Advances and Archives in Early Sino-Western Relations: An Update

ADVANCES AND ARCHIVES IN EARLY SINO-WESTERN RELATIONS: AN UPDATE John E. Wills , Jr. Department of History University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA 90089-0034 In Volume 3, Number 2 (December 1974) of this journal, I published an article, "Early Sino-European Relations: Problems, Opportunities, and Archives", drawing on my own experiences in the field and on my brief investigations of various archives. In the nine years since I completed that article, I have managed to visit a few more archives and have seen some very encouraging signs of growth and maturity in scholarship in the field. In this article I will describe some of the recent advances and give supplementary information on archives, following the organization of my earlier article. By way of introduction, I would like to suggest a number of perspectives and approaches that have become clearer to me as I have followed work in this field. First, for many topics the "Chinese" end of our SinoWestern relations is the "maritime China" whose history I began to explore in my essay in Spence and Wills, From Ming to Ch ' ing (1979); we cannot understand these relations without some sense of the continuities and peculiarities of the history of this region. The regional history approach will continue to develop as we have more studies of local coastal areas— the Canton delta, Ch ' ao- chou, Chang-chou, and so on. The growing interest in China in local history and local sources and relics , on which see my report in CSWT 4:9 (June 19 83) on the Xiamen conferences in the summer of 19 82, should be of considerable value for such studies. This regional approach will be especially valuable if we remember to keep the overseas Chinese in focus as part of "maritime China." Their importance in the history of trade between China and European centers in Southeast Asia is well-known. But even for missionary history it is important to remember the connections among the Manila-based missionaries, Chinese converts residing in Manila, and convert communities in Fukien. Even formal diplomacy was influenced by overseas Chinese in the several cases when they became intermediaries, and not always reliable ones, for the Dutch. Second, it has become increasingly clear that there are a number of topics that are important for the study of early Sino-Western relations that cannot be fruitfully studied in a strictly Sino-Western framework. Overseas Chinese communities were enmeshed in complex relations with the indigenous populations as well as with European rulers and traders; these relations and institutions have to be seen whole, not just in their Sino-European dimension . Thus, for example, the position of the Chinese community in Manila has to be firmly set in a matrix of Spanish institutions, their application to the rule of the Filipino population, and the effects on all parties of the institutions and efforts of the Church. Trade networks involving Chinese and Europeans also were many-sided. and shifts in them frequently were caused by changes in which few or no Chinese were involved, such as those in the position of the Portuguese in Timor or the English in Bengal. The importance of avoiding a purely SinoWestern perspective is reinforced in a number of cases by the nature of the archival sources. If you go looking only for material related to China and the Chinese in the Filipinas section in Seville or one of the runs of general documentation on the Estado da India in Goa or Lisbon, you will find three to five usable documents for every one hundred documents you scan. If you also are working on two or three non-Chinese aspects of the history of that place or that empire, you not only will be developing your understanding of important contexts of Sino-Western relations but also will be getting much more value out of the tedious work of surveying runs of documents . Third, my own work in this field, and especially my cooperation with J. L. Cranmer-Byng on a chapter, "Trade and Diplomacy with Maritime Europe, 1644-c. 1800" for the Cambridge History of China, has convinced me that the various topics listed below are so inter-connected that...