The City for Intermediaries: Compradors in Hong Kong, 1830s to 1880s

• In Event: Living on the Boundaries: Social, Cultural, and Economic Intermediaries in Modern China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan

Abstract

My paper shed lights on the rise of the compradors in nineteenth century Hong Kong with a specific focus on the individuals working in the colonial government and foreign firms. The compradors’ socio-economic activities overall underpinned the commercial development of Hong Kong throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. The First Opium War (1839-1842) dismantled and privatized the licensed comprador system, designed by the Qing government, in Canton. Thereafter, a variety of the compradors appeared in Hong Kong, including the government compradors, ship compradors and company compradors. Of these, the company compradors, who acted as internal staff and as external business partners to the foreign firms, achieved prominent economic success in the 1870s and the 1880s. At the same time, collaborating with the Qing and British officials, and local Chinese leading figures, the compradors obtained social recognition in Hong Kong by the late 1880s. Although by the 1960s, Hong Kong’s compradors dispersed into the general commercial population, no longer recognizable as a distinctive group, the social fabric they established is still in place today. The present prosperity of Sino-foreign joint ventures and the intermediating roles of business elites in local politics all have their antecedents in this earlier period of colonial history.

Author

• Kaori Abe, Nanyang Technological University