ABSTRACT
Traditionally historians have devoted considerable attention to early Chinese voyages and trade with overseas countries during the Sung and Ming dynasties. Only recently has an increasing interest been shown towards Chinese shipping during the Ch' ing dynasty. Doctoral theses on the trade with the kingdom of Siam have been produced by Sarasin Viraphol and Jennifer Cushman, studies by Iwao Seiichi and Uamawaki Teijiro have thrown new light on Chinese trade with Tokugawa Japan, Ng Chin-Keong has analysed the role of the Amoy traders in Chinese coastal shipping, and George Souza in his recent thesis on Portuguese trade from Macao has described the orientation of Portuguese trade towards Indo-China and the Indonesian archipelago after Japan shut its doors to the Iberians in 1640. 1 While Ng, Viraphol and Cushman largely depended on Chinese sources, Iwao and Yamawaki combined Dutch materials with Japanese sources. The same can be said of Souza, who added much pertinent evidence from Dutch archives to the Portuguese sources of the Macao archives. Unfortunately, only little Chinese evidence remains of what was during the early eighteenth century one of the most important Chinese trade links: the commerce with the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company in Asia, Batavia. In 1979, Leonard Blusse, one of the contributors to the present article, mainly on the basis of Dutch source materials, provided a short overview of Chinese trade with Batavia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Deriving his information from printed sources like the edicts and resolutions by Governor-General and Council, in connection with Chinese trade and the so-called Generale Missiven, the bi-annualletters that the Batavian government sent to the Heren XVII in the Republic, he was able to show the changing policies of the Dutch towards the Chinese trade and the way in which these policies effected the decline of the junk trade at the end of the eighteenth century. The
scope of that survey, published in the special issue on the South China Sea of the French journal Archipel, however, did not permit further processing of the ample amount of quantitative data on Chinese shipping to Batavia which are kept in the Algemeen Rijksarchiefin The Hague. Of recent years the contributors to this article have joined forces to collect quantitative data on the number of junks sailing to and from Batavia, the cargoes, the goods that were purchased, et cetera. These data have gradually been classified and put into a computer, and here we should like to present some preliminary results of our research, which will soon be published in book form. In order to put these figures into a conceptual framework, we shall very briefly review the development, or better said, the rise and fall of the junk grade during the V.O.C. period.
