香港市場に見る東アジア開港の意味

抄録

The "opening" of East Asian ports, such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, Bangkok, Saigon, and Yokohama, in the mid nineteenth century meant they were opened not only to trade with Western countries but to trade among themselves. While the structure of their traditional economies, where traditional goods were dealt, was maintained, new factors were added with the participation of Western merchants. The author of this article quentitatively studies that situation based on two key words, Hong Kong and rice. How much rice was imported into China is examined in Chapter I by using reports of British consuls and Chinese Maritime Customs. Chapter II draws a rough sketch of trade in Hong Kong according to this documentation. At the same time we find that they can't depict the whole or exact image. Therefore the author constructs a database for the Hong Kong market from a contemporary newspaper of 1864, and analyzes it in Chapter III according to categories of goods. This analysis shows how much of each item was sold and by whom it was bought. In Chaper IV he delineates the structure of Hong Kong trade in 1864, while synthesizing the previous two chapters. Chapter V deals with the rice trade of an American firm, Augstine Heard & Company from 1840 until the early 1870s, to understand the chronological phase of the rice trade in East Asia. Through above analyses we get the idea that rice was the most important commodity in the Hong Kong market with the exception of opium, that it was far more dealt than english manufactured goods, that it was re-exported to South China by Chinese junks and to North China by Western ships via Hong Kong after importation from South East Asia, and that it was also re-exported to Japan during 1867-71 when demands on China decreased, showing the situation of the intra-Asian rice trade and how Hong Kong played the role of an emporium. Finally, concerning to the share of rice import into Hong Kong, Chinese merchants accounted for forty per cent.