The Unthreatening Alternative: Chinese Shipping in Southeast Asia 1567-1842

Abstract

For most of the past millennium China was the major trading partner of Southeast Asia. In the thirteenth century Marco Polo (1298, 209) pointed out that for every shipload of tropical Asian spices that arrived in Venice there were a hundred arriving at the Chinese port of "Zaiton" (Quanzhou). That advantage was lost during the enormous explosion of European demand for spices in the "age of commerce," but as late as the 1820s there was still a larger tonnage of Chinese than of European shipping in the South China Sea.1 Until the Nanjing Treaty of 1842 the bulk of the foreign trade of Vietnam, Siam and Cambodia, and a substantial proportion of the remainder, was carried in "Chinese" junks - though frequently Southeast Asia-based. Show more