MRI International Workshop 2011

 

 

 

Place

Institute For Tourism Studies (IFT) Auditorium, Macau

 

Language 

English

 

Contact 

[email protected]

In his article, “A Seller of ‘Sing-Songs'”, on the foreign trade conducted in Guangzhou and Macau in the first half of the nineteenth century, J.M. Braga rhetorically asked if the activities of the London merchant John Henry Cox had “contributed not a little to the spread of those notions of free trade which took hold of the consciousness of an industrialized Britain and, in course of time, to an awakening of the East”.

Since Braga’s pioneering article was published by the University of Hong Kong in 1964, a spate of publications has appeared, discussing not only the goods, but also the art that was produced for export to the West. Following Carl Crossman’s 1970s writings on the decorative arts of the China trade, art collections and art exhibitions of significant cultural value have mushroomed in China, Europe and the U.S., as well as in Hong Kong and Macau. They attest to the importance of an era that has had such a dramatic impact on the world that we know today.

The present Workshop invites papers that discuss, preferably as a result of recent research, historical, economic and artistic developments that took place from approximately the 1760s to the 1860s in Guangzhou, Macau and Hong Kong. The first decade has been chosen as starting point because of its historical implications. The Chinese guild trading system known to Westerners as the 公行 Cohong had existed since the mid-seventeenth century. However, it was the restriction of the European trade to Guangzhou from 1759 on, up to the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 that resulted in a more politically complex system of trade between China, Europe and the Americas, a trade that also gave rise to a large variety of luxury items and artifacts. The 1860s have been chosen as cut-off date because it was the preceding century that saw the production of most of the works of art and craftsmanship that have come to define the art of the China trade today.

 

Main Themes:

• The Dutch, British, Swedish, Danish, and other East India companies and their headquarters and main trading interests and merchandise in Guangzhou.
• The East India Companies and their headquarters in Macau.
• The relations between the 公行 Cohong and Western merchants after 1760.
• Unstudied aspects of the Thirteen Factories of Guangzhou.
• The demise of the Lisbon-Macau-Guangzhou Portuguese trade, and the trans-Pacific Acapulco-Manila Spanish trade.
• Export painting and art made for the China trade.
• “China Trade” art in Guangzhou, Macau, Hong Kong and elsewhere in China.
• China trade museum collections in China and the West.
• Shipwrecks, rescue and restoration projects that throw light on the China trade.
• Individual personalities, art collectors and chroniclers of the China trade.
• Contemporary literature and publications in Macau.

 

 

 

 

 

 Languages

 

 Organising Institution