WHEN PORTUGAL’S CHINA SEA lane was established for trading in the 16th century, it terminated at Macao on the China coast to the east of the great Eurasian land mass, at the mouth of the Pearl River delta 110 kilometres downriver from Canton.

The territory is not more than 8 km square and consists of a peninsula and the two islands of Taipa and Coloane. About 5 km long and averaging 1.6 km broad, the peninsula, on which the city-proper stands, is part of the island of Heungshan, one of the large islands in the Pearl River estuary of which...

ON THE LAST DAY OF December 1599, Queen Elizabeth I granted the Royal Charter that conferred on ‘the Governor and Company of Merchants of London, trading to the East Indies’ a monopoly of the English trade to the East for the next 15 years. Much the same provisions governed this trade until the Company’s dissolution in 1874, as revised in their detail – to reflect changed conditions, improvements in commercial efficiency, nautical science and naval architecture – and renewed from time to time when the currency of each succeeding charter expired. In 1709, the Company amalgamated with a rival group, which had...

DURING THE TIME OF ITS operations, the Select Committee developed into the instrument of discipline for all British traders and the only effective channel of communication with the Canton authorities. British merchants, chafing under Company rules, had been successful lobbying for the abolition of its monopoly, now saw the opportunities of unlicensed trade opening before them, and had hopes of shaking off most of the fetters on commerce, unaware of the Company’s failure of 1832 to open trading in other ports. Lord Napier (164) was sent out by the British Government to take over its functions as Superintendent of Trade;...

THE MOST ROMANTIC OF ALL spectacles was a tea clipper under full sail. When under the command of Captain Shamgar Slate (13) in 1857, the celebrated clipper Wizard was hailed enthusiastically as of the most noble ‘appearance, ‘alow and aloft’. An extreme clipper of 1,600 tons, she had been built at a cost of $95,000 for his firm, Slate & Co of New York, by the master Boston shipbuilder Samuel Hall. Her stern was round and richly gilt, and her figurehead a splendid oriental magician, one arm clasping his book of spells. The fastest trader seen in the China Sea,...

MACAO WAS THE HAVEN not only for the British, but for all the other foreigners who had to make their exodus from Canton at the end of each trading season: the members of the Danish, Dutch, French, and Swedish East India Companies, and for the independent American, Baltic States, Indian, Parsee and Spanish merchants. This community of foreign merchants and their families – despite the privations of a life far from home, the irregularity and staleness of the news from abroad, martyr to disease, hopes too often dashed by the high mortality rate, daily activities hazed and confused by restriction and...

THE PROFITS OF PRIVATE TRADE could be large, and the wealth of successful merchants supported a lifestyle of great ease. Most diarists have passed some comment on the opulence of life. Harriet Low frequently mentions a cohort of butlers and maids and other servants charged with making life easier. Up to 20 servants was not unusual for a Macao house kept by single men, a degree of aid offering the chance of entertainment on a generally noble enough scale. Residents dressed generally in fashion and in apparel fitting all occasions. Carriages were a rare sight in so confined a territory,...

AMONG THE MANY REVIEWS of the Company’s charters between its founding in 1600 and its dissolution in 1874, the review of 1813 was of particular significance to events in Macao. Apart from renewing the charter, the review extended the sovereignty of the British crown to include the Company’s East Indian territories, abolished the Company’s monopoly of trade with India, but not yet, for another 20 years, of its trade with China, and redefined the status and range of the churches it had established.

Under the provisions of the 1698 charter, the Company was required to found and maintain ecclesiastical establishments;...

OUR WORK ON EACH memorial was in three phases. The inscription was deciphered and inked in with Chinese brush, its stones were measured, and photographs were taken. Information for the biographical entries of the persons buried in the Old Cemetery and about their families and related companies, societies, services, and ships, was sought from newspapers of the period, from libraries, and from family records. All these findings were then collated and recorded.

RECORDING THE DESIGN of the memorials presented its problems. In the large and varied literature on British churchyard memorials there seems to be no generally accepted nomenclature. For...

EACH MEMORIAL HAS an entry in the next pages, consisting of its official list number and the full name, nationality, date of death, and age at death of the person commemorated (where known). Entries for 1 to 166 and 178 also provide either a photograph or transcript of the inscription, other notes about the person and any events and shipping recorded in the inscription (where information has been found), a description of its size and characteristics, a note on such variants as appear in the other listings, and references to the sources of immediate and further information. The source items...

TWENTY-THREE memorials are set into the wall dividing the upper terrace from the lower. All but one bear dates in the late 18th century and before the East India Company had acquired the grave-yard for burials and had ceased burying Company associates in the garden next door. Those here, numbered from 167 to 177 and from 179 to 189, were removed from their original resting places in the Meesenberg Hill beyond the walls of Catholic Macao, at a time when the hill was being levelled to provide fill for sea-from reclamation. Several others (41, 42, 43, 44, 58, 90 and...