Page 54

The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
     Clearly, this is speculation, but not groundless. Consider the sudden dependence of Fujian on Taiwan in the latter half of the eighteenth century, just at the moment when Siam's exports to China were severely disrupted by political turmoil and economic chaos.81 As Dr. Ch'en Kuo-tung's recent research has indicated, Taiwan regularly exported its rice for sale in Fujian from 1746. Rising to as high as 2,250,000 bushels in the late 1780s, these exports overwhelmingly fed a Fujian population not noticeably greater than it had been a few decades earlier. But these supplies were also uncertain and feel eventually by the 1830s to about 500,000 or 600,000 bushels.

     Meanwhile, as the import of Taiwan rice declined, there seems in the 1790s and through the nineteenth century a revival of the Siam rice trade, partly by Chinese and partly by Westerners. The Siam court's income from domestic taxation, according to the chronicles of the time, "did not amount to much," and its "greatest revenues in that era fame from the junk trade."83 Within its first 20 years, 1782 to 1802, this court sent to China 11 formal embassies, well in excess of the tribute trade's quota of just one ever three years. Also, each of these missions included, in addition to the three ships officially prescribed, another 10 laden down with Siam goods, especially rice and wood.84 Thus, as Dr. Viraphol has written of the Siam trade in the early nineteenth century, "Apart from the 20-odd junks owned by the court, nobility, and officials, Chinese residing there also owned a fleet of some 136 junks, 32 of which operated in the trade with China while 54 traded to other parts of Southeast Asia."85 As these figures suggest, the Chinese private share of the trade was ascendant, and it soon outstripped the monarch's mercantile undertakings in volume and profitability.86

     The comments of the English trader-diplomat John Crawford are very apposite here. Writing in the late 1810s, he observed: "I know nowhere that rice is so cheap as in Java, except in Siam, and here [in Siam] it is so exported... for third the price even of Java. A great deal of the rice of this country is therefore exported to China by the junks."87 Crawford also notes that the Java rice trade might get a 150 to 200% profit in Guangdong markets.88 The far cheaper Siam rice would have presumably reaped even greater harvests in the markets of Canton and Amoy. Captain Burney estimated the profits for the Siam king and his courtiers at 300% in 182689, and later sources say that by 1847, the Siamese nobility was making as much as a 320% profit in exporting its rice merely Singapore for transshipment on to China.90

Previous |49|50|51|52|53|54|55|56|57|58|59|Next