My overall reaction to this book is that it is extremely well documented but narrowly conceived. The author's focus is deliberately confined, though that may be entirely appropriate for publication as a monograph in the promising Chinese Overseas series. The most impressive aspect of Jason Lim's book is his comprehensive bibliography displaying a very diverse array of resource materials. Totaling twenty-five pages, the exhaustive list includes UK, Singapore and Australian official records, materials from the Nanjing Second Historical Archives, Fujian Provincial Archives, and collections in Xiamen, Quanzhou, Wuyishan and Shanghai, not to mention numerous holdings in Taiwan (including the Institute of Modern History and Guomindang archives), plus a wide array of secondary resource materials in English and Chinese. The author has gained access to sources that were not accessible to this reviewer in preparing his own published work on the Fujian and China tea trade a decade and a half ago. A notable omission, however, is economist Thomas P. Lyons's comprehensive survey of China's Maritime Customs statistics, which itself is centered upon a meticulous critical case study of Fujian's tea trade.Footnote ¹

The strength of this book rests on its merits as a discrete study of the evolving political economy of early to mid-twentieth century interregional trade between Southeast Asia and southeastern China. Lim's diligent archival sleuthing does not add as much to our comprehensive knowledge of the modern history of the China tea trade and Fujian's tea trade as it might have. While that aspect of his study falls short, it was clearly not the author's principal concern. Lim's preoccupation is the qiaoxiao (Overseas Chinese) tea trade, in contrast to the very much larger neixiao (domestic Chinese) market and the greatly diminished but not insignificant waixiao (global export) market. Lim declares that by the 1920s the qiaoxiao market in wulong (oolong) tea was the salvation of Fujian's tea trade. As Lyons notes, Fujian's share in China's total tea trade had by then sunk to between 10 and 20 percent, versus 40 to 50 percent two generations earlier (Lyons, p. 141). More to the point, exports of Fujian tea to Singapore amounted to only 10,000–18,000 piculs per year during the 1930s, at a time when China's total tea exports stood at 600,000–700,000 piculs (Lim, p. 31; see also the detailed statistics provided on the supplementary CD to Lyons 2003). While a vastly reduced trade is preferable to none, under these circumstances the regional (not to speak of national) impact of qiaoxiao trade should not be overestimated.

In an introduction and five chapters Lim plumbs every angle of his topic. The introduction makes a forthright case for his study as a “missing link” in the existing literature, but also harbors a few misconceptions. Lim erroneously claims that the British East India Company found it difficult to turn a profit by monopolizing the trade before 1834 due to exorbitant import taxation.Footnote ² He states that previous Western and Chinese studies of the trade have belabored a few common themes, especially the centrality of waixiao trade and the supremacy of the industrial technology that accompanied foreign capital investment and the establishment of colonial plantation tea production. The statement glosses over the connection between differing organizational or structural modes of tea production and the issue of the technologies appropriate to each.Footnote ³ Lim's summary of the complexities of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tea trade is too perfunctory, and might almost have been omitted without any loss.

The first chapter broadly traces the importance of overseas Chinese tea exports and trade linkages between Anxi County, Xiamen and Singapore. A survey of the history of Fujian tea production from 1920 to 1960 in Chapter 2 then describes largely futile efforts to modernize the production system in often chaotic circumstances, concluding with the rigid imposition of centrally planned agriculture under the People's Republic. Anxi's cohort of Hokkien tea merchants, their establishment and domination of a specialized trade association (the Singapore Chinese Tea Importers and Exporters Association or SCTIEA), and its activities in that entrepot occupy center stage in Chapter 3. Although full of details about the operations of the SCTIEA, the discussion here grapples with more limited data on merchants' business management and their rather humdrum daily working lives. Stressing the link between nationalism and commercial enterprise, Chapter 4 discusses an emphatic shift between 1932 and 1947 from marketing qiaoxiao tea as a patriotic product to the advent of official commodity marketing schemes. Hindrances to the growth of the trade arose from increasing efforts by the Nationalist government to regulate and control tea exports in defiance of affected merchants' interests (while not cited here, William Kirby's research offers ample confirmation of such statist Guomindang policies).

As Chapter 5 confirms, the linchpin of this transregional commerce before 1949 was the port of Xiamen, where the overseas Anxi merchants in Singapore sought to sustain their own direct interests in tea production in their home county and the Wuyi Mountains of northwest Fujian. These two to three dozen Singapore tea firms staked their modest fortunes upon assuring a standardized, branded quality of tea traditionally demanded by local Chinese consumers. Patriotic promotion during the war years and solidarity as an ethnic commercial interest group or bang helped sustain this trade despite continued instability in China. The author concludes that the end of the Nationalist regime also marked the demise of the Anxi merchants' private tea farms and commercial enterprises in post-1949 Fujian. Disaffection with the People's Republic now confirmed the merchants' chosen identity as Singapore-based nationals struggling to diversify their commodity sourcing and maintain their trade in the face of Cold War difficulties. In contrast to the highly visible grand tycoons and entrepreneurs such as Tan Kah Kee so commonly discussed in the literature, Lim sees these tea dealers as a representative sampling of the great middling stratum of Singapore merchants. His sympathetic account certainly does succeed in rescuing both the overseas Chinese tea merchants and their transnational commerce from historical obscurity.