[
    {
        "id": 204646,
        "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": 127,
        "title": "RAS-1963",
        "content_text": "114 \n\nA. D. BLUE \n\nwith Howqua, the great Canton hong merchant, until 1861 and were also associated with Baring Brothers, the London bankers, shows that the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company was far from being a purely American concern. The initiative in its formation and its success, however, was almost entirely due to the determination and ability of the Shanghai heads of Russell and Company, and in particular to Edward Cunningham, the firm's managing partner in Shanghai in the vital years of 1862, 63, and '64.\n\nBecause of American influence in the early days, and the similarity between navigational problems on the Mississippi and on the Yangtse, the luxurious river steamers which plied on the Lower and Middle Yangtse during the heyday of foreign trade were very similar to the Mississippi steamers of Mark Twain's day. They had the same tall, narrow funnel, and the long promenade deck extending almost the whole length of the ship, which Hollywood has made so familiar. At the forward end of this deck was the dining saloon, and at the after end the lounge. Both of these were elegantly, and even ornately furnished, the entrance to the lounge being flanked with potted shrubs leading to a wide stairway down to the lower deck. The best cabins were on the promenade deck. Unfortunately no one with Mark Twain's genius has written a ‘Life on the Yangtse' to match his Life on the Mississippi, an omission now very unlikely to be repaired.\n\nIn his journey up the Yangtse and overland to Burma in 1874, which was to end in his tragic murder, A. R. Margary travelled from Shanghai to Hankow by the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company's Hirado.\" Margary described his cabin as large and airy, and the Hirado as a wonderful structure and not like a ship at all. She had a tall narrow funnel in front of each paddle box, tier upon tier of cabins built on the smallest possible hull, and the general appearance of a gaudy palace of pleasure full of windows and terraces floating upon the water. Margary continued by mandarin boat10 to Yochow, and then across the Tungting Lake and by the Yuan River to the border of Kweichow, and then completed his\n\n10\n\n\"The Hirado was one of the largest steamers on the river at this time, being of 1,294 gross tons. She had been built in America for Dent and Company in 1866, and sold by them to the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company in 1867.\n\n10 A long, narrow junk divided into 5 or 6 compartments.\n\n1",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 208938,
        "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": 100,
        "title": "RAS-1980",
        "content_text": "68\n\nJOHN VILLIERS\n\nfined to the limited, though evidently still profitable, carrying trade between China and Japan.3\n\nConditions in Japan were no more conducive to an organised system of state trade than they were in China. The period from 1467 to 1568 was the age of the warring states, in which both the Emperor and his shoguns were powerless against the might of the regional war lords, the daimyō. Even amid the anarchy to which this state of affairs gave rise, merchant communities nevertheless flourished and cities such as Hakata, Hirado and Sakai prospered. Japanese exports to China included copper, sulphur and weapons, and their imports from China were chiefly raw silk and porcelain, both of which they considered superior to their own products, cash, drugs and books. Again, from the Chinese point of view this trade was technically tribute and the ships were officially dispatched by the Emperor, the Shogun, by great daimyō or monasteries, while the fitting out of the ships and the business arrangements were in the hands of the merchants of Sakai and Hakata, and chiefly to their profit.\n\nAs both Chinese policy became more restrictive and isolationist and the power of the shoguns grew weaker, so this Sino-Japanese trade collapsed and by the 1540s had been replaced by extensive piracy and smuggling. Pirates ranged up and down the coasts of China and the many offshore islands more or less unchecked. In Japan the daimyō and in China the mandarins connived at this illegal activity because it brought them considerable profits.4\n\nThus, when the Portuguese first arrived on the scene, they found great opportunities for acting as trading agents in goods which for various reasons could no longer be traded directly between the countries that produced them. They soon found that \"there is as great a profit in taking spices to China as in taking them to Portugal\". But they had to fit into existing trade patterns both in the inter-island trade of the Indonesian archipelago centred on Malacca and in the trade of the China Seas. Even in theory they were never able to attain a complete monopoly but had to trade in competition—and often in conflict—with the Asian traders already active in those waters. Within a few years of their conquest of Malacca the Portuguese had opened up direct trade relations with the spice islands and sent expeditions to the Lesser Sunda Islands in search of sandalwood. They also endeavoured to open relations with China. Their first attempt was a disaster and led to",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 208942,
        "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": 104,
        "title": "RAS-1980",
        "content_text": "72\n\nJOHN VILLIERS\n\nlegitimate trade that could be allowed to the Portuguese. Portuguese ships were indeed used both by the Chinese and Japanese for suppressing local pirates.\n\nThere was keen competition among the daimyō of Kyushu to attract the Great Ship from Macau to their fiefs. In 1562 Omura Sumitada gave what amounted to extra-territorial rights to the Portuguese at Yokoseura and soon after was baptised with the name of Dom Bartholomeu. Yokoseura was however destroyed in 1564 by some anti-Christian merchants from Bungo and the Great Ship was diverted to Hirado. In 1568 Jesuit missionaries first visited Nagasaki, then a small fishing village in a wood belonging to a Christian vassal of Omura Sumitada. It provided excellent anchorage and in 1571 the Great Ship called there for the first time. From then on it was the chief port in Japan for the Macau trade and by 1580 had become a large settlement with an entirely Christian population. In that year Omura offered possession of Nagasaki to the Jesuits, reserving only the shipping dues for himself.\n\nFrom about 1578 the Macaonese began to make use of the Jesuit missionaries, then gaining rapidly in influence in Japan, to market their goods. As the Italian Fr. Valignano wrote to his superiors in 1580: “After the grace and favour of Goa, the greatest help we have had hitherto in securing Christians is that of the Great Ship. For as the Lords of Japan, even though they have much land, are very poor in revenue and ready money, the benefits they derive when the ships come to their ports are very great...they try hard to entice them to their fiefs\".15 The Jesuits indeed depended for most of their revenue on this investment in the Macau-Japan trade. By an agreement of 1578 with the Macau merchants they were allotted a share of 50 piculs in the annual cargo of 1600 piculs of raw silk.16 These 50 piculs brought a profit of about 1600 cruzados. There was much opposition to this arrangement — from the Mendicant Orders, particularly the Spanish Friars in the Philippines, from the Jesuit General in Rome and even from some of the more scrupulous merchant casados in Macau, but it survived at least until 1614, when the first decree of the Tokugawa Ieyasu banishing all foreign and Japanese missionaries from Japan was issued, and it gave the Portuguese an edge over their English, Dutch and Spanish rivals.17\n\nMeanwhile, the Philippines were being brought under Spanish rule by force and the missionary work of the religious orders. The",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 210600,
        "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-1985",
        "page_number": 207,
        "title": "RAS-1985",
        "content_text": "188\n\nANTHONY FARRINGTON\n\nan essential preliminary to any such scheme.\"\n\nA reformulated version in 1670 incorporated this suggestion and added Taiwan. Beginning in 1672 three ships a year were to be sent to Japan, one via Tongking and the others via Taiwan. Tongking would supply silk, musk, skins and tutenague for Japan; Taiwan would supply hides and sugar. On the return voyage the three ships would separate: one to Surat, one to Madras, and the third to Taiwan, Tongking and Bantam, to pick up any commodities suitable for Europe.\n\nUnlike the early years before 1623, the East India Company seems to have begun to appreciate that the whole area of South-East and East Asia, from Malaysia to Japan, formed a region-wide commercial unit, criss-crossed by an inter-dependent trade network powered by the monsoons. What the Company was now attempting to do, as the Dutch had already done, was to insert itself into a Chinese dominated system of exchange.\n\nLooking back from the Company's commercial and political strength a century later it is perhaps tempting to see the Japan scheme as a second-best alternative or a prelude to trade with mainland China. However, more than 25 years ago at least one historian argued that the gradual development of trade with China only took place against a background of failure in Japan and difficulties in Tongking, and that it was not until the decade 1674-1684 that interest really shifted from Japan to China. The possibility of direct access to China had agitated Richard Cocks at Hirado in Japan between 1613-1623. But the Company paid little attention to his dreams and the archives covering the new 'East Asian push' of the 1660s and 1670s give China only passing mention. Morse throws Tongking into his confused narrative as a mere extension of China and states that Tongking was the only accessible source for the bulk supply of Chinese silks. The English factory diary, though, makes it quite clear that the silk trade out of the Red River was not a matter of re-export but handled a local product.\n\nIt seems incredible now that the East India Company never considered that they might not be allowed to re-enter Japan",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x",
        "rank": 0
    }
]