Trading Tea and Porcelain with China
The English had come into contact with Chinese merchants, middlemen and migrants throughout Southeast Asia from their earliest days at Bantam, constantly praising them as a nation peculiarly hardworking and sober, though terribly addicted to gambling. The maritime trade of the whole of East Asia, from Japan to Java and Sumatra, was dominated by Chinese junk traffic. The junks came south in search of pepper and other spices, Indian textiles, perfumed woods and tree gums (which formed the essential ingredients of incense), and hundreds of natural products that were highly prized in Chinese medicine and gourmet cuisine. They brought silk, silk textiles, porcelain, and economic migrants. Chinese brokers acted as agents in procuring pepper cargoes for the Europeans. They were the retail traders, small manufacturers and spirit distillers of Southeast Asia's port cities.
The British Library | The factories at Canton--a detail from an 8-metre-long scroll of the Pearl River from Whampoa to the city, painted by a Chinese artist c.1760. The Company's regular trade at Canton in the eighteenth century concentrated on tea, silk textiles and inexpensive porcelain. (BL shelf-mark Map Collection K.Top.11623) |
A failed venture to Japan between 1612 and 1623 had shattered the Company's idea of selling Chinese silks bought in Southeast Asia in return for Japanese silver. But the dream of direct access to the Chinese mainland, procuring there silks to fuel the inter-Asian trade and selling English manufactures to the teeming millions of the Celestial Empire remained an aspiration of the Company's business schemes.
In the first half of the seventeenth century few of the Chinese goods available at Bantam and other southern ports were imported into England. The VOC adopted porcelain as a cargo for Europe and the fashionable taste for blue and white that is reflected in so many Dutch paintings of the period was soon established. The English Company instructed its servants not to meddle with porcelain, though its use was common in the factories and some employees did make individual bargains. For instance, in 1619 Sir Thomas Dale sent home from Batavia a box containing 82 pieces as a present for his brother-in-law.
Cheng Chih-lung and the Dutch
The problem with direct trade to China was that the Chinese state, unlike the Mughal Empire, refused to allow any Europeans into its ports except the Portuguese at their closely supervised enclave of Macao. Typically, the VOC soon took the offensive. Two years after their attack on Macao in 1622 the Dutch established themselves near modern Tainan, on the southwest coast of Taiwan, constructing a huge castle that they named Fort Zeelandia. The island, inhabited by aboriginal tribes, was outside Chinese control and had become a seasonal meeting place for Chinese and Japanese trader-pirates.
Cheng Chih-lung, a protégé of Li Tan, the 'Captain' of the Chinese trading community in Japan, assisted the Dutch settlement. By the mid-1630s the powerful junk fleet that he built up was their main source of Chinese goods and Chinese immigrants, who began to plant sugar on the island. Fort Zeelandia became the VOC's distribution centre for East Asia, sending porcelain and sugar south to Batavia, and silk, sugar and deerskins north to Japan. ed to remain in Japan after the expulsion of the Portuguese, transferring their factory from Hirado to the strictly guarded artificial islet of Deshima at Nagasaki, from where they pursued an increasingly valuable trade in Japanese copper rather than silver.
In 1644 Manchu invaders from beyond the Great Wall captured Peking and established the Ch’ing dynasty. Cheng Chih-lung's support for the refugee Ming court was continued, after he had surrendered to the Ch’ing, by his half-Japanese son Cheng Ch’eng-kung, immortalised in East Asian historical legend as `Koxinga', the Dutch version of his Ming title Kuo-hsing-yeh or 'Lord of the Imperial Surname'. As the Ch’ing forces swept into southern China, Koxinga held out in the region around Amoy before transferring his fleet to Taiwan in 1661 and driving the Dutch out of the island.
English bases at Taiwan and Tonkin
The English Company now re-entered the East Asian scene. In 1670 Koxinga's son Cheng Ching invited the Bantam factory to open trading relations. The Directors in London were enthusiastic, formulating another elaborate scheme for inter-Asian trade in the region.  | | The British Library | | Title page of John Ovington's 1699 essay on tea. Ovington became an early enthusiast for tea when he was Chaplain at Surat between 1689 and 1693. (BL shelf-mark 1651/1509) |
The theory this time was that English manufactures could be sold in Taiwan for sugar and deerskins that could be exchanged in Japan for copper, which would buy silk textiles in Tonkin (North Vietnam) for Europe and Japan. Taiwan and Tonkin were opened in 1672, but the English ship sent to Nagasaki was expelled by the Japanese authorities.
At Taiwan, operating from the former town hall of the Fort Zeelandia settlement, the English sold pepper and a small amount of broadcloth--scarlet was favoured for the furnishings of Chinese temples--together with large imports of gunpowder, lead, iron and muskets to feed the Cheng war effort. Between 1674 and 1680 Cheng forces held Amoy again. English ships were able to trade in a mainland port for the first time, exporting quantities of silk, porcelain and a new commodity: tea.
Meanwhile, Tonkin was proving to be an excellent source for locally produced Chinese-style silk textiles, despite serious difficulties in coping with the exactions of the Vietnamese mandarinate, 'who would have the carpet off the table'. Conditions improved slightly when the factory was moved from the Red River delta trading port of Phô Hien to modern Hanoi in 1679. A typical order from London to Tonkin, in 1682, called for 145,000 pieces of various types, including velvets, gauzes, plain white peelongs, and lengths patterned in the loom with coloured flowers.
In 1683 Taiwan finally surrendered to the Ch’ing forces, beginning the process that turned the island into a Chinese province. The English were allowed to settle their affairs and were even granted renewed access to Amoy in 1684-85. Now the wars were over the Ch’ing government relaxed the emergency restrictions that it had imposed on overseas trade from the ports of South China. An explosion of junk traffic followed, especially to Batavia. The VOC was able to obtain all the Chinese commodities it required without any urgent need to go to China. The English, who no longer had a southern base after their expulsion from Bantam in 1682, persisted with voyages to the mainland, mounting them from its Indian factories or directly from London. Regular visits were made to Chusan, Amoy and Canton, and these were so successful that the Tonkin factory was closed in 1697.
Consolidation at Canton
The final breakthrough came at the turn of the century. From 1699 English ships traded at the great city of Canton on the Pearl River almost every year, and from 1715 the Chinese government made Canton the only port for foreign trade. The English were eventually joined there by the merchants of the French, Dutch, Austrian (or Ostend), Danish and Swedish East India Companies, as well as `country' ships from India and the Americas after 1784. But for once the English Company was in first and remained leader of the pack.
Conditions of trade at Canton were very different from India.  | | The British Library | | Scene in a tea warehouse at the Canton factories, by a Chinese artist, c.1800. The Chinese workers are bringing in the straw containers in which the tea has been transported from the inland growing districts. They are supervised by Europeans, who are wearing white kerchiefs to protect their hair from the dust. (BL shelf-mark OIOC Add.Or.4665) |
The Chinese state, while projecting a Confucian disdain for foreign barbarians and their mercantile activities, was well aware that Europeans could be dangerous. It managed to keep them at a distance until the 1830s.
The factories at Canton were built on a strip of land between the city walls and the river front. Europeans were not officially allowed into the city, though they could take recreation on Honan island in the river, and they were only permitted to live in the factories during the annual trading seasons from roughly June to December each year, leaving when their ships sailed. The ships anchored and received cargoes downstream, off the island of Whampoa, where they were required to unload all their guns and powder into Chinese custody. From 1773 the English Company's servants occupied a fine house at Macao during the non-trading months, giving them a permanent presence close to Canton.
Business was controlled, in the taxation interests of the Chinese state, through close co-operation between the Imperial authorities under a Peking-appointed official known as the Hoppo, and a limited number of government-approved wholesalers called the Hong merchants. All orders for and purchases of the main commodities had to be made through members of the Hong Guild, at prices negotiated by them with the up-country suppliers. No single merchant was allowed to provide more than half of any ship's cargo, but small handicrafts like fans, lacquerware and paintings could be bought freely from local shopkeepers.
Chinese interpreters handled communications, in Portuguese at first and then in a kind of pidgin that came to be known as `port lingo'--it was the late eighteenth century before any English mastered the Chinese language, partly because of difficulties in finding any native speaker willing to risk official disapproval by teaching them. But demand and profits were such that the trade flourished, whatever the restrictions. Silver flowed into China in unprecedented quantities.
The wonder of tea
The pre-Canton voyages to ports like Amoy had bought more or less everything on offer, including fans, porcelain figures of animals and deities, Japanese porcelain, cabinets and wallpaper. At its December 1696 auction in London, the Company even sold one strange lot of costumes for a Chinese opera, which brought £56-11s.  | | The British Library | | Advertising handbill for Morgan and Fenning of London, tea dealers, 1791. (BL shelf-mark 1609/5370) |
Once the regular trade at Canton was established the Company came to concentrate on three principal commodities--tea, silk textiles and inexpensive porcelain. All the 'fancy' goods and special orders, for example for armorial porcelain or large decorative pieces, were left to the private trade of their servants and ships' officers. Purchases of silk textiles declined during the eighteenth century, although they always formed an important part of the `country' trade from India.
Tea was the new wonder commodity that powered the China trade. Company servants at Bantam and Hirado had become familiar with the universal habit of tea-drinking among east Asian society of all classes, even if the esoterics of the Japanese tea ceremony had eluded them. The tea leaf in all its varieties, infused in boiling water, was recognised by the discerning as a more wholesome daily drink than alcohol. It seems to have been a belief in its health-giving properties, coupled with its exotic novelty status, that launched tea in the West.
On 25 September 1660 Samuel Pepys drank a 'cupp of tee' for the first time. Four years later the Company ordered 'one hundred weight of the best tee procurable' from Bantam, followed by regular orders for small quantities throughout the 1670s. Why tea became Britain's national drink in the succeeding years has never been satisfactorily explained. Demand boomed once the Company had access to Canton, and by the late eighteenth century tea accounted for more than 60 percent of its total trade. In 1713 the Company imported 97,070 kgs; in 1813 the total was almost 14,515,200 kgs, and customs duty on tea was providing 10 percent of the British government's annual revenues. Green varieties predominated at first, but from the 1760s black tea became the most popular. Commercial tea cultivation in India and Ceylon was a late nineteenth-century development. Until then, tea meant China.
The utility of porcelain
Along with tea, the Company also began to import massive quantities of porcelain. In terms of value and share of the total trade it was not of any great significance. It was, however, a useful commodity. Porcelain was cheap, it could be sold for a modest profit and, above all, it was an ideal non-polluting cargo to accompany the chests of tea, providing additional ballast for the ships. hinese craftsmen at the great manufacturing centre of Jingde-zhen near Nanking, long accustomed to the non-Chinese requirements of markets as far away as Constantinople, churned out whatever the customer wanted, in any shape and any pattern.
The Company was not interested in artistic or decorative pieces. Most of its orders to the Hong merchants fell into the two categories of dinner services and sets for tea-drinking, either blue and white or in coloured enamels. They were designed for domestic use, hence the level of imports. For instance, in 1730 alone the Company brought in over 517,000 pieces, a figure that was maintained throughout the century. Shipwreck salvage during the last twenty years has revealed, in a way that archival statistics never could, the staggering scale of Chinese porcelain exports, and the more humdrum pieces have now taken their place alongside treasured survivors of the private trade.
As developments in India changed the whole nature of the English East India Company's position there, it was the China trade that provided both its continuing commercial justification and the revenues that bolstered its continuing existence.
This session is adapted from pp.80--97 of Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia 1600-1834 by Anthony Farrington, published by the British Library, 2002. |
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