John D. Wong's engaging book studies the life and business strategies of one of the most prominent Chinese merchants in the history of global trade, Wu Bingjian (1769–1843), known in the West as Houqua or Houqwa. As a member of the select Chinese merchants with exclusive license to trade with foreigners at the port of Canton—the so-called Hong merchants—Houqua operated a successful trading house during tumultuous times and became one of the wealthiest men in the nineteenth-century world. Wong demonstrates that such achievements were unusual even with Houqua's privileged background and position. Indeed, it was his outstanding business acumen and foresight that created a lasting legacy of what can be called a Chinese model of global business, the impact of which lives on to this day.
Houqua chiefly operated in the Canton system, seen by the Qing court as a safe addition to the existing tribute system that regulated trade with foreigners. Under this system, the Hong merchants were to take responsibility for their trading partners (including debts incurred by the foreign traders), and these merchants faced constant scrutiny by the government. Furthermore, to gain their business monopoly, the Hong merchants had to pay large sums to the court. Therefore, the effectiveness of the Canton system relied heavily on the financial capacities, technical expertise, and personal charisma of the individual Hong merchants. Unsurprisingly, although the new opportunity to engage in foreign trade attracted many enterprising businessmen, few thrived. Meanwhile, foreigners often understood the limits of the Canton system. They appreciated and even respected the Hong merchants for their capabilities and intelligence.
Unlike previous scholarship that focuses on the predicament of the Hong merchants, Wong explores in detail the strategies deployed by Houqua to not only stand out among his Cohong colleagues, but also orchestrate the international flow of capital and goods from his local nexus. By so doing, the author follows in the footsteps of scholars such as Paul A. Van Dyke in dispelling the misconception of an isolationist Qing China and the overemphasis on Western impact in opening China to global trade. In addition, instead of focusing on the Canton system as a transitional phase between the traditional tribute system of imperial China and the new treaty port system after the first Opium War, the focus on one merchant's life enables Wong to dispute the view of the treaty port system as a sharp break with the Canton system.
Due to the book's focus on one individual, the organization of the chapters follows a biographical approach, echoing the unfolding of the business world for Houqua: the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South Chinese society under Qing rule into which he was born; the large migrant family from Fujian in which he was raised; the established institutions of trade he had to learn; and his own creative reworking of the idioms of these institutions. The last chapter examines Houqua's foreign investment and its fate during the decline of his trading house under the command of his successors. This study relies mostly on company documents and merchant letters in various British and American collections, as well as local histories and genealogies often neglected in previous studies of global trade.
Most interesting among Houqua's various business strategies studied by Wong are Houqua's maneuvering of the “barter trade” with the British East India Company (EIC) and the cultivation of trust in trade with the Americans by building and maintaining long-term relationships with a limited number of partners. On the one hand, the British attempt to sell woolen to balance the trade deficit from Chinese tea was unsuccessful due to the lack of local need. Houqua and his fellow Hong merchants were forced to buy woolen from the British as their ticket to a trade partnership. Instead of becoming a victim of this asymmetrical system, Houqua managed to make himself indispensable as a financial resource and credit line for the EIC and the junior merchants groomed by the company. On the other hand, trust building was a primary strategy Houqua used to cultivate his relationship with American partners. The Americans entered the Chinese market later than the British and only as individuals and not chartered companies, which made possible a different form of business partnership. Houqua's personal effectiveness and charisma are most clearly shown in his ability to capitalize on this fresh opportunity of a viable business alternative. Wong offers many illustrative examples of the obvious trust between Houqua and his American partners, such as the investing of his US$26 million fortune with John Forbes in Boston.
Given the nature of this study, the author faces the risk of interpreting as individual innovations what are equally likely to be actions taken as a result of the social and cultural expectations of a given time and place. Houqua was certainly not an “average” Chinese, but compared to his peers—such as the two other prominent Hong merchants mentioned in this book, Puankhequa (Pan Chencheng) and Mowqua (Lu Guangheng)—were Houqua's actions his own deliberate choices, or were they a result of contingencies his colleagues did not experience? And to what extent was Houqua copying his colleagues because that was expected of a Hong merchant? For instance, Houqua was not the only Hong merchant whose portraits have reached the United States and Europe; in fact, the famous painter Lamqua had portrayed a number of Hong merchants, Mowqua included. Was the appearance of Houqua's portraits primarily the result of his strategic leveraging of the artist community in Canton, or of the continued fascination with Chinoiserie in Europe since the eighteenth century? Similarly, the author's argument would be strengthened by more detailed explanations of Mowqua's business partnership with the British and how it differed from Houqua's, and why Mowqua and Puankhequa, unlike Houqua, never engaged in business with Americans (pp. 171, 74, 80).
