The British Presence in Macau, 1635–1793

Conclusion

131 At the end of the eighteenth century, Britain took on the role of a mighty power in the East; the British role and status in Macau at that point were very different from those of a hundred years before when the EIC set itself up in China. The foreign population and trade ultimately became essential for Macau’s economy, but the local and religious authorities accused the British of constituting —through their higher standard of living than that of the Portuguese—a trade and moral threat, of driving upward the prices of the city’s products, of keeping prostitution active and of introducing a taste for excessive luxury in private and public life. If on the one hand, local economic interests depended on British investment in the city, through the letting and purchasing of houses and vessels, as well as loans, the Macau Senate also wished to control foreign activity and competition, aims which were difficult to reconcile. On the other hand, from 1700 onward the Portuguese could do nothing against the designs of the Chinese authorities and Canton traders, who increasingly encouraged the setting up of trade relations with other European partners. The British and North-Americans, the two largest foreign communities in Macau from the end of the 1700s until the first Opium War, had a representative social impact on life in the enclave, from fashion to cultural customs, and further contributed to the accumulation of wealth and to the intense cultural activity in Macau, a multi-ethnic enclave since the Portuguese had founded it. In addition, as a geographical-cultural referent, Macau served as a backdrop to countless fictional adventures in British literature,1 a phenomenon closely linked both to the development of the EIC China Trade, whose picturesque and exotic dimension attracted British writers and painters,2 and to the founding of Hong Kong. If Conclusion The British Presence in Macau, 1635–1793 132 the members of the Anglophone communities influenced the modus vivendi and progress in the Portuguese-ruled territory, the latter played a pivotal role in these English-speaking communities’ trade and cultural relations with China, a status acknowledged by Alexander Michie in 1900, when he listed some of the pioneering “glories” of Macau within the framework of Sino-Western relations: the influence of Macau on the history of foreign relations with China extended much beyond the sphere of mere commercial interests. For three hundred years it was for foreigners the gate of the Chinese empire, and all influences, good and bad, which came from without were infiltrated through that narrow opening, which served as the medium through which China was revealed to the world. It was in Macau that the first lighthouse3 was erected, a symbol of the illuminating mission of foreigners in China. It was there also that the first printing-press was set up, employing movable type instead of the stereotype wooden blocks used by the Chinese. From that press was issued Morrison’s famous Dictionary, and for a long series of years the Chinese Repository [...]4 conducted chiefly by English and American missionaries. The first foreign hospital in China was opened at Macau, and there vaccination was first practiced.5 It was from Macau that the father of China missions, Matteo Ricci, started on his adventurous journey [...] in the sixteenth century [...]. The little Portuguese settlement has therefore played no mean part in the changes which have taken place in the great empire of China. [...] St Francis Xavier [...], [...] Camöens,6 who in a grotto formed of granite blocks tumbled together by nature, almost washed by the sea, sat and wrote the Portuguese epic “The Lusiad”.7 If the trading population of the “diminute settlement”8 initially wished to hamper foreign infiltration in the China Trade, such a design became impossible in the face of the interests of both the Chinese traders and those of the enclave’s population who profited from the seasonal presence, in the case of the EIC supercargoes, and annually, in the case of private traders and their families; the English-speaking residents did not, however, often mix with the Portuguese. Macau was the Western gateway into China for British traders and supercargoes and their only permanent residence there until the early 1840s. In the late 1700s it was also a base where independent traders could set up in trade and compete with the EIC’s monopoly until 1833. The City of the Holy Name of God of Macau thus played a basic and unique role...