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 well made ... and things of very poor quality like those that come to Portugal from Flanders." These items could be produced far more cheaply in China than in any of the Southeast Asian cities because of more advanced mining and smelting methods, so that Southeast Asian mining and metalwork tended to retreat with time to less accessible areas in the interior.

Was There a Chinese Role in Borneo Ironworking?

Iron is found in the northerly areas of the mainland states, and in the hills between Siam and Burma, as well as in the islands in central Sumatra, Belitung, western Borneo, and central Sulawesi. Weapons, tools, and ploughtips manufactured in these places had to circulate to many other populous centers, such as Java and Bali, where iron was not found.

The ready availability of brown iron ores near the surface in many parts of western Borneo, and the islands of Belitung and Karimata off its shores, make this region particularly interesting. The ironworking site at the mouth of the Sarawak River was somewhat controversially investigated by Tom Harrison in the 1960s. He and Stanley O'Connor claimed as many as 40,000 tons of slag were left behind in three adjacent sites where iron was extracted from ores between around 900 and 1350. The technology for smelting the iron was not of Chinese type, with a fixed furnace, but rather by using open charcoal fires in bowl-like recessions in the ground. This relatively simple technology was still in use in the nineteenth century among peoples of interior Borneo such as the Kayan and Kenyah, whom imported iron was the last to reach. Karl Hutterer also found large amounts of slag in Cebu that he dated to ironsmelting processes of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries.

Both sites were relatively accessible to the China trade. In particular, West Borneo was on the standard sailing routes between south China and the Majapahit heartland of Java. While discounting Chinese technological influences on ironworking in Borneo, Harrison and O'Connor argue that Sarawak iron may have been carried to China by Arab and other ships, since too much was being produced for local consumption. Wheatley had already argued that wi-mung-i, which was listed in the Sung chronicle as being brought to China by Arab merchants, was probably "the hydrated iron oxide known as limonite."

Around 1600, a time for which evidence of the internal Southeast Asia trade is more abundant, the most important archipelago center for exporting parangs and other iron tools was Karimata, about 60 kilometers off the coast of Southwest Borneo. Java and Makasar imported their axes and parangs from Karimata, while Malays of the Peninsula were said to carry krisses of Karimata steel. When the Dutch found a way to access this supply, in 1630, they purchased almost 10,000 axes and parangs in one lot. Although Belitung was also a source for this kind of trade, with "more parangs but fewer axes," the reputation of tiny Karimata for superior workmanship was such that the label "Karimata" was applied more widely.

So centrally were the Karimata islands located on the sailing routes between China and Java that the major strait on that route was named the Karimata Strait, between those islands and Belitung. Whatever the case in the Sarawak River area, there is firm evidence in Karimata of Chinese craftsmen settling as early as the thirteenth century. Wang Dayuan, describing the Nanyang a half-century after the Mongol fleet set off to conquer Java in 1293, had this to say of an island he called Goulan Shan.

When the [Yuan] dynasty was founded, the forces to attack Java were driven by the wind to this island, and the ships wrecked. One ship fortunately escaped with stores of nails and mortar. Seeing that there was a great deal of timber on this island, they built some tens of ships, everything from ribs to sails and bamboo poles were supplied [from the island]. Over a hundred men who were ill from the long beating about in the storm and were unable to leave were left on the island, and today the Chinese live mixed up with the native families.

Rockhill sought to identify this mysterious island with the tiny island of Gelam off the coast of Southwest Borneo, though the Karimata group seem more likely in view of their location on the sailing routes. Whether or not this group of Chinese transferred smelting technology to Karimata and Belitung, there were many other Chinese craftsmen who passed this way in Ming times, some of whom may also have been shipwrecked or defected voluntarily. As Zhou Daguan put it of Angkor in the 1290s, since "women are easily had ... a great many sailors desert to take up permanent residence."

Whatever technology transfer there may have been to iron-production in this Karimata-Belitung area cannot have been continuous. The gap between economies of scale in production in China and in the archipelago grew wider with more frequent shipping in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, cheaper imported Chinese iron- and metalwork drove out most of the production in accessible coastal areas of the archipelago. The dwindling community of ironworkers of Karimata left for the mainland in 1808.

Chinese Expansion of the Mining Frontier in the Eighteenth Century

In the eighteenth century, China's population grew markedly, stimulating an increase in the demand for silver, gold, copper, and lead as currency to fuel the expanding economy. The quest for minerals was one factor propelling Chinese explorers, miners, traders, and officials south and west, eventually bringing the empire's extent to its historic maximum. Yunnan was the largest mining frontier for Chinese, with 300,000 Han miners reportedly working there in 1750 and 500,000 in 1800. Sources of silver, lead, and zinc were particularly abundant around what is today the boundary between southern Yunnan and Burma's Shan state. The massive Munai and Maolong mines peaked in production in the mid-eighteenth century, and eventually came under permanent Qing control. Chinese miners went beyond imperial control, into the hills in the north of Dai Viet and what is today Burmese and Lao territory.

The huge Bawdwin opencast mine in Shan territory was the most important Chinese-worked mine of the border area that never fell under Qing control. It may have been "protected" from this fate by malaria, which Herbert Hoover contracted when inspecting the mine for its modern rebirth in the British period. Ming records suggest that it was Chinese miners who first brought the mine into production in 1412, and they continued to extract silver from it in increasing amounts throughout the eighteenth century.

Copper, lead, and silver also occur in the border area of northern Vietnam, where geographical barriers to an influx of Chinese miners were less intimidating, but political ones were better established along one of Asia's oldest frontiers. Here, too, the eighteenth century was the peak period for the expansion of Chinese mining. The Trinh regime that governed northern Vietnam (Tonkin) profited greatly from the booming output of the mines and in the 1760s was reportedly drawing half its revenue from levies on these northern mines. By midcentury, there were upward of 20,000 Cantonese at the Tong-tinh copper mines alone, despite a series of royal decrees seeking to limit their numbers. In the second half of the century, the copper-mining operation in the border areas was thought to have averaged over 500 tons output per annum, making it one of the largest in Asia. The tenuous control the court exercised over the Chinese mining kongsis caused increasing difficulties, however, and in 1767 the Trinh attempted to expel them from Vietnam. The economic stakes were too high, however, and the attempt failed.

Gold-Working

Precious metals were the most ancient and valued of Southeast Asia's precious minerals, particularly the silver of the northern mainland close to Yunnan, and the gold of Sumatra, Borneo, and the Peninsula. Chinese miners were also attracted to these commodities, although they never became as dominant as they were on the nineteenth-century tin fields. Sumatran gold, which gave rise to the Sanskrit soubriquet Suvarna-bhumi (gold-land), was for the most part off limits to Chinese miners. It was considered so precious an item of royal monopoly that outsiders were discouraged. William Dampier related that in Aceh in the 1680s, when gold had become the principal export of the state, only Muslims were permitted to go to the rich mining areas of Kawaj XIII in the hills behind Pidië. Huge profits were reportedly made in these goldfields, discovered only about thirty years earlier, and the wealth they produced brought Chinese traders and craftsmen to the Aceh capital every year. However, to prevent them reaching the goldfields, armed guards were posted along the route.

Central Southeast Asia—western Borneo, eastern Sumatra and its islands, and the Peninsula—with its sparse populations and states largely dependent on the economic activities of outsiders, was the major Southeast Asian theater of Chinese mining. Gold had been extracted from Borneo and the Peninsula for more than a millennium, by simple methods of panning. However, as with tin, the larger-scale labor organization of Cantonese and Hakka miners was introduced to archipelago gold-mining in the middle of the eighteenth century. In most cases, river-mouth chiefs and rajas engaged them to work more efficiently interior mineral resources hitherto dependent on the part-time attention of agriculturalists.

One such early settlement on the Peninsula was Pulai, in upper Kelantan, which Hakka gold-miners had opened by the second half of the eighteenth century. Graham, however, suggests it was considerably older, and that in earlier times "the mineral products of Kelantan considerably exceeded in value those of any other State" in the Peninsula. During the reign of Sultan Mahmat in Kelantan (1807–1837), the ruler's son was killed by the previously self-governing Chinese miners when he tried to enforce his newly granted monopoly of rice distribution by cutting off the mining settlement from all supplies coming up the river to them. The dead prince's son then organized a massacre of the whole Chinese settlement, "and the gold mining industry of Kelantan came to a sudden end."

But it was the goldfields north of the Kapuas River in West Borneo that drew the largest number of Chinese pioneers. As early as 1740, the ruler of Mempawah, or in some accounts the Sultan of Sambas, decided to bring Chinese miners in to work the gold-bearing rivers he sought to control. Production had previously depended on the part-time labor of Dayaks. The Malay rulers used terms that had been effective on a small scale with the Dayaks, providing salt, rice, opium, and cloth at inflated monopoly prices in return for a monopoly of the gold extracted. In addition, the Chinese as outsiders were forbidden to engage in agriculture (to increase their dependence on the ruler's supplies) and were charged a head tax on entering or leaving Borneo through the ruler's port.

The Chinese miners set to work initially on mines abandoned by the Dayaks, but used more intense and mechanized methods to sluice away the topsoil above the gold-bearing lode. They were also much more centrally organized through their kongsi, a ritual brotherhood in which capital and labor were shared in acknowledged portions. Gradually the kongsis became autonomous by forming their own relations with interior Dayaks (including marriage), farming the surrounding land, and smuggling their gold out through channels not controlled by the rulers. The capitalists who established the mine and funded the importation of workers of course had the largest share, and laborers still indebted for their passage had none, but older workers did share decision-making and often rotated the leadership among themselves.

There is no way to know the amount of gold shipped out, chiefly to China, but the fact that about 60,000 Chinese miners were at work there over about a century indicates that it must have been extremely large. As Dutch power advanced in the nineteenth century, most of the kongsis made their peace with it through a system of indirect rule, but the strongest Montrado kongsi remained defiant until conquered in the 1850s.

The Chinese Tin-Mining Frontier

A large proportion of the world's tin is concentrated in the chain of hills from eastern Burma in the north down through the Malayan Peninsula to the islands of Bangka and Belitung in the south. By the tenth century, the Peninsula was supplying most of Asia's tin needs. The trade boom of 1580–1640 witnessed a great increase in mining of this tin to supply the busy markets of India, China, Siam, and Java. Up until the seventeenth century, it was the ports of the western coast of the Peninsula—Junk Ceylon (Phuket), Perak, and Selangor—that supplied India, while Ligor (Nakhonsithammarat), Pahang, and other ports on the eastern coast supplied most of China's needs.

The miners appear to have been long-term Peninsula residents of various ethnicities, who attended to mining when the demands of rice growing or serving their rulers' requirements permitted. Mining sites were located and supervised by a pawang (shaman) who could mediate with the spirit of the tin. Men dug the ore and earth out of flooded pits, while women separated the tin ore with their fingers. The method was first described in Perak by Eredia: "The earth is dug out of the mountains and placed on certain tables where the earth is dispersed by water in such a way that only the tin in the form of grains remains on the tables. It is then melted in certain clay moulds and by a process of casting is converted into ... slabs." The "casting" was a primitive form of smelting in which burning charcoal was mixed with the tin ore until the metal ran out into the mold. These slabs, of about twenty kilograms, were then floated down the rivers to port, where the port-ruler usually took the largest share of the profits of selling it.

(Continues...)

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