Page 81 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

67.

Chinese officials who otherwise winked at foreigners• illegal

actions. Other measures restraining foreigners forbade their

hiring Chinese servants and their entering inside the walls of

Canton. Imperial decrees also banned the use of sedan chairs
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for transportation and use of the river for pleasure-boating.

Consequently, the Factories and the area between them and the

river were the only space in which the foreigners had any

freedom.

Transcending these restrictions was the law that for­

eigners must leave Canton as soon as they completed their

commercial transactions. Theoretically they were to return

home with their vessels. In the early years of Western trade

with China such a limitation did not actually hamper the European

traders. Weather conditions, namely the monsoons, governed the

seasons at Canton. They in turn determined the trading season
for the Europeans. The summer southwest monsoons made passage

through the South China Sea extremely dangerous, if not

virtually impossible at that time. So the trading season

opened soon after the southwest monsoons changed to blow from

the northeast. This usually occurred in October. From October

to March the majority of foreign vessels arrived, sailing in

from the Pacific Ocean or from the Indian Ocean through the

Straits of Malucca or Macassar and around the eastern side of

the Philippines. This latter route was an easy one through

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For a list of the major restrictions governing
foreigners at Canton, see H.B. Morse and H.F. Macnair, Far
Eastern International Relations (Boston, 1931), pp. 60-61.