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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
     Chinese trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century was conducted through both the tribute trade and the junk trade. Much past research has dealt with the former, and too little with the latter, mainly because much of China's troubles with the West in the nineteenth century stemmed from conflicts over this type of tribute trade and because the institutions engaged in this trade have left numerous records.15 The junk trade, which sometimes accompanied this tribute trade but often was separately carried out by Chinese merchants themselves, has only recently begun to attract the attention it merits.16 Its records are far fewer and more scattered. Also, it involved nations who, instead of threatening China, actually allowed or supported Chinese merchants to secure an indispensable role in Asian trade under the tribute system and eventually dominate commerce throughout all of southeast Asia.

     Thus, whereas Western traders had regularly secured political and military support from their governments and even Chinese peasants had often received tax breaks from the Qing government for opening up land on the barren plains of the northwest, the overseas Chinese traders and the foreign success of the junk trade usually received little but distrust from their government.17 At the court, they were widely considered little more than pirates, smugglers, and criminals selling off the nation's patrimony of precious metals, hardwoods, rice, and boats. Thus, for two and a half decades, from 1661 to 1684, and from 1717 to 1727, they were banned from going abroad, as in the Ming. And when the court eventually tolerated the overseas trade due to repeated local insistence on the importance of this trade for tax revenues and jobs18, both the court and local officials conspired to channel all this trade to its direct supervision and skim off a fair portion of its profits for their personal use.19 Just as the Imperial Household relied increasingly on a share of the overseas trade, so did many Manchu and Chinese officials appointed to supervise the trade to turn to it for their private income.20 Hence, the Qing established only four ports that overseas boats had to sail to and from-Canton and Amoy from 1684 and Shanghai and Ningpo from 1685. And from 1757 it ordered that all overseas trade be conducted at only one port, Canton.

     Moreover, the Qing concocted a labyrinth of rules for Chinese maritime trade which would have warmed the heart of any bureaucrat. The size of the boats and their crews, their destinations, the amount of rice in their holds, the number of masts on their decks, and the objects they could trade were just a few of the matters the government felt free to regulate.

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