Approaching Macao from the sea, one is struck first by the town’s extraordinary beauty. Built on the end of a peninsula that juts out into the South China Sea, Macao, in the late eighteenth century, was a lovely, orderly contrast to the life that seamen had endured on the long voyage from the Atlantic or the Northwest Coast of America. For well over two centuries, the tiny Portuguese colony had given a Mediterranean, even Moorish, aspect to the maritime gate to China. This remnant of a once-great and still impressive empire remained the only European jurisdiction permitted within the Celestial...

Until relatively recently the Orient has always represented riches, exoticism, and luxury to the West. Medieval contacts with East Asia were occasional and fleeting, a circumstance that added to the legend. Such trade as existed was a trade in rare products like spices, porcelain, and silks. Marco Polo, the Portuguese explorers, and Dutch merchants of the early modern period further reinforced the myth both in their tales and in the commerce they pursued. The maritime trade that grew up with China was a commerce in wonderful things like lacquers, jades, bronzes, carvings, fans, incense, porcelain, and any number of other...

The traditional story of the old China trade emphasizes the search for something—anything—that the Chinese would buy. Here was a reclusive nation with inexhaustible supplies of teas, silks, and other highly desirable products, that wanted nothing that Americans had to offer in return. Here was a challenge worthy of the enterprise for which the early United States became renowned. In response American merchants proved endlessly inventive. Tiny, fast-sailing vessels, manned by intrepid Yankees, scattered all over the globe in pursuit of the strange products that the Chinese demanded. Among other peculiar items were amomum, aniseed stars, benzoin, bezoar,...

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the road to fortune was the road of trade. Typically a young trader began as a clerk in an established company, where he received his basic business training. He then became a supercargo,¹ a businessman traveling with a ship but having plenary power over the goods aboard. A sedentary merchant in America had no way of knowing what market conditions in Canton would be when the ship arrived, months after leaving home. Reliance on the supercargo’s judgment was necessary, and his power of decision was absolute within the limits of his instructions, which were necessarily...

In 1828 a new firm, Russell & Sturgis, announced its existence at Manila, giving among its references Russell & Co., Bryant & Sturgis, Perkins & Co., and Perit & Cabot of Philadelphia.¹ Even if he had not seen the names of the principals, a contemporary merchant reading the circular would have recognized that here was yet another link in the Boston Concern’s network, for all four of these firms were involved. One of the partners was Henry Parkman Sturgis, a nephew of James P. Sturgis and a great-nephew of William Sturgis. He had arrived in Manila by way of Canton,...

If there is one quality that strikes a modern reader of the correspondence of Canton residents, it is the very commercial nature of the community. Hong merchants, British private traders, especially the restless Scots and Americans, all displayed the same motivation. Yet somehow the Americans seem to have been the least complicated, the most typical businessmen. The hong merchants were the most sensitive to status and security pressures, especially because they were responsible to the imperial government and very vulnerable. They also held to Chinese values and hoped to rise in the social system, but “their primary loyalty was to...

The mercantile residents of Canton had come for a single purpose; so had the missionaries. Neither was primarily interested in politics or diplomacy. They understood Ch’ing bureaucracy and its policy very imperfectly, but they chafed at the restrictions on their lives. In their letters and China coast publications, they objected impotently, but, for the most part, quietly. Except for the hong merchants, the Chinese, of course, heard none of their complaints, and certainly they intended to make no changes.

Because the American consul held no diplomatic commission and was not recognized by the Chinese authorities except as ataipan(i.e.,...

As with other such missions in that day, the success of the Cushing embassy depended almost entirely on circumstances (luck) and on the skill of the mission’s principal member. The administration had chosen its man well, despite the partisan attacks of the Jacksonians. But for all his ability, training, and scholarship, not even Cushing could claim to be well informed on China.

It was in the early spring of 1843 that this aloof scholar-statesman began to prepare for his contest with the representatives of the Son of Heaven. A more mountainous task can scarcely be imagined. No one in America...

Once the treaty was signed, there was little else for Cushing to do, but, shrewd lawyer that he was, he unquestionably understood the value of putting the treaty to the test of practice. By so doing he would establish precedents for the guidance of his successors and of the Chinese. The most delicate problem presented by the new articles was undoubtedly that of applying the extraterritorial clauses. The Hsü-A-man killing provided an ideal opportunity to put the new system into effect.

Governor Ch’eng Yü-ts’ai began the exchange of notes with a message to Consul Forbes on 18 June demanding that...