The Lüsong Trade: Chinese Junks and Cross-Cultural Merchants in Eighteenth-Century Manila

• In Event: Frontiers in Late Imperial and Modern Asia: From Inner Mongolia to the East Asian Sea

Abstract

From the late sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries, the Hokkien commercial orbit in the South China Sea had in the Manila junk trade a connection to the silver producers and textile consumers of the Spanish Americas. In Sino-Spanish trade, mercantile trust between Chinese merchants and their counterparts was contingent on a partial commitment to Hispanization, namely conversion to Catholicism. This created a class of converts who brokered exchange between Chinese “infidels” and the trans-Pacific merchants of the Manila-Acapulco galleons within a culturally hostile environment. Sources on the Minnan-Manila trade in colonial Spanish archives represent a largely unexplored source on the actual organization and operation of the Chinese junk trade during the golden age of junk transport. This paper takes a cache of shipping manifests from the first half of the eighteenth century, as well as other evidence from archives in Mexico, Spain, and the Philippines, to delve into how Hokkien merchants organized and operated commercial voyages to the land they referred to as Lüsong (Luzon) and how they engaged in cross-cultural trade with their non-Chinese buyers.

Author

• Guillermo Ruiz-Stovel, University of California, Los Angeles