The Tongking Gulf Through History

9. Chinese Merchants and Mariners in Nineteenth-Century Tongking

Chapter 9 Chinese Merchants and Mariners in Nineteenth-Century Tongking Vũ Ðu, ò, ng Luân and Nola Cooke In 2006, a leading Vietnamese economist observed in a Chinese newspaper that “Sino-Vietnamese trade is more frequent than domestic trade between northern and southern Vietnam.”1 As several chapters in this book have shown, this pattern of interregional economic interaction in the Tongking Gulf is a centuries-old phenomenon . This impulse to exchange and the economic complementarity on which it rested have helped interknit different parts of the gulf shores and hinterlands over centuries, and these innumerable transactions between local peoples have always resurfaced in the wider Tongking Gulf region whenever circumstances allowed , with or without official sanction. This chapter brings our horizontal view of this region to its conclusion at the start of the colonial era, when Western military intrusion into the gulf waters finally curbed the endemic, large-scale piracy and unregulated trade that had marked the region since the seventeenthcentury Ming-Qing transition. The chapter focuses on coastal and maritime exchanges in the last century of Vietnamese independence and draws its evidence largely from Vietnamese and Chinese archives or published primary sources, plus certain eyewitness Western accounts.2 South China’s Maritime Trade with Early Nineteenth-Century Tongking In the first decades of the nineteenth century, junk traffic between China and Southeast Asia continued to flourish.3 Sarasin Viraphol estimated the combined carrying capacity of Chinese and Southeast Asian junks around 1830 at 85,000 tons, while the English East India Company, in its last years as monopolist of European trade with China, was moving only about 30,000 tons.4 From the 1830s, however, economic relations between southern China and Southeast Asia began to change rapidly. First, the British free port of Singapore displaced Bangkok as Guangzhou’s major trading partner; then the advent of commercial steamships began a process that, by the middle of the century, would revolutionize the system that had regulated Guangzhou’s trade for nearly 150 years. Before the end of the century, steamships had invaded the inland waterways of China and dominated its long-haul maritime transport.5 Within a couple of decades of their first appearance in the 1830s, Chinese shipping companies were increasingly preferring to use these faster, more secure steamers, many of them leased in Hong Kong and thus British-flagged. In 1863, French officials in Saigon pointed to this trend to explain an apparent decline in the amount of Chinese junk shipping that year.6 Both of these important changes tended to cut the Tongking Gulf off from the most important international maritime transport routes. Singapore’s easy access from the new primary Vietnamese port of Saigon in far southern Vietnam made this port important commercially for the new Nguyễn dynasty, which had taken over the country in 1802.After the second king, Minh Mạng (r. 1820–41), decided to renew state-run trading expeditions to Southeast Asian ports in the 1820s, both official Vietnamese missions and illicit private traders were often seen plying the Singapore route and its surrounding waters.7 But although the Tongking Gulf could play no real role in this booming long-haul international maritime traffic, its waters continued to attract regional commerce involving southern Chinese junk merchants, coasting small traders, pirates, and other seafarers from both sides of the porous coastal frontier, as this chapter will show. Unfortunately, our only direct information for this interregional trade at the time is contradictory and undoubtedly inaccurate. There are two basic sources. One is the information about Tongking gathered from Chinese merchants in far southern Vietnam by English East India Company envoy John Crawfurd. He reported that, in the early 1820s, annual Chinese trade with Tongking averaged eighteen junks from Hainan Island, each of about 120 tons; six from Guangdong of about 120–150 tons each; seven from Amoy of about the same tonnage; and seven from Chaozhou of about 150 tons each. It totaled on average about thirtyeight largish or medium-sized junks carrying 5,000 tons. Crawfurd was also told that no really big junks (over 3,000 piculs, or 180 tons) could navigate upriver to Hanoi, although that was the location of the principal market. (Iioka’s chapter in this volume confirms that was also the case in the seventeenth century.) There 144 Vũ Ðu’òng Luân and Nola Cooke they unloaded...