In December 2007, our Chinese and Dutch colleagues organised an international conference in Guangzhou and Macao entitled “Canton and Nagasaki Compared, 1730–1830: Dutch, Chinese, Japanese Relations.” I participated with seven Japanese colleagues. With more than twenty-five papers, the conference was a great success and participants were eager to deepen their discussions and to enlarge the scope of their inquiries. And so, stimulated by the co-editor of this special issue of Itinerario, Professor Leonard Blussé of Leiden University, I took up the responsibility of organising the follow-up conference in Japan on the same theme, but placed in a broader temporal context: “Canton and Nagasaki Compared.” Comparing the two port cities Canton in South China (nowadays called Guangzhou) and Nagasaki at the western end of the Japanese archipelago, between 1600 and 1850 would yield new historic insights and reveal new perspectives for further research. The articles presented in this issue bear the fruit of this exclusive intellectual exchange.

The articles deal with wide ranging subjects, from urban fires to the art of translation, and cover the broad period 1600–1850s. All contributors have taken the comparison of the two port cities at heart. We have grouped the thirteen contributions along four major research themes that emerged out of the conference: shipping networks and the state; managing trade flows; mediating trade; and urban and cultural life. The contributions bear witness of what I would call the four major benefits of the comparative history approach, which will be discussed further below.

In the 1660s the renowned publishing company of Jacob van Meurs in Amsterdam published three richly illustrated monographs that fundamentally changed the European perceptions of the empires of China and Japan. It all started with the publication in 1665 of the travel notes and sketches that Joan Nieuhof had made ten years earlier, while travelling in the retinue of two Dutch envoys to the Manchu court in Peking. With no less than 150 copper prints, this book aroused so much interest in travel topics—it was published in Dutch, French, German, Latin, and English—that Van Meurs did not hesitate to launch a whole series of illustrated volumes about faraway countries. To keep the China lovers happy, he published a reprint of the richly illustrated China Monumentis by the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. In 1668, another monumental illustrated work appeared in Dutch (and later also German, English and French editions) time about Africa written by the Amsterdam physician Olfert Dapper, and shortly afterwards, when that publication also proved to be a smashing success, Van Meurs asked for the right to publish two more works, one on Japan and one on China. That privilege was obtained on March 1669. The book on Japan, Gedenkwaerdige Gesantschappen der Oost-Indische Maetschappij aen de Kaisaren van Japan, or “Memorable embassies of the (Dutch) East India Company to the Emperors of Japan,” was compiled by Arnoldus Montanus, a learned Dutch clergyman, who according to the preface had already published fifty-three monographs. The book on China was authored by Olfert Dapper, who this time edited the travelogues of the second and third Dutch embassies to China. What made these books so interesting is that they all were based on eyewitness accounts of the interior of the widely known but little explored empires of China and Japan by servants of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The reason why it was possible for the Dutch merchants to travel where few other westerners had gone before was that they had been sent by the directors of the company as envoys bearing tribute presents to the rulers of both realms to secure privileged trading rights.

When entering a foreign country, one usually fills out an immigration form asking for a set of personal details such as one's name, nationality, date of departure, destination, and the purpose of one's visit. In addition, one needs to answer several questions, for example, whether he has any banned substances or objects like drugs or weapons, whether he have a criminal record, and so on. Furthermore, one has to waive any rights to appeal an immigration officer's decision and finally declare and sign that all answers are true and correct.

While many assume that this familiar system is specific to the modern age, historical documents show us that this supposition is not valid. In fact, we can find a similar system in the early modern Ryukyu Kingdom, though little attention has been paid to it. To demonstrate this system, I will begin introducing a document left by a shipwrecked Chinese captain coming to Ryukyu in the late eighteenth century:

The captain Li Zhenchun states that: We received a permit for sailing from the government of Min prefecture in Fujian on December 24, 1770, loaded wood under the Nantai bridge on May 13 in the next year, sailed from Min'anzhen for Shandong on May 24, and arrived on June 24. Though we left for Fujian on December 2, after purchasing beans, on the next day, a storm broke our mast and halyards, which made it impossible for us to navigate and caused our ship to drift into Yaeyama Island in your country on the 22nd. Now we are living on board here. There is no Christian missionary, arsenic, Epicanta gorhami [, which is a terribly virulent insect including cantharis], or any other poison with us. None of us are disguised as Chinese people clothed in Chinese clothes. Also we have no weapons. If you find any violation as such, we should be tried by the national laws. There is no lie in this report.

Owing to the development of global history in recent decades, the idea of the West as the standard by which to consider economic development in other parts of the world has been abandoned.

In his studies, Kenneth Pomeranz emphasised the similarities in the living standards that existed in the core region of East Asia and Northwest Europe until the beginning of the nineteenth century. He concludes that the reasons for the great divergence between East Asia and Northwest Europe had to do with the regions' access to coal mines and the New World. His studies stimulated comparisons between East Asian countries, such as China, India, and Japan, with Northwest Europe using different economic indicators.

However, these studies do not adequately explain the reason for the “small divergence” between China and Japan after the mid-nineteenth century. There were no significant differences in the living standards or real wages in the core regions of China and Japan until late in the century. Because of the development of transportation technology during the 1800s, the location of coalmines cannot explain the difference between the two countries. Therefore, it is important to examine the institutional background for the “small divergence” between China and Japan.

The English East India Company (EIC) first arrived in Siam in 1612, when its traders were given a royal audience by King Songtham (r. 1610/11–28) in Ayutthaya. Peter Floris and Lucas Antheuniss, Dutchmen working for the EIC, came to Patani on the Globe and then branched out to other ports, exploring the possibilities of trade in mainland Southeast Asia. Armed with a letter from King James I, the EIC employees led by Antheuniss and Thomas Essington were able not only to approach the court, but also to observe for themselves the possibilities of trade in Siam. This first sojourn in Ayutthaya marked the start of over a decade of Anglo–Siamese contacts, through the establishment and maintenance of an EIC factory in Ayutthaya.

During this first phase, the EIC was to stay in Ayutthaya for only eleven years, closing its factory in 1623. It was not until the 1660s, after a gap of around thirty years, that the company returned to trade in Siam. After a troubled stay, the EIC once again left Siam in 1685, and was engaged in war with the court of King Narai (r. 1656–88) over several disputes. The only English merchants coming to Siam after 1688 were “country traders” mostly based in India.

The Macao–Nagasaki connection in the early seventeenth century involved a complex set of interrelationships with regard to trade, mission, cultural intercourse, and other important topics between China, Japan, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands. The rise to importance of Macao and Nagasaki was the result of the interruption of Sino–Japanese trade relations and the policy adjustments by the governments of China and Japan to bring the Portuguese under their control and administration. One of the main differences between Macao and Nagasaki was that the former remained a Portuguese settlement for centuries, while the latter was an enclave first of the Portuguese and later of the Dutch. This short article, mainly based on secondary sources by C. R. Boxer, Leonard Blussé, and others, is a tentative study of the international relations in East Asia and their changes after the appearance of the Portuguese and the Dutch in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Two important facts make the sixteen-century international relations in East Asia different from the situation before: the appearance of the Portuguese in this area and the deterioration of Sino–Japanese relations.

For the first thirty years after the Portuguese arrived on the coast of Guangdong in 1514, encounters between them and the Chinese were rife with misunderstandings and conflicts, because Portugal was not a tributary country of China; the Portuguese were totally new to the Chinese. As the Portuguese could not establish formal commercial relations with China, in order to acquire Chinese goods they sought close relations with Chinese and later Japanese smugglers and pirates. They even engaged in the slave trade, which gave them a very bad name in China.

Foreign/long-distance trade has been one of the most popular themes in socio-economic history. However, the perceptions that we have of the role played by international trade in economic development is highly dependent on the actors we are focussing on. The universal actors of trade include ship owners, captains, crews, cargo owners, investors, mediators, agents, dealers, and so on. These actors, however, tend to be treated much like “merchants.” In this study, we focus particularly on capital investors to clarify the practical institutions of foreign trade that came to be organised in pre-modern maritime East Asia.

In Japan, the pooling of capital seems to have started in the early stages of foreign trade, although it can be clearly observed only in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the advent of Sino–Japan trade on the ships authorised by the Ming dynasty. In this trade, merchants from Hakata and Sakai were particularly active in making investments, even though the nominal ship owners were the central government and/or powerful lords like the Ōuchi () and Hosokawa () family. This fact ensured that these two port cities emerged as the centres of capital pooling in Japan, and remained so till the beginning of the seventeenth century.

The form of investment, which is mainly associated with a particular part of Japan and which we try to clarify in this paper, has been called nagegane () in previous studies. The term nagegane usually refers to a type of investment wherein the payments are exempt in the case of a shipwreck; nagegane was utilised in the trades through Nagasaki during the seventeenth century. This exemption is very similar to cambio maritimo (bottomry), which was used in the medieval and pre-modern Mediterranean trade and transformed into prestamo à la gruesa (Spanish) or emprestimo ao risco (Portuguese), which was used in transoceanic Iberian trades.

Ayutthaya was a key transit port and a centre for the intra-Asian maritime trade in the early modern period. Consequently, Siam's international trade must have been transformed once the maritime trade in Asia changed on a large scale. This essay aims to offer a systematic picture of the changing trend in the maritime trade in the China Sea region, with particular emphasis on Ayutthaya's trade with Japan and China. To this end, the transition of the Siamese trade will be examined from the point of view of regional trade patterns and how these changed from the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century.

This essay has two general purposes. First, it provides a multinational perspective for a comparative study of Japan and China's foreign trade. The second is to use this case study of the Siamese trade to examine the hypothesis posed by Leonard Blussé that the eighteenth century should be regarded as a “Chinese century.”

Keeping these aims in mind, I shall analyse the Siamese trade with Japan and China in the long run and after detailed investigation, propose a model for the triangular trade between Japan, China, and Siam.

With the expansion of Western power from the seventeenth century onward, many Asian countries were confronted with difficult political and economic problems in their relations with Europe. In several countries in Asia, in order to suppress Western cultural influences within their own nations, governments often employed foreigners as interpreters for their own diplomacy and trade with Europeans, with some governments even prohibiting their people from learning foreign languages.

But, in the case of Japan, interpreters played a crucial role in both the study of the Dutch language and the integration of Western knowledge during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It seems that early-modern Japanese interpreters were quite different from the interpreters of Western languages in other countries in Asia, as in Nagasaki interpreters of the Dutch language were shogunate-appointed Japanese nationals.

Here I will examine and compare several aspects of the Chinese pidgin-English interpreters at Canton and the Japanese Dutch-language interpreters at Nagasaki, in particular their origins, incomes, duties, learning, and businesses. Through this examination I will demonstrate how the so-called Westernisation processes adopted in China and Japan were actually reflected in and represented by the different models of foreign trade at the ports of Canton and Nagasaki.

In order to “describe world history from a new angle,” Professor Haneda Masashi has set up the framework of “Comparative Studies on the Cross-cultural Contacts in Asian Port Cities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” One of the proposed points of comparison concerned communications between Europeans and local people and the indispensable role of interpreters, on whose work “the Dutch trade representatives relied utterly in their business and daily life” in Canton as well as Nagasaki.

Whereas Professor Yao Keisuke, elsewhere in this special issue, has emphasised the different roles of the interpreters in both port cities, Professor Haneda is more in favour of pointing out the similarities. He has identified state control of foreign trade, motivated by concerns over “security, social stability, and the prosperity of the state,” as a fundamental feature common to both countries in this period. Because of a clear distinction between the local people as “insiders” and Europeans as “outsiders,” the foreigners' activities were strictly controlled and contacts between locals and Westerners restricted to a minimum. The interpreters stood between both parties as mediators and were intentionally used by the authorities as “tools of control,” sometimes functioning as spies reporting on suspicious activities, but also acting as safety shields against direct Dutch confrontations or breaches of etiquette and protocol. Mechanisms to control the interpreters themselves were built in as well.

The Dutch East India Company was forced to move its factory in Japan from Hirado to Nagasaki by the order of the bakufu in 1641. Following that move, the Dutch were no longer allowed to freely go out into the city or to trade with city people. In order to have any contact with the people outside Deshima, they needed proper mediation of the Japanese officials. The interpreters (tolken, Oranda-tsūji, ) are well known as the intermediaries between the Japanese authorities and the Dutch residents of Deshima, but they were not the only ones who worked between the two sides. In this paper, I would like to deal with the Deshima Otona as the official responsible for the Dutch compound, and the compradoors, suppliers of the daily necessities for the Dutch factory, and to consider these officials within the context of the Nagasaki city system in order to compare this situation with that prevailing in Canton.

Otona literally means “head” or “chief” and indicates a prominent member who is in charge of a certain group. In the cities of Edo-period Japan, the townspeople were controlled through their organisation in groups, which were given a considerable amount of autonomy. These groups consisted, in their turn, of members who were officially recognised by both the group organisation itself and the lord of the domain in which the city was located, because they owned a house, ran a family business, and performed some kind of public service (kuyaku, ).

These few words were entered from time to time in the dagregisters, the official diaries kept by the heads of the Dutch East India Company trade in Canton and Nagasaki during their stay there. Fortunately, they do not occur too often, otherwise we would know far less about the lives and circumstances of the Dutch in China and Japan than we do. As it is, the dagregisters provide us with a wealth of information on a wide range of topics ranging from commercial matters, social and trade relations between Europeans and East Asians, political matters, the importation and use of Western technology and medicine in Japan, natural disasters, crimes, and, very important, the weather. The entries in the dagregisters recorded what happened on the day and they give us descriptions, sometimes in great detail, of the activities of the Dutch and their fellow Europeans in Canton and Nagasaki and of their interactions with their Chinese and Japanese hosts. They are the best sources for an understanding of the patterns of everyday life of the Dutchmen in the foreign settlements in the port cities of Canton and Nagasaki.

The instruction to keep dagregisters (diaries) dates back as far as 1621, when the Heren Zeventien (the Gentlemen Seventeen, the board of governors of the Dutch East India Company in the Netherlands) wrote to the governor-general and councillors of the Indies in Batavia (present-day Jakarta), the VOC headquarters in Asia: “We think it necessary that not only in the General Comptoir [Office] in Batavia, but also in those in the Moluccas, Amboina, Banda, Patani, Japan, Jambi, Paliacatta, and Surat, in sum, in all those places where we have offices, our people keep a daily journal of everything that happens there and concerns our people, both in regard to the English, as to any other people, whoever it may be, in any way.

Kaji to kenka ha Edo no hana (Fires and fights are the highlights of Edo) is a famous phrase to illustrate that fires plagued the city of Edo (now known as Tokyo) during the Tokugawa period (1603–1868). Fires seem to have been considered not only terrible disasters, but also a symbol of a busy, active metropolis. The same is true in other early-modern Japanese cities, particularly those facing the Pacific Ocean or the East China Sea, such as Nagasaki.

The geographical setting of these two cities, among others, is one of four factors that contributed to many of the fires in Japan. The winter monsoon from the north or northwest caused by the Siberia anticyclone is steady and powerful from December to February, and the first summer monsoon from the south, called haru ichiban (the first wind of spring) in March or April is also quite strong. During these months, the combination of dry air, strong winds, and individual fires set to keep homes warm create fire hazard conditions. Even today, the season when most fires occur is winter.

As Edo lies in the center of the Kanto plain, there is nothing to prevent strong winds. Between 1601 and 1867, there were 1,798 fires in Edo, including 49 large fires, whereas Osaka experienced only six large fires and Kyoto nine. Although it is open to the sea on the south-west, Nagasaki is surrounded by mountains, so the winds blow from the north-east to the south-west. There were smaller fires in Nagasaki, which is a smaller city than Edo, but the number of incidents was still high. Nagasaki suffered from 232 fires during the period 1633–1868, including those that occurred in suburban areas.

I have often said, though mainly to captive audiences of students of Leiden University, that the mental map Japanese intellectuals had of their country counted three important hubs: Kyoto, Edo, and Nagasaki. Kyoto had the highest density of juku; it was the place where people studied. Edo was the place where everyone, and certainly the samurai, met; it was a clearing-house of all kinds of information. Nagasaki, finally, was the place that all self-respecting scholars and physicians would want to visit at least once, to get a whiff of the atmosphere of their “source country,” be it China or the Netherlands, and to acquire books.

This thesis, such as it is, breaks down into three questions that can, in principle, be answered. (1) Who travelled to Nagasaki? When? What did they do there? How long did they stay? What are the aggregate numbers? (2) Did an appreciable quantity of the imported Dutch and Chinese books remain in Nagasaki? (3) Did there exist an intellectual establishment in Nagasaki that catered to the needs of visiting students? In practice, it might well be a life's work to answer these questions. In this article, I will concentrate on one aspect of the second of these questions: the import of foreign books through Nagasaki. The context, however, should be kept in mind.

This idea has been with me ever since I read that Hayashi Razan (1583–1657) visited Nagasaki twice—once as a private person in the autumn of Keichō 7 (1602), when he stayed for over one month, and the second time in Keichō 12 (1607), immediately after he had been taken into the employ of Tokugawa Ieyasu's (1542–1616; shogun 1603–5).