Expanding Possibilities 403
cost of ship construction was highest at the port of Amoy and lowest
in Siam. A 476-ton junk built in Amoy, Changlim or in Siam cost 21,000
dollars, 16,000 dollars and 7,400 dollars respectively.^193 Moreover, “[the]
junks built in Siam are a superior class of vessels, the planks and upper
works being invariably of teak”.^194 As a matter of course, not only did the
shipping industry of Siam beat its competitors in China, it also triggered
the migration to Siam of the Chinese junk construction industry, bringing
with it its skilled workers. As early as the late eighteenth century,
“[v]irtually all the ships in the [Sino-Siamese] trade including a large
number of vessels engaged in China’s external trade were built in Siam”.^195
On shipbuilding in Siam, T’ien Ju-k’ang makes the following remarks:
Around 1821, there were already one hundred and thirty-six junks
being constructed with capital put up by the overseas Chinese in
Siam. Eighty-two of these junks engaged in trade between Siam
and China, and another βifty-four traded between Siam and other
Southeast Asian ports in Vietnam, Malaya and Java.... The eighty-
two vessels trading to China were nearly all manned by overseas
Chinese sailors. With the exception of a few ships that employed
both the Chinese and Siamese seamen, the crews of the rest of
the βifty-four junks trading in the Malay waters were all overseas
Chinese seamen.^196
Of the Bangkok junks around 1820, the Siamese king and local dignitaries
owned about 20 of them. The Siamese kings also possessed junks of
their own in the southern ports. In Bangkok, at this moment the Teochiu
(Chaozhou) people were already in a controlling position in trade and
shipping, although the Fujianese still had a role to play in the southern
ports outside Bangkok, such as Songkla and Ligor. The majority of the
latter merchant group traded to Amoy.^197
The rapid development of the regionalized shipping can be attributed
to the Fujianese and Chaozhou settlers.^198 By the early nineteenth
century, trading junks, especially those in the Sino-Siamese trade,
increasingly set sail from the home ports in the region rather than in
China. Among the 20 junks anchored in Singapore harbor in 1820, two
- John Phipps, Practical Treatise on the China and Eastern Trade, p. 205.
- Ibid., p. 205.
- Sarasin Viraphoy, Tribute and Proϔit, p. 180.
- T’ien Ju-k’ang, “Shiqi shiji zhi shijiu shiji zhongye zhongguo fanchuan”, p. 15.
- Sarasin Viraphol, Tribute and Proϔit, pp. 186‒7.
- Anthony Reid and Radin Fernando, “Shipping in Melaka and Singapore as an
Index of Growth, 1760‒1840”, South Asia 195, suppl. 1 (1966): 59‒84.