Page 168 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 4 Early Eighteenth-century EEIC Porcelain Trade in Canton 1729-c.1740

1
focuses on Canton Hong merchants. Studies on the porcelain itself served a very

important role in the field of material culture, and this role was expended on a global

scale into so-called global culture. Studies on trade helped economic historians to

demonstrate how the East India Company and its trade with Asia stimulated economic

growth in Europe.

As a result, we know a great deal about Chinese export porcelain from

curators, collectors and dealers in terms of their decoration patterns, history of

design; we also know much about the East India Company; we know a considerable

amount about Canton Hong merchants and we also know that the trade itself brought

significant impact in Europe. However, we do not know how a new type of porcelain

affected the trade and traders; we do not know how small local operators, those who

were not Hong merchants, played a role in the trade; and we do not know how the

EEIC and its porcelain trade affected local port City-Canton. The answers lie in the

overlapping area where issues of porcelain, the East India Company and merchants

were involved, as shown in Figure 4-1. However, this overlapping, related and

1 Hong means Guild, in Canton trade context, Hong merchants were referred to big dealers who
have formed a guild which had the exclusive privilege of trading with foreigners. Based on the
English East India Company’s resources, Weng Eang Cheong’s research His research brings out
previously unknown aspects of each family such as their relationship with Hong merchants through
inter- marrying, and the close connections that early merchants had with the regions of Quanzhou,
Manila, Batavia, and Amoy. See Chen Guodong, The Insolvency of the Chinese Hong Merchants,
1760-1843 (Taipei: Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica, 1990); Weng Eang Cheong, Hong
Merchants of Canton: Chinese Merchants in Sino-western Trade, 1684-1798 (Curzon, 1995). More
recently, based on the resources of the East India Companies including the Dutch, English, Danish,
French, as well as Swedish, Paul A. Van Dyke has published a series of book on Canton merchants
that attempt to reconstruct the day-to-day operations in Canton by focusing on the practices and
procedures of the various groups involved in the trade. See Paul A. Van Dyke, The Canton trade:
life and enterprise on the China coast, 1700-1845 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press;
London: Eurospan, 2005) and Merchants of Canton and Macao: politics and strategies in
eighteenth-century Chinese trade (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press; Kyoto: Kyoto
University Press, 2011).
152