[ { "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": 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": 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 }, { "id": 213171, "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-1993", "page_number": 239, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "221\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nEdward Seidensticker, Low City, High City Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake how the shogun's ancient capital became a great modern city, 1867-1923 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1991) and Tokyo Rising The City since the Great Earthquake.\n\nThese two volumes by Edward Seidensticker may well be the envy of every university press they are books which deserve to be on every scholar's shelf, which should be assigned regularly to students in classes and which are desirable reading for amateur historians and tourists alike. Certainly popular enough to be published in paperback as well as hardback, the books have also been made major selections in at least one book club. Profits like these are the staff of life to all the other worthy academic books which never make back their cost.\n\nSeidensticker is, first and foremost, a translator of Japanese literature and a commentator on the literary arts in Japan. His has long been an esteemed name in the field, holding with Donald Keene (likewise a professor of Japanese literature at Columbia University) pre-eminent position in the field. He crowned his “serious” career with a new translation of Lady Murasaki's The Tale of Genji, the first novel in Japan as well as in the world. Initially questioned for challenging the masterful translation by Arthur Waley, Seidensticker's translation has now been accorded pride of place in the field. It hews closer to the words that Murasaki wrote, yet it parses well too, even if it is not so splendid a piece of English literature as Waley's work.\n\nIn addition to literature, however, it is evident that Seidensticker has long been smitten by the city of Tokyo. He has collected enough trivia about the city, combined it with urban history and literary information, and achieved a series of insights into the city, the culture which vibrates through it, and the history of the development of Japan's largest urban centre. These he weaves together with light delicacy into a pair of books that are readable, interesting, entertaining and informative.\n\nSeidensticker begins Low City, High City by stating his intention to write primarily about the plebeian portion of the city, leaving the more patrician High City for the moment and stating about it that 'Another book asks to be written.' Fortunately, after the success of Low City, he replied to the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216338, "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-2003", "page_number": 97, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "46\n\nown people, and as Denham's editor wrote, its officers expected to exercise the same 'absolute, unquestioned, and unlimited authority over the persons of those who traded to their shores', or came there on any other business: with implicit obedience 'not to what the laws had provided, but to what they [the Chinese officers] thought fit to order'.68 The ever watchful Gutzlaff had noted that 'the poor are generally the sufferers (in the judicial system), whilst the rich expiate their crimes by means of money'. 'The purest virtue is boasted of on paper, whilst cruelty and oppression mark every public act'.70\n\n69\n\nFundamental aspects of the China Trade\n\nA Mutual Ignorance\n\nWhilst those Westerners engaged in the old China Trade became accustomed to the very different world around them, and sent back all manner of items illustrative of certain aspects of its culture (albeit those perceived by Chinese to meet demand) the greater part of those engaged were \"on the outside looking in.\" Little real knowledge of the country could be acquired by the great majority of those coming to China, because of its government's firm determination to confine the foreign maritime trade to one outlet at Canton, and to hedge in its personnel with all manner of restrictions. In this aim, the authorities were at one with the Japanese Shogun, who confined the Dutch to the one small demi-island of Deshima at Nagasaki for over 250 years of limited trading.71\n\nThe restrictions were greatly lamented by some. Major George Henry Mason, author of one of the most valuable early works in English on China and the Chinese, who stayed in Macau and Canton in 1789-90, had complained of 'the very circumscribed limits which are marked out for foreigners at Canton.' It was, he wrote, 'to be exceedingly regretted, that either habitual caution, ungenerous suspicion, or experienced necessary circumspection, should influence the Chinese, even at a distance of fourteen hundred miles from the capital of their empire, to restrain the observing traveller within his narrow compass'. And after describing the tumultuous outcome of an unsuccessful attempt by a party of British officers to gain the city walls of Canton, he had remarked, 'This adventure is related as a convincing proof of the difficulty, if not of the danger, attending inquisitive strangers in China.'72", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]