The disadvantages under which the native trade is now carried on have become so burdensome as manifestly to curtail it, greatly to the loss and injury of the Chinese population, enhancing the price of all the common articles of consumption: any measures calculated, therefore, to exempt their commerce from the danger, delay, and loss attending the transport of valuable produce by junks must ultimately prove a great boon of permanent value, though at first it may seem the reverse.
In a political point of view the transfer of the more valuable portion of their junk trade to foreign bottoms is highly desirable, as tending more than any measures of Government to improve our position by impressing the Chinese people and rulers with a sense of dependence upon the nations of the West for great and material advantages, and thus rebuking effectually the pride and arrogance which lie at the root of all their hostility to foreigners.
In a commercial sense the direct advantage would consist in the profitable employment of foreign shipping to a greater extent: it would also assist the development of the resources of the five ports—more especially those which hitherto have done little foreign trade. I have entered into some details to show how the carrying trade may work such results, particularly in reference to sugar, which promises to pave the way at this port to large shipments in this and other articles for the Chinese.
A more effective blow will be given to piracy on the coast by a partial transfer of the more valuable freights to foreign vessels than by any measures of repression which either Government can carry out, for piracy will, in fact, cease to be profitable....
A further extension of the trade between our Australian settlements and China, and our colonies in the Straits with both, may follow as a natural result of any successful efforts in this direction,—the addition of a large bulky article of regular consumption like sugar alone sufficing to remove a great difficulty in the way of a Straits trade....
If this can be counted upon, I think it may safely be predicated that at no distant period a large and profitable employment for foreign shipping will be found here totally exclusive of the trade with Europe.
It has been said with regard to tea that the quantity sold for export is but the overflow of what is produced for native consumption, and to silk the same observation would apply. Essentially a consuming country, it is the surplus of these two articles that China has been able to afford which has constituted the staple of export trade from first to last. It is an interesting question whether there may not be surpluses of some other Chinese products to be similarly drawn upon. If the foreign trade has been distinguished by its simplicity, being confined to a very few standard commodities, such cannot be predicated of the native trade, which is of a most miscellaneous character. It is impossible to give any statistical account of the coast and inland traffic of China. Any estimate of it would be scarcely more satisfactory than those which are so loosely made of the population. In the early days, when the ports opened by the treaty of 1842 were still new ports, great pains were taken by the consuls to collect all the information they could respecting purely Chinese commerce, which they not unnaturally regarded as the source whence the material of an expanded foreign trade might in future be drawn. Especially was this the case at Foochow under the consulship of Mr Alcock and the assistantship of his energetic interpreter, Parkes. We find, for instance, among the returns compiled by that industrious officer of three months' trading in 1846, the quantities and valuations of over fifty articles of import and as many of export given in great detail: imports in 592 junks of 55,000 tons, and of exports in 238 junks of 22,000 tons. Of the sea-going junks he gives an interesting summary, distinguishing the ports with which they traded and their tonnage, with short abstracts of the cargoes carried. These amounted for the year to 1678 arrivals from twenty different places, and 1310 departures for twenty-four places; and this at a port of which the consul wrote in 1847, "No prospect of a British or other foreign trade at this port is apparent in the very remotest degree." Every traveller in every part of China is astonished at the quantity and variety of the merchandise which is constantly on the move. It is this that inspires confidence in the boundless potentialities of Chinese commerce, which seems only waiting for the link of connection between the resources of the empire and the enterprise of the Western world.
Besides the sea-borne trade of which it was possible to make these approximate estimates, there is always in China an immense inland trade; and at the time when piracy was rampant on the coast, and before the aid of foreign ships and steamers was obtained, all the goods whose value enabled them to pay the cost of carriage were conveyed by the inland routes, often indeed from one seaport to another, as, for instance, between Canton and Foochow, Ningpo, Shanghai, &c.; and it is still by the interior channels that much of the trade is done between Shanghai and the provinces to the north of it, which would appear, geographically speaking, to be more accessible from their own seaports.
The relation of the Government to the inter-provincial trade is, in general terms, that of a capricious tax-gatherer, laying such burdens on merchandise as it is found able and willing to bear. The arbitrary impositions of the officials are, however, tempered by the genius of evasion on the part of the Chinese merchant, and by mutual concession a modus vivendi is easily maintained between them.
The item of trade in which Government comes into most direct relation with the trader is the article salt, which is produced all along the sea-coast, and is likewise obtained from wells in the western provinces. Like many other Governments, the Chinese have long treated salt as a Government monopoly. As the manner in which this is carried out illustrates in several points the ideas that lie at the root of Chinese administration, some notes on the subject made by Parkes at Foochow in 1846, and printed in an appendix to this volume, may still be of interest.[26]