Page 215 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 6 A New Context of Porcelain Trade 1760-1770

when there was no evidence of such a shift of production to Canton of a previous

time? And how did the new conditions of trade in the 1750s affect local

manufacturers?

This chapter explores the factors that had an impact on this situation. It argues

that production at Canton was associated with changing trade at Canton. I seek to

show that the policies regulating the Canton trade in the 1750s had a direct impact on

the porcelain trade, combining all the events that took place in the 1750s. It argues

that the late 1760s were an important time for porcelain dealers to set up their own

workshops, as the one depicted by William Hickey.

The porcelain trade has been studied from an economic history point of view and

from the perspective of material culture, but rarely from the point of view of the

Canton trade system or under Canton merchant’s scheme. Paul A. Van Dyke in his

recent research contributed much to the current scholarship. Based on extensive

archival resources, his research provides valuable and quite complete records of some

of the porcelain dealers’ trading activities, especially dealers of the second half of the

eighteenth century. After years of archival research, he published a series of books on

Canton trade and merchants; the latest volume touches upon porcelain dealers. As he

shows, ‘the porcelain and silk chapters were especially time consuming owing to the

10
fact that there were hundreds of these men.’ Most of them were small dealers and

they were not Hong merchants. This means that we have relatively less documentation

about them. However, it was they who channelled the vast porcelain trade with

European Companies and supercargoes. In his research, Van Dyke has provided

thirteen prominent porcelain dealers and miscellaneous porcelain dealers trading

10 Paul A. Van Dyke, Merchants of Canton and Macao: Success and Failure in Eighteenth-
Century Chinese Trade (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016).
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