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57 THREE The Northeast Asian Trade Network, the Manchu Procommerce Tradition, and the 1684 Open-Door Trade Policy I n May 1685, the Kangxi emperor invited his court officials to debate the merits of allowing bannermen to trade overseas. A number of these officials were themselves bannermen, and with Mingju as their leader and spokesman they responded with the suggestion that Manchus be allowed to engage in maritime trade.1 This demonstrates that the banner elite shared Kangxi’s open policy toward maritime trade.Furthermore,when we consider the history of the relationship between the banner elite and overseas trade, we find that before and after 1684 more than a few leading bannermen had engaged in overseas trade. In 1658, for example, a bannerman named Mahu violated the maritime trade ban that had been issued shortly before.2 In the 1690s, imperial princes collaborated with English merchants in Canton— engaging indirectly in overseas trade.3 In 1740, the court’s banner officials of Manchu origin unanimously called for perpetuating the policy of permitting seagoing trade with Southeast Asia.4 It is evident that, not long after entering China in 1644, bannermen embraced maritime trade.This suggests a question: why did the banner elite, most of whom lived along the commercially underdeveloped northern frontier and had no maritime experience, accept the open trade policy so readily? Three tenets had once impeded a proper understanding of this question in the early twentieth century.The first is that the Manchu ruling class could not possibly understand the importance of maritime trade because it was a primitive tribe from China’s commercially underdeveloped northern frontier; some have maintained that the Manchus scorned maritime trade. The second is that the Manchu court, an alien regime, always saw overseas trade as a possible channel for collusion between the seditious Han Chinese and foreign enemies of the Manchus; it suppressed maritime trade in order to suppress potential rebellions. The third tenet is that after eliminating the Ming loyalists,the Qing court devoted great efforts and personnel to addressing unrest in central Asia, neglecting maritime affairs by default. Such views painted a picture of Qing rulers in a passive or,at worst,defensive attitude toward maritime Asia. In sum, naïveté, paranoia, and the primacy of central Asia drove the Qing court to maintain reactionary Ming trade 58 Chapter 3 policies.5 In the meantime, Japanese scholars made a pioneering contribution to the study of the commercial life of the Jurchens in the pre- and early Qing periods.6 Since 1970, several Western scholars have written about Manchuria before and during the Qing. Morris Rossabi has explored the commercial relationships between the Jurchens and their neighbors during the Yuan and Ming. Robert Lee has dealt with the history of Manchuria during the Qing, but his focus is on Sinicization.7 Christopher Isett, by contrast, has looked at trade in Manchuria, particularly the activities of Han Chinese merchants in Manchuria in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and imperial policy toward them.8 Historians interested in both early Qing history and the formation of Manchu identity—Jonathan Spence, Frederic Wakeman, Pamela Crossley, and Mark Elliott—have investigated the commercial life of the Jurchens and the banner elite in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.9 Gertrude Li has examined trade by the Jurchens and Manchus with Ming China and Korea.10 However, few of these studies trace the commercial life of the Jurchens and Manchus over different periods, and fewer still offer a systematic and contextualized discussion. In this regard, more has been done by Chinese and Japanese scholars . Through an exhaustive study of Korean archives, Zhang Cunwu and Liu Jiaju have detailed the trade relations between Qing China and Chosŏn Korea between 1637 and 1894. Another pioneer is Luan Fan, the first scholar to put the economic life of the Jurchen people in the wider context of the triangular trade between Korea, China, and the Jurchens in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Yang Yulian has analyzed the importance of the horse trade for the Jurchens and Manchus. Ejima Hisao and Kawachi Yoshihiro have explored in detail the sable trade and tributary trade between the Jurchens and Ming China.11 These studies have done much to advance our understanding, but none explores the role that the banner elite and leading Manchus had in making and executing the 1684 open trade policy.In my view, the topic can be understood only by being set in the far longer history of Jurchen...

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