Page 122 - Chinese SIlver By Adrien Von Ferscht

to mention opium. It was clear from the outset of the China Trade that the Chinese
silversmiths could produce silver as fine as the best Georgian silversmiths and silver, as a
commodity was cheaper; the labour being a fraction of the cost. However, initially any
purchasing had to be through the auspices of the Hong merchants.

The combination of the freneticism and the sheer volumes of trade in in tandem with
devious minds and varying degrees of greed eventually began to take its toll on the Hong
merchants themselves, By far the most shrewd was Houqua; he was also a master of
networking and was becoming vastly wealthy, while staying relatively immune to the
knocks and shocks of voluminous trading, much of which was speculative. The other Hong
merchants did not fare so well, many getting severely into debt. It was in the interest of the
British and the Hong that the status quo for the time being should be maintained. The
British government actually passed Acts of Parliament that created substantial loans to
help keep the Hong solvent. Houqua himself also contributed and the balance required
was raised by the Parsi Indian merchants working in parallel to the East India Company.
The Parsi merchants were to remain very much part of the equation in the China Trade
until the Treaty of Nanking created the various treaty ports; the Parsi merchant dynasties
of the Banajis, the Dadiseths, the Kamas and the wonderfully named family, the
Readymoneys, were all headed by Sir Jamshedji Jijibhai. After the Treaty, they were
replaced by the Bombay and Calcutta Jewish merchant families; the Khadoories, the
Hardoons and the Sassoons, with David Sassoon being titular head. The Parsis took
advantage of the American Civil War and concentrated their energies on the cotton and
cloth trades with Manchester in Britain.

The entrance to Old China Street from the foreign factory area in 1811

The bailing out of the Hong merchants put the latter in an unenviably weak position with
the British, but devious minds are often the mother of invention - it is best to say that some
highly ingenious ways were found that were beneficial to all parties involved, except for the