Page 64 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

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vessels were unable to sail any further upriver.

Foreign vessels arriving in China were unable to sail

the sixty miles up the Pearl River to Whampoa without a

Chinese pilot. Between Whampoa and its mouth, the river flowed

through a narrow channel bordered by high cliffs. Foreigners

called this channel the Bogue (the English form of the Portu­

gese name Bocca Tigris or Chinese name Lu-men, Tiger's Mouth).

After the Bogue, the river widened at its mouth into a broad

expanse of water (forty miles across) dotted with numerous

islands. These islands and the waters around them formed the

Outer Anchorages, area which the Chinese considered outside

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the jurisdiction of the Celestial Empire. Upon arrival all
foreign vessels stopped at one of the Outer Anchorages to

obtain a pilot. (If the vessel had aboard any cargo that must

be smuggled into China, the master would dispose of it here
before receiving his pilot.) The most common Outer Anchorage

was the large island of Heungshan and its port of Macao. All

foreign passengers disembarked at Macao, as they were forbidden

'only after the Opium War did foreigners discover the
channel that would allow them to sail cargo vessels all the
way up the Pearl River to Canton. rr11e Chinese had success­
fully kept the knowledge of this channel from the foreigners.
S. Wells Williams, "Recollections of Cina Prior to 1840," Royal
Asiatic Society Journal (China Branch), VIII (February 21, 1874),
2.
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The Chinese considered the Outer Anchorages, islands
off the coast of China, as outside the Empire's jurisdiction
because they could not integrate these areas into their tightly­
organized systems of defense and political control. See Philip
A. Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China:
Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864 (Cambridge, 1970).