During the seventeenth century there was intensive rivalry among merchants from Holland, Spain, Japan, and China for the trade across the Taiwan Straits, but in the following eighteenth century the cross-straits trade came to be monopolized to a considerable extent by Chinese guild merchants. Yet, according to the earlier studies, the guild merchants then lost their dominance in the nineteenth century. One of the chief factors mentioned for this decline was Western competition; others include internal corruption among the merchants and silting of harbors. Some scholars, including Christian Daniels, have focused on the guild merchants' subordination to the British-led world financial market. l

This study of the guild merchants will also delineate the patterns of trade as an important segment of the prosperous intra-Asian trade, a segment dominated by Chinese merchants in the late nineteenth century. When the guild merchants finally withdrew from the cross-straits trade in the early twentieth century, their withdrawal was not only due to discriminatory policies of the Japanese, the new administrators of Taiwan, but also due to a concomitant collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the long-distance traders who had networks stretching from Northeast Asia to Southeast Asia. This, together with the fluctuation of trade around 1850 due to cyclical changes in the global economy, may also have implications for the whole change in the intra-Asian trade.