Page 256 - 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

invisibility, their network of owners—porcelain shopkeepers—were not visible to us

either. As a result, the roles played by these shopkeepers in the porcelain trade were

neglected. Without a detailed analysis of these shops and their trading activities, a

series of issues such as how they sold porcelain and the interaction between local

shopkeepers, local manufactures and their foreign buyers cannot be fully understood.

The investigation of porcelain shops is, however, hindered by limited and

fragmented textual evidence. The few textual records of shops at Canton are either

11
fragmental, or attributed to a later period. Porcelain shops were mentioned in Dutch

records as ‘boutiques’. The names of the VOC supplier were listed in the daybooks

12
and the ‘unloading books’; according to C.A. Jörg, in the trade report of VOC in

1764 a good fifty shops were mentioned, which mainly sold porcelain of higher

quality which the VOC needed in larger amounts at that time. My examination of the

EEIC records revealed one hundred and thirty porcelain dealers between the late

13
1720s and early 1760s. Most of them showed up randomly, and sometimes their

names just appeared once. It is impossible to trace the development of shops in the

eighteenth-century Canton if we only rely on such textual records.

Recently, the representations of Canton port recently became another source by

which the trade between China and Western traders of the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries may be traced. A large scholarship has been generated in the last decade.

The paintings of ‘views of Canton’ were categorised as a type of export art and were

11 Of the early nineteenth century, local shops were mentioned by American traders. See, Jean
McClure Mudge, Chinese Export Porcelain for the American Trade, 1785-1835 (Newark, 1981).
12 Jörg has noticed the porcelain suppliers for the VOC were both from Hong merchants and
porcelain shops. C.J.A. Jörg, Porcelain and the Dutch China trade (The Hague, 1982), p.113.
13 Appendix A. Because the records are in manuscript form, some of spellings of Chinese dealers’
names were slightly different from year to year.
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