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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
In the 1830s, American, British, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese ships were importing to China over 420,000 bushels of rice, collected mainly from Batavia, Manila, and, most importantly, Singapore, the transshipment port for much Siamese rice.91 SO popular was Siam rice that the Christian missionary Charles Gutzlaff in the 1830s noted that all the crew on Chinese junks took bags of it back to their families in China on return voyages from southeast Asia.92 Its taste, its price, and its sheer availability thus had made it an indispensable part of the diet of southeastern Chinese. And in the troubled years of the 1860s and 1870s, China is said to have annually imported from Siam over 10,000,000 bushels of rice, an exaggeration that makes the point even if it was no longer shipped by the Siam monarch, nobility, and their loyal Fujian merchant nobles on "Chinese" boats.

Any effort to estimate the volume of this Sino-Siam rice trade before the mid-nineteenth century encounters the shortage of comprehensive, reliable statistics. Also, the Chinese demand and the Siam supply varied from harvest to harvest. Thus, Chinese import of Siam rice sharply increased during the mid-eighteenth century, dipped in the 1760s and 1770s, and thereon surpassed its previous high levels by the early nineteenth century. It seems to me, then, that a total annual figure well in excess of 1,000,000 bushels would not have been unusual by no later than 1800. Compared to the 30 to 40 million bushels being shipped down the Yangtze in the early nineteenth century, this figure may seem small. But it, along with rice from the Yangtze Valley, was a staple in the diet of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of persons in Fujian and Guangdong.

The success of this trade marked not only a significant stage in the integration of the coastal economy of southeast China with the rice surplus and products of the Chinese-dominated commercial economies of southeast Asia. It also marked a change in the character of these overseas Chinese merchant circles themselves. At the risk of overgeneralizing about a group with important internal differences, it seems fair to say that the overseas Chinese merchants could achieve these links between China and southeast Asia due in large part to their success in assimilating with the indigenous societies of southeast Asia. Since very few, if any, Chinese women migrated to southeast Asia at this time, these Chinese settlers married local women and gave birth to sizable creolized communities throughout southeast Asia.95 Their return to China was perhaps impeded by the Spanish obligation that they convert to Christianity, just as their assimilation was aided by the Spanish requirement that they cut their queues and wear their hair like Europeans.96 By the mid-eighteenth century, the migrants from China had become far fewer, and from this time those in Manila were far outnumbered by the Mestizo community.

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