of the English East India Company wrote in 1636 that the Chinese, “will as soon part with their blood” as silver once they had possession of it.13 Japan possessed rich silver mines in Honshu, and the ratio of the value of silver to gold in Japan was about 12:1, approximately the same as in Europe. China, however, possessed very little silver and was willing to acquire it in exchange for gold at about 5.4:1.14 Thus, the Portuguese could trade spices for Chinese silks and porcelains, sell these to the Japanese, who prized them above their own products, together with some European goods such as firearms, in exchange for silver and, finally, exchange the silver in China for gold at a very favourable rate. The total ban imposed by China in 1557 on all direct trade with Japan, and the continuing raids by Japanese pirates on the China coast, enabled the Portuguese to gain a virtual monopoly of this Sino-Japanese trade, and the annual silver exports from Japan in the Great Ship from Amacon reached a value of about 1 million cruzados by the end of the 16th century. The restoration of strong central government in Japan under Oda Nobunaga, who occupied Kyoto in 1568, brought about a decrease in piracy and a consequent increase in the volume of",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207",
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    },
    {
        "id": 208949,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1980",
        "page_number": 111,
        "title": "RAS-1980",
        "content_text": "SILK & SILVER: MACAU, MANILA TRADE\n\n79\n\n› See Spate, op. cit., p. 151, Tien-tse Chang, Sino-Portuguese trade from 1514-1644. Leyden, 1934, pp. 35-38 and 54-56 and Boxer, South China in the sixteenth century. Being the narratives of Galeote Pereira, Fr. Gaspar da Cruz, O.P., Fr. Martin de Rada, O.E.S.A, 1550-1575. Hakluyt Society. 2nd series. CVI, pp. xIV-XX.\n\nBailey W. Diffie and George D. Winius. Foundations of the Portuguese empire 1415-1580. University of Minnesota Press and Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 380.\n\n↑ Cartas que os Padres e Irmaos da Companhia de Jesus escreverao dos Reynos de Japao e China desde anno de 1549 até o de 1580. Evora, 1598. Quoted in Boxer. The Great Ship from Amacon. Annals of Macao and the old Japan trade 1555-1640. Lisbon, 1963, p. 22.\n\n* For accounts of the foundation and early history of Portuguese Macau see Duffie and Winius op. cit., pp. 381-392, Jose Maria Braga. The western pioneers and their discovery of Macao, Macao, 1949, pp. 102-139, A. Ljungstadt. An historical sketch of the Portuguese settlements in China. Boston, 1836, pp. 30-46, Boxer. Fidalgos in the Far East 1550-1770. Oxford University Press, 1968, pp. 12-29.\n\n\"Chang, op cit., p. 98.\n\nLjungstadt, op cit., p. 79.\n\nSee Boxer. Portuguese society in the Tropics. The Municipal councils of Goa, Macao, Bahia and Luanda 1510-1800. University of Wisconsin Press, 1965, pp. 42-71. See also Montalto de Jesus. Historic Macao. Hong Kong, 1902, pp. 37-40.\n\n12 On the Captains-major see Boxer Great Ship, pp. 8-11 and 179-241, and Idem. Christian century, p. 106.\n\nU.H. Boinford writing from Surat to the East India Company of London. 29 April 1636. Quoted in Boxer. Great Ship, p. 1.\n\n14 Boxer, Christian century, pp. 426-427 and 464-465.\n\n15 Quoted in Boxer, Christian century, p. 93. Padre Lourenço Mexia in his report for 1580 makes an almost identical comment. See Boxer, Great Ship, p. 40.\n\n16 Viceregal provisao of 18 April 1584.\n\n17 Boxer, Great Ship, p. 39.\n\nJ See John Leddy Phelan. The Hispanization of the Philippines. Spanish aims and Filipino responses. University of Wisconsin Press, 1959, pp. 11-12, 42, 101-102 and P. Chaunu. Les Philippines et le Pacifique des Ibériques. Paris, 1960, pp. 43-46.\n\n1 Spate, op cit., pp. 161-164.\n\n20 For a detailed list of Chinese goods brought to Manila see Dr. Antonio de Morga. Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas. Mexico, 1609. Trans. and ed. Hon. H. E. J. Stanley. Hakluyt Society. First series. XXXIX, 1868, pp. 337-339,\n\n21 W. L. Schurz. The Manila galleon. New York, 1939, p. 27.\n\n22 Spate, op cit., p. 162.\n\n23 Boxer, Great Ship, p. 170.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207",
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]