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This article examines the commercial activities of five members of the Ye family—Cudgin, Leunqua, Giqua, Tiauqua, and Yanqua—who operated within the Canton trade system between 1720 and 1804. While maritime historiography often focuses on the dominant "large houses" such as the Yan and Pan families, Paul A. Van Dyke argues that the Ye merchants provide a vital counter-narrative, representing the "small merchants" who navigated the trade with distinct strategies. Utilizing a range of European archival sources, including records from the English, Ostend, and Danish East India companies, the study reconstructs the business operations and social trajectories of these figures. The findings reveal that most Ye merchants adopted a cautious, thrifty approach, eschewing the aggressive expansion and heavy foreign debt characteristic of their larger competitors. They typically relied on middlemen rather than direct agents in China’s interior. Significantly, the article highlights Cudgin and Yanqua as rare, documented examples of Chinese merchants who successfully retired with substantial fortunes, challenging the traditional view that such financial preservation was nearly impossible under the Canton System. By detailing their involvement in the porcelain and tea trades, the article offers a more nuanced understanding of the economic diversity, risk management, and social mobility present in the eighteenth-century Pearl River Delta.
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This article reconstructs the trajectory and commercial networks of the Cai and Qiu family firms in Canton between 1730 and 1784, arguing that the expansion and resilience of these groups depended both on mercantile alliances and on strategies of identification and succession within a fragmented and polysemic documentary environment. The methodology is based on the "cross-reading" of European and colonial records—especially Belgian mercantile diaries and ledgers (the Ostend General Company of the Indies), Dutch resolutions and account books, and English sources—comparing variant spellings of names, family relations (father, partners, and "sons" in lists and inventories), and chronologies inferred from events such as marriages and the commencement of commercial activities. Van Dyke shows that "Hunqua" appears repeatedly with multiple nominative possibilities, requiring careful discrimination among individuals sharing the same surname, branches, and associated family names. From this disentangling, the study more confidently attributes to Cai Hunqua (identified in Dutch series as "Young Honqua" and later "Tjayhonqua") a central role in trade with European companies and in the consolidation of a lasting alliance with the Suqua/Chen. It concludes that, by mapping genealogies and encoding onomastic ambiguities, it is possible to recover the internal functioning of mercantile houses and their long-term connections within the Atlantic-Asian system.
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- Journal Article (2)