44 Boundaries and Beyond
Other observations that vividly depict the βlourishing condition of
the Chinese economy have been made by Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo
Giraldez who highlight the inβlow of silver. As Flynn and Giraldez indicate,
China was the most signiβicant end-market customer for the silver output
of Peru and Mexico in Latin America that began in the 1570s, initiating
a trade on the global level. Another supplier in the late sixteenth and
the seventeenth centuries was Japan. This should come as no surprise
since in the Ming period China contained over a quarter of the world’s
population and it was “the center of the largest tribute/trade system
in the world”,^155 continue Flynn and Giraldez. Andre Gunder Frank has
also provided a very detailed discussion of the silver inβlow into Asia in
general and China and India in particular.^156
Chinese Shipping Trade Achieving Supremacy in the “Long”
Eighteenth Century
Expanding their earlier achievements, after maritime trade was legally
sanctioned again by the Qing court, the South Fujianese (minnan) people
assiduously consolidated their strength on two fronts. Along the China
coast, the South Fujianese were unquestionably the leading group in the
long-distance trade. Their junks traded southward from Amoy to Canton
and northward to Ningbo, Soochow, Kiaochow, Tianjin and Jinzhou.
Crossing the Taiwan Straits, their junks enjoyed an unchallenged position
in the shipping between coastal China and Taiwan. In the Nanhai region,
for centuries the South Fujianese had been the leading contenders in the
βield of sea trade. When the Yue (Teochiu) people from Changlim in east
Guangdong joined them in the seafaring business in the Nanhai in the
later decades of the eighteenth century, the Min-Yue junk trade was an
unquestionable shipping force in the region. They were omnipresent
in the Nanhai, not only visiting the main ports of Bangkok, Batavia and
Singapore, after it had been established as a British trading station in
1819, but also penetrating into many remote and feeder ports of the
region. Very soon, the Teochiu junks managed to assume the leading role
in the Siamese-Sino junk trade. As the eyewitness John Crawfurd conβirms
in his book published in 1820, during this time Chinese trading junks
- Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, “Arbitrage, China, and World Trade in the
Early Modern Period”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
38, 4 (Nov. 1995): 429–30. - Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), pp. 143–9.
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