Page 254 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 7 Porcelain Dealers and their Role in Trade

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relationship between silk shops and workshops in eighteenth century France.

Methods of selling silks are proven to have been experienced innovations.

Interestingly however, such an approach has never been adequately applied to

Chinese porcelain trade studies. We know little about the details of how porcelain was

actually sold to foreign traders. Little has been written by scholars about their methods

of selling or the role of those porcelain dealers played in the trade. However, we do

have records and visual representations of porcelain shops. This chapter therefore

argues for a different perspective on the development of porcelain shops in Canton

during the eighteenth century.

The shops created a space for selling and buying which increased the volume of

trade, as well as the exchanges. Porcelain shops were located in the so called ‘Foreign

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Factories’ area, about half a mile above the city suburb, in going from Whampoa.

(Map 5) In the 1760s, the local government at Canton moved most shopkeepers to a

new street in order to have better control, later called ‘China Street’ by visitors of later

times. According to Patrick Conner, this street was probably called ‘China Street’

because it was a place to buy ‘Chinaware’ (a word used by traders at the time for

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Chinese porcelain). Hog Lane and China Street were becoming the main shopping

streets in the nineteenth century, as they were consistently described in visitors’

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notes.

6 Lesley Ellis Miller, ‘Innovation and Industrial Espionage in Eighteenth-Century France: An
Investigation of the Selling of Silks Through Samples’ Journal of Design History, Vol. 12, No. 3,
Eighteenth-Century Markets and Manufactures in England and France (1999), pp.271-292.
7 Patrick Conner, The Hongs of Canton: Western Merchants in South China 1700-1900, as Seen
in Chinese Export Paintings (London, 2009), pp.25-61. Paul A. Van Dyke, ‘The Shopping Streets
in the Foreign Quarter at Canton 1760-1842’ Revista de Cultura 43(2013), pp.92-110.
8 Conner, The Hongs of Canton, p.75.
9 The best example describing these two streets is from C.Toogood Downing, The Fan-Qui in
China in 1836-1837 (Philadelphia, 1838), pp.288-290.
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