350 Boundaries and Beyond
Committee of the House of Commons in 1830, an occasion on which he
presented updated information on the subject.^7
Among other oft-used contemporary accounts are the works by
John Phipps, Edmund Roberts and an anonymous author that were
published in 1835, 1837 and 1838 respectively. The information
that they collected about commerce in China and the junk trade is
valuable for research purposes. Excited by the emerging opportunity
to open up the China trade and intensely interested in the British
mercantile communities, John Phipps endeavored to collect and
compile information that would beneβit British merchants engaged
in shipping as well as others connected with the trade of China and
India.^8 Edmund Roberts was America’s βirst envoy to the Far East, a
post to which he was appointed by President Andrew Jackson. He led
an American embassy to the eastern courts of Cochin China, Siam and
Muscat in the US sloop-of-war Peacock during the years 1832‒34. His
voyage was an effort to make up for the neglected state of American
commerce in the regions from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan. The
intention of the mission was, whenever practicable, to establish treaty
relations with the respective countries, “which would place American
commerce on a surer basis and on equality with that of the most favored
nations trading to those kingdoms”.^9 The third account was written by
one of the Englishmen residing in Canton on the eve of the βirst Sino-
British war generally known as the [First] Opium War (1840‒42). The
author had a dream of the China market with “an immense population of
eager traders, hard workers, and willing buyers”.^10
Documents and records collected as British Parliamentary Papers or
scattered among the bulky Foreign Ofβice βiles are extremely relevant,
- John Crawfurd’s testimony given on 25 March 1830; see “Third Report”, Report
from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Affairs of the East-
India Company, 1830, pp. 446‒73, copy from the University of California at Los
Angeles Digitized Library. I thank the kind assistance of Shengqi Shu in tracing
the depository of the document. - John Phipps, Practical Treatise on the China and Eastern Trade: Comprising
Commerce of Great Britain and India, particularly Bengal and Singapore, with
China and the Eastern Islands (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1835), in “The
Nineteenth Century Books on China” (Microβilm; Cambridge, 1995), “Preface”. - Edmund Roberts, Embassy to the Eastern Courts of Cochin China, Siam, and
Muscat (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1837), in “The Nineteenth Century
Books on China”, “Introduction”, pp. 5‒6. - Anon., “A Dissertation upon the Commerce of China”, in Nineteenth Century
China: Five Imperialist Perspectives, ed. Rhoads Murphey (Michigan Papers in
Chinese Studies, no.13, 1972), “Introduction”, pp. iii‒iv.
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