Reference: MA, Debin. “The Great Silk Exchange: How the World ...

seventeenth century, British and Dutch merchants sailed further eastward for direct
purchase of raw silk for Europe. Over the next two centuries, Britain succeeded in bringing
out substantial amounts of Chinese raw silk through the Chinese government’s restricted
foreign trade port cities.
Silver for silks: the emergence of a global market
Although, by the time of the Cape Route breakthrough, Chinese silk had long lost its once
exclusive appeal, Europeans still managed to play an important role by tapping into the
pre-existing trading circuit in the Pacific. This was well-illustrated by Portugal’s
intermediary involvement in the on-going silver for silk trade between Ming China and
Tokugawa Japan. In the 1530s, Ming China ended its century long official tribute trade with
Japan because of unresolved disputes and also banned private trade. During that time, the
Japanese silk weaving sector relied heavily on the imports of Chinese raw silk (Fan and
Wen 1993: 262). This led to the booming smuggling trade between China and Japan. Using
Macau, a base it seized from China in 1557, the Portuguese traders launched the so-called
triangular trade of Nagasaki-Macau-Canton that illicitly exchanged Japanese silver for
Chinese silk. 13 Dutch as well as private Chinese merchants took over this transit trade in
the early seventeenth century, using Taiwan as an intermediary base.
The persistent outflow of precious metals from Japan to China helped prompt the
Tokugawa shoguns’ tight control of foreign trade and, in particular, the sweeping
restrictions imposed in 1685 on imports of Chinese silk (Morris-Suzuki 1992: 106). These
measures provided powerful incentives for creating a domestic supply of raw silk for the
14