[
    {
        "id": 204970,
        "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-1965",
        "page_number": 78,
        "title": "RAS-1965",
        "content_text": "69\n\nPIRACY ON THE CHINA COAST\n\nA. D. BLUE\n\nFor most of recorded history piracy has been a menace to sea-borne trade, and there have been times when it has been difficult to distinguish between pirates and honest or should one say legitimate traders. Nationality has often been the only mark of distinction, as Spanish and English views of Drake, Hawkins, and the like illustrate.\n\nThe Chinese were pioneers in piracy, as in so many other things, and a history of piracy in China would begin many thousands of years ago. The Chinese were probably skilled practitioners of the art before history began to be recorded. The earliest accounts are in the records of the Chou Dynasty in the fourth century B.C., and piracy continued in China long after it had been suppressed in other parts of the world.\n\nWhen the first Europeans arrived in the China Seas in the sixteenth century, many of the pirates on the coast were Japanese. For three centuries after the defeat of Kublai Khan's invasion of Japan in 1281, Japanese pirates mainly from Kyushu were active along the whole coast, from the Liaotung Peninsula in the north to Hainan Island and the Straits of Malacca in the south. The famous Arctic explorer, John Davis, met his death at their hands in 1604. Davis was serving on an East India Company ship which was anchored off the island of Bintang, east of Singapore, when it was attacked by Japanese pirates.\n\nThis was at the end of the Japanese era, which came about as the result of several different factors. One was the establishment of a strong central government in Japan by Iyeyasu, the first of the Tokugawa Shoguns at the beginning of the seventeenth century; and another was the increasing superiority of Chinese over Japanese junks.\n\nThe depredations of these Japanese pirates often extended far inland, and they were accompanied by atrocities reminiscent of the Japanese Rape of Nanking in 1937. Because of this the Ming Emperors banned all intercourse between the two countries, and this afforded the Portuguese the opportunity to act as",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1965.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s752cj653",
        "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": 208947,
        "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": 109,
        "title": "RAS-1980",
        "content_text": "SILK & SILVER: MACAU, MANILA TRADE\n\n77\n\nIn 1629 the Viceroy Conde de Linhares ordered that both the Macau-Nagasaki and Macau-Manila voyages should henceforth be made under the supervision and control of the Crown and the profits from them used for the upkeep of the royal dockyard at Goa and the maintenance of the Portuguese fleet in Asian waters, but it was not until 1635 that an administrator for the voyages was sent from Goa to Macau to enforce the new system.32 In the same year the Viceroy finally agreed to allow one pinnace to make the Macau-Manila voyage each year, laden with munitions for the Manila garrison and enough silk for local consumption in the Philippines without any surplus for export to Mexico, where it would compete with silks from Seville.\n\nBy the end of the 16th century Macau's trade was already being threatened from several quarters. On the one hand, the development of the Manila-Japan trade, the increasing power and cohesion of the Japanese state under the Tokugawa and the encouragement of a Japanese merchant navy by Tokugawa Ieyasu — the famous Red Seal ships33 — and, above all, the growing hostility of the shoguns towards Christianity and the missionary activities of Portuguese Jesuits and Spanish friars undermined Macau's trade with Japan. On the other hand, competition from the Dutch, whose control of the Straits of Malacca made trade and communications between Macau and Goa difficult and dangerous and whose establishment in Taiwan after 1624 extended this danger into the China Seas, had a deleterious effect on Macau's trade with Indonesia. The extortions of the Chinese merchants, who also of course carried on direct trade in competition with the Portuguese, licitly or illicitly, both with Japan and Manila, weakened Macau's position still further. Between 1613 and 1640, an average of 60 to 80 Chinese junks visited Japan yearly, though from 1634 they were, like the Portuguese, confined to Nagasaki. These difficulties culminated in the summary expulsion of the Portuguese from Japan in 1639 by the Shogun Iemitsu and in the fall of Malacca to the Dutch in 1641. The embassy sent from Macau in 1640 in a last attempt to get Iemitsu to revoke his edict of expulsion met a terrible fate. 61 of the 74 members of the delegation were beheaded by 61 executioners sent specially from Yedo to Nagasaki for the purpose. A contemporary Portuguese account of how the citizens of Macau reacted to the news of the calamity sums up well the peculiar quality of the whole Portuguese adventure in the East, its mixture of missionary zeal and ...",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207",
        "rank": 0
    }
]