Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eric Tagliacozzo is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier and co-editor of The Indonesia Reader: History, Culture, Politics, also published by Duke University Press.

Wen-Chin Chang is an Associate Research Fellow at the Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan.

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Chinese Circulations

Duke University Press

Contents

List of Maps..................................................................................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments...............................................................................................................................................................xvWang Gungwu Foreword.........................................................................................................................................................xiWen-Chin Chang and Eric Tagliacozzo Introduction: The Arc of Historical Commercial Relations between China and Southeast Asia................................................1Anthony Reid Chinese on the Mining Frontier in Southeast Asia................................................................................................................21C. Patterson Giersch Cotton, Copper, and Caravans: Trade and the Transformation of Southwest China...........................................................................37Adam McKeown The Social Life of Chinese Labor................................................................................................................................62Carl A. Trocki Opium as a Commodity in the Chinese Nanyang Trade.............................................................................................................84Takeshi Hamashita The Lidai Baoan and the Ryukyu Maritime Tributary Trade Network with China and Southeast Asia, the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries.....................107Li Tana Cochinchinese Coin Casting and Circulating in Eighteenth-Century Southeast Asia......................................................................................130Masuda Erika Import of Prosperity: Luxurious Items Imported from China to Siam during the Thonburi and Early Rattanakosin Periods (1767–1854)..........................149Heather Sutherland A Sino-Indonesian Commodity Chain: The Trade in Tortoiseshell in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries............................................172Sun Laichen From Baoshi to Feicui: Qing-Burmese Gem Trade, c. 1644–1800................................................................................................203Leonard Blussé Junks to Java: Chinese Shipping to the Nanyang in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century..............................................................221Lucille Chia Chinese Books and Printing in the Early Spanish Philippines.....................................................................................................259Kwee Hui Kian The End of the "Age of Commerce"?: Javanese Cotton Trade Industry from the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Centuries.............................................283Man-houng Lin The Power of Culture and Its Limits: Taiwanese Merchants' Asian Commodity Flows, 1895–1945...............................................................305Wu Xiao An Rice Trade and Chinese Rice Millers in the Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries: The Case of British Malaya..............................................336Nola Cooke Tonle Sap Processed Fish: From Khmer Subsistence Staple to Colonial Export Commodity..............................................................................360Jean DeBernardi Moses's Rod: The Bible as a Commodity in Southeast Asia and China............................................................................................380Bien Chiang Market Price, Labor Input, and Relation of Production in Sarawak's Edible Birds' Nest Trade......................................................................407Eric Tagliacozzo A Sino-Southeast Asian Circuit: Ethnohistories of the Marine Goods Trade....................................................................................432Wen-Chin Chang From a Shiji Episode to the Forbidden Jade Trade during the Socialist Regime in Burma.........................................................................455Kevin Woods Conflict Timber along the China-Burma Border: Connecting the Global Timber Consumer with Violent Extraction Sites................................................480Contributors..................................................................................................................................................................507Index.........................................................................................................................................................................509

Chapter One

Anthony Reid

The influx of Chinese into Malaysia in particular and "Central Southeast Asia" more generally is often popularly attributed to colonial rule, as if the pluralism they exemplified were not "natural" to the region. In reality, the Peninsula has always been highly plural, and the advance of the Chinese mining frontier within it preceded the British. This essay documents some of the means by which Chinese mining advanced the economic frontiers in Southeast Asia ahead of European capital. Tin, being the most obvious example, takes center stage in this story.

Early Controversies

How metals technology spread in Southeast Asia in the earliest periods is a matter of considerable and long-standing debate, particularly since the Ban Chiang excavations in Thailand in the 1970s raised the possibility that bronze-working there may have been as old as that in China. The earliest Ban Chiang periodizations have now been largely discredited, however, and a consensus is emerging that the Southeast Asian bronze age began in the middle of the second century B.C.E., that it was distinct from any of the older "Chinese" traditions, yet somehow related to them, and that it long predated the rise of states in Southeast Asia. Gold, iron, copper, and tin were undoubtedly mined, smelted, and worked into ornaments, utensils, and weapons in Southeast Asia before the Common Era (C.E.), and Chinese records of contact with Lao peoples at the end of the sixth century C.E. declare that they made their own bronze drums in a manner different from the Chinese. We know little, however, about how the relevant technologies were disseminated or developed.

Until the era of bulk imports in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, iron and copper remained relatively scarce in island Southeast Asia, and travelers from Europe and China found that their everyday nails, knives, and needles were in great demand from the locals. The reasons appear to have been not so much the lack of minerals in the ground (although Java and Bali were particularly disadvantaged in that regard) as the sparse population (by Chinese standards) in the vicinity of most of these minerals, and consequently smaller scale, less efficient methods of both mining and smelting.

As trade developed in the second millennium of the Common Era, everyday metal items became cheaper to import from afar than to produce locally. In Sung times, iron and ironware were "among the commonest commodities" exported to Southeast Asia from China. By 1500, the needs of Southeast Asian maritime centers like Melaka were provided principally from China, including "copper, iron ... cast iron kettles, bowls, basins ... plenty of needles of a hundred different kinds, some of them very fine and...