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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
By the 1770s the number of ships trading to southeast Asia from Fujian and Guangdong was not less than 110 a year.30 And by c. 1830 the total figure would double to more than 220.

      The figures on the profits accrued by this trade are even less clear and uniform than these figures on vessels, but they nonetheless strongly suggest the accumulation of great profit from this China trade. In late seventeenth century, Siam Chinese traders fetched at least a 50% profit on metal goods, as much as 60% on sweetmeats, and 100% on raw silk.32 In 1773 an official in Fujian estimated that the roughly 30 boats leaving Amoy that year were taking overseas cargo worth 600,000 to 1,000,000 ounces of silver and then returning with silver and cargo worth 3,000,000 ounces of silver.33 If these profit levels persisted, then the more than doubling of the number of Chinese overseas boats by the 1750s would have led to very high profits flowing into China.

     One reason for this high profit level was its high level of risk. Piracy was still a problem, though less so for most of the eighteenth century than the nineteenth.34 More trouble came from storms. For instance, in 1728 a fifth of the boats returning to Amoy from the "South Seas" had suffered great or total damage.35 As their size and speed had been restricted by a government anxious to keep them smaller and slower than its own boats, they were, in the view of the famous eighteenth century scholar Zhao Yi, less sturdy and speedy than Western boats.

     This trade at all four overseas maritime customs ports was overwhelmingly in the hands of Fujian traders. In Ningbo, four Fujian merchants were among the eight merchants appointed in 1728 as principal merchants to run the Japan trade and act as guarantor for the Chinese merchants leaving for Japan.37 In Canton, where more than 1,000 Quanzhou and Zhangzhou merchants were established in the early eighteenth century, roughly 80% of the merchants were from Fujian, mainly from Quanzhou.38 In Shanghai they controlled the foreign shipping, as the local people were not active in seafaring39, while in the Portuguese colony of Macao they constituted the largest Chinese merchant group.40 Their influence stretched into the domestic trade, both coastal and interior. Of the 109 ships registered as making 143 visits to Tientsin between 1717 and 1732, 96% were owned by Fujian men; at least several hundred from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou lived there at this time.42 And in inland China's commercial capital of Suzhou, by 1780 they accounted for half of the non-local merchants.

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