Page 142 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

128.

shipments' arrival home were major problems. No matter how

good the quality or how low the cost, with a cargo of tea there

was always the risk of its arriving too late only to find a

market flooded. The Canton houses also had to decide whether

to send a vessel to Europe instead of the United States, where

the profit might be larger. Such a decision determined the
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type of cargo.

Considering the speculative nature of the tea trade,

many American merchants engaged in it profited immensely.

Success required a specialized knowledge of markets both at

Canton and elsewhere plus an intuitive ability in the general

mechanics of commerce. With the creation of commission houses,

merchants were able to profit from pooling their knowledge and

commercial talents. This was as essential in the silk trade as

in the tea trade. Silk had been a staple of Western trade with

China since the Middle Ages. Produced in the southern and eastern

provinces of Kwangtung and Chekiang, raw silk was transported to
towns near Canton, where men, women and children wove the thread

5
into various forms of silk fabric. ° Foreign merchants preferred

silk piece goods to the raw silk. These piece goods included

such familiar types as handkerchiefs, satins, crepes and pongees

as well as rarer levantines, lutestrings (lustrings) and sarsnets

(sarcenets).

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Examp 1 es o f h. s type o f d . . ecision are in: Letter, E.
t
i
.
Carrington to S. Russell & Co., Oct. 16, 1819, Russell & Co. MSS;
Letter, E. Carrington & Co. to P. W. Snow, Aug. 16, 1819, Russell
& Co. MSS; Letter, Perkins & Co. to J. & T.H. Perkins, Mar. 27,
1820, Perkins & Co. MSS.
SOLjungstedt, Historical Sketch of Portugese Settmements
in China, p. 284.