Treacherous Waters: The Coastal Opium Economy
The Coastal Opium Trade in 1830s Fujian
Treacherous Waters is the story of how a transnational coalition of maritime traders came together to operate one of the largest illicit drug markets in history. The importation of opium into China prior to 1832 occurred exclusively in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province, where Fujianese and Cantonese ships would load up on the drug for delivery to other parts of the empire.
By the late 1830s, a huge portion of the import trade had migrated north into Fujian province. Every day after 1834 or so there were around a dozen British ships permanently anchored in strategic bays along the Fujian coast, importing tens of thousands of chests of opium directly into Fujian and exporting jaw-dropping quantities of treasure.
This module allows users to explore this dramatic explosion in the Fujianese opium trade, by focusing on the local story of Shenhu Bay in Jinjiang County, and the interactions between the Shi Lineage of Yakou Village and the Rees brothers of Jardine-Matheson and Dent & Co.
Module Layout
- Start with the introductory path, Navigating Sources and Mapping the Opium Trade. This path explains the goals of the module, offers a short description of background information necessary to process the module, and summarizes my interpretation of the archival sources that make up Paths One and Two.
- Path One is entitled "The Case Against Shi Hou: A Qing Document." This is a primary source from the Qing bureaucratic administration, describing the legal case against a man who the Fujian provincial government blamed for escorting British opium ships to his hometown of Yakou.
- Path Two is entitled "The Jardine-Matheson Global Network." This is a re-creation of the largest and most influential British opium-trading firm, divided up geographically and interspersed with images, videos, and primary source text from the Jardine-Matheson archive.
- The module concludes with Analysis: Toward a Spatial History of the Drug Trade. This concluding portion of the module offers a collection of short essays on how reading the Chinese and British sources together can offer a spatial history of profit and corruption on the Qing maritime frontier.
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Link: Jardine-Matheson Archives Catalog (holdings are at the Cambridge University Library)
Link: First Historical Archives in Beijing
