清代（鸦片战争前）荷使朝华概略 -摘自 Leonard Blussé、庄国土（1989）《荷使初訪中国記研究》

满州入主中原以后，郑成功据金、厦与清朝对抗。清朝历行海禁、迁界，加上郑成功与荷人争夺海上贸易的控制权，使荷人希望除了继续进行日益减少的私商贸易外，能与中国官方建立贸易关系，取得在中国内陆的贸易权，以期扩大远东地区的贸易。

有清一代，荷兰遣使朝贡中国六次。

第一次是顺治十二年（1655），东印度公司总督约翰·马绥克（Gouverneur-Generaal Johan Maatzuiker）派遣使臣彼得德·候叶尔（Piter de Goyer）和雅可布·凯塞尔（Jacob Keizer）及其随员共十六人入贡北京，求通自由贸易。清朝对此的答复是：“所请朝贡出入，虽灌输货贝，利益商民，但念里险阻，舟车跋涉，阅历星霜，劳费可悯。著八年大次来朝。员役不过百人，止令二十人到京。所携物货，在馆交易，不得于广东海上私自货卖。”[15]

1662-1664年在苗焦沙吾·博特（Balthasar Bort）的指挥下，东印度公司的夹板船多次帮助清朝水师攻剿郑氏父子军队。康熙二年（1663）六月，东印度公司派遣诺贝尔（Nobel）和范·甘贝（Van kompen）率领数人到福建求通贸易，“贡有刀剑八，皆可屈伸。马四，凤膺鹤胫，迅速异常。”［16］此行不见载于《实录》，也不知有否到北京。但清朝准许荷人此后可以两年入贡一次。康熙三年（1664），荷人“率舟师助剿，以甲板船乘势追击”。助清军攻占浯屿、金门二岛。靖南王耿继茂上表为荷人请功，皇帝赐荷兰国王银二千两，荷水军首领银一千两，并各赐绸级若干，遣官带到福建交荷人带回本国。［17］

康熙五年（1666），东印度公司又遣使携金叶表文，入贡大尚马及锒金锒银马，具、刀枪、哔叽绒缎、洋布、琥珀、珍珠等，以应二年一贡之约。清朝除照例赏赐外，改二年一贡之例，仍著荷兰八年一贡。此次进贡未载于实录，也不知是否到达北京。

康熙六年（1667）五月十七日，东印度公司总督马绥克又遣使入贡。此行到达北京，朝廷依例馈赠礼品及赐宴给荷使。［18］但指出，荷使违例从福建贡道到北京，“除今次不议外，嗣后遇进貢之年，务由广东道，入别道不许放进。”［19］

康熙二十五年（1686）六月，东印度公司使臣宾先·巴芝携表文方物到北京朝贡。其时，清朝正和俄国争执雅克萨的归属。荷兰贡使自称与俄罗斯接壤。康熙皇帝正因数次传书俄国国主却不得回信而烦恼，准备托荷使传书给俄王，说明收回雅克萨的理由和希望两国边界和睦、人民安居的诚意。并谕俄罗斯国王，如陆路难通，可请荷使从海路带来回书。此书是否带到不得而知，但在这次朝贡中，荷兰使臣又从八年朝贡一次的定例争取到五年朝贡一次，而且得到了从福建贡道入贡的机会。［20］

荷人的理由是”福建路远而稳，广东路近而险。”［21］但实际上当时台湾已被清朝攻下，海禁已开，荷人向来在福建沿海与台湾、吕宋、日本之间从事贸易。从福建朝贡对荷人是轻车熟路，又可避开在广东道来往经常会碰见的宿敌―住在澳门的葡萄牙人。

乾隆二十七年（1762），荷兰随其他国家之例，在广州设立商馆。

乾隆五十九年（1794），荷使德胜（Isaac Titsingh）和范朝白览（A.E.Van Braam Houckgeest）率使团到北京祝寿并朝贡。乾隆帝赐宴朝鲜、荷兰国使及诸亲王贝勒等于紫光阁。此次荷使留京凡四十日，大斋礼品而归。［22］

鸦片战争以前，朝贡条例向由清朝单方面规定。清朝奉行锁国政策，也不愿朝贡贸易规模过大，次数过繁。但在荷兰人帮助了清朝或清朝想利用荷人时，朝贡的条例就适当放宽。从以上第二次、第五次朝贡均可以看出这点。

（三）第一次荷使朝华始末

先是，顺治十年（1653）二月十一日，荷人斯赫得尔（Frederick Schedel）从台湾携带货物，到广州要求朝贡贸易。署厂东巡海道沈时前往虎门，把荷人带到广州，查询是否带金叶表文和朝贡方物。但荷人说要朝见广州二位藩王（平南王尚可喜、靖南王耿继茂），要求朝贡贸易。广东藩王会同督、抚，二司(布政司、按察司)商议，稽查历朝会典、通志，未发现载有荷兰国名，荷兰国以前也没有前来朝贡过。在清朝官员看来，番邦前来朝贡，“其大节则在表文为重。使其国长果有输款之诚，金表银笺缴文纳勅。”［23］而荷人这次前来广州求贡，既无国主金叶表文，又没有以前朝贡所授的宣勅，无所为凭。广东藩王、督抚自然不敢贸然接受。但考虑到从未入贡来朝的荷兰“而今入贡，则我大清圣人御极，万国朝宗，度越前代远矣。”因此，遣返荷人，并以平南王和靖南王的名义，分别致书荷兰台湾总督尼高𦛨攀直武禄（NicoLaas Verburgh 即韦尔柏）让他速具金叶表文，再来朝贡。两王咨文基本一致，现录平南王咨文如下：

“平南王谕荷兰国台湾虞文礁律管理北港地方等处事尼高𦛨氏攀直武禄知道：两藩奉命徂征，南怀三楚，东绥百粤，总体朝廷好生之德。威惠兼施，俾厥兆姓，稽角输诚。以及海外列国，莫不举踵向化，伏质称臣。兹辱执事，遣使航海，申之珍遗，远来悃款，实用嘉悦。但稽外域来宾，必奉国王之命，循朝贡之期，进金册以崇体，具符节以征信。然后达之朝廷，优以礼数，此荒服之制而柔远之经也。今热事贸易私请，我朝功令森严，可否定夺，出自睿断，非而藩所敢擅使。执事若晓新朝德意，其转达吧主，遵三年或二年一朝之制，任土修贡。则夹板船无过三只，自洋入境，即预行咨报，以便引入广省，渐达京师，永著为例可也。若似以贸易为言，我大清敦诗说礼，贵五谷而贱珠玉，又何利焉？所说捕道倪素，兴尔构隙，此直刁逞于明季耳。顷已归心，隶为属国，便当宣谕，言归于好。来使悉令回国，不必留质，不腆土物，藉手附复，以志远怀。”［24］

顺治二十年（1655年）七月十九日，东印度公司派遣使臣候叶尔和凯塞尔作为贡使，携带表文、贡品，乘坐商船高德克号（koudekerke）和贝鲁道尔号（Bloemendaal）从巴城出发，前往中国求通贸易。于八月十八日驰入广州虎门。广东巡海道徐炟启呈报两位藩王和广东督、抚。荷人这次携带了呈送中国皇帝的表文，并造有所贡方物的清册，而且还另外递交给两位藩王一份呈文。现抄录当时呈文的译本如下：

“管在小四诺处荷兰国人统领如翰没碎格、贺靖、平南王奉大清国皇帝命，统管广东省，求造物主准赐安和永寿。向闻造物主准朝廷得了广东地方，朝廷又有德，以公道治天下，乃命有德的好官管治百姓。你德重厨尊，统领众官，效法朝廷，公道服民。我等外国人闻之喜悦。我等系以交易为生者，到处寻地方居住。近至广海，初在北港，着人前去做交易的勾当，不料做不成回来，说若要成须差人到北京大王之前。今特差二人有年纪者，一名伯多罗俄也，一名雅哥伯克斯，代我众人奉贺朝廷新得天下，并贡礼物。料来不至虚我之望也。靠你福庇，管他去进贡，又管他回来，今我等放心外，又差一人方济各懒斯蛮（Francois Lantman）在你广东治下住着，理料去使来回零碎货物。我地方人感激不尽。望你福庇准此。

八答未（Batavia）（地名盖谓在此写的）
天主降生一千六百五十六年，西历七月十三日，统领如翰没碎格（即总督Johan Maatzuiker）。”［25］

平南王看过呈文，并与靖南王、广东督抚商议后，认为这次荷兰入贡，“乃朝廷德威远被，仁泽覃敷，是以梯山航海，愿觐光天化日，实兴朝之盛事也，⋯···且使臣言词谆恳，具有表文方物，向幕之诚，似未可坚阻，以塞远夷景仰上国之风。”［26]

因此，他于当年九月十二日上疏朝廷，请求接纳荷人入贡。此疏经过四十天后，于十月二十二日到达朝廷。经过廷寄、部议，朝廷决定接受荷人入贡。隔年西历二月二十二日，荷人得到去北京的许可，前往藩王府，拜谒尚可喜，商量去北京的事宜。荷人于三月十七日从广州动身，扬帆北行。经过七个月的涉涉，于七月十七日下午到达北京。

(四)清代的朝贡制度

鸦片战争以前，有两种主导思想支配清朝的对外关系。一是“天朝地大物博，无所不有”，二是“普天之下，莫非王土，率土之宾，莫非王臣。”在这种思想指导下，其对外关系有两个基点，一是闭关锁国，自给自足。二是所有要和中国保持某种联系的国家，都必须承认中国是他们的宗主国。

外国要来中国贸易，就必须以朝贡的名义，而中国则以赏赐礼品作为交换。赏赐的礼品价值通常大大高于所接受的贡品，作为保持“天朝上国”地位的代价。因此这种朝贡贸易对外国使团来说，常常是有利可图的。而中国进行这种朝贡贸易主要是着眼于政治上的考虑，即宗主国地位得到承认，满足虚骄心理，并藉朝贡贸易维持和平体系，免得”蛮夷小邦”因贸易不成而大动干戈。而只要这种政治目的能达到，就尽可能把朝贡贸易限制在小规模范围内。

朝贡贸易历史悠久。朝贡制度经过历代王朝不断修改，到清代已经形成非常严密的制度。新航路开辟、欧人东来以后，世界性的贸易网络初步形成。欧人认识到，中国地大物博，人口众多，既是大市场，又是西方所需的多种商品的产地。因此，他们努力想打开中国市场。固然外国人能从与中国的朝贡贸易中获得大利，但严密的朝贡制度则相当大程度上限制了那些想扩大贸易的自由通商国家。

荷兰的第一个贸易使团到中国寻求自由通商权益，但他们所遇到的是一整套繁琐严密的朝贡制度。从贡使踏入中国以后，这套制度就对他们的住宿、行程、朝见，礼仪、购货甚至停留时间、归国日期都有详细的规定，并派专人陪同、监督。荷使一到中国后，就身不由已地按照各种成例行事。

清制定例，凡外国使团欲来朝贡，其奏疏不得交遣往来使臣带来，专差官交该督抚转奏。”［27］还必须把起程日期具报广州府，转报布政司、移会按察司、颁发兵部、勘合一道，驿传道路牌一张，并请院宪委护送官三员随同，伴送进京。”［28］

根据如上规定，荷人到广州后，需把朝贡奏疏转广州督、抚上奏皇帝，皇帝批礼部合议，认为荷人“重译来朝，诚朝廷德化所致，”才批荷人进京朝贡，但尚有种种限制。一是命督、抚派官员兵丁护送，即是保护、又起监督作用。二是规定来京人数不许超过二十人，余人留在广东。三是让督抚选派几个懂荷语的人同来。［29］

另外，荷人还需向广州府报告进京的日程，广州府再上报广东布政司，布政司移会按察司，再报到北京兵部，然后兵部发下驿传道路牌一张，才能沿驿道进京。荷人到广州后，不得不停留半年多办这些手续，等待北京的回音。根据朝贡条例，贡使人等到省，“委员备办牛、酒、米、面筵席等项，俟起贮表方物后，前赴犒赏”。因此，荷兰使团在广州及沿途都受到地方官员的筵席款待。

贡使进京，需专人陪送弹压，伴送官员“文职应委道、府大员，武职应委参、付大员。”伴送荷使进京的人员是广东分巡道员。由于广州府已把贡使及伴送官员人数和＂沿途所需口粮、夫船数目填注，勘合内经过沿途州县”［30］报到北京兵部，而兵部再传下各驿站及沿途州县准备贡使的食宿、船只及夫役，因此，荷兰使团沿途均有地方官员照应，为他们征集船只、拖船夫等，并准备各种食品。

荷兰使团进京的路线即是广州通北京的传统贡道，沿水路驿道北行，沿途皆有水驿提供食、宿、夫、船。先从广州到三水，然后溯北江而上，到南雄州下船。再由州官征集夫役，把礼物背过大庾岭。大庾岭有梅关古道，向来是中原通广东的交通要道。所有经此道南来北往的客商货物都在此经马驼人背翻越山隘。有很多人在此藉搬运为生。荷兰使团的货物行李就需九百人搬运。

法国外交官恩波于亚（Imbault Huart）到过大庾岭。他提到，直到本世纪初，尚有不下五万背夫在此搬运为生。［31］

翻越大庾岭后，就到江西省境了。荷使在南安府城上船，沿赣江顺流而下，经吴城镇入鄱阳湖，再从鄱阳湖入长江。然后经长江北岸的仪征县到达扬州。从扬州开始沿运河北上，过山东入河北，在张家湾下船。此时礼部已派二十四匹马和几部大车在此地等候搬运行李了。然后由陆路到达北京，照例住在会同馆一一北京内城接待

1655年7月19日 荷使杯突高啮和惹诺皆色率随员从巴达维亚出发。
22日 到达雕门岛
8月1日、看到交趾陆地。
10日 在海上遭遇风暴。
14日 到达澳门。
16日 过南投角。
18日 到达虎门停泊。派助理商务官向当地长官说明来意。
24日 当地长官要求使臣上岸详述来意。
29日 提督率随员奉二位藩王之命，迎接使臣前往广州。次日，使团随员一并出发。
9月4日 使团随员到达广州，使臣已先住下。
10月15日 二位藩王和广督宴请荷使。
12月30日 小藩王前往广西作战。
1656年2月2日 二位使臣前去老满王府第商量前往北京事宣。
27日 老藩王设宴为二位使臣饯行。
3月17日 荷使与约五十条船的船队从广洲出发，前往北京。当夜宿佛山。
19日 到达三水过夜。
21日 到达清远,换拖船夫。
22日 过浈阳峡。
24日 到达英德，过夜，换拖船夫。傍晚时有一艘船触礁。
25日 过观音岩。
27日换拖船夫。夜里逢狂风巨浪，幸好有惊无险。
29日 到韶州，换拖船夫。
30日 过五马头山区、始兴县。
4月4日 到达南雄，下船准备越山，需力伕儿百，
8日 在150个士兵护卫下越过梅岭。
9日 到达南安，是江西境地。二位鞑靼专使来访。在此准备船只顺流下赣江。
13日 从南安出发，顺流而下。仍需人力。船曾损坏。到达南康。
15日 到达贛州，并拜访当地巡抚。
18日 经过万安及乡镇彭家凹，深夜到达泰和。
19日 过吉安市、吉水市。
20日 过峡江县、新淦城。
22日 过丰城县。
23日 到达南昌，在城门前抛锚宿夜。访紫极宫，当地长官热情接待。
25日 到吴城镇。此地瓷器美便宜。
26日 过南康城。
27日 到达湖口。的隔水至员料阳街日公民银
28日 过彭泽县。
29日 过小城东流和著名的安庆市，到达铜陵停宿。
5日3日从铜陵出发，到达芜湖郊区过夜。
4日 过当涂。
9日 到达南京城前过夜。
10日 拜访当地长官和鞑靼贵人，访报恩寺。
11日 耶苏会士前来欢迎荷使术三货极e
12日 耶苏会士设宴招待荷使。
18日 从南京出发。
20日 到达仪征，从仪征进入大运河。
21日 到达扬州。
25日 离开扬州。当天中午到乡镇邵伯，逢龙船会。
26日 过高邮州，见高邮湖堤。过宝应县，到达淮安过夜，有一法国神甫来坊。
27日 到达清江浦过夜，见到著名水闸。
28日 又过水闸,到达娘娘庙。
29日 晨出发,到黄河支流。
6月1日 到桃园县。
4日 过宿迁县，在运河旁的一个小镇过夜。
6日 过贾还镇，进入山东省。
11日 到达大镇多义沟。
13日 在济宁州过夜，见鱼鹰捕鱼。
14日 过南旺，此处汶水连接黄河。
19日 到达张秋城。次日起程，多次过水闸。
20日 到达东昌城。
21日 停泊东昌。同日到临清；一个荷兰喇叭手于此地去世。
22日 再度出发。
完一司景造日1
25日 过武城县；山东省界结束。
26日 到故城县郊区。
28日过德州；过东光。
7月2日 到达沧州，当地长官夫人接待。当晚，到达乡镇姚官屯泊宿。当夜，藩王我克船失火。
3日 过兴济镇。
4日 过青县。过静海县：当夜、农民赶蝗虫。到达天津准备泊宿，当地长官率人迎接荷使。老藩王属吏先前往北京通报，荷使为其线行。
11日 到河西务。
12日 经漷县。到张家湾前的御港。由陆路往北京，皇宫已派车前来接运。
17日 经通州，下午一日到北京郊区，再到寓所。
18日 钦差前来分派食品。
19日 礼部官员检看商品；尚有汤若望随行。
8月3日 吐鲁使臣也到了北京。
14日 礼部召见使臣，问及朝贡目的。
22日 前往礼部，行叩见圣旨礼仪。
23日 皇弟去世。
9月14日 莫斯科使臣未能进皇宫只好离去，并向荷使辞行。礼部官员反复前来荷使处盘查。
10月1日 接令明日进皇帝，先前往皇官候见。
2日 朝见皇帝。下午前往礼部赴宴。
3日 又去赴宴；本应连三天，但因故推迟。
10日 赴最后一次宴。
鈴东山县梨商技日#S
16日 到中堂府第接圣旨。中午就出城回程。
17日 到通州，下午到御港张家湾，租小船飞速回航。
21日 到天津卫。
31日 在临清会合经陆路而来的分巡道。办迎 民11月13日 到黄河。
某日 到扬州。
20日 到长江。
21日 到南京。去报恩寺看使臣塑象。
22日 风雪骤起；夜赴宴。
12月10日 年取到口粮、关役、船只后再度出发。
15日 深夜到达安庆。
19日 黄昏到南康。
23日 到南昌，换小船。
26日 从南昌出发，遇风雪。
1657年1月1日 到吉安。
2日 找到拖船夫以后，下午二时再度出发。
5日 到达万安。
6日 找到拖船夫、领水员后出发。以水险滩多，特别在冬季，贡船几次破损过。
10日 到贛州，该城长官以中堂名义来迎。
11日 出发,拖船绳缠住，鞑靼兵火烧河岸，荷使险遇不测。
15日 到南安。
19日 翻梅岭，夜到南雄。装运行李上船。
20日 再度出发。过瀑布、五马头、始兴县。
24日 到韶州。
25日 再过观音庙。
26日 过演阳峡。
27日 过三水，见军队遍地，整装待发。
28日 到广州，公司贸易总监来迎。
29日 荷使拜访二位藩王府第，当晚受招待。
2月1日 赴老藩王宴。
2日 赴小落王宴。广州城内大官也同时出席。
3日 分巡道回到广州，面见荷使。
7日 荷使把皇帝批文上中堂大人阅看，并拜访城内诸位大员。
21日 向二位藩王辞行未见，当夜听说派给使团的通事被谋杀。
22日 晨从广州出发，无风。
23日 以二藩王名义践行荷使。
28日 到虎门寨。
3月1日 夜向东南方向行，黎明时过南头角黄昏时过澳门诸岛。
4日 见海南诸山。
18日 过雕门岛。
21日 过马来西林加岛。
24日 过邦加海峡。中午
26日 过苏斯巴拉岛。
31日 到巴达维亚外港。

“Landing Place at the Yuk-Shan”

Few scenes in the whole winding water-way of the Kan-kiang（贛江） present a more picturesque assemblage of objects than the vicinity of the great bridge of Yuk-shan（庾山，今”大庾岭”）. Here the granite ridges descend from their majestic elevation to human accessibility, and to human purposes also, leaving rocky ledges everywhere along the river-cliffs, where habitations are erected; and there earth may be deposited, or disintegration take place, sufficient to sustain vegetable life. On one bank a toll or custom-house is established, in front of which waves the imperial flag, one of the most decided badges of despotism in existence. The officer of customs is seated before the door, sheltered from the rays of a burning sun by a bamboo umbrella of considerable diameter, beneath the weight of which his slave is sinking; while the duty of examining each cargo, detecting violators of excise-law, and repairing of pit-pans for the service of his men, is proceeding with alacrity on all sides.

赣江曲折蜿蜒，沿途风景秀丽，尤以大庾岭石桥一带为最。山脊处是裸露的花岗岩，从人迹罕至的山顶一直延伸至人们聚居的山脚，顺着江岸逶迤而去，沿途尽是嶙峋的怪石与暗礁。这儿土壤还算肥沃，可以种植粮食作物，因此人们在此修建房舍，安居乐业。 江岸的一侧建有一处收税的关卡，关卡门前龙旗迎风招展。负责收税的官员端坐在门前， 一旁侍立的仆役撑着一把大竹伞，为他遮挡阳光。税务人员正在检查往来的商旅，没收违禁物，还有一些人在修补破旧的平底船。

Tea, silk, cotton, are conveyed hither in country barges, and with the stream, from the fertile district north of the Melung mountains; but there is a superstitious reverence attached to the bridge of the “Nine Arches," which leads the Chinaman to fear a change of fortune, should he not change his junk when he arrives within view of this ancient monument.

商人们把原产于梅岭以北的茶叶、丝绸、棉花等货物装上平底船，运往此处。迷信的中国人对九孔桥心怀敬畏。商旅远远望见这座桥的时候，便会换掉舢板船，以免厄运降临。

Famous as is the structure that bestrides the flood at Yuk-shan, the roadway is but a few paces in width; the architect having only intended it for those who knew " to ride on a bay trotting-horse over four-inch’d bridges." No idea of terminal or lateral pressure ever entered the calm conception of the engineer; he calculated on the strength of the materials, perpendicularity of the piers, adhesive quality of the cement, and obedience of the emperor’s subjects, who would not dare to drive a team of cattle, if they possessed any such useful concentration of animal power, along its narrow causeway.

大庾岭河道上的这座九孔桥远近闻名，但却只有几步宽，建筑师当时就是这样设计的，“一匹栗色快马可以通过便足够了”。建筑师根本就没考虑末端压力和侧向压力这些问题，好像他们也没有这些概念，他们在设计初始只考虑材料的强度，桥墩是否垂直，水泥的黏性是否足够。作为皇帝顺从的子民，他们也不敢驱赶牛群上桥。

Fauy-tchoui, a celebrated hero of the days of old, constructed this bridge for the safe passage of his army; but, being a sorcerer and a soldier, he declared it to be unlucky to pass under it, in the same barge that arrived at its arches either from the lake, or from the fountain. Possibly the hero might have distrusted the stability of his structure, and been desirous of keeping off heavily-laden junks.

However, some years after, a resolute character in the district, Ouan-tche, who conducted an extensive carrying-trade, determined to make experiment of the fact, but, before he entered the arches, repaired to a neighbouring temple, or hall of ancestors. Here he commenced calling on the shades of departed greatness, and bowing most reverently to the idols and pictures; his trackers at length becoming uneasy at his protracted absence, entered the hall in search of their master, where they ‘beheld him enacting ko-tows with the utmost diligence, as if he had only then begun.

After some delay, they ventured to approach, and signify that he had been perhaps longer engaged in worship than was beneficial, or probably intentional; but in vain—for the spell had bound him, and from that day to that day twelvemonth, Ouan-tche never ceased making ko-tows in the hall of ancestors at the bridge of Yuk-shan.

Satisfied of his sin, on being released from enchantment, he acknowledged his fault, and immediately setting to work, built the long line of store-houses on the south bank of the river, which from that period has served as an entrepot for all goods in transit.

以上原文為 Wright 配圖書寫，後段寫到的地方典故尚未找到考據。至於 Allom 何以會涵蓋這個地點，聰明的你應該已經想到了：使團的返程從京城南下廣州時循水陸路（而非如去程循海路），在贛江支流這裡下船，準備走梅關古道到南雄接珠江水系。

梅关古道，北接章江，南接浈江，连通长江和珠江，鹅卵石铺就，是古代遗存下来最完整的一条古道。

沿着鹅卵石铺就的古道从江西大余上梅岭，古道宽一丈，绝对算得上是古代的高速公路。岭南第一关——梅关，就矗立在梅岭垭口，江西和广东的边界线穿梅关而过，一脚可踏两省。梅岭，是大庾岭最核心的区域，也是南岭保存最完好、最具代表性的古隘口。梅关海拔不高，746米，整个南岭的平均海拔也只有1000米左右。站在梅关，你多少会好奇，这样低矮的山峦如何能抵挡住南下的冷空气？

狭义上的南岭，只包括五岭。五岭从东往西，依次为大庾岭、骑田岭、萌渚岭、都庞岭、越城岭。广义上的南岭，以五岭为主体，向东延伸与武夷山相连，向西接云贵高原，向南延绵与九连山一体，向北则与罗霄山脉相连。包括九嶷山、万阳山、诸广山、连山、海洋山等。就是这片破碎的山地，构成了南中国的一道屏障，阻挡了来自北方的冷空气，将中国的冬天挡在了南岭以北。

南岭，是冬季10℃等温线所在。按照道理，不高的南岭，其实很难挡住南下的冷空气，只是因为南岭地处南国，冷空气千里奔袭，到这里已是强弩之末，难以翻越南岭，除非遇到超级寒潮，不然，岭南是很少能有真正意义上的气象学上的冬天。不过，南岭山地间的低谷和垭口，是北方寒潮南侵的通道，岭南冬季仍可受到冷空气威胁。南岭间的谷地和孔道，不足以稀释湖南的冷空气，却足以让湖南走向岭南、走向世界。

河流，在此孕育。湖南的母亲河湘江的源头在海洋山，潇水、夫夷水、舂陵水、耒水和章水（北向，长江流域），漓江、桂江、贺江、连江、武水、浈江（南向，珠江流域）都发源于南岭，却各奔南北。南岭，隔绝了长江流域和珠江流域，却塑造了湖南、江西、广东、广西的基本地理格局，也成就了浩瀚的洞庭和鄱阳湖。

五岭，也是五条通往岭南的通道。除了大庾岭，其余四岭皆在湖南。战乱结束之后，南征的孔道成了商道。定都长安的秦、汉、唐，经略岭南，广东徐闻、广西合浦是重要的对外交通和贸易口岸，通往南海诸国，取道湖南是最近的路线，湖南，成为国家的交通要道。「越城岭」有灵渠沟通湘江与漓水，中原南下舟船沿湘江上溯至广西兴安，经灵渠，直接进入珠江水系，沿水路到达徐闻、合浦、番禺（今广州），扬帆出海，越城岭一度是沟通岭南岭北最重要的通道，长沙窑的瓷器，就是通过这条通道走向世界。南下北上的商旅，都取道湖南。骑田岭、萌渚岭、都庞岭古道曾经的繁华，在遗存的古道依稀可见。

唐代之后，京杭大运河开通，经济、人才、政治中心东移，广州成为最重要的口岸，加上张九龄主持开凿大庾岭，湖南交通要道的地位被江西取代。大庾岭，也成为通往岭南最重要的通道。

「去也遵陆 · 歸也循海」- 五世紀前葉

法显 399 年發自長安，在外15年。於414 年回到青州。所撰行传，在诸经录及《隋书·经籍志》中，有《历游天竺记传》、《佛国记》、《法显传》等编，现仅存一本行世，有题《佛国记》者、有题《法显传》者，似皆非是。今暫改題曰《法显行传》以名实相符。

法之去也遵陆，其归也循海，兹仅录其归程：始于多摩梨帝 (Tamralipti, 今孟加拉灣北岸Tamluk)国。⋯据《法显行传》，法显自昔「多摩梨帝」港载商人大舶，乘冬初信风西南行十四日到昔师子国，今锡兰岛。留住二年，复载商人大船得好信风东下，二日便值大风，飘流十三日，到一岛，补船破漏，复前行九十日许，到昔「耶婆提」（阇婆、诃陵 Karajan Kalingga，今爪哇中部北岸）或苏门答剌。

停此国五月日，复随他商人大船，上亦二百許人，赍五十日粮，以四月十六日发。法顯於舶上安居。东北行，趣广州（411年，第7次記”夏坐”varsa）。一月徐日，夜鼓时遇黑风暴雨，天连阴，海师误路，经七十馀日，不见海岸。即便西北行求岸，昼夜十二日到山东之牢山湾南岸，时在七月十四日。

其在锡兰出发，应在义熙九年夏秋之间，盖夏秋季为西南信风发时，冬春二季为东北信风发时；帆船往来南海者悉视信风为准也。《行传》云；“商人议言，常行时正可五十日便到广州”，具见当时广州、耶婆提间频有商往来云。

中国海港名见诸传者，有山东半岛北岸之东莱，南岸之长广，然与南海交通频繁之大港，要不外交、广二州。顾外国船舶所莅，且溯江而上至于江陵。

《高僧传》卷二《佛驮跋陀罗传》载：
跋陀羅（Buddhabhadra，359-429）在长安预言「本乡有五舶俱发…停止歲许，復西适江陵，遇外国舶至，既而讯访，果是天竺五舶先所見者也。」虽预言之偶合，要足证长江中有外国船舶往来诸僧行程约略可考者：求那跋摩（Gunabhadra）经行锡兰、阇婆、占城而至广州；拘那罗陀（Gunarata）经行狼牙修（Langkasuka大泥、今馬來半島的北大年）、扶南（Phnom, 今柬埔寨境內湄公河三角洲）而至广州。其先或曾假道锡兰，盖其为优禅尼（Ujjayani 鄔闍衍那，印度烏賈因）国人，而锡兰为东渡必经之地也。

冯承钧《中国南海交通史》上编第三章《法显之归程》，上海古籍出版社，2005年，第15、20页。上篇第四章《南北朝时往来南海之僧人》，第26页。

永恒的“瞬间”连缀可见的历史：“第三只眼”中的近世中国 (代序：西方的中國影像)
卞修跃 (2013)

一、以图记事是人类古老的文化活动之一，是人类的精神本能。

然而，众所周知，在作为中国古代传统正史的《二十四史》中，图像内容并未被收载。道理其实很简单：在造纸术发明之前，中国的图书镌刻在狭长的木简，结简成卷；而幅面较大、内容丰富的图像无法在木简这样狭小的介质上存在。此后造纸术和刻版印刷术发明，但同样由于印刷技术的局限，中国传统图书中难以大量用图，这种情况延续了千年之久。

不过，尽管二十四史没有收图入史，但在中国数千年的传统文化中，从未忽略图形、图像传递信息、传承文化的价值与作用。大而言之，绘影成形，利用图像的形式展现人类认识客观世界，体现人类自身精神生活，几乎是人类与生俱来的精神本能，也是人类最古老的文化活动之一。当人类通过用手劳动，站立起身躯，进化了大脑，产生了精神意识之际，人类便开始认识到自身作为自然界最具特色的存在。他们进行物质生产、生活的同时，智力水平日益提高，精神生活简单走向复杂。于是，他们在从事原始采集、狩猎的同时，开始逐步认识自己赖以生存的客观世界，并由此逐渐走向对自己精神世界的认识。为了体现这种认识、传承所积累的知识，原始先民们往往会利用天然的、简单的颜料，在岩壁之上、器物之表，或绘、或凿、或铸，刻画出各种人物、动物图案，反映自己的采集、狩猎等现实生活或生殖崇拜等意识观念。如广泛分布中国西南、东北、西北等地的岩画，黄河流域仰韶文化遗存中画在陶器上的人面、鱼身图案等，都向后世形象生动地展现了这一点。

相对抽象的文字表述，图形、图像更能生动、形象地反映人们对外部世界的认识，表现日常的生产、生活，展示人类精神生活。因此，即便是在文字发明之后，图形、图像的这种价值也并未削弱。许慎《说文解字·序》称：“黄帝之史仓颉，见鸟兽蹄迒之迹，知分理之可相别异也，初造书契。” 虽类属传说，但也从一个方面说明，抽象文字之发生实源自形象的鸟兽之迹，也就是从形象的图案中演变进化而来。而在纯粹文字记载的中国古史关于以图记事、以图载史的內容同样不绝如缕。《吴越春秋》称“功可象于图画”。《世本·作篇》曰“史皇作图，仓颉作书”。《吕氏春秋·审分览》载“史皇作图”。《说郛·卷四二》则记：“夫画者，肇自伏牺画封。至黄帝时，史皇、仓颉生焉。史皇状鱼龙之迹，仓颉因而为字，盖画先而书次之。” 《拾遗记》卷一《颛顼》亦云“颛顼生，手有文如龙，亦有玉图之象”。《吕氏春秋·先识览》记桀之将亡，”太史终古其图法·····出奔如商”，“殷内史向挚见纣之愈乱迷惑也，于是载其图法，出亡之周”，“晋太史屠黍见⋯晋公之骄而无德义也，以其图法归周”。《周易·系辞上》则更有名言：“河出图，洛出书，圣人则之。”

今本《竹书纪年》更细致：“黄帝轩辕五十年秋七月·····《龙图》出河，《龟书》出洛，赤文篆字，以授轩辕。”《汉书》记刘邦克秦都城，萧何“收律令图书”。以至于后世史家，更是图、书并重。而章学诚则在《和州志》评司马迁始创十表，后世相承，志表愈繁，图经渐失”，把正史中无图的责任全部推给了太史公。

自古以来，中国即把书籍径称”图书”，彰显了中国古代图、书并重的传统，以至于后世往往把语出《新唐书·杨馆传》的“左右图史”词的本义，从用以形容一个人嗜书好学、藏书丰富，引申为中国古代治史、治学的一种图文并重的传统。

此外，于文字书籍之外独立存在的图像，又与文字并行流传，成为人们再现对外部世界认识和内在精神生活不可或缺的工具与形式。文字之所创制，是从形象的图形、图案中抽象演化而来，自不待言。而流传数千年以至今日能为人们所见的，如商周彝鼎之纹、汉代画像石、画像砖、帛画等物，皆为当时人们对现实生产、生活和精神文化生活的展现，也是今世认识特定历史内容一个重要且形象、生动，弥足珍贵的历史资料。

晋唐以降，迄于明清，文明益昌，不同流派的绘画作品汗牛充栋，所反映的內容，更遍及人类社会生活的方方面面。既有纯粹的反映人们衣食住行、重大政治军事活动的纪实作品，如疆域舆图、天文天象、工具制作、生产流程、军事战爭、仪典节庆等；也有纯以反映画者内心感受、传达画者精神情感的艺术性绘画，如不同流派的文人画作、山水花鸟鱼虫之类；还有印制在人们生产活动产物上的装饰性图案等，如各类建筑物的雕梁画栋、官民窑瓷上的印花图形、官民服装上的花团锦簇等。

进入近代之后，随着摄影技术的发明 (1839年)，人们更热衷于把手中的相机，作为观察世界和展现事件进展与社会状况一连串瞬间的“第三只眼”。相机能把人类的眼睛所能看到的一切东西精确、细致地摄制下来，准确地再现，流传至久远，从而为人类更加精确地映客观世界，乃至凝固稍纵即逝的人类活动瞬间以成永恒画面，提供了强大的、无可匹敌的武器，因此更加丰富了人类以图像记录历史的手段与内容，也为后世留下了取之不尽的影像资料。近年来，随着人们学习与欣赏习惯的变化，历史图像受到社会各界、特别是历史学界越来越多的关注和重视，而近代保留下来的无以数计的照片，也同样构成我们这里所说的图像种类之一，成为人们研究历史的最为珍贵的资料。

二、“第三只眼”中的近世中国，形象生动，丰富多彩。

相机是人类认识外部世界的“第三只眼”，而近世以来西方世界对中国的观察，同样也是另外一只观察中国的眼睛。近世西方世界对中国的形象认识大体上始于1793年英国马戛尔尼使团的随行画家威廉·亚历山大（William Alexander）的画作。当然，此前的中国早已誉满欧洲，"中国热”已经在欧洲持续了很久。从最初听到中国的名字直到启蒙时代，西方世界一向将这个东方古老帝国视为富裕和文明的典范，生起无限的羡慕与神往之情。虽然马夏尔尼一行的来华，没能够完成促使中华帝国打开国门，进而促进对华贸易的使命，使团的随行画家威廉·亚历山大却把他的一路见闻沿途的风光、庙堂建筑、风俗民情、官员走卒、将军士卒等绘成画幅，在18、19世纪之交长期成为西方世界对中国最权威，甚至是唯一的形象描述。

直到1843年，英国伦敦费舍尔公司出版了一套规模可观的配文画册《中国：那个古老帝国的风景、建筑与社会习俗 (China: The Scenery, Architecture, and Social Habits of That Ancient Empire；1958年版)，这一局面才稍有改观。这本由英国建筑师、风景画画家托马斯·阿洛姆 (ThomasA1lom) 精心绘画，历史学家乔治·赖特（George Wright）配文的画册，集当时欧州中国题材绘画之大成，为西方世界在照相术成熟之前，提供了有关中国社会生活的丰富的历史信息。也正是在这部画册面世之际，英国人在香港岛建起了以女王维多利亚名字命名的港口，他们用坚船利炮洞开了中华帝国闭锁已久的国门。而在此后不久，西方人挟着画板、携着刚刚发明出来的笨重的照相机，随着炮舰源源不断地涌进中国，把目光、镜头无数次地聚焦于这块对于他们而言神秘、新奇、美丽、富饶的土地。

摄影术约于1844年被西方人带到中国，并留下了一批有关中国的照相资料。此后，涌入中国的西方军人、记者、传教士、商人、旅行家、探险家、外交官、科学家等，一步一步地深入到中国的每一个角落，用照片或图画记录着中国社会发生的巨大变化。也正从此时开始，有关中国历史的记载，除了传统的文献档案资料的记述与绘画的描绘外，许多重大历史事件都越来越多地被来到中国的西方摄影家们用相机凝结为永恒的“瞬间”。中国在西方人心目中的形象，也发生着天翻地覆的变迁：其中虽然仍不乏西方世界对中国辉煌灿烂的传统文化的敬畏、对中国风格独具的古代建筑的瞻仰、对中国恬淡淳朴的民风世俗的勾画，以及对中国雄伟壮丽的山川风景的惊羡；但是西方人用笔与镜头记录下来的，更多的是西方世界对中华帝国国门的叩击以及这一古老帝国威严的坍𡉏，是踏海而来的西方世界的坚船利炮在神州土地上的耀武扬威，是中国朝廷的腐败、官場的昏暗、军队的怯懦与民众的愚昧，是西方列强在中国的攘权夺利，是进入民国时期的军阀混战与民不聊生···西人画笔与镜头聚焦的这段风云激荡的中国近代史，展示的近世中国无数个永恒的“瞬间”，时间跨度久远，涉及中国社会方方面面，深刻而广泛，给中国乃至世人，留下了丰富多彩的內容。同时，由于直观生动地记录了那个时代中国的历史风貌，这些“瞬间”成为我们今天历史研究的重要史料，同时也形成了西人对中国近世历史形象而真实的写照。

于是，历史给我们留下了一长串的名字：亚历山大（马夏尔尼使团随团画家)、阿洛姆(英国建筑师、画家)、于勒·埃及尔（法国海关总检察长，1844年来华)、李阁朗 (早期来华摄影师)、比托 (英国摄影师，第二次鸦片战争期间来华)、汤姆逊 (早期来华摄影师)、奥尔末 (早期来华摄影师)、南怀谦 (来华传教士)、斯坦因 (早期来华探险家，活动于中国西北地区)、沙畹 (早期来华探险家)、赫定 (早期来华探险家)、查尔 (1870-1880年在华)、马达汉 (俄国早期来华探险家)、礼荷莲女传教（18世纪末活动于福建)、那爱德 (早期来华传教士，《消失的天府》作者)、方苏雅 (法国领事)、海斯 (德国人，《山东》作者)、亨利王子 (法国人，《从东京到印度》作者)、威尔逊 (美国植物学家)、杰克逊 (美国人，1895年来华活动)、小川一真 (日本人)、佩奈尔 (1900-1910年在华，收集大量中国摄影照片)、派尔森 (法军上校)、山本讚七郎 (日本人)、柏石曼 (德国建筑师)、喜仁龙 (瑞典人)、斯威尔 (1906-1907年来华探险)、克拉克 (1908-1909年来华考察，活动于陕甘地区)、莫里循 (《泰晤士报》记者，清末民初长期活动于中国)、海达 (20世纪30年代来华)、甘博 (美国传教士，1920年前后来华)、洛克 (美国探险家)、彭德尔顿 (1931-1932年来华考察)、皮肯斯 (美国传教士，1934-1936年拍摄北京等地清真寺)、饭山达雄 (日本人，1936年来华)等，以及如《伦新闻画报》(18421940)、法国《巴黎小画报》、《小巴黎人报》、美国《生活》杂志等报刊的记者等。可以说从1840年至1949年的百余年间，在中国历史上的近代史时期，发生了无数次重大历史事件，在这些历史事件中，都有西方人的现场目击和摄影报道。这些报道及由之形成的影像资料，时间跨度从1793年至1949年，逾150年之久，范围则涉及中国社会之方方面面，凡军国大事、山川风光、人物肖像、庙谟民风、建筑物产、贩夫走卒、交通店肆，等等，无所不有，真实形象地记录和反映着当时中国的生产方式、生活方式、教育文化、宗教信仰等领域的情形，直观地展示着中国近世社会的变化轨迹、西人心中的中国形象的变化发展，内容广泛而深刻。

三、永恒的“瞬间”，连缀成可见的历史。

尤为可贵的是，近世以来西方人士用“第三只眼”展现的中国社会，形象、具体、丰富多彩。来到中国的西方人，身份不同、兴趣不同、聚焦点不同。他们或关注中国的山川俊美、物产丰饶；或关注中国的文化悠久、社会变迁；或关注中国的风俗民情、名胜建筑；或关注中国的军事政治、经济生活；或关注中国的政坛乱局、国民疾苦。他们用画板或镜头凝结的一个个近世中国的历史瞬间，具体而微且又全面广泛地连缀成了一部鲜活的中国近代历史。其中不少图像所反映出来的历史内容，甚至为官书档案，乃至方志文史所不载或载而未详。

简单地举一个例子：美国霍普金斯大学地质学教授罗伯特·拉里莫尔·彭德尔顿(Robert Larimore Pendleton）早年长期活动于中国、印度、菲律宾和暹罗。1931年6月前后，彭德尔顿率探险队深入华北远地区考察土壤，恰遇1928年由时任绥远省政府主席李培基倡议兴建的萨拉齐民生渠接近竣工。彭德尔顿用手中的相机，拍下了数十幅照片，完整地记录了该渠在竣工前的修建、渠道、土方、堤坝、民工，以及竣工通水时的龙口、水闸、放水、观众、庆典等各方面的细节图像。最令人震撼的是，当年的民工们，居然是全身上下一丝不挂，裸着躯体，担土筑堤，开挖河渠。时至今日，当笔者试图查阅有关萨拉奇民生渠的历史资料时，却发现彭氏当年现场所拍摄的这些历史图像资料，尚未被人提及或加以运用，而在文献资料中，同样也不会有这种细节的记载与描述。这或许能够直接说明影像资料所具有的独特的明史、证史和补史的学术功能。

今天，当人类社会已经踏进一个新的世纪，回首百年前的中国，其所经历的苦难与屈辱、抗争与梦想，都被近一个世纪的岁月洗礼得恬淡、安详。我们也能一种平和心情，来翻检百年前西方人士为我们留下的无数的近世中国影像，来审视这段用无数个被镜头与画幅凝为永恒的“瞬间”连缀而成的可见的历史来认识、研究和反思中国近代社会的动荡、变迁与发展，同时也来感受西方人士当年对中国的观察、探寻与研究，来认识西方人士为我们留下的这笔丰富历史遗产所独具的学术文化价值。当然，摄影被西方人携入中国之后，很快被中国社会所接受。中国人也很快掌握了这门新兴的观察世界的技术，同样也涌现出无数的摄影家，拍摄出了无数照片，为我们留下了珍贵的历史影像资料。只是，本文考察的主体侧重于近世以来西方人士对中国的形象观察表现，所以，同时代的中国摄影家的贡献，只能留待另文再作讨论了。

近代西方人士拍摄流传下来的有关中国的影像资料，存在形式多样，收藏分布广泛，存世数量庞大。近若干年来，随着大量的有关中国题材的历史图像不断面世，“影像史料”和“影像史学”也逐渐成为历史学界热门话题之一，越来越受到学术界的关注，许多学术专著或普及性读物都利用了大的影像史料，图文并茂，受到读者的欢迎；专题性图片集的出版也日益丰富，对历史知识的传播和历史学术研究都起到了积极的推动作用。与此同时，国际史学界中对“影像史学”的探讨与推动方兴未艾，影像与史学研究的关系越来越受到关注与重视。历史影像本身不仅被视为历史学研究重要的新的史料来源，而且影像信息之表达形式甚至影响到历史学的表达方式、人们认识与观念的传播方式。王国维尝言，新学问的出现大都由于新材料的推动，材料可帮助方法，而材料的不同又可以使做学问的结果与成绩不同。拟之于影像，则历史图像资料之作为一种新的材料，其形象、具体、生动的历史图像本身所蕴含的丰富的历史信息，同样也将推动历史学乃至其他学科的新学问的诞生与发展。

近些年随着中国综合国力的增强和国际地位的提升，有中国题材的各种历史图像或老照片受到全球读者的关注，埋没数十年乃至百年之久的中国历史图像、老照片等从西方的图书馆、博物館，乃至私人收藏家的尘封中陆续得以重见天日，而且有层出不穷之势。这为我们提供了绝佳的历史契机，使我们有机会更系统全面地搜集近世来西方世界有关中国的绘画作品与摄影作品，在彰显国家进步与文化繁荣的同时，有目的、有意识地积累、保存、保护这些承载着我们民族文化历史丰富信息的珍贵资料，进而更深刻、全面和形象地认识、理解风云激荡的中国近代历史。

所以，我们相信有计划、有目的地搜集、整理和出版中国近世影像史料，尤其是近世来西方人士拍摄描绘的有关中国的影像资料（包括绘画、照片、纪录电影），利用现代高度发达的科学技术，以适当的方式提供给大众及专业研究者使用参考，必将会给中国近代史研究带来许多新鲜的史料，拓展新的学术研究领域。这项工作不仅体现了对中国古代以图载史、图书并重传统的传承与弘扬，而且顺应人类文化发展潮流，从而将史学研究带入“图像时代”，对中国“影像史学”的建立与发展起到积极作用，对促进国家文化建设也具有重要的现实意义。

古人云：“以铜为镜，可以正衣冠；以古为镜，可以知兴替。” 事实上西人画笔与镜头中的近世中国影像，既是中国近世历史的写照，某种程度上也反映着西方对中国的认识。不论是其影像所反映的中国近世历史，还是西人对中国近世的认识本身，都值得我们去揭示、认识、理解和反思的课题。因此，我们经过搜集、整理，编辑、出版了这套《西方的中国影像》1793-1949，意在通过被西方人当年用“第三只眼”凝固的中国近世的一个个历史“瞬间”，形象地展示中国近世社会的变化轨迹，以及西人心中的中国形象的变化发展。

以上摘自《西方的中國影像》叢書主編者之代序，是以相機影像為主的圖書，但年代往前延伸到 1792~93 年英國 Macartney 使團隨團畫師 William Alexander 的畫作，及其後建築師畫家 Thomas Allom 引申的遊記插畫。其實再前推近140年到 1655年，VOC 使團的書記 Johan Nieuhof 也留下60 張沿途速寫，在隨後的出版也同樣被銅版畫師加油添醋，而且擴充到近150幀插圖。這兩波遊記在歐洲都廣受歡迎，引發中國風（chinoiserie）的流行時尚。

Hugo Grotius 格勞秀斯（荷蘭文：Hugo de Groot 許霍·德赫羅特；1583-1645）Hugo（雨果）在國際公法首次傳入中國時，被譯為虎哥。

《On the Law of Prize or Booty》手抄本為國際法及海洋法鼻祖，其中第12章以《海洋自由論》之名出版，主張公海是可以自由航行，為當時新興的海權國家如荷蘭、英國提供了相關法律原則的基礎，以突破當時西班牙和葡萄牙對海洋貿易的壟斷，並反對炮艦外交。

荷蘭著作是英國成為海上強權的絆腳石，於 1609 年出版。書名頁上未登出作者姓名，但出自許赫・德赫羅特之手、已是公開的秘密。這位荷蘭神童，在該書出版時才26 歲，已在文壇和政治界闖蕩多年。他16 歲就出版個人第一部著作（談大學文科），同年獲任命為海牙的律師，18 歲成為荷蘭邦的官方撰史人。他是他那一代人裡熠熠耀眼的知識界新星，終其一生都將頭角崢嶸，且最終在政治流亡生涯裡度過大半人生。

《自由海洋論》(Mare Liberum) 一書中主張，沒有哪個國家能對海洋行使獨占性的管轄權，任何國家的船隻可自由航行於其為了貿易而選擇的任何海域。把此書取名為《自由貿易論》或許更貼切。德赫羅特所費心探討的法律問題，乃是1494 年教皇讓葡萄牙人與西班牙人瓜分世界之後，葡萄牙人的以下主張：荷蘭東印度公司無權派船進入東印度群島的海域。本書的問世有其特殊的時代環境，且為特定的利益而發聲。它是向葡萄牙人發出的挑戰，但火力四射，因而也打擊到有意阻止荷蘭進入全球貿易領域的任何國家，且因其言之有理的法律論點，成為後來稱之為國際法的法律開端。

引發這場爭端的事件，發生於1603 年2月25日，地點是馬來半島的南端，即今日所謂的新加坡海峽。荷蘭东印度公司船長雅各布·范海姆斯凱爾克（Jacob van Heemskerck）在南海南緣海域搜尋香料一年，只小有收穫。對當時初抵東南亞的英格貿易商說，第一個停靠港是萬丹(Bantam)。萬丹是個獨立小王國，爪哇島西端的貿易港。Jacob 於前一年春天在萬丹弄到五船香料，將它們運回尼德蘭，但他這次東航航的主要目的，是打破被葡萄牙人對爪哇島東邊摩鹿加群島（香料群島）生產者的控制。

葡萄牙極力阻止來自北歐的新闖入者進入他的貿易區，處死擄獲的荷蘭人，以表明其阻止競爭者進入這市場分一杯羹的決心。Jacob 船長在香料群島毫無所獲，轉而西航北大年 (Pattani)，即馬來半島東部的國際港。在那裡，他與柔佛（Johor）蘇丹的兄弟羅闍·蓬蘇（Raja Bongsu）搭上關係。

柔佛是小型地區性強權，占據馬來半島最南端，屬於馬六甲蘇丹國（即滿剌加王朝）。因不滿葡萄牙人在該地區的專橫作為，已向葡萄牙人宣戰。Jacob 不想這次遠航空手而回，柔佛則很擺脫葡萄牙人掌控，於是雙方一拍即合，合謀奪取航經新加峽的下一艘葡萄牙貨船。如果 Jacob 無法透過購買取得香料，則可用奪取的手段如願。荷人攻擊時，「聖卡塔莉娜」(Santa Catarina) 正從澳門航往麻六甲途中，船上載了黃金、商品，八百多名船員和乘客。荷蘭人炮轟時極為小心，力求只讓船失去動力而不把該船炸沉。經過一日的炮轟，葡萄牙人別無選擇只有投降。荷蘭人把船上所有人毫髮無傷地送到麻六甲，但把船和船貨帶回阿姆斯特丹。這次奪船獲利驚人，VOC的資本一舉增長超過50%。

葡萄牙要求歸還船貨，於是聖卡塔莉娜號遭奪占事件成為阿姆斯特丹海事法庭受理案件。不出任何人所料，1604 年9月，該法庭裁決被告，亦即 Jacob船長和荷蘭东印度公司勝訴。該公司主張，此船是在對葡萄牙發動的”正義之戰”中取得的合法”戰利品”。據萬國公法，尼德蘭和柔佛都有權自行締結貿易關係，不必受制於第三方的意向。根據所謂的「自然法」，類似 Jacob 的海船船長有權在正義無法有效伸張的情況下懲罰違法者。

荷蘭東印度公司心知自己打贏這場官司乃是建立在薄弱的法律邏輯下，於是決定在法庭判決之後，立即取得合乎已意的法律意見書。該公司某董事的弟弟是 Grotius 的大學室友，因為這層關係，荷蘭東印度公司委請該公司提出訴訟案情摘要。Grotius 利用荷蘭東印度公司所提供的大量文獻資料，超乎他所受託之工作的要求，寫成一部大部頭的法學手抄本，取名《論捕獲物或戰利品的法律》(On the Law of Prize or Booty)。這部手抄本的第12 章談海洋是否可自由航行的問題，從而談到荷蘭用武力對付試圖削弱荷蘭船隻行動自由、禁止荷蘭人與土著統治者貿易的第三方是否有理的問題。隨著與英格蘭在貿易上的競爭更為激烈，那一章以《自由海洋論》之名出版。

該書一在英格蘭出現即遭詹姆斯一世查禁，但他禁不了這個人入境。四年後的1613年，荷蘭人派一官方代表團前來倫敦協商貿易爭端，Grotius 是代表團一員，從而讓詹姆斯一睹這位荷蘭年輕人的風采。Grotius 的聰明才智、流利的拉丁語在與他意見不同者面前展現的從容自信一一如此年紀輕輕就有如此台風，令英格蘭人大為不快——使他成為協商的開幕會議和閉幕會議時荷蘭代表團之正式發言人的不二人選。

詹姆斯出席這些會議有其特殊理由：他是蘇格蘭人。荷蘭漁民到蘇格蘭東岸近海捕撈魚已數十年，一直未有哪個英格蘭國王出手干預。詹姆斯的表姑婆伊莉莎白一世認為海洋是自由開放之地，從未想過她有職責要荷蘭人退出北海。無論如何，即使這麼做也徒勞。荷蘭人的裝備較精良、利於在一望無際的大海上作業，且荷蘭人以鯡魚場作為他們當時才剛開始打造之全球帝國的基礎。詹姆斯的看法不同。荷蘭人所捕撈的鯡魚本該屬於蘇格蘭漁民所有，如果蘇格蘭漁民不捕撈，荷蘭人該付費給他，以取得在該海域捕魚的權利。如今他不只是蘇格蘭王、還是英格蘭王，他能把此事列為政府首要的待辦事項。

1613年4月6日的會議上，Grotius 在詹姆斯一世面前做開場致詞時，只談到荷蘭在東印度群島的地位。他不厭其煩地解釋荷蘭東印度公司幾次被迫出手援助亞洲地區與他們有優先貿易關係的統治者，使他們免遭葡萄牙人「迫在眉睫的毀滅」，他指出打入香料貿易所需要的龐大開銷，建議英格蘭人和荷蘭
人不應把對方當成對手，而應結成「公平的夥伴關係」。這位滔滔不絕的年輕演說家舉出一個又一個例子，不停鼓動他的如簧之舌，致使在場某些人認為他已在單調乏味上臻於無人能及的最上乘境界。但這是外交場合，每個人都得表現應有的禮貌。

Grotius 在詹姆斯一世面前長篇大論，全程未談到鯡魚場之事。他認為那完全不在他的職責範圍。他來倫敦是為了促進他雇主荷蘭東印度公司在亞洲的利益。該公司欲在東印度群島站穩腳跟轉虧為盈，但眼前還在辛苦努力當中，因此不希望英格蘭的東印度公司在那些海域與他們競爭。他無法主張荷蘭人與葡萄牙人爭奪的海域如今屬荷蘭人所有，但他能指出在地球另一端貿易所需的高昂成本。

Grotius 於六個星期後重返講台，代表荷蘭代表團演說。這一次他體恤與會者，致詞比第一場簡短，認知到雙方未達成正式協議。但他也未承認失敗，而是提出兩個切實可的暫行辦法：在雙方都已站穩腳跟的地方，不該彼此為敵，「在東印度群島的其他地方，兩國應盡可能互示善意，應按照自己的意向自由經商。」

詹姆斯對亞洲貿易有興趣，但更想找出辦法讓荷蘭人為鯡魚場支付使用費。雙方各有所圖，因而不管在這次協商期間，還是在兩年後英格蘭人回訪尼德蘭重啟協商期間，均毫無所成。但這一爭端引起塞爾登的注意。

塞爾登（John Selden: 1584-1654）就如同英格蘭版的 Grotius，只是年紀輕一歲。這時塞爾登還不像 Grotius 那麼有名，才剛開始走上（會使這兩人成為全歐洲的目光焦點、並）讓兩人注意到對方的學術道路。但他大概有同樣的抱負，也就是要用他博大的法學知識引導世人的走向。客觀形勢使他們在這場新開闢的國際法爭議領域分處兩陣營，但兩人後來英雄惜英雄，都極為欣賞對方。Grotius 於1613年後未再踏上英格蘭土地，塞爾登則從未離開大不列顛島，因而兩人從未見面。兩人如果見面，大概會是當世絕頂天才的世紀之會。

塞爾登還是個在為友人的出版物寫寫應景詩的初級大律師時，想必聽過年輕的 Grotius 在國王詹姆斯面前大顯身手的事。什麼因素使塞爾登起意駁斥《自由海洋論》，將永遠不得而知，但他拿到這本書，並決定寫書批駁一一當然是用拉丁文寫成。於是而有《閉鎖海洋論》(Mare Clausum) 問世。

節錄自 The Golden Ghetto (1997)

Part 2 THE RESIDENTS AND THEIR FIRMS

Chap.4 “The Dominant Firms”

(p.150)
From the departure of Carrington to the end of the War of 1812, no individual or firm at Canton really stands out. Trade fell off drastically with the beginning of hostilities, and the Americans stranded at Canton were hard-pressed to keep busy, let alone show a profit. There were shadowy concerns like Milnor & Bull, a New York concern with houses at either end of the trade; individuals like Daniel Stansbury, who represented Minturn & Champlin, also of New York; the Philadelphians James and Benjamin C. Wilcocks and Charles Blight, representing themselves and their families; Philip Ammidon, whose ship President Adams had been wrecked in the China Sea in 1812, and various others on their own account, like Rhode Islanders P. W. Snow (son of Samuel) and Captain William F. Megee, who drifted in avoiding his creditors. But after the war, increasingly, one name and one firm at Canton developed a preeminent commercial reputation—John Perkins Cushing and Perkins & Co.

Perkins & Co.（珀/普金斯洋行）

In the fall of 1789, young Thomas Handasyd Perkins was in Canton as supercargo of E. H. Derby’s ship Astreae, Captain James Magee. Captain Robert Gray of the Columbia arrived in November fresh from the Northwest Coast. From Joseph Ingraham, first mate of the latter vessel, Perkins learned what John Ledyard had been trying to tell American merchants for several years past–that a trade in furs, especially the glossy Black Sea otter skins from the Pacific Coast of America, could be extremely profitable if exchanged in Canton for teas.

The following year, Perkins, Captain Magee, and Russell Sturgis (Sr.) sent Ingraham back to the Northwest Coast in their newly acquired ship, Hope, on a fur voyage. From this time on, T. H. Perkins was in the China trade on his own account. In 1792, with his elder brother, Perkins formed James & Thomas H. Perkins, a firm that was to send dozens of talented young Perkins relatives into the commerce. The fur trade proved fabulously lucrative, if ephemeral, and, as we have noted, it made the fortunes of the Perkins brothers.

(p.151)

It was to manage the Canton end of this commerce that J & T. H. Perkins sent out Ephraim Bumstead the season after Carrington arrived. Bumstead, who had learned his trade in the Boston firm’s countinghouse, was to be the resident partner of Ephraim Bumstead & Co. of Canton. With him came John Perkins Cushing, the sixteen-year-old nephew of the Perkins brothers.

T. H. Perkins had adopted the boy after the death of Cushing’s erratic father. Although the young man reportedly had literary and artistic leanings and little interest in commerce, he was to become the shrewdest and most successful American trader in China. Within two years Bumstead was dead, and young Cushing had assumed the whole burden of the Canton office some three years before he had attained his majority. Colonel Perkins, who had been badly frightened by the news of Bumstead’s death, was moved to admiration of his precocious nephew’s skill, when a masterfully selected cargo of tea arrived in Boston to an excellent market.

The firm of Perkins & Co. was not formed until 1806, though it had been in operation for two years by that time, with Cushing as the sole resident partner. From Carrington’s departure in 1811 until its demise in 1829, this firm was easily the most important American house in China.

A second major Boston firm was organized in 1810 by Perkins relatives, Bryant & Sturgis, which was often closely associated with the Perkins brothers.

Cushing proved extraordinarily imaginative in developing new lines of trade and making mutually profitable arrangements with Chinese, British, and other American traders. He was to be a central influence in the building of several fortunes, including those of Howqua, his uncles, Thomas H. and James Perkins, Samuel Cabot, William Sturgis, John Bryant, Samuel Russell, George R. Russell, Henry Parkman Sturgis, Benjamin C. Wilcocks, John R. Latimer, the Forbes brothers, and a number of others.

In his alliance with Howqua, in the development of the Turkey opium trade, the creation of a postwar commerce between Canton and South America, the subversion of the East India Company’s monopoly of the trade in British-made cloth, and in his never-failing judgment of China cargoes, Cushing repeatedly displayed a commercial talent of the first order.

By 1830 the Perkinses’ London agent estimated that the firm carried on half of the American China trade and all of the European tea trade except that conducted by the Dutch East India Company. Ironically by that date Cushing had retired and Perkins & Co., Canton, had disappeared.

The indispensable factor in Cushing’s success was his association with Howqua (伍秉鑑 Wu Ping-chien, 1769-1843). The great Chinese trader was the third son of the founder of his firm (Howqua I, 伍國瑩 Wu Kuo-jung, 1731-1810). The family had originally come from Fukien in the seventeenth century and settled in the Nan-hai（應指珠江以南的”河南”島，今海珠區）district just outside Canton. By Howqua II’s time the family was of the gentry class, although its earlier status is not certain.

Howqua’s wealth, however, was very clearly a major factor in consolidating the family’s social position in China, just as the collective fortunes of the Boston Concern members established the allied Massachusetts families in the burgeoning social hierarchy of America.

(p.152)

Howqua specialized in what were probably the most profitable branches of the trade for a hong merchant. He contracted with tea merchants, making advances a season ahead of time, and he sold mostly to the British East India Co. and to Americans, especially to Perkins & Co. before 1830 and to Russell & Co. thereafter. Because the Honorable Company’s credit was impeccable and the American trade was generally a cash business, Howqua was never critically short of money, unlike many of his fellow hong merchants. He also enjoyed several very important advantages, not the least of which was his own very considerable business genius.

As head of the Cohong, he exercised great personal influence on prices and policies in the Chinese market. Because his own fortune was immense, he was able to avoid the difficulties that beset other security merchants, and he did not have to rely on the enlightened charity of the East India Co. for aid in difficult moments. The only hong merchant who approached Howqua in shrewdness and success was Puankhequa I (潘振承 P’an Chen-cheng), and he was of an earlier generation.

Besides his domestic investments, Howqua seems to have made money in a number of ways: he acted as middleman for the products the foreigners took away from China; he owned land, buildings, and facilities used by the Chinese and foreign merchants alike at Canton; he speculated in commodities (he cornered the market in pepper in 1820) and on exchange; he acted as a money lender and he often shipped abroad on his own account. In this last capacity Howqua was in a very strong position. He bought at a reduced rate directly from the grower (or was, himself, the producer), and he sold in the auction houses in American and European cities. In this way, Howqua freed himself from the vagaries of the Canton tea market and collected the profits of tea grower, hong merchant, shipper, and commission house. Finally Cushing began a practice that the Boston Concern continued throughout Howqua’s life: investing the old hong merchant’s capital in American development, especially railroads.

The one element Howqua could not supply on his own was a completely trustworthy American agent. Because he neither spoke nor wrote English. he needed someone with these skills who was also well versed in Western law and commercial procedures. In Cushing, Howqua found these qualities together with everything else he required–access to the superior Western shipbuilders and navigators, the skill of American sailors, the business acumen of the Boston Concern and its affiliates worldwide, the advantageous American customs position of importing in American ships under American title, and superior connections in England and Europe independent of the East India Company.

(p.154)

Howqua’s dealings with members of the associated Boston families date back at least to 1804, when John Cushing was only a clerk for Bumstead, and Howqua I. was still head of the Wu family and business. The relationship developed and deepened as the years wore on. During the War of 1812, Perkins & Co. could do very little, because the British fleet swept American merchantmen off the seas.

At Canton, Cushing had very little business of his own to occupy his time. Thus he managed Howqua’s oversea business, directed legal protests against confiscations of the Chinese merchant’s property by the belligerents, and had Howqua’s funds forwarded from America through London and Calcutta. After the war Perkins & Co. and Howqua shipped on joint account, even in opium. This latter trade emphasized the hong merchant’s need for an absolutely trustworthy foreigner to handle his affairs.

A very cautious, even timid man (his Chinese nickname was “the timid young lady”), Howqua would have been in very serious trouble had his American friends ever divulged the nature of all their dealings with him. So well kept was the secret that it was not even suspected until recently, and the closeness with which Cushing and Howqua cooperated was the subject of complaint even by firms that were not in direct competition. Samuel Russell & Co. (the predecessor of Russell & Co.) explained to Edward Carrington, et. al. on 6 March 1821:

“We could undoubtedly purchase of Mr. Houqua, and obtain as long credits as Mr.
C[onsequa] used to do for you, but we know that we cannot, generally speaking, buy of him on so favourable terms, as we can of others. He will have a pretty good profit on his goods. & others are content with less, and independent of this consideration, we are not the first to be served, if he has a very prime chop of Teas, we might possibly be able to purchase it of him provided another person [i.e., Cushing] did not want it & we would give him a good price for it."

As a long-range commercial arrangement, the Howqua-Perkins & Co. alliance worked very tidily to offset the fluctuations of both the Chinese and American markets. When prices were high and supplies short, Howqua always had more high quality teas than any other merchant in the Cohong. Conversely, when prices were low, Howqua could undersell anyone else in the market at New York and Boston and still make a profit. Howqua unquestionably was one of the greatest merchants of the century. His investments were huge and his fortune enormous, even by bloated modern standards.

His methods, whether Chinese or Western, were so effective that the American merchants he employed found them useful in the conduct of their own business in later years. John Murray Forbes always gave due credit for his later success to the experience he received in Howqua’s hong.

It was not until after the War of 1812 that the Howqua-Perkins & Co. combination took mature form. The great hong merchant increasingly restricted his American trade to Perkins & Co. Baring Brothers established a connection with the alliance, and Samuel Cabot became the workhorse of T. H. Perkins in Boston. It was also not until the 1820s that the associated firms secured their dominant position in the Turkey opium trade.

(p.155)

Although the story of Perkins & Co. in its last decade is not only the story of Turkey opium, there can be no doubt that the drug was a critically important item in the concern’s business. Perhaps some idea of the profitability of the commerce can be derived from R. B. Forbes’s estimate of the probable gain on a shipment of Turkey. He figured that on one hundred thousand pounds purchased at $3.00 f.o.b. Smyrna, the firm might realize 37.5 percent. Such profits made control of the Turkey trade highly desirable, but such control took capital and reliable connections in several, widely separate places. Perkins & Co. had built up a worldwide commercial combination which
functioned as smoothly as one could wish.

The whole structure was based on a gifted, prolific, and powerful kinship group in Eastern Massachusetts whose two representative Boston firms, J. & T. H. Perkins and Bryant & Sturgis, were sometimes collectively called “the Boston Concern" or “the PCBS concern," at Canton, so closely did they cooperate. Central to this informal alliance were the Perkins, Sturgis, and Forbes families, although other names also appeared from time to time.

Members were linked by ties of blood, marriage, religion, business, friendship, and politics, and for many years they constituted the most formidable American combination in the China trade. The informality of the alliance should be emphasized, for as closely as the members cooperated, they occasionally fell out. In the era of family capitalism, domestic squabbles could affect business and vice versa. Moreover there were few of the binding
legal obligations that modern business relies on. Instead there were the immemorial ties of the most personal primary group—the family. The combination has been described as “a network of personal relationships which
remained, first to last, informal, fluid, complex and highly personal."

Just as the Concern kept a member in China, it also had one in London, Joshua Bates, a partner in Baring Brothers & Co. of London and Liverpool. Born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, Bates had close emotional and family ties to the Boston families. His wife was Lucretia Sturgis, a cousin of William Sturgis, and he always credited Thomas H. Perkins with giving him his start in business. Bates was sent to London by William Gray shortly after the War of 1812, but he soon developed an independent business.

From very early in his residence in England, he seems to have acted for the Boston Concern in that country. Samuel Williams of London was the group’s banker until his failure in 1825. The following year Bates founded a house with John Baring and immediately received the Concern’s trade. When he joined Baring Brothers & Co. in 1828, that firm became the Concern’s agent in the British Isles with Bates as the partner who handled its affairs.

In 1851, when Bates was ill and over sixty, he persuaded a cousin by marriage and former partner in Russell & Co., Canton, Russell Sturgis, to join Baring Brothers. Accordingly the Boston Concern’s influence in the great English house was preserved for many years after Bates retired.

(p.156)

With sound leadership and a substantial capital base in both America and Britain, the Concern lacked only a similar component in China. Cushing’s intimate relationship with Howqua completed the triangle. Thus Perkins & Co. was able to command the most complete information, the best credit facilities, and the shrewdest commercial direction on three continents—the three corners of its global trade.

After 1829 Howqua confined his foreign business almost exclusively to Russell & Co., which had absorbed Perkins & Co., thus reducing his risks and increasing his control. Howqua had always been a powerful influence on the policies of the firm, and in these latter days, he saw to it that the concern was cautious, well-managed and profitable. Small wonder that Russell & Co. was the strongest and best-informed American firm on the China coast.

In the period from the end of the War of 1812 to the demise of Perkins & Co., Cushing and Howqua worked out their system, adapting to changing circumstances, increasing their security, and involving other Americans, seemingly as benefciaries of Cushing’s generosity. As Cushing built up his own trade (i.e., that of the Boston Concern and Howqua), he grew less interested in commission work. In Cushing’s estimation, conflicts of interest,
creased risk, the loss of personal control, and other disadvantages apparently outweighed the prospects for profit. The most important part of his import trade, the traffic in opium, was illegal. Because the Chinese government inaugurated several antiopium campaigns in these years, Howqua was growing apprehensive and Cushing certainly must have had second thoughts as well. Thus in 1818 Perkins & Co. announced that it was abandoning all commission business to the new firm of J. P. Sturgis & Co. Sturgis had arrived in 1809 aboard the Atahualpa, captained by his colorful uncle, William Sturgis. He had remained, patronized more or less by his cousin, John P. Cushing, ever since. On the same day that Cushing informed his correspondents of his firm’s abandonment of the commission business, circulars went out announcing the formation of James P. Sturgis & Co., with three brothers, James P., Henry, and George W. Sturgis as partners. The Sturgis brothers were not the merchants that Cushing was, and James P. Was especially bullheaded in refusing to follow orders. Moreover Henry died in 1819, and George withdrew. In the meantime, Cushing began giving commission business to others, including Wilcocks, and most especially, Russell & Co. By the later 1820s, Sturgis’s business seems largely to have been confined to the management of the Boston Concern’s storeship at Lintin, in which function he was replaced by Robert Bennet Forbes in 1830.

Some Cushing proteges had proteges of their own. James P. Sturgis befriended a young man named Timothy G. Pitman, who first appeared in China about the same time that Sturgis himself arrived on the Atahualpa.
Some ten years later Pitman formed a partnership with the able but very nervous William French, who had come from Boston via the Hawaiian Islands in 1819. French brought with him a letter of introduction from Stugis’s Uncle William, and the new concern, Pitman & French, opened its doors within the next year.

(p.157)
James Sturgis advanced funds “out of friendly motives…to enable this young firm to carry on its business," and it shortly became a very diversified concern indeed. Pitman & French kept a hotel, ran a store, and sold ship’s supplies, in addition to its commission business and its own ventures to other ports. At the end of 1821, the firm added a six hundred dollar-a-year clerk, Daniel T. Aborn, member of a Providence seafaring family, and Pitman went home for the second time in twelve years. Two years later the concern expanded. Pitman went to New South Wales as supercargo of the Euphemias, apparently to establish a branch office in Sydney. This office later attracted investments both from James P. Sturgis and B. C. Wilcocks.

On 1 January 1826 Aborn was admitted to partnership, and shortly thereafter French set up another branch house in Hawaii. With such scattered interests and only one partner, Aborn, who remained regularly at Canton to coordinate the business, Pitman & French seems to have been spread very thin. After Aborn withdrew and went home in 1830, the firm went to pieces. A Hawaiian source states that it “dissolved of its own limitations as well as the death of the first named partner [Pitman]," who succumbed to
tuberculosis on 29 March 1832.

In some measure Cushing was forced to play Lord Bountiful to Sturgis and others at Canton. His business was becoming too extensive, too risky, and too time-consuming to be handled by the only system he knew and trusted. Had he decided to expand in the fashion that Russell & Company did in the 1830s, Cushing would have had to reorganize his countinghouse radically, as Russell & Company did under John C. Green. Thus instead of restructuring his tiny firm into a larger, more complex organization, Cushing spun off business to Sturgis, Wilcocks, Russell, and others.

In venturing for himself, his Boston partners, and Howqua, he had developed new trades. During the Latin American revolutions, Cushing and others carried on a prosperous direct commerce between Canton and the Pacific
Coast ports of the Americas. The rich trade in tea and silks formerly carried by the Manila galleons was in American hands for a few years, and it served to fll in the dismal years of the early 1820s when very little else paid a profit.

More annoying to the British was a new trade supposedly opened by some enterprising Philadelphians but prosecuted most successfully by the Boston Concern. The Honorable Company had originally developed the Chinese market for English cloth. Company control maintained quality and created a monopoly that the Americans, together with British allies, were now able to evade very profitably.

(p.158)
Because both Yankees and Philadelphians were already accomplished smugglers, it is perhaps not surprising to find them competing for first place in this trade. A biographer of Samuel Archer, a substantial Philadelphia merchant of the period, maintains that Archer entered the commerce even before the War of 1812. If this statement is true, Archer probably deserves credit for being the pioneer. Other Philadelphians, Nathan Dunt and Edward Thomson (before his collapse in 1825), were also deep in the business. Probably the most successful of the Americans in this commerce, however, were the members of the Perkins-Sturgis-Cushing alliance. They had entered the
trade sometime around or even before 1818 and, through their superlative connections in England and China, were able to secure a large share of the trade. One of their agents in England stated flatly that they were the
frst in the commerce. He also admitted to practicing the same kind of guile that characterized the firm’s dealings in China—imitating the East India Company’s packaging, trademark, and other distinctive characteristics. Several years later, in a document intended for internal circulation only, R.B. Forbes explained this dubious enterprise in some detail. He warned against doing anything differently from the East India Company,
“as it injures the Sale at the rate of $1 pr ps as it enables the Country dealers to distinguish our goods immediately from the Comps…there should be no alteration in the mode of packing our goods & those of the Coy even in the most trivial aspect except tearing out their mark on the paper labels…the arms &c to be the same if there is no objection thereto.”

Clearly the aim was to confuse the buyer. Later Forbes gave the figure of 22.6 percent proft on an 1828-29 cloth shipment aboard the Milo, which was sold to a shopman. He seems to have considered this low, for he estimated the possible gain on a hypothetical shipment of British woolens at 39.5 percent, a very tidy profit for the era.

The head of the London operation at this time was Frederick W. Paine, a nephew of James Perkins by marriage. Paine married Ann Cushing Sturgis, a blood niece of both Perkinses, in London, thereby cementing further the family tie at the same time he was conducting the Concern’s European business. Paine had been the Perkinses’ agent in the Mediterranean, but as the Smyrna houses became more reliable and London became an important pick-up point for the drug as well as the source of woolens and the financial center of the firm’s European trade, he settled there in 1818. As the Perkinses’ general agent, he handled the buying and despatching of cargoes from England and Europe and the sale of China cargoes in the same area. He was aided by Charles Everett, who “superintended the orders and took delivery of the goods," and by Samuel Williams, the Concern’s London correspondent and banker until 1825.

Paine’s largest supplier of cloth was Benjamin Gott of Leeds, who was “probably the outstanding figure in the West Riding woolen trade” and “one of the ten or twelve largest employers in Europe." In 1821 Pain placed an order with Gott for £28,000, the largest order Gott received in the period.

(p.159)
The collapse of Samuel Williams in 1825 put a temporary crimp in the alliance’s cloth trade, at the time probably second in importance only to its opium business. Like the drug traffic the commerce in cloth depended upon the East India Company’s monopoly. The Hon. Company was obliged by its contracts to buy cloth dyed in London, although Leeds had made many
technical advances and sold material at substantially lower prices. The Americans, of course, were under no such restriction. In addition, of course, the Americans enjoyed the support of Howqua and their usual shipping advantages. Their vessels were smaller, more cheaply built, and faster. Crews were far smaller; they did not travel in convoy and could change business tactics and ports at will. Captain and crew were personally interested in the voyage and were, thus, highly motivated. Finally there was none of the red tape that bound the Company’s vessels, so the Americans could operate with far greater flexibility. The East India Company simply could not compete. It was the British private traders’ envy of this American trade,
combined with the pressure from Midlands textile manufacturers chafing under the Hon. Company’s monopoly, that ultimately brought the revocation of the Company’s charter in 1834.

James Matheson, always a champion of
free trade, informed a correspondent in 1822 that he doubted that the Select Committee could finance its investment by drawing on India alone because of “the diminution of their [the Company’s] export trade to China in consequece of American competition." In a postscript he noted further,"A large importation from Liverpool in the American ship Columbia has occasioned a great depression in British Piece Goods." Two weeks later Matheson wrote that Cushing’s competition in the cloth trade to Batavia had made him cautious in that trade as well.

The cancellation of the East India Company’s franchise on the British China trade ended much of the American advantage in this commerce. The New Englanders, however, were soon buying Lowell cloth for the same purpose. American cottons had appeared in China earlier, the first major importations having arrived in 1826-27, a time when it was becoming increasingly clear that the attack on the Hon. Company would ultimately be successful. In that year the Americans brought as much calico to Canton as the British. This was the beginning of what became the great cloth trade of the latter part of the century," though for years American textiles would not be able to compete with British goods, especially as the English were wont to dump their surplus cottons in China.

In 1820 Cushing installed his young cousin, Thomas Tunno Forbes, as his clerk in Canton and began to train him to take over the business. Over the next eight years, Cushing and Forbes became very close, and the latter learned the trade thoroughly, showing much the same commercial talent for which other members of his family became renowned. On 30 June 1827, on the eve of Cushing’s departure for home, Forbes formally became a partner in the firm.

(p.160)
Actually for the purpose of dividing profits, Cushing had considered Forbes a partner ever since the younger man had left on his last visit home in 1826, and in the intervening period, the business had prospered handsomely. Thus by the time he was admitted, Forbes was already on the way to becoming rich, and he began to think of going home himself.

Meanwhile Cushing was finding business in America very different from business in China. Colonel Perkins had offered Cushing his own place as head of his Boston firm. The older man had long since turned his attention elsewhere; James Perkins had been dead since 1822, and Samuel Cabot, the colonel’s son-in-low, had been the effective force behind the business for several years. Cabot had the appearance of a pirate, because he had a patch over one eye, which he had lost in France years earlier. However he had the soul of an accountant and a personality reported to be glum, humorless, and taciturn. Cushing did not like him, and he had no wish to take on the burden of the Perkins sons, James Jr., an alcoholic who died that very year, and
Thomas Jr., a playboy. Finally the authority on the family believes that the differences in business styles between T. H. Perkins and Cushing could not easily have coexisted in the same countinghouse. The colonel was an optimist, willing to take chances that the more conservative Cushing abhorred.

R. B. Forbes probably reflected accurately the thinking of Cushing (and of Forbes’s brother Thomas) when in 1828 he reported that “each one of the former firm will in future do business separately or joining as the whim may take them [as was the fashion among members of the Boston Concern generally]. There will only be Thomas T. Forbes, commission Mercht instead of P & Co., Canton with the wt of millions on his back." It was in the expectation of this state of affairs that Robert Bennet Forbes, at the urging of Cushing and William Sturgis, was preparing to go to Canton as his
brother’s understudy when the untimely death of Thomas Forbes interrupted everyone’s plans.

When Cushing had sailed away from Canton in April of 1828 on the Milo, he was confident that he had left the business in capable hands. And so he had, but he left nothing to chance. Not only had he trained Thomas Forbes thoroughly for several years, he left him extensive instructions, dated 31 March 1828, which describe merchants, business practices and policies, investment of idle funds, Hong merchants’ debts, the management of ships that would come to the firm’s address, instructions in anticipation of future business and other matters that Forbes would have to manage. Had Forbes lived to train his successor, the later shape of the American trade could have been far different. However on 9 August 1829, Forbes drowned in a typhoon. Ironically it was the arrival of a Perkins ship, reported bearing the news of a major shake-up in the Boston Concern, that led Forbes to embark for Macao on his fatal trip.

Among Forbes’s effects friends found a document placing the business of Perkins & Co. in the hands of Russell & Co. Samuel Russell, head of the five-year-old commission house, had been close to Forbes and was well
acquainted with Perkins & Company’s business. He took charge and ran things smoothly and without interruption.

(p.161)
As soon as he received the news of his nephew’s death, Cushing rushed back to Canton to save the business. Of course he could not have been ignorant of Forbes’s contingency plans; moreover, he was not one to waste a journey. He returned to Canton in the Bashaw, loaded with one cases (133,300 pounds) of Turkey opium.

Because he had no intention of remaining in Canton and no other member of the family yet had either the experience or the desire to succeed Forbes, Cushing made arrangements to dissolve the Canton firm that he had founded nearly twenty-five years earlier. He left the business of the Boston Concern with Russell & Co., thus combining the two most important American opium dealers in China.

Their styles and functions were importantly different and merit emphasis. By 1829 Perkins & Co. was nominally a buyer of China cargoes for the Boston firms with which Cushing was affliated, and it also shipped on its own account. Actually Cushing orchestrated the entire trade in Turkey opium, setting prices, regulating the volume, and disciplining interlopers who failed to come to terms. Cushing, his partners, and allies were the real owners of much of the drug they sold on their storeship. Russell & Co., on the other hand, was exclusively a commission or agency house with no property interest in the goods it handled. It sold only services, marketing
imports (including opium, which it sold on Perkins & Co’s storeship), investing the proceeds, securing freight, negotiating bills, finding insurance, and the like. And a smaller, but increasing proportion of its business came
from India, especially in the form of opium.

Thus in terms of the trade, the merger was not the radical change it may have seemed. Cushing had been the chief local patron of Russell & Co., which had largely succeeded J. P. Sturgis & Co., as the main recipient of Cushing’s commission business. One of the possibilities Cushing had considered for the future of Perkins & Co. had involved Russell. R. B. Forbes had remarked at the time that he might go to Canton and join Russell & Co., but as he put it himself, he was never enamored of the idea of “learning my duties from strangers & crowding myself into a house from mere influence of freinds [sic]." Thus Cushing had little real choice. Under the circumstances he did the best he could for his family. He wrote Samuel Cabot,
“Bennet Forbes in his letters led me to suppose that he had made up his mind not to remain hear [sic] & in consequence of which I had come to an understanding with Russell that he should take another partner into his Concern who[m] I should approve of, & that our business in future should be confided particularly to that partner…I also agreed with Russell that he should take John Forbes into his
house as an assistant & that as soon as he qualifed himself he should become a partner, in this way I think there would be an opening for those who are coming forward quite as good as if a new establishment were formed.”

Thus, with Cushing’s signature, Russell Co. became the most important American house in the East.

摘自：Chap.3 “Opium Transforms the Canton System“

Lin Tse-hsu and the Opium War

To China the opium trade was an unmixed evil, and it is difficult to imagine any alternative to the course the Ch’ing government adopted. The drug was corrupting its officialdom, demoralizing its people (perhaps mostly to Manchu authorities, its soldiery), draining its specie, raising the cost of living and generally undermining its authority, its finances and even what has come to be called its credibility.

In 1838 Hsu Nai-chi, a high imperial official who has a close acquaintance with Canton, made a brief attempt to persuade the court to legalize the trade, but there never seems to have been much chance that the emperor would approve it. After September of that year, it was certainly a dead issue. Nevertheless many American and English traders continued to hope that the Chinese government would make the trade legal.

Even granting the traders’ ignorance of Chinese politics, it is difficult to see what they thought the legalization of opium would have gained for China. They were well aware of the pernicious effect of the drug on the Chinese economy and government, and the physiological results of drug addiction were known to everyone. The opium trade was too damaging to Chinese interests, people, and power for China to permit it to continue. Yet not to legalize the commerce was to risk the possibility or even probability of a confrontation with British power. It was Hobson’s choice, even had the Chinese been aware of the degree of their own military backwardness.

As the quantity of opium coming to China increased, the alarm of the Chinese government grew accordingly. Under the circumstances, the Manchu authorities probably did about as well as could have been expected in their attempts to stamp out the drug traffic, but we have no way of judging until China historians produce more particular accounts of the Ch’ing administrative record. Why these efforts were not more successful is not wholly clear. Western technological superiority was obviously a factor, but another important variable was the uneven commitment of Chinese officials. The number of honest mandarins was certainly higher than the opium traders believed, but underlings were notoriously corrupt. Whenever a dedicated governor would leave Canton on a tour of inspection, for example, the traders and brokers would prepare for a frenetic period of smuggling, even by the official boats themselves. Venality was surely part of the reason for this subversion, but mere greed may also be too simple an explanation. The Manchu rulers were less than popular among important segments of the population, and one wonders how significant a factor this dissatisfaction may have been in the government’s inability to enforce its will on foreign smugglers who were always able to find allies among the Chinese people.

Beginning with the appointment of Wang Ch’ing-lien as provincial judge and growing more intense after the arrival of Governor General Teng T’ingchen（鄧廷桢） in February 1836, the official attack on the opium trade mounted, and it was increasingly effective. Governor General Teng was an honest, rigorous administrator who later became very close to the ill-fated Lin Tse-hsu. Teng’s views on opium have been condensed into two sentences:
“Let the law concentrate and hit hard at the wealthy and powerful; the rank and file will follow suit. Let decrees be strictly enforced on Chinese soil; the foreign goods [opium] will naturally disappear."

(p.133）
Teng was primarily “a poet and a philologist," who conducted the antiopium campaign “more as a duty and a gesture to please the emperor than as a crusade based on high principle." Though foreigners accused Teng of all sorts of corruption, it is almost certain that the accusations concerning Teng’s venality were groundless. The alleged increase in the bribery rates during Teng’s tenure of office may well have resulted from his strictness in enforcing the opium prohibition. His faithfulness to the pronounced policy of the imperial government was fully reflected in Captain Elliot’s reports made throughout Teng’s three-year administration.

Elliot even worried that Teng’s program would force the trade into desperate men and thus create more, rather than less, trouble, a prediction which proved only too accurate.

Morse states that prior to 1839, “the trade, though not legalized, was fully regulated, and it is a misuse of terms to apply the word ‘smuggling’ to what went on then. Today, especially amidst our own government’s
efforts to stop the drug trade to America, this statement simply cannot be defended. The efforts of the imperial government to end the drug trade were more or less continuous, and they grew more strenuous in the late 1830s. “It is a fallacy," a more modern authority reminds us, “to believe that before the advent of Commissioner Lin in 1838 the opium trade was not subjected to frequent and vigorous interruption by the Chinese authorities.” Year after year Canton traders noted the seizure of opium chests, the destruction of smug boats, and the imprisonment, execution, or deportation of brokers, dealers, and even smokers. As the East India Company relaxed its control and encouraged the production of opium, China was inundated with huge new supplies of the drug. Naturally the imperial government became concerned and redoubled its efforts to prevent smuggling, and it was remarkably successful from 1837 onward. If what was happening in the opium trade in Canton and along the coast was not smuggling, then surely it was war.

When the “scrambling dragons" were replaced by European boats manned by armed Westerners and Lascars, the attendant risk of apprehension brought with it the virtual certainty of violence. Few Westerners were willing to permit an incriminating search that would result in their being exposed to the draconian Chinese drug laws. Strongly worded edicts and brutal incidents appeared with disturbing frequency. Captain Elliot’s reports and the commercial correspondence are full of mayhem and of the news that the drug traffic had stagnated as a result. Here was precisely the situation that the opium traders had always said would justify ending the traffics —energetic Chinese action which effectively cut demand. But the drug merchants were delivered from the necessity of abandoning either their trade or their moral pretenses at the last moment.

After months and even years of deliberation, the imperial government finally took the one step that must bring it into conflict with Britain. At the end of 1838, the emperor despatched a special commissioner, Lin Tse-hsu, to Canton with broad powers to end the opium traffic. Lin was a very intelligent, resourceful scholar-administrator with a wealth of experience in administration in the Ch’ing bureaucracy. He accomplished his mission in short order, but his methods ultimately provoked war with the mightiest power in Christendom.

(p.135)
The British government had always acknowledged the right of the Chinese to prohibit the drug traffic, but it eventually took military action because
“the law against opium in China had been a dead letter for a long time…the local officials in Canton had connived and derived profit from it, and … suddenly Commissioner Lin had come on the scene and seized the opium by procedures entirely foreign to English legal usage.”

The late Hsin-pao Chang destroyed much of this argument by demonstrating the continuity between Commissioner Lin’s actions and the policies of Governor Teng before him. The law clearly had not been a “dead letter" for at least two years before Lin arrived. The isolation of the foreign community was another matter. Although less than “sudden," the action was certainly “foreign to English legal usage." Not even a Palmerston government would have been so arrogant as to insist that the Chinese adopt English legal usage in place of their own. Obviously the question is then simplified:
Were the English ready to acknowledge that the Chinese were sovereign in their own country, even if that recognition meant stopping a trade that wasimportant to England? By 1839 clearly the price was too high. Fairbank has put it cogently: the opium trade’s “economic value outweighed its moral
turpitude," and Western military and naval superiority enabled Britain to get away with it.

Lin began by organizing a campaign against smokers, brokers, and dealers. He filled the prisons, closed opium dens, seized pipes, and opened a rehabilitation center to aid addicts who wished to reform. Then he turned his
attention to the foreigners who brought the drug to Canton. Governor Teng’s exertions of the previous two years had already gone far toward stopping the trade locally, and along the coast other provincial governors had also
energetically tightened enforcement of the drug laws. Yet though the price fell disastrously, the foreigners brought still more opium. When the commissioner arrived, there was a far greater amount on the ships at the outside anchorages than the Chinese were likely to consume, and much more would arrive in the course of the spring. After a brief but notably thorough investigation, Lin took action. Beginning 18 March he stopped all foreign trade, cordoned off the factory area, and ultimately demanded the surrender of all
of the drug aboard the storeships.

The novelty of Lin’s measures lay in the rigor of their enforcement and, most importantly, their direction against foreigners. Although Teng’s repression of Chinese smuggling had done its work, the barbarians were not touched. They remained free to inflict incalculable damage on China. At this point if China really wanted to stop the trade, some kind of physical seizure of persons and property of the non-Chinese involved in the traffic was inevitable. Commissioner Lin’s action was certainly not the most drastic form of detention.

(p.136)
Presumably he could have arrested all known opium traders, driven all the residents into a stockade, thrown them into prison, or otherwise manhandled them, as some Third World nations have done more recently. In fact there was no violence. Lin merely isolated the community, withdrew its servants, and interdicted communications and trade until the opium was surrendered. The foreigners so restrained, were adequately fed, and though they complained about having to do their own work, after a few days their personal chores such as laundry, mending, cleaning, and cooking were performed by the linguists’ employees, whom Lin allowed through the lines.

A holiday spirit prevailed at the factories. Hunter wrote at the time,
“Our greatest fear is, that the Boats from the Shipping at Whampoa, where there is a force of 8 or 10 Hundred men may attempt to force their way to relieve us—in which case, the Chinese would probably fall upon and massacre us." Briefly Lin’s “durance vile" was not very vile.

But in the Lockean atmosphere of the midnineteenth century, this sort of thing was regarded very seriously indeed, especially the uncompensated seizure of property. In particular it was unwise to sequester British property when
Palmerston was in the Foreign Office. Moreover the Chinese doctrine of group responsibility for the crimes of individuals had no parallel in Western jurisprudence, except in the ominous case of wartime. It was considered barbaric by all Westerners at Canton.

Lacking any protection by their government, the Americans were perhaps more sensitive to the mood of the Chinese government. Certainly Russell & Co. was under no illusions. R. B. Forbes had written nearly two months before Lin’s arrival:
“The Government are determined to put down the drug trade & I think in a year or two it will only be conducted by desperate men outside–We have already informed our Indian friends that we can make no further advances on the drug & that the 1 per cent which our Mr. Coolidge took off shall again be charged on remittances & our staunch friend Houqua says if we don’t cut the drug trade “in toto" he will cut us.”

On 27 February the firm sent out a circular announcing that it was withdrawing from the traffic altogether. On 4 March Russell & Co. wrote John Murray Forbes to explain:
“…some of the more prominent reasons for adopting this course. We are of opinion that the measures which the Government are pursuing must render the Opium business dangerous as well as disreputable. Heretofore you are aware that the connivance of men high in authority has given a legal character to the drug trade which had been conducted almost as openly & with as much facility as any other branch of business in which we have been engaged. It has not had the character of a smuggling transaction until the river trade commenced. In addition to the odium which we think will hereafter attach to the business we fear that the interests of our constituents generally might suffer if we continued in it, & we are fearful that the Government will embarrass the legal trade by denouncing all agents dealing in Opium & it is quite possible they may forbid the Hong Merchants dealing with such agents.”

(p.137)

But it was too late. The foreign community, leaderless since the exodus of the East India Company and the failure of Lord Napier’s mission, could hardly resist Lin’s demands. For a few days it attempted to stall, and then more by default than by conscious decision, it accepted the leadership of the chief superintendent of British trade, Sir Charles Elliot, who arrived from Macao on 24 March in full uniform. In fine Victorian style he ran up the Union Jack and took charge. The drama of Elliot’s action for a time obscured the fact that there was very little he could do except surrender the opium. His assumption of liability for the confiscated drug in the name of the Crown convinced even the most doughty of the holdouts, for the drug market was saturated. Her Majesty’s promise to pay was far better than nothing and may have rescued some holders from serious embarrassment.

The detention lasted about six weeks, while the opium was being delivered to Lin. When he had received about fifteen thousand chests, the Commissioner lifted the blockade and trade resumed. The British immediately left Canton in protest, appealed to their sovereign for relief and redress, and refused to sign the pledge, required of them by Lin, never to engage in the opium trade again. The Americans signed with minimal hesitation, but eight of them followed the British example and appealed to their government. This group petitioned Congress to support Britain in her attempt to bring the Chinese to a recognition of Western usages. They did not ask for military support so much as for diplomatic action to secure for themselves the same advantages sought by the British. This memorial was quickly followed by another from China merchants in America. The latter was much more moderate for, although they were in many cases related to the Canton merchants, the stateside traders “most earnestly” deprecated any suggestion that the nation “interfere in the contest between England and China or…enter into any diplomatic arrangement whatever." Confronted with conflicting suggestions from interested parties and having no China policy anyway, the State Department pursued its habitual course–it would do nothing.

Regardless of what Britain did, the U.S. government was not going to risk involvement in an East Asian war, and the Canton merchants would have been obtuse indeed had they believed that the United States would behave differently.

Meanwhile until the British blockade of Canton became effective, American residents would be content to accumulate fortunes in the lucrative trade between Canton and the outside anchorages. British merchantmen were
arriving daily, ready to discharge their cargoes and load up for the homeward voyage. Yet all British merchants had left Canton, and Elliot forbade any of his countrymen to resume trade. Thus the more accommodating Americans soon busily engaged as go-betweens. As they grew rich on the river commerce, their opinions became noticeably milder, and they could afford to smile at the harsh remarks of the envious British traders, who had no choice but to pay the high freight charges demanded by American vessels.

(p.138)

Of course it could not last. The first blood of the war was not shed until 2 November 1839, when a few British warships destroyed a junk fleet off the Bogue. This was the"Battle" of Chuenpi (Ch’uan-pi). On the following 18 June the Chinese unsuccessfully attempted to send fireships among the British vessels outside the river, and that very day the first ship of the British expedition, H.M.S. Alligator, arrived in the Gulf. The rest of the fleet, under Admiral George Elliot, Sir Charles’s first cousin, followed shortly afterward. Still there was no ground action. Instead the expedition sailed north almost immediately to seize Chusan and continue to the mouth of the Peiho. With warships in the neighborhood of Peking, Elliot hoped the emperor would see the futility of resistance and open negotiations. The governor general of Chihli Province, Ch’i-shan (Kishen 琦善), the most exalted official the Elliots were able to see, persuaded them to return to Canton and conduct their talks there.

Late in November 1839 negotiations began at the mouth of the river, but they bogged down. Ch’i-shan, if not his imperial master, was quickly brought to see the logic of the situation when the British fleet reduced the Chuenpi（穿鼻）forts to rubble in a single day with great loss of life among the defenders.

The Convention of Chuenpi, signed on 20 January 1841, gave Britain Hong Kong, an indemnity of $6 million, and the right to communicate directly to the upper echelons of the mandarinate at Canton. In retrospect it was a sensible agreement, and most of the American residents who expressed an opinion welcomed it, but neither belligerent was ready to accept anything so moderate. The emperor would ultimately be forced to worse terms, but
not before enormous quantities of Chinese blood had been shed, and the war was brought much closer to Peking.

Palmerston, even more ignorant than the Son of Heaven about affairs in Canton, also disavowed the Convention and scolded poor Elliot furiously. The treaty was either too generous or too severe, apparently, so the war would go on. Both Ch’i-shan and Elliot were recalled in disgrace. Elliot had little support among the British residents other than James Matheson, who was in the captain’s confidence, and, oddly enough, James Innes. A member of Dent’s probably voiced the view of most of his countrymen at Canton when he wrote that he had been unable to “discover that Capt. Elliot’s present arrangement has a single supporter—not even an American…They are preparing to go to Canton, laughing at our disgrace, but still looking around for themselves." This critic must have been blinded by his enmity, for few Americans who expressed an opinion disapproved of Elliot’s moderate policy, and most seemed to regret his recall. They regarded the British merchants’ criticisms as foolish, greedy, and/or bloodthirsty.

(p.139)

While waiting Peking’s reaction to the treaty, the Chinese feverishly began improving their fortifications, bringing in fresh troops, buying
Western vessels and armament, and in other ways giving solid evidence that regarded the agreement as a mere truce.

In the second week of March, the British moved their forces upriver, demolishing all opposition, both on land and on the river, with ease. They took the foreign factory area on the eighteenth. The Chinese thereupon agreed to an armistice, which was broken on 25 May by a Chinese fireboat attack on the British fleet anchored in the river. This time the British riposte was more effective. Reinforced by the shallow-draught steamer, Nemesis, the newly arrived General Hugh Gough landed troops north of Canton and occupied the heights commanding the city. Hurriedly the local authorities agreed to a $6 million “ransom" of Canton, though they neglected to report that expensive fact to Peking. Gough’s attack was called off in the eleventh hour, to the disgust of the military and naval leaders. The city’s inhabitants were relieved, but both peasants and gentry in the countryside were outraged by what they considered a craven capitulation and by the savage behavior of Gough’s soldiers.

At San-yuan-li（三元里）, a village north of Canton, the country folk launched a spontaneous but futile attack on Gough’s men. Chinese popular mythology has since converted this incident into the beginning of Chinese nationalism. In reality it was a local phenomenon that exacerbated the already strong native xenophobia of Kwangtung, something that would make for future problems both for foreigners and for the dynasty. Although the incident was reported at the time, foreigners paid it small heed. James Matheson quoted a member of Wetmore & Co. to the effect that the incident was merely “an affray occasioned by some of our Soldiers taking liberties with the Chinese women," and the anonymous British “tea merchant" connected with Dent’s refused to believe it at all.

Trade resumed after the truce, but there would be no peace without another’s northern campaign. During the summer the British, now under the leadership of Elliot’s replacement, Sir Henry Pottinger, took Amoy, and by the end of October they were once more in possession of Tinghai in the Chusan Islands and of both Chenhai and Ningpo on the mainland. Although the British had indulged in looting and indiscriminate slaughter before this time Ningpo was the first city deliberately sacked. After the repulse of a Chinese counterattack on 9 March, plundering became less controlled and massacres grew more common. Two months later the British struck again. Chapu (乍浦) fell on 18 May, Woosung on 16 June, and Shanghai on the 19 June. The Yangtze was now open, and for the rest of June and July, the fleet proceeded slowly upriver. Chinkiang, at the junction of the Grand Canal, fell after a particularly bloody battle. The members of its Manchu garrison either died fighting or committed suicide together with their families, and the expedition came to a halt before the walls of Nanking. Here, after some delaying tactics by the Chinese, negotiations began with I-li-pu（伊禮布）, an elderly Manchu, who had dealt with the British on Chusan, and Ch’i-ying (Keying 耆英), a younger, less experienced Manchu, who had been made an imperial commissioner for the occasion.

(p.140)

On 29 August the Treaty of Nanking ended the war. The document contained much harsher terms than the Convention of Chuenpi, reflecting the changed military situation. Britain received Hong Kong, a $21 million indemnity, and the right to conduct relations with China on a basis of equality. Five ports (Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and Shanghai) were to be opened to trade and to the residence of British subjects, including consul. Regular customs duties were to be worked out and published, and—formally ending an era–the Cohong was abolished.

The Americans in the Canton-Macao area watched these events with mixed fear, outrage, pity, and hope. Most Americans were antiimperialist, and they were repelled by the ferocity of the British soldiery. A number even
wished Chinese resistance might be more successful. Persons as different as Isaac M. Bull, Augustine Heard, and Edward Delano wrote of their sympathy for the suffering Chinese and their disgust with the looting, rapine, and slaughter that accompanied British military action. Edward Delano was so upset by the completeness of British victory that he scribbled angrily, “I have now no pity for them–the idea of 10,000 men submittancing 10,000,000 !" This was the outburst of a frustrated younger man. Coolidge, who had been roughly handled the previous year by Chinese soldiers, called the treaty a “‘most lame and impotent conclusion" to the war and thought a resident minister in Peking worth more than the $21 million indemnity. “I should say the terms are altogether too lenient,"‘ he stated flatly, and he blamed that leniency on the influence of Captain Elliot who was now at
home. Coolidge had come around to the opinion of many British merchants (it may be important that he was writing to one of the most influential of the latter). Among some of the older merchants, on the other hand there was a different view. “Whatever faults the Chinese may have, & they are not faultless, bad treatment of commercial foreigners is not one of them & they appear to me to have the right side of the question in their quarrel with the Eng," wrote Augustine Heard. Still later he commented,
“The Chinese have been severely & I think most unreasonably dealt by. They have been obliged to…relinquish the policy that has guided them for centuries & promise everything that their invaders required & although they dow not now openly avow their feelings and express the mortification with which their humiliating position fills them,…it seems to me evident that they are pursuing a course to enable them at a favourable moment, when they shall be relieved from the awe in which they now stand of a foreign force & when they shall have acquired some military Knowledge …to shake of they [sic] yoke which now galls them.”

Despite this sympathy it was a rare American, whether merchant or missionary, who did not welcome the opportunities presented by the treaty and clamor for equal treatment. That demand eventually produced the mission of Caleb Cushing, who stepped ashore at Macao on 24 February 1844.

英國海景畫家 William John Huggins（1781-1845）的油畫描繪1824 年停泊在內伶仃島的三艘鴉片船。

1830 年，旗昌洋行（Russell & Co.）與他舅舅的土耳其鴉片貿易公司（J & T H Perkins & Sons）合併時，John Murray Forbes 的二哥 Robert Bennet Forbes（1804-89）福布斯被安排指揮鴉片倉庫船「伶仃號」（Lintin），該船長久停泊在珠江口的內伶仃島。他負責監督鴉片的重新包裝，以及與毒品走私者談判，這份工作使他賺到第一筆財富。他有了充足的財力，慷慨地幫助他的母親和弟弟。

Robert 自1817 年首次隨舅舅 Thomas 的 Canton 號出航，1818年抵達廣州，之後多次回訪中國。1839 年他代表旗昌洋行再乘 Canton Packet 號返抵廣州，正好親睹了第一次鴉片戰爭。最後一次 1849-51 年訪華期間他成為美國駐廣州領事、法國副領事。

According to the 1997 book “The Golden Ghetto: The American Commercial Community at Canton and the Shaping of American China Policy. 1784-1844” written by Jacques M Downs (American):

Chap.3 OPIUM TRANSFORMS THE CANTON SYSTEM

Opium Opens a Second Seaport (p.128)

Where opium went, other goods followed. By the 1830s, smuggling involved more than drugs. Storeship captains at the outside anchorages soon developed a number of profitable lines of business besides opium.

Robert Bennet Forbes wrote William Sturgis on 25 June 1831 that he had cleared some three thousand dollars in buying and selling provisions alone since he had arrived on the station eight months earlier. His cumsha and demurrage fees had amounted to another fifteen thousand dollars. He also dealt in rice, utilizing the Chinese government’s own regulations to help pry China open to trade still further.

In an attempt to alleviate the occasional rice shortages that occurred in China, the government at such times reactivated an old law exempting ships carrying the grain from most of the port charges, thus creating another lines of business for storeship operators. Although intended as a means of insuring China against famine, the measure gave Western merchants a convenient means of avoiding the heavy duties at Whampoa.

A vessel carrying rice could unload part of its cargo at Lintin, sometimes at a higher price than could be obtained at Canton. Other ships could take on as much rice from the storeship as needed to get by the Hoppo’s men. Rice was even rented on occasion. One supercargo noted with some amusement that he was paid five hundred dollars by an English captain for the privilege of being allowed to deliver part of his rice cargo upriver.

Other opportunities immediately appeared. Manila and Batavia were both important sources of rice within a relatively short distance from Canton. Ships with insufficient funds for a China cargo could make a voyage to one of these nearby colonial ports and return with a cargo that would bring both a profit and privileged status at Canton.

From opium, silver, rice, and provisions, Lintin merchants moved into other commodities, even bulky ones like raw cotton, textile and occasionally export products.

A permanent, small fleet of these floating warehouses grew up, and the trade there soon became so extensive that Lintin could no longer be considered a mere smuggling base. The Select Committee noted in 1825 that
“many of the Vessels engaged in the Country Trade now remain [at Lintin] during their stay in China without coming further up the river. Every facility is there afforded to the Opium Traffic and smuggling transactions to a considerable extent in other articles are carried on. A Vessel frequently remains there until a cargo of Opium is delivered and a lading of Rice has been obtained which gives an exemption from Port charges. The fees formerly paid to the Officers of Government for their connivance have been very materially diminished, the Opium Trade has nearly entirely forsaken Macao and a security has been given to it at Lintin which it has never previously possessed.”

In subsequent years the high port charges drove increasing numbers of ships from Canton to Lintin until most private vessels routinely engaged in at least some smuggling.
“The Burthen therefore of Exactions is thrown upon the Honourable Company’s Trade." and an additional advantage is given its competitors.
“At one time during the last summer," lamented the “Select," “no less than 12 or 14 Ships were delivering or receiving Cargo [at Lintin]—at which time not a single vessel was at Whampoa.” By 1833 easily one quarter of the American vessels that came to China failed to enter the river at all, and a sizeable number of the rest touched at Lintin before making their way to the anchorage. Finally what the later years of the old China trade began, Opium War completed. By 1841 the proportion was reversed. In the fall of that year, a typical issue of the Canton Press listed fifty British ships in China, only twelve of which were at Whampoa; nine American craft, four of which lay in the Reach; and four ships of other nations, only one of which was not at Lintin.

Clearly Lintin had become a major port rivaling Canton itself well before the Treaty of Nanking formally “opened" China. In typhoon season and whenever the mandarinate became too threatening, the storeships would move elsewhere, most prophetically to Hong Kong, which ultimately became a dry-land and more or less legitimate version of the Lintin station. Lintin also foreshadowed Hong Kong in another respect —it became the base for trade up the China coast.

As with earlier expansions of the opium trade, this northern extension of the trade developed as a response to the oversupply and low prices at Lintin. Moreover the trade in other goods, as with Lintin earlier, was dependent at first on the drug traffic. Woolens sold only when there was opium to lubricate the gears of coastal commerce. It was to relieve a burdened and depressed market that James Matheson had inaugurated the new trade in 1823, and others followed, including the American, Charles Blight, then a partner in Dent & Co. For reasons that are not quite clear, the trade was then abandoned. Another American, Josiah Sturgis, took the Grey Hound to the eastward in 1827, and others also attempted to reopen the coastal market from time to time. In 1833, when the Select Committee reported that the supply of opium at Lintin was so excessive that the price had sunken below the delivered cost, William Jardine sent the Sylph, John Biggar, and Jamesina up the coast. This time the new trade paid off handsomely.

Within a few years Canton opium houses were running small, swift schooners up the coast to supply their own stations. Little Lintins developed at Namoa, Chinchew (Ch’uan chou), Poo Too (Shanghai), and elsewhere. Clippers would bring the drug from India, even against the monsoon after the early 1820s and deliver their cargoes at Lintin or elsewhere as their consignees directed. The little vessels that took the opium up the coast often carried Chinese brokers with them in the later days of the trade in order to identify secret delivery points, as the station-ship areas became too “hot." An elaborate system of signals would bring out “scrambling dragons" from the dealers on shore to collect the drug and pay in silver or sometimes even in gold.

The larger firms worked their trade into very businesslike systems ensuring quality, honest weight, and stability. Captain William Morgan, Jardine Matheson & Company’s storeship master at Hong Kong and the kingpin of the firm’s coastal operations in the early 1840s, explained the routine:
all the opium shipp’d from this [Hong Kong] …to the east coast is first examined by Mr. Stewart as to quality–and when the gross weight is short it is weighed and repacked…When it is inferior in quality it is tested by the Shroffs and upon that valuation certificates are made out.
I shouId tell you that when the opium comes over the Ships side the gross weight is taken, and the same is done when it is sent on board any ship for the Coast.
If attention is paid to our gross which always goes with the opium they can never be at a loss to find out if it has been plundered and when it has taken place…
If a chest is broken it is always repaired before it [is] sent over the Shop side.
I always send Mr. Wright the certificates as soon as the opium has been examined…
All our Captains that take opium from this sign for gross weight and are answerable with the ship’s company for any deficiency.

Chinese official response to this new trade was slow, but it became steadily more effective. W. C. Hunter’s famous description of the placidly corrupt mandarin and the ease and expedition of the coastal trade on his voyage aboard Russell & Company’s ship Rose in 1837 was certainly not typical of that commerce even one year later. Although the coast was long and patrolling made difficult by the many islands and inlets, by 1838 even Jardine’s was complaining about the dullness of the trade.

Chinese “persecutions" had finally become effective. From 1837 onward mandarin vigilance increased so markedly that Western boats, using the storeships as a base, began to deliver the drug themselves. The reluctance of the Chinese to attack foreign vessels made them safer than native craft, most of which had already been apprehended and broken up in any case. Even the junk trade was curtailed by the government’s enforcement drive and the consumption of the drug was drastically curbed both in the Canton area and along the coast. As William Jardine wrote shortly before his departure for home,
“The present persecution of Opium dealers & Opium smokers is not much more severe here, than on some previous occasions; but it pervades every province throughout the Empire, a circumstance never before known to have occurred.”

The campaign was empire wide in scope.

1687 Michael Shen Fuzong（沈福宗 c. 1658-91）隨耶穌會的 Philippe Couplet（柏應理，Procurator of the China Jesuit Missions in Rome）於 1681年離開澳門，一路遊歷了葡萄牙、荷蘭、羅馬，以及法、英、比、荷，其間 1684.9.15 獲法王路易十四接見*，次年6月獲教宗接見。1687年應邀與英王詹姆斯二世會面，年末與柏應理重聚（…然後又一起在比利時居住了一段時間，最後從比利時前往荷蘭？）。1688 年他們離英赴里斯本加入耶穌會；1691年他病逝於返華的船上。

1756-7 Loum Kiqua 經歷里斯本大地震，死裏逃生。輾轉到英國受到皇室禮遇，並用 VEIC 的船送他回廣州。

1769-72 Tan Che-gua（Tan Chet-qua 譚其奎 (?) c. 1728-1796）民間捏泥藝匠，1770 在倫敦展出泥塑作品。

1775 Whang at-Tong（黃亞東，c. 1753, fl. 1770s–1784）與畫家 Mauk-Sow-U 同為植物學家 John Bradby Blake 的助理。1773年11月Blake 病逝廣州。亞東最早可能於 1774年帶著其未完成的植物圖鑑赴英，這些圖鑑影響了之後西方對中國植物的興趣。

*由於沈福宗非常博學，還懂拉丁文，而且來自遙遠的中國，因此受到了特別的禮遇。沈福宗給路易十四留下了深刻的印象，而柏應理、沈福宗的到來使路易十四決定派遣法國耶穌會科學家和數學家去中國，以了解那個遙遠的國度。1685年1月，白晉（Joachim Bouvet，1656～1730）、張誠（Jean-François Gerbillon）等六位巴黎王家學院院士以「國王的觀察員與數學家」的名義受命起程前往中國，這是法國首個前往中國的科學考察團。他們抵達中國後，受到康熙皇帝的接見和重視。（報導）