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Chusan

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by Liam D'Arcy-Brown


  We will never know for certain precisely when it was that the name ‘Chusan’ was first spoken on English shores, nor even what English tongues made of it, for the word was at first set down in a bewildering variety of ways by people naturally unaccustomed to the Chinese language. Most likely, at some time during the early 1500s stories of a temperate island with good anchorages percolated back from the China seas amongst Portuguese cargoes of spice and silk. Yet by the time those cargoes reached London, Chusan would have been barely a whisper, its location merging imperceptibly into rumours of exotic lands.

  The exact reasons why, as the China trade burgeoned in the late 1600s, the East India Company set its sights upon opening a ‘factory’ on Chusan rather than elsewhere in the province of Zhejiang are something of a mystery. After all, the much larger river port of Ningbo, lying only forty miles to the west, had been visited by English vessels as early as 1683. Yet Chusan’s deep, sheltered harbour certainly made it desirable, as did its insular location, equidistant as it was from the provincial capital Hangzhou and the mouth of the Yangtze, and just a few days’ sail from the outlying islands of Japan. We can at least be sure that hopes for a lucrative trade on Chusan must have been high: in the 1650s, atlases of the Chinese Empire had become available in Europe, compiled by missionaries such as the Jesuit Martino Martini. Chusan had appeared as a vast island (almost the twin of Taiwan, in fact, though Taiwan is seventy times larger), and it was said to be a potent kingdom with three score and ten cities upon it. More importantly, the province of Zhejiang was understood to be the ultimate source of much of the teas and silks which the Company was buying in Canton, hundreds of miles to the south. By tapping into markets closer to their origins, it was hoped that the overland transit duties paid to the imperial exchequer might be avoided, and ladings got more cheaply as a result. Besides, at those more northerly latitudes people might be more eager than their tropical compatriots to buy the warm, English woollens for which the Company sought a market. [2]

  And so it was in March of 1699 that the East India Company for the very first time, eager to test the market at untried northerly ports, handed to one Mr Allen Catchpoole a commission to act as King William III’s consul-general to the Empire of China. His trade mission was to be England’s first official contact with the Chinese. A council was appointed, consisting of Catchpoole and four merchants — Henry Rouse, John Ridges, Robert Master, and a man named Solomon Loyd who had learned Chinese while trading with Taiwan — accompanied by five secretaries, five manservants, the Reverend James Pound, and a Scottish physician named James Cunningham. Late in the year 1700, almost a year after setting sail and having called at Borneo to buy a lading of pepper to sell to the Chinese, the ship Eaton was piloted into Chusan. Already at anchor in anticipation of Catchpoole’s arrival were two Company vessels, the Trumball and the Macclesfield. Like all Company vessels, they held large quantities of silver coin — Spanish ‘pieces of eight’, Mexican dollars, Venetian duccatoons and French crowns — and woollen broadcloth from England. They saluted the Eaton with cannon, an act which enraged the Chinese who by tradition held that the firing of any levelled gun, even when unloaded, was an act of aggression. That simple misunderstanding would set the tone for the Company’s entire venture on Chusan. [3]

  At first sight the city of Tinghae looked promising as a place of trade, but the English were frustrated to find that descriptions of the island had been somewhat exaggerated: the potent kingdom proved to have been the besieged refuge of a Ming prince whose entire population had been slaughtered when the conquering Manchus had overwhelmed him. Not a single building or mulberry tree, it was said, had been left standing. For a quarter of a century the Manchus had enforced their ban on shipping here, driving the entire coastal population inland to deny all succour to the last of the Ming loyalists. Earthen walls had been raised, and boundary stones set up, beyond which every last settlement was put to the torch and transgressors executed. For years, the seas around Chusan had been abandoned to pirates. At Catchpoole’s arrival, barely a decade had passed since Tinghae had been rebuilt. The stonework of its city walls had only recently been completed, and the houses within them were as yet poor, the three or four thousand settlers there striking James Cunningham, physician to the factory, as little more than ‘beggarlie’. And as for Chusan’s supposed three score and ten cities, well, in truth there was but Tinghae and a scattering of hamlets.

  Catchpoole and his council took up residence in a substantial building on the waterfront a short distance south of the city. Specially constructed for them in wood and whitewashed plaster, it consisted of fifteen handsome rooms in one, long row, a two-hundred-foot verandah running their length. Fitted out now to their satisfaction according to English tastes, we might surmise that they were soon indistinguishable from the home of any eighteenth-century gentleman back in London. Below these residential quarters were the warehouses, and across a yard from these stood a range of outhouses. An acre and a half of land, defined on its seaward side by stone embankments, provided a wharf for the Company’s ships, while a creek behind the outhouses made landing cargoes easy. From a surviving sketch in a ship’s journal it looks neat and well-built. The islanders took to calling it Hongmaoguan, the Red Hair Hall. [4]

  It would be fair to say that neither the Chinese nor the English were particularly clear in their own minds about how trade ought to be conducted. This was, after all, the first time that English ships had dropped anchor at Chusan, and the mandarins who resided there, though keen to profit from the Company’s presence, had scant experience of Europeans. Clearly anxious to make his guests feel at ease, Chusan’s military commander, General Lan Li, sent them presents (there were even a live deer and a large carp to celebrate King William’s birthday), despatched a guard to the factory to ensure that curious locals did not disturb their Sunday prayers, and invited them to a banquet served in what he mistakenly believed to be the English style. When this was brought in, it consisted of boiled and roast meats — pork, venison, bacon, whole pigs, geese and more. The servants knelt to disjoint the carcasses with their bare hands but with little decorum:

  Having cut the flesh into small pieces from the bones, the same was brought on a plate and thrown into a bowl upon the table, one sort of meat after another, but all put into the same bowl, which we took out with Chop-sticks and dipped into sauces lying on the table, eating the same without bread.

  The whole affair was sufficient, the English recalled, to turn a weak stomach. [5]

  The island’s civil magistrate Mu Sui, thankfully, was more knowledgeable than his military counterpart in culinary matters, and when it was his turn to feast the English he even managed to procure knives and forks, plates, napkins, bread, ‘and other things in very good order suitable to the English Eating.’ This first course having ended, the rest of the dinner was served in the Chinese fashion, accompanied all the while by a play, which the English considered very dull and noisy. Catchpoole in return feasted General Lan. As Chusan’s more senior mandarin — he outranked magistrate Mu Sui — it was in Lan’s gift to allow the English to live and work there, and it was essential to win him over. The Red Hair Hall had been built as his personal investment in the East India Company’s success, and with his superiors expecting their palms to be greased it was important that Lan see a good return. Besides, as he explained to Catchpoole, he was personally responsible for the good behaviour of the English while they were in Chusan, and he could expect to lose his position — or worse — if he could not control them. [6]

  Once the mutual flattery had been concluded, trade talks began in earnest. Catchpoole was an experienced Company agent, and from time spent in the great Bengali trading centre of Cossimbazar he must have understood the importance of following local custom and cultivating powerful contacts. Kneeling on the floor as Chinese protocol required, he was granted an official audience with General Lan. Despite Lan’s honied words (‘I am sorry,’ he would say of the English, ‘that I had not the happine
ss of a more early acquaintance with so worthy a people’), Catchpoole began to realise that navigating a safe path through a maze of vested interests would be a treacherous matter. The English found themselves at the bottom of a pyramid of kickbacks and bribes, for an official posting for humble, county-level mandarins such as Lan would last just five or ten years before the emperor informed them that they were to be moved elsewhere, and they were fully expected to feather their nests for a comfortable retirement while they had the chance. Lan was duty bound to pay his superior officer, the military commander of Zhejiang, a cut of any money he squeezed from his official roles, and above this man was Zhejiang’s provincial governor, and above him a governor-general…. Chusan’s civil magistrate Mu Sui, too, had already been in the post for five years and must have been keen to grasp such a rare opportunity to provide for his future. And above Mu Sui, again, was the local prefect residing in Ningbo, and above him a powerful circuit intendant, each breathing down the other’s neck for a cut of the East India Company’s silver [7]

  So if the Company had naïvely hoped that with increasing distance from Canton it might find more profitable markets, it was simply to be disappointed. For all an English consul was worth in Chinese eyes, Catchpoole might as well have been a Chinese fisherman turning up at Dover claiming the right to negotiate with King William himself. Any hopes he had harboured of encountering an enlightened and just bureaucracy in a famed Celestial Empire rapidly evaporated. For a start, General Lan would allow none but his own merchants to trade with the Company, all others being prohibited on pain of the most severe punishment. One man, from whom the Company had privately agreed to buy 2,000 silk fans and thirty-six piculs of tea, was soon to face being beaten to death with bamboo rods if he dealt any longer with the English. Lan, though, was not to be outmanoeuvred, and he flew into a foaming rage when told in direct terms that the English saw through these wiles. ‘Thus much for the general character of the Chinese functionaries here,’ observed Catchpoole wryly. [8]

  Catchpoole presented Lan with a list of the conditions under which the Company wished to trade. Most were concerned with the details of commerce and duties and could be negotiated, but others proved to be quite out of the question: the English could not build houses for themselves, nor travel as they pleased; sailors who broke Chinese law were to be answerable to Chinese justice; Catchpoole was not at liberty to engage linguists of his own — men like Solomon Loyd — but had to rely on those provided by General Lan; there would be no overturning of the regulation requiring that English ships land their gunpowder and sails as signs of goodwill, nor would a cemetery be provided for all the Englishmen who would inevitably die while at anchor, and Lan would not stop the islanders selling sailors samshoo, the deceptively strong spirit for which Tinghae was famed. Finally, it went without saying that Englishmen would not be permitted to meet the island’s mandarins as equals — they would have to go on sitting before them upon a carpet to show their inferiority. In return for an official ‘chop’ — a stamped certificate allowing the Company to trade — the English agreed after some weeks of negotiation to pay General Lan a 2% tariff on everything they bought and sold, on top of a tax based on the dimensions of their ships. This ‘measurage’ was noticeably lower on Chusan than it would have been at the going rate in Canton, but this was scant comfort when compared to Lan’s insistence that two-thirds of all the bills owing to his merchants were to be paid in silver and just one-third in woollen broadcloth and trinkets, the very goods the English most wished to sell. [9]

  Catchpoole’s hope that silver would be less in demand on Chusan than at Canton proved elusive for good reason: silver was the medium in which Zhejiang, just like Canton, paid its taxes to the emperor, while the Chinese simply did not wish to wear wool. Anyone who has spent time in China’s tropics will understand why wool is not the most sought-after material there; yet even in Chusan, which in winter is bitterly cold despite lying at the same latitude as Cairo, the population proved far from eager to turn its back upon generations of tradition and cast off its homespun cottons. In any case, merchants familiar with the finest silks from Suzhou and Hangzhou were unimpressed with anything Kentish weavers had to offer. And as for the products of England’s burgeoning workshops — mirrors, swords, guns and clocks, and objects of amber, coral and crystal — the Chinese had little need or interest.

  Catchpoole was quickly learning that trading on Chusan would require a great deal of patience and silver, but as 1700 drew to a close the first of his ships did at least sail for England with a rich cargo. Despite Lan’s cornering the market and his thirst for precious metal, consumers back home would soon be wearing silks and drinking tea from porcelain cups, all loaded in Tinghae harbour. Business seemed to be going rather smoothly, all things considered. So when one day General Lan summoned Catchpoole to tell him that their agreement was only a temporary measure, Catchpoole realised he had been misled; if the English wished to reside permanently in the Red Hair Hall, he was informed, they would need to send an embassy begging the emperor’s personal favour and bringing his majesty £10,000 in gifts. Any chop allowing the Company to trade on Chusan, it dawned upon Catchpoole, would have to be renegotiated with each new vessel, just as in Canton. This was precisely the stifling bureaucracy the Company had come to Chusan in the hope of escaping. Worse, General Lan’s merchants were becoming capricious to the point of sheer dishonesty, seemingly changing the terms of each contract according to whim and demanding money to guarantee the timely delivery of their goods. This was decidedly unlike home, where the commercial classes could appeal to an impartial court to decide their disputes. Unfamiliar with the intricacies of silk-weaving and tea production, and bemused both by Chinese obligations of gift-giving and by the relationship between Chusan’s mandarins and their superiors on the mainland, Catchpoole saw only disingenuous hurdles placed in his path: ‘There is no faith in these Chinamen,’ he railed. ‘We have chops, grants and articles, but they keep none of them but what they please.’ [10]

  Mr Robert Douglas, Catchpoole’s chief ‘supercargo’ (the man ultimately responsible for buying and selling in Chusan on behalf of the Company), was equally damning:

  The many troubles and vexations we have mett with from these subtile Chineese — whose principalls allow them to cheat, and their dayly practise therin have made them dextrus at it — I am not able to expresse at this time; and however easie others may have represented the trade of China, neither I nor my assistants have found it so, for every day produces new troubles.

  As spring gave way to a hot summer, those troubles only seemed to worsen. General Lan Li was promoted to the command of distant Tianjin, and his successor General Shi Shipiao proved to be a man of rash temperament. When General Shi’s appointed merchants proved unable to deliver great quantities of tea and silk that had already been paid for, the English threatened to cut their losses, weigh anchor, and leave. The prospect of watching the goose that laid the golden eggs paddling out of harbour seemed to invigorate General Shi, and he gave assurances of prompt delivery. But of course, in exchange for such guarantees, the Company would now be obliged to pay three quarters of its bills in silver and just one quarter in woollen broadcloth…. It was an even worse deal than before, but if Catchpoole wanted to build a profitable market on Chusan he had little choice but to agree. By the end of the year another ship full of luxury goods had sailed for home and contracts for more had been exchanged. [11]

  Yet it must have come as scant surprise to Catchpoole when, as completion on that lading neared, the same old demands resurfaced. Days of fraught talks in the cold of winter ended with the English squeezed of yet more cash, not to mention 24 lbs of silver as cumshaw, a gift for General Shi’s elderly mother. Civil magistrate Mu Sui, angered and insulted that the Company was sidelining him in its business dealings, harangued Catchpoole and his merchants over what a powerful man he was and demanded they console him with silver. The English refused, and amid a flurry of accusations and recriminations were
ordered by an enraged Mu Sui to leave Chusan in the name of the Kangxi Emperor. There was no counterargument to this ultimate method of expulsion, and little time to reship all the goods stored at the Red Hair Hall. Soon the wharf was a scene of confusion as personal possessions and merchandise were taken aboard. In the midst of the chaos a mob broke down the door to the Red Hair Hall and began to loot it. Escaping to the relative safety of their ships in the harbour, the English wrote to London that same day recommending that the Company refrain from ever again sending ships to Chusan: even a consul-general with a commission from King William himself had no status on this hateful island. They had lost some £20,000 in the venture, and could only lament the troubles that had dogged them ever since they had first set eyes on Chusan, ‘having been scarce a day free from insults, impositions or hardships.’ Indignant at his treatment, Catchpoole sailed for Jakarta. [12]

  And there he resided at the pleasure of its Dutch rulers until, one summer’s day in 1702, he decided to set a course once more for Chusan. A less tenacious man might have thought better of it, but Catchpoole’s expulsion had benefited neither the East India Company nor General Shi nor Mu Sui, and Catchpoole was welcomed back with smiling reassurances of fair treatment. Within the month, another Company ship had sailed laden for home. But again, predictably by now though no less disappointingly for that, the situation deteriorated. The unexpected arrival of merchants acting for no less a personage than the future emperor of China provoked dismay: knowing full well that they could expect to be bled of any profit or severely punished for standing in their way, the local merchants simply vanished. [13]

  ‘China is all trouble,’ wrote Catchpoole in sheer frustration. ‘They will deliver no goods but what they please; no force can be used against them; and for the arguments of justice and reason, they laugh at us.’ Delays again grew, and prices rose. When the provincial inspector of customs, a mandarin of great authority on the Zhejiang coast, waded in, demanding a third of a ton of silver in unexpected taxes and duties, this was as much as Catchpoole could bear. He began to reship his stock with a view to leaving, only to be placed under house-arrest in a Red Hair Hall now flooded with Chinese soldiers. Liberty for His Britannic Majesty’s Consul-General to China came only with what seemed little short of a ransom demand — 500 lbs of silver — while the price of freedom to go on trading was an agreement that nine-tenths of all future contracts be paid in silver coin. These were devastating terms for a man who had dreamed of simply swapping English woollens for Chinese silks! [14]

 

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