A key factor in this Chinese domination for the first 40 years of Qing rule were the pirate fleets of Cheng Chenggong. Throughout the 1650s, they completely dominated the China-Japan trade. For instance, in 1654, 41 of the 56 Chinese boats which landed at Nagasaki came from Zheng's home port in Fukien. In 1658, 28 of the 47 Chinese ships in Nagasaki had come at his orders. When the Zhengs captured Taiwan from the Dutch and the Qing imposed its coastal ban in 1661, this dominance on the Japan trade was all but locked up. In 1677, all but two of the 29 Chinese ships trading in Nagasaki were from his fleet. Only with his defeat at the hands of the Qing did he lose this monopoly and then the end of the Qing ban on maritime trade in 1684 allowed other Chinese ships, both from the mainland and elsewhere in East Asia, to fill the gap. So great was the Chinese merchant's domination of Japan's foreign trade that the Japanese historian Nazumi Yoko has recently concluded that "from 1670 onwards Chinese ships ruled the waves in East Asia." Certainly, as the Japanese expert on this trade Iwao Seiichi, claims, "Chinese ships always outstripped Dutch ships in trade with Japan at Nagasaki." Even their shipment of Japanese copper exports surpassed Dutch cargoes from the early 1680s and by 1689 were three times greater.

     If that was the case in northeast Asia, then what was the fate of Chinese mainland and overseas Chinese traders in southeast Asia, where the Dutch were busy setting up their colony in Batavia? It is here where the evidence is less informative. But two factors need to be recalled. First, Chinese imports during the late seventeenth century were greatly restricted by the overseas ban. But many Chinese ships were already overseas in southeast Asia. In comparison to earlier periods, they in fact were settling there in greater numbers and engaged in not just their famous secret society smuggling back to China but also the intra-southeast Asian trade they came to know and at times dominate. Second, the Chinese economy itself was experiencing a long depression in the very period which had originated at the time of the overseas ban was enforced and which was intensified by the eventual reduction of the Japanese silver exports the Chinese economy had grown so dependent on. Only in the late 1690s did economic recovery come to south China, when the Qing defeat of the pirate Zheng Chenggong led to a lifting of the overseas ban and when China began to import far more Japanese copper than silver. The Chinese government as I mentioned in my first lecture, would seek to establish a more sensible currency system, based as much as possible on domestic resources of copper from Yunnan.