Page 217 - 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

The EEIC records show that in the late eighteenth century, three porcelain dealers

transformed themselves into tea merchants and stopped supplying porcelain. (see

Section 5 of this chapter) Van Dyke has shown that seven porcelain dealers traded silk

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in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century.
In the decades of the 1740s and 1750s, the Chinese government began to require

that all the foreign traders engage one or two Hong merchants for each ship to stand

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as security merchants for customs payment. There were about twenty-six Hongs
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that were licensed for foreign trade. Only six of them were appointed as Security

Merchants, who petitioned for their monopoly of the trade. They were given sole

securing rights to trade and ship abroad and were responsible for the duties and

charges to the Qing government. Through such an arrangement, the government could

best secure the collection of revenues with the least trouble. However, this system

gradually caused the Security Merchants problems.

The trade between Security Merchants and the East India Company was basically

bartering tea, silk and wool goods. Security Merchants were responsible for the goods

that European Companies brought to China, such as wool. This meant that they had

to take over all the goods unloaded from European ships. For most of the cases, they

were unable to pay for all the goods at one time, and it would take up to two years to

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balance their accounts. Even the Security Merchants managed to balance his

account as soon as possible; he would need to sell all the goods unloaded from

European ships as well. He was answerable to the government for duties on the

11 Van Dyke, Success and Failure, p.166.
12 Weng Eang Cheong, The Hong Merchants of Canton: Chinese Merchants in Sino-Western
Trade, 1684-1798 (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1997), pp.104-106.
13 Ibid, p.93.
14 Hosea Ballou Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company, Trading to China 1635-1834
(Five volumes, Clarendon, 1929), vol.V, p.24.
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