Page 273 - 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

provide us with more information, which make it possible to explore the internal

network of Chinese porcelain dealers.

In 1755, the local government demanded that all shopkeepers register with a

Hong merchant in order to participate in trade. The registration required the written

commitment from all members of each five-person group that each would be jointly

liable for any unpaid foreign debts of other members of the five persons registered

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group. This registration was authorised by the governor of Canton and was brought
into action by the fourth level of trade administration in Canton. It was originally

issued by the local government in Chinese, but no Chinese textual records have

survived in regards to this; the EEIC’s records show an English version of this

44
statement.
This statement provides us with important clues that porcelain dealers had to

register with Hong merchants, and they were grouped in fives and were responsible

for each other. Apart from this textual record, the most recent work by Paul A. Van

Dyke’s archival research provides this study with valuable information. His has found

seventeen contracts between Canton dealers and European Companies, nine of which

45
were linked with the porcelain business. I have found transactions between Chinese

43 Hosea Ballou Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company, Trading to China 1635-1834
(Five volumes, Clarendon, 1929), vol.V, p.29, p.39; Weng Eang Cheong, The Hong Merchants of
Canton: Chinese Merchants in Sino-Western Trade, 1684-1798 (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1997),
p.94 and p. 205; IOR/R/10/3, p.358.
44 IOR/R/10/4, p.27.
45 Paul A. Van Dyke, Merchants of Canton and Macao: Success and Failure in Eighteenth-
Century Chinese Trade (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016). Plate 07.03;
07.07;07.08;07.11;08.01;08.02;08.03;08.04;08.05 and p.129. I thank professor Paul A. Van
Dyke for his generosity of sharing information on this issue. Through our email conversations,
he told me that most of the contracts he came across were with Hong merchants, and the
contracts made with porcelain dealers are rare. (Email conversations with Professor Paul A. Van
Dyke, 11 June 2016).
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