A Quiet Convergence of Interests: Makassar as an Emporium for Chinese Trade, 1613–1669

Abstract

This article describes the evolution of the commercial connections between China and the southern Sulawesian port of Makassar from the beginning of the seventeenth century until 1669, when the Dutch Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie conquered Makassar. It attempts to show that these connections went through several transformations. Initially direct Chinese shipping supplied Makassar with Chinese goods, but this direct trade lasted only about a decade. However, commerce carried by Macanese ships and trade in Indochinese ports that were frequented by both Sulawesian and Chinese vessels maintained the commercial connection. This connection in its different forms allowed Makassar to act as an entrepôt that supplied Chinese goods and Japanese copper to more distant parts of Southeast Asia, especially those in the eastern Indonesian archipelago. The article concludes by arguing that after the conquest of Makassar, Banjarmasin in southern Borneo developed as a new regional entrepôt connecting China to the eastern archipelago.

This article traces the connections between the trading network centred on the port city of Makassar in the southern Sulawesian kingdom of Gowa and the trading network of China's maritime merchants during the mid-seventeenth century. It also attempts to periodise the relationship between these two trading systems from the establishment of their first connection in or around the year 1613 until the conquest of Gowa by the Dutch Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie (VOC) in 1669. The most basic argument that the article makes is that although the connections between the Chinese and Makassar networks went through a series of transformations, they allowed Makassar to act as a distribution hub for Chinese products, including porcelain, silk, gold, tutenague, china root, and later re-exported Japanese copper. Sulawesian merchants carried these products to the parts of the eastern archipelago that the VOC had isolated from other trading networks, as well as a number of more western and southern ports that they visited, including Banjarmasin and Aceh.

Since the path-breaking work of M. A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz in the 1960s, the importance of Makassar in the seventeenth-century economic history of Southeast Asia has been well established. Meilink-Roelofsz portrays Makassar's position in Southeast Asia as being closely tied to the fortunes of the Portuguese and other European trading systems in the region that depended on the east-to-west flow of spices from the Maluku islands towards the Malay peninsula.¹ Her followers have since complicated this picture in different ways. In a number of works Anthony Reid connects Makassar's rise as a commercial centre to what he sees as a pan-Southeast Asian ‘age of commerce’ during which maritime trade flourished and enriched polities across the region. In his account, Makassar succeeded in taking advantage of this commercial efflorescence by reinventing itself as an open port that provided security and freedom for foreign merchants.² More recently, Jennifer Gaynor and Tristan Mostert have continued to emphasise the importance of Makassar's participation in the trans-Southeast Asian trading networks, especially its role as a distribution hub for Malukan spice. However, rather than seeing Makassar as a passive beneficiary of a trading system evolving around it, they show how its rulers actively pursued their realm's commercial interests through diplomatic and military means.³

This article builds on these more recent works by examining Makassar's commercial relationship with China during the mid-seventeenth century. To date, this has been an aspect of early modern maritime Asia's trans-regional trading system that has rarely been discussed in modern scholarship. The lack of attention that the Chinese-Makassar connection has received during this period is understandable. Between the 1620s and the VOC's conquest of Makassar in 1669, there is almost no evidence for direct voyages by Chinese ships to the port. A valuable article by Gabrielle von Kispal-van Deijk points out that, despite some tantalising hints, before 1669 our sources have very little to say about the activities of Chinese merchants or sojourners in Makassar.⁴ Consequently Von Kispal-van Deijk's article, like almost all other studies of the Chinese-Makassar connection to date, focuses on the period after the VOC's conquest.⁵ Studies of the development of seventeenth-century Chinese trading networks also have had little to say about Sulawesi or Makassar for the same reason. A number of excellent recent studies of the celebrated Zheng family, who dominated China's overseas trade in the mid-seventeenth century, have traced the sailing routes of the family's ships to Japan, Luzon, Indochina, the Malay peninsula, and Java. However, as with the studies of Makassar's trade, the focus has been primarily on the activities of the family's merchant fleet, so studies of the Zheng family's trade have typically gone no farther than the ports where the Zheng ships docked. They thus have had little to say about the impact of their activities on Makassar or anywhere to its east.⁶

The present article will take a different approach. It will focus on the movement of trade goods rather than ships or people and will attempt to show that in the seventeenth century the reach of overseas Chinese trading networks extended further than Chinese ships actually sailed thanks to links between them and the trading systems of other groups in Southeast Asia. Consequently, Makassar was able to play an important role in the redistribution of Chinese goods long before the VOC's conquest of Gowa despite the absence of direct Chinese shipping. Several indirect connections to Makassar brought Chinese porcelain, Japanese copper, and a variety of other goods exported or re-exported from Chinese ports, and these were in turn sent to markets in the eastern part of the Indonesian archipelago or to Makassar's important trading partners in the west, including Banjarmasin and Aceh. This indirect flow of goods from the cargo holds of Chinese ships through intermediary ports to Makassar's harbour and then on to more distant markets is evident in our sources, but has largely fallen through the gap between the scholarship focussed on Makassar's pre-1669 trading world and the scholarship focussed on the trials and tribulations of the Zheng family. This article is an attempt to bridge this gap.

The one type of scholarship that has acknowledged the commercial connection between Makassar and China in the mid-seventeenth century has focussed on the activities of Portuguese traders sailing from Macau, particularly the work of George Bryan Souza and Roderich Ptak.⁷ This article's central concern is the flow of Chinese trade goods, as well as Japanese copper, which were originally exported or re-exported from China by Chinese ships, but because the trade between Macau and Makassar carried by Portuguese merchants also supplied Chinese goods, the analysis here will necessarily draw upon the works of Souza and Ptak to analyse the relative importance of the different connections between China and Makassar. It will argue that although the Macanese connection may have sometimes been the most important link, it was not consistently so, especially in the last decade or so of Gowa's independence.

Finally, a note about the main primary sources used in this article is in order. The most important of these are the records of the English East India Company, which maintained a factory in Makassar from 1613 to 1667. The majority of the primary source references are drawn from the India Office Records G/10 (Celebes), G/21 (Java), and E (correspondence) series that are held by the British Library. D. K. Bassett and John Villiers have already made extensive use of these series to explore the history of English trade with Makassar,⁸ but this article will re-examine them specifically for references to the trade in Chinese and Japanese goods.

China-Makassar Trade during the Last Decades of the Ming Dynasty, c. 1600–1644

Before 1600, Makassar was likely an important but not crucial port on the northern littoral route of the Java Sea that ran along the southern coast of Borneo, past Sulawesi, and towards the Maluku islands. This route included numerous ports of various sizes, none of which had become a dominant emporium in the sixteenth century.⁹ At the turn of the seventeenth century though, Makassar's role was enhanced by the policies of Karaeng Matoaya, the first minister of the Gowa kingdom between 1593 and 1637. As Anthony Reid has shown, Matoaya actively developed the kingdom's rice production for export and implemented policies designed to maintain Makassar as a free and secure port. His governance in the first few decades of the seventeenth century encouraged foreign merchants to dock there in increasingly large numbers. However, the greatest single factor that allowed Makassar to become a major emporium connecting the eastern and western parts of Southeast Asia was the aggressive entry of the Dutch VOC into the Maluku islands and their subsequent attempts to monopolise trade in the subregion.¹⁰ Other merchant groups who were reluctant to challenge the VOC directly found that Makassar, since it was a free port possessing a merchant marine with regular access to the Maluku islands, provided indirect access to the eastern markets and products that they sought.¹¹

According to the English East India Company's factory in Makassar, the first merchant vessel from China to anchor in the city's increasingly busy harbour arrived in December 1613.¹² This statement should be taken with a grain of salt because the English themselves had arrived earlier in the same year,¹³ but the probability that Chinese trade with Makassar only began within a year or two of 1613 is broadly supported by its absence in most late-sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Chinese sources that describe the sailing routes and destinations of Chinese ships in Southeast Asia. Makassar was not among the port cities that the Ming authorities began issuing annual permits for trading voyages to in 1589 or on the revised list issued in 1593,¹⁴ and it was also not a destination described in the later sixteenth or early seventeenth-century rutter, the Shun feng xiang song 順風相送.¹⁵ Similarly, it was not mentioned by Zhang Xie 張燮 in his 1618 treatise on overseas countries, the Dong xi yang kao 東西洋考.¹⁶ The only Chinese-language geographic work from the early seventeenth century that does include Makassar is the Selden Map, which, according to Chen Jiarong's analysis of its contents, seems to have been created around 1624.¹⁷ The map was likely produced in Southeast Asia, possibly in Sumatra, but the author was most probably a Fujianese mariner who would have been familiar with the Chinese trading system at the time.¹⁸

The absence of Makassar from the list of Southeast Asian ports that the Ming authorities began granting sailing licences for in the late sixteenth century is understandable because the city only began to become an important emporium after 1600. The Shun feng xiang song, whose precise date of compilation is uncertain, may also have predated Makassar's rise.¹⁹ The port's absence in Zhang Xie's 1618 Dong xi yang kao is a bit more surprising if Chinese ships had begun arriving in 1613 or earlier. Elsewhere in Zhang's work, his information seems to have been current to within about five years of its publication.²⁰ It may have been that in the mid-1610s when Zhang was writing not enough information concerning Makassar was yet available. However, the inclusion of Makassar on the Selden Map along the northern littoral route of the Java Sea does tally with other sources, because if Chen Jiarong is correct in dating the map to 1624, Chinese merchant vessels would have been visiting the city for more than a decade by then according to the 1613 English report.

Later English company records suggest that Chinese ships continued to arrive up until the mid-1620s. According to another report written in 1618, no Chinese ships had arrived that season (approximately October 1617 to April 1618), implying that their arrival had been a regular occurrence in the years prior.²¹ The next mention of Chinese shipping at Makassar comes in 1626, when an Italian adventurer who switched service from the English company to the VOC informed his former employers that the Dutch company had given him a commission to hunt Chinese vessels heading to Makassar or anywhere else in the archipelago other than Batavia.²² Despite the absence of specific mentions in the English records or any other sources, this move by the Dutch company also hints that there were Chinese ships arriving at least sporadically in Makassar up until that year, which would have justified the port's inclusion in the Selden Map.

After 1626, aside from one partial exception, I have been unable to find any mention of Chinese ships sailing between China and Makassar before the occupation of the city by the Dutch company in 1669.²³ This apparent end of direct trade carried by Chinese ships was probably not because of the VOC's attempts to tighten its mare clausum. The company attempted to blockade Makassar in the 1630s, but despite the brief disruption this caused it was mostly unsuccessful at stopping other European and Asian merchant vessels from docking in Makassar before 1660.²⁴ Instead, it was likely a result of changes taking place within the structures of the trading systems of both China's coast and the Indonesian archipelago.

To begin, on the southern coast of China during the late 1620s, a struggle between several powerful maritime mercenary and pirate groups had broken out. The ultimate victor was the mercurial merchant prince Zheng Zhilong 鄭芝龍, the original patriarch of the family that would dominate China's maritime commerce until the 1680s. Zheng managed to secure an official title as a Ming military commander while maintaining an independent war fleet and de facto control over a community of maritime merchants based out of Anhai in Quanzhou county to the north of Xiamen. Supported by Zheng's official authority and his military force, Anhai's merchant fleet became the most important carrier of China's overseas trade in the 1630s. Effectively freed from the Ming dynasty's regulations (which had previously banned commercial voyages to Japan and restricted the numbers of vessels allowed to visit Southeast Asian ports), the Anhai-based merchants seem to have used most of their resources to pursue the silk-for-silver trade in Nagasaki and Manila.²⁵

In 1631, Chinese merchants began sending ships south along the western sailing route to Southeast Asia as well, but this was a minor part of the new Anhai-led trading system. According to VOC records examined by Cheng Wei-chung, that year there were only thirteen Southeast Asia-bound vessels, all destined for relatively near ports in Indochina and the Malay peninsula, including Hoi An, Cambodia, Siam, Patani, and Songkhla.²⁶ By way of comparison, in the same year Manila received thirty-three Chinese vessels and Nagasaki sixty.²⁷ Zheng Zhilong also sent ships to the VOC's headquarters in Batavia during the 1630s, but their numbers were similarly tiny compared to those sailing for Luzon and Japan. According to data collected by Marie-Sybille de Vienne, although thirty-three Chinese ships had arrived in Batavia between 1621 and 1625, only eleven did so between 1626 and 1630, eleven again between 1631 and 1635, and seventeen between 1636 and 1640.²⁸ The implication of these developments is that once the greatest part of China's maritime merchant shipping became affiliated with Zheng's organisation, it became focussed on the incredibly lucrative silk-silver trade in Japan and Luzon at the expense of trade in other Southeast Asian ports, including Makassar.

Another reason that Chinese merchants may have stopped sending trade ships to Makassar by the late 1620s was a relative lack of interest in the major export commodities available there, especially cloves.²⁹ One factor that likely discouraged Chinese merchants from seeking cloves in Makassar or elsewhere in Southeast Asia was competition from the VOC, which was sending shipments of the spice to Taiwan by the 1630s. In 1631, VOC ships brought 1659 pounds (820 kg) of cloves along with other commodities to Xiamen's harbour.³⁰ Similarly, in 1637 the company sent another 38,800 pounds (19,167 kg) of cloves to Taiwan for the China market,³¹ and a further assignment of 12,200 pounds (6,027 kg) was sent in 1644.³² The VOC's imports appear to have more than sated the market. Of the 1659 pounds of cloves imported in 1631, only 48 pounds (24 kg) were sold, in contrast to healthy sales of pepper and ivory sent on the same ships.³³ According to the daily registers of Fort Zeelandia in Taiwan, the later assignments of cloves were sold only gradually in mostly small quantities to Chinese ships.³⁴

The Chinese merchants also had indirect access through other channels to trade goods from the eastern archipelago that the VOC was not sending to Taiwan in significant quantities. In the 1620s and 1630s, Makassar's own trading fleet was expanding its network. In 1634, the VOC's governor-general in Batavia complained that for some time the number of vessels at Makassar had been increasing as foreigners from other parts of Southeast Asia, including Johor, the Lingga islands, and Patani, were flocking to the port, while in the other direction Makassar's fleet was still capable of collecting cloves and other goods in the Maluku islands.³⁵ In 1637 another report noted that there were four vessels from Makassar in Siam that had brought eastern archipelagic goods, including cloves, wax, and sea turtle shells.³⁶ The small number of trade ships sent by the Anhai merchants to Indochina and the Malay peninsula would have had the opportunity to buy eastern archipelagic goods from the Makassar-based merchants in these ports, along with the pepper, ivory, and other locally produced goods.

The final factor was the increasing Macanese presence in Makassar in the 1620s and 1630s. The Portuguese were in the process of being shouldered out of many of their formerly important markets by the VOC so Makassar, as an emporium beyond Dutch control, was an attractive haven for Macau's trading fleet. It was also useful to the Macanese as a halfway point between China and the Lesser Sulu Islands where sappanwood and sandalwood could be acquired.³⁷ The usual goods the Macanese brought to Makassar seem to have usually been high value Chinese products (especially gold, fine porcelain, and silk).³⁸ The presence of regular deliveries of these profitable goods from Macau by Portuguese merchants would have made Makassar a less attractive port for Chinese merchants who would have been bringing many of the same sorts of goods. Furthermore, the Portuguese were carrying archipelagic goods back to Macau, and these were distributed through the Chinese coastal trading network, creating more competition in what seems to have been an increasingly limited market.

China-Makassar Trade during the Zheng Family's Dominance, 1644–1669

Before the heyday of the indirect trading connection between China and Makassar in the 1650s and 1660s, there appears to have been a hiatus for several years after the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644. As the English company's servants in Makassar observed while lamenting their difficulty buying Chinese green ginger and sugar in 1650, the main source of the problem was the long war raging within China between the new Manchu Qing empire and loyalists to the fallen Ming dynasty.³⁹ The war in China, along with a series of famines in the 1640s, seems to have disrupted Chinese overseas maritime trade in general from the fall of Beijing to the Manchus in 1644 until the end of the decade.⁴⁰

By the early 1650s, Zheng Chenggong 鄭成功 (still often referred to as “Koxinga” in European language scholarship), Zheng Zhilong's son and successor as patriarch of the family from 1646 to 1662, had managed to take control of most of China's foreign trade. Acting both as a merchant prince and a Ming loyalist warlord, he slowed Qing advances into south-eastern China and supported his military forces with more direct control over the merchant fleets that had previously been relatively loosely affiliated with his father. He accomplished this with an impressive naval force, a secure deep water harbour in Xiamen, and unintentional help from the Manchu Qing's anti-trade policies in the parts of China that the new empire controlled.

Like the Anhai merchants in his father's day, Zheng Chenggong's trading fleet continued to focus most of its commercial efforts on trade in Nagasaki and Manila, though Southeast Asia was still a tertiary part of the Zheng family's trading strategy. Starting around 1650, the family's merchants began sending trading vessels to Siam, Cambodia, and the Nguyen domain in what is now central Vietnam. Voyages to these ports seem to have become more regular, and this was probably primarily because the disruption caused by the war in China meant that Chinese goods were harder to acquire and alternative products needed to be found to supplement their Japan-bound cargoes.⁴¹

Despite Zheng Chenggong's relatively greater interest in Southeast Asia, Makassar was still not part of the family's business strategy. Although on at least one occasion the family's merchants did send a ship to Manado on the Minahasa peninsula of northern Sulawesi for rice,⁴² there is no record of any Chinese trading vessels sailing from China to Makassar during Zheng Chenggong's rule. The Zheng organisation's continued lack of interest in the port was likely because the already limited market for eastern archipelagic goods in China declined even further thanks to economic disruption and poverty caused by the Ming-Qing war. Whatever demand remained for these types of goods was probably satisfied either by supplies from the VOC's factory in Taiwan or by Zheng trade in the Indochinese ports, which were still linked to Sulawesi and the eastern archipelago by Makassar's own trading fleet.

However, there was still a demand for Chinese goods in Sulawesi and its trading partners in Southeast Asia, and this provided an opportunity for Macau's beleaguered merchants to increase their trade in Makassar. Macau's trade, which was its raison d'etre, was badly damaged first by the 1639 Tokugawa ban on Portuguese trade in Japan and then by the VOC's conquest of Portuguese Melaka in 1641. After these losses Makassar quickly achieved an oversized importance in Macau's trading system. Roderich Ptak suggests that trade with Makassar was the primary reason Macau even survived in the 1640s.⁴³ As both he and George Bryan Souza have pointed out, the greatest advantage Makassar had for the Macanese starting in the 1640s was that it provided indirect access to the silver from Spanish America coming via Manila that the Chinese economy still craved, so the critical imports that they brought were those in demand in Manila. These included silk and cotton cloth (the latter often originating in South Asia) and iron, while gold, porcelain, china root, sugar, and other less important products were sold for consumption in Sulawesi or re-export to other markets.⁴⁴ For example, a report from the VOC's governor and council in Batavia in 1649 mentions the dispatch of a Portuguese ship from Makassar to Macau to collect gold, candied ginger, sugar, china root, and other Chinese goods.⁴⁵

In 1660, the system underwent another major shift. A VOC fleet attacked Gowa with the intention of forcing the kingdom to accept a number of demands that would improve the company's position in Makassar and limit its merchant fleet's involvement in the spice trade of the eastern archipelago. Key among these demands was the exclusion of Portuguese traders from the city, and this was hammered home by the capture or destruction of six Portuguese ships lying in Makassar's harbour, four of which were from Macau.⁴⁶ The subsequent peace treaty signed between the company and Gowa included this provision, and although some Macanese ships did continue to arrive at Makassar, Souza estimates an average of only one per year.⁴⁷

The other important factor that limited Macanese trade was the Qing government's decision in 1662 to evacuate most of China's coast. This decision was made with the aim of cutting off the Zheng family's access to China's markets, but even though the Macanese were more competitors than partners of the Zheng, their enclave initially received no exemption. The intervention of the Jesuits and their allies in Beijing, as well as Qing officials in Guangdong who understood Macau's potential as a source of revenue, helped delay the order's implementation until it was revoked in 1668. In the meantime though, Macau's overseas trade was officially prohibited, and the handful of ships that managed to sail from there to Makassar and elsewhere during this period did so only through stealth or bribery.⁴⁸

However, despite the diminished trade between Makassar and Macau, the city seems to have continued as a major distribution point for Chinese goods at least until 1667 when the VOC attacked once again. What trading connections made this possible? Though no systematic quantitative data exists, both English and Dutch records suggest that it was indirect trade through Indochina, especially Siam and Cambodia, that continued to supply the port with Chinese goods. The importance of Siam and Cambodia to Makassar's importation of Chinese and Japanese goods during the 1660s was closely related to the later developments of the Zheng family's trading system under Zheng Chenggong and his son (Zheng Zhilong's grandson) Zheng Jing 鄭經, who became the family's patriarch after his father's death in 1662. As Cheng Wei-chung has described in detail, the Zheng merchants required ungulate hides (usually deer or cattle) for their trade in Japan, and these were reliably available in both Siam and Cambodia.⁴⁹ Siam was the larger of the two markets and a considerable centre of international trade in its own right. A report by an English company servant stationed there in 1661 lists arrivals of “Japan ships” in the winter (meaning the Chinese ships that were sailing from Nagasaki, most of which would have been affiliated with the Zheng) and five Makassar ships in the summer, as well as ships from virtually every other major maritime trading centre in the western half of Southeast Asia.⁵⁰

By the early 1660s, Cambodia may have become an even more important meeting point for Makassar and Zheng ships. A brief blockade of the Chao Phraya River in 1663 and 1664 followed by a treaty between King Narai of Siam and the VOC that was favourable to the company may have redirected some of the Zheng family's shipping towards Cambodia.⁵¹ In the latter country, the company was more reluctant to use force in the 1660s, despite the presence of Chinese ships trading for ungulate hides. Trade had only just been re-established after a disastrous conflict between Cambodia's ruler and the company had ended it in the 1640s.⁵² The company was attempting to establish a better relationship with a new king who had come to the throne in 1658, and went so far as to instruct its agents in 1665 not to attack Chinese ships anywhere in territory the king claimed, including the Mekong delta, Hon Khoai Island (often called Pulo Ubi) off the Ca Mau peninsula, or even Con Dao (Pulo Condor) about 200 kilometres from the mainland.⁵³ Instead, the VOC attempted to exclude the Chinese through a treaty with the Cambodian king, but this proved entirely ineffectual as Chinese immigrants were already too powerful a force within the kingdom to be controlled and the company's agents reported Chinese ships continuing to arrive and depart with hides.⁵⁴

The English company's servants in Makassar also noted on a number of occasions in the 1650s and 1660s that trade with Siam and Cambodia was crucial to Makassar. A 1657 letter from the English council in Makassar mentions junks sailing to Cambodia for benzoin.⁵⁵ In 1662, the English in Makassar worried that the VOC had begun drawing the trade of the southern Borneo pepper port Banjarmasin away from Makassar and towards Batavia, and were planning to block trade ships coming from Manila, Siam, and Cambodia, which they believed would ruin the Sulawesian port.⁵⁶ Their fears were not realised; two years later the English reported that there were several ships bound for Siam and Cambodia, and added that European and South Asian commodities proper for China would be useful in Makassar, presumably to trade to Makassar's merchant shippers.⁵⁷ In 1665, the English noted that vessels from Siam and Cambodia had arrived with large cargoes of benzoin, ivory, and Japanese copper, the latter of which would have been brought to Siam and Cambodia by Chinese trading ships.⁵⁸ In another telling passage in a letter written the same year, an English company servant refers to “Chyna” merchants in Makassar who bought up all the imported sea turtle shell, suggesting that by this time it may have been Chinese immigrants who were operating some parts of its trading system, and this may have facilitated the connection with the Zheng family's merchants in Siam and Cambodia as well.⁵⁹ An even stronger testament to the importance of Cambodia in particular to Makassar's trading system was the VOC's attempt to use the 1664 treaty to force the Cambodian king to prohibit his subjects from sailing from Makassar and to prevent Makassar ships from trading in his country.⁶⁰ These clauses of the treaty seem to have been cheerfully ignored by the Cambodians, just as the clause requiring the exclusion of Chinese trade was, but they suggest that the Dutch as well as the English recognised that trade with Cambodia was an important trading partner for Makassar.

The very best evidence we have for how Chinese goods were channelled into Makassar's emporium comes from an extensive report written in 1670 by Cornelis Speelman, the VOC's admiral responsible for occupying the port in 1669. Speelman's report includes an extensive discussion of how Makassar's trade functioned on the eve of his conquest, and this section has been conveniently annotated and published by Jacobus Noorduyn.⁶¹ Speelman identifies three sources of Chinese and Japanese goods besides Portuguese ships from Macau. Siam, he says, sometimes supplied a little Japanese copper, along with cloth, sandalwood, rough sulphur, and cowries. The Japanese copper would almost certainly have been originally acquired in Nagasaki by Zheng merchants, but Speelman mentions no goods available in Siam actually produced in China. Makassar's trade with Cambodia was generally superior to that with Siam he claims, and states that every year two or three Makassarese ships sailed to Cambodia to trade for these goods.⁶² According to him, their homebound cargos consisted of Japanese copper, Japanese copper kettles, coarse porcelain, cloth, small amounts of sandalwood, rough cotton yarn, raw yellow silk, benzoin, gumlack, ivory, and other sundries (“snuysterijen”).⁶³ The Japanese copper and porcelain would have been brought to Cambodia by Zheng ships. The yellow silk likely originated in Dong Kinh, but may have been imported into Cambodia by Zheng-affiliated Chinese merchants as well.⁶⁴ The assorted sundries were probably also Chinese products, as China was often a supplier of different sorts of manufactures to Southeast Asia.⁶⁵

The final connection between China's overseas trade and Makassar in the 1660s that Speelman's report reveals is Manila. In the 1640s and 1650s, Chinese goods had flowed in the opposite direction. The Macanese, desperate for silver and prohibited from sailing directly to Manila, had shipped Chinese goods to Makassar where some of them could be exchanged for Spanish reales.⁶⁶ However, according to Speelman, by the end of Gowa's independence the ships returning to Makassar from Manila were bringing not only reales, but also gold and sometimes coarse porcelain, Japanese copper, and tobacco.⁶⁷ The Japanese copper and coarse porcelain were both goods that were relatively less desirable for reshipment across the Pacific to the Spanish American market, which was the primary destination for most high value-per-mass Chinese goods in Manila, so they likely represented a “spill over” from the Zheng family's trade to Luzon. Nonetheless, the reversal of this commercial flow does testify to the relative weakness of the Macanese trade in Makassar after 1660, and to the gathering strength of the Zheng family's trade in Manila after 1663 when Zheng Jing ended the family's hostile stance towards the Spanish colony.

The types of Chinese and Japanese goods imported to Makassar that are described in Speelman's report and the English records also reflected the different trade structures of the Macanese and the Zheng family. Speelman credits the Macanese alone with the importation of tutenague, silk, and fine porcelain.⁶⁸ This is most likely because the Macanese had no direct access to either Luzon or Japan, so irrespective of whatever quantities of these high value-to-mass Chinese goods they acquired, they could not be sent directly to their two best markets in East Asia. Makassar, because it still afforded them access to sandalwood and pepper, was the best market available to the Macanese,⁶⁹ so they sent their high value Chinese goods there. The Zheng family, on the other hand, was trading directly with Japan and after 1663 Luzon as well, so any significant quantities of tutenague, silk, or fine porcelain that the Zheng acquired would likely have been exchanged for silver in Manila and silver and copper in Nagasaki. Consequently, the indirect flow of goods from the Zheng family's trading system to Makassar through Cambodia, Siam, and Manila, consisted primarily of re-exported Japanese copper, coarse porcelain, and some sundry manufactured goods.⁷⁰

Banjarmasin and the Post-1669 Trade between China and the Eastern Archipelago

Gowa's defeat at the hands of the VOC in 1667 and the subsequent occupation of Makassar in 1669 changed the port's function in Asia's maritime trading network. Heather Sutherland and Gerrit Knaap have shown that Makassar's role as a grand emporium capable of connecting markets as distant as China and the Maluku islands was initially lost because of the VOC's attempt to subordinate the city commercially as well as politically. The company claimed a monopoly on the importation of Indian textiles and Chinese products and attempted to control private (meaning non-company) traders through a system of passes intended to make Makassar's trade dependent on Batavia. However, these restrictions were only partially successful even in the first decades after conquest, and southern Sulawesi's trading system soon began to evolve as commercial forces beyond the company's control emerged.⁷¹

In the late seventeenth century, thanks to the company's policies, the port of Makassar itself became a minor commercial centre dominated by Batavian Chinese and Dutch vrijburger merchants,⁷² but other groups were soon establishing or re-establishing trading routes that ran around southern Sulawesi by moving them to ports beyond the VOC's control. Some examples given by Knaap and Sutherland include ports in the northwest of Sulawesi, such as Mandar, and Bima on the island of Sumbawa, which became an important port for Makassarese and Bugis trade ships.⁷³ However, the greatest beneficiary of the company's rule in Makassar, at least until the mid-eighteenth century, was Banjarmasin in southern Borneo.

Banjarmasin had been a port of middling importance until the final decades of the seventeenth century. It does seem to have become a destination for Chinese ships sailing directly from China somewhat earlier than Makassar because the Shun feng xiang song, Dong xi yang kao, and Selden Map all include it.⁷⁴ However, like Makassar, there is little evidence that direct trade with China continued between the 1610s and the Qing legalisation of overseas trade in 1684. The VOC's attack on the sultanate in 1612 and on-going conflict with it through the middle part of the century may have been partly responsible for the absence of direct Chinese shipping, but the more important reasons were probably the changes occurring within China discussed earlier in this article.⁷⁵

Nonetheless, Banjarmasin's importance to Southeast Asia's trading networks was sustained by its abundant pepper, although from the 1610s to the 1680s it seems to have been primarily a supplier for Makassar's emporium. There is some evidence that Banjarmasin may have occasionally traded indirectly with China in the same manner as Makassar; a report written by the VOC's agents in Siam in 1637 claims that there were three Chinese vessels there to buy pepper, and that the king of Siam subsequently dispatched ships to Banjarmasin, Jambi, and Ligor carrying some Chinese goods, including gold and coarse porcelain, in order to secure more pepper for future trade with China.⁷⁶ However most of the VOC's mid seventeenth-century observations of Banjarmasin's commerce were related to the Makassarese purchase of pepper.⁷⁷ Tellingly, cloves and nutmeg are almost never mentioned in connection with Banjarmasin before the late seventeenth century, and according to Speelman Makassarese traders were the ones responsible for delivering porcelain and other Chinese goods there.⁷⁸

By the end of the century, Banjarmasin's situation had clearly changed. When the first ships sailing directly from China began returning to southern Borneo is uncertain, but it was likely in the late 1680s. The defeat of the Zheng family in 1683 and the Qing Kangxi emperor's legalisation of maritime trade in 1684 initiated a surge in the numbers of Chinese merchants arriving in Southeast Asia. Within a decade or so they had established a new trading network across the region that was structured around several major emporia. Banjarmasin was one of these, with Dutch and English observers reporting approximately three to six large ships from China arriving most years between 1692 and 1716.⁷⁹ Although pepper remained Banjarmasin's prime attraction to the Chinese, it also gave them access to goods brought by ships from the eastern archipelago.⁸⁰

However, despite Makassar's conquest by the VOC and its eclipse by Banjarmasin, Heather Sutherland has shown how the Sulawesian port gradually recovered its position as a major emporium. This recovery was driven primarily by what Sutherland has called a ‘Sino-Indonesian commodity chain’ that eventually linked Makassar to the Chinese market more securely in the eighteenth century than it ever had been in the tumultuous seventeenth. The key products of the commodity chain were sea turtle shell and trepang, both of which were harvested in the eastern Indonesian archipelago. Growing demand for these products in China prompted mostly overseas Chinese merchants to begin buying them up in Makassar, then channelling them to Batavia for re-export on Chinese ships. Makassar's recovery culminated in 1746 when Chinese ships sailing directly from Xiamen once again began calling at its harbour with the acquiescence of the company's administration.⁸¹

Conclusions

This article has sought to trace the development of Makassar's relationship with Chinese trading networks from the port city's rise as a major emporium around the turn of the seventeenth century until its occupation by the Dutch VOC in 1669. For most of that period, there was no direct trade between China and Makassar other than that carried by Portuguese ships from Macau, and consequently past scholarship that has dealt with the relationship between China and Makassar has focussed almost exclusively on the period after 1669 or on the activities of Macau-based Portuguese merchants. Similarly, even Cheng Wei-chung's recent detailed study of the Zheng family's trading system based on the VOC's archives has not examined the influence of the family's trade beyond the regions in Southeast Asia that their ships actually sailed to.

The analysis presented here shows that despite the lack of a direct connection, the Zheng family's trading system and Makassar were connected by a flow of Chinese goods through intermediary ports, especially those in Cambodia and Siam. These indirect connections allowed Makassar to function as a major link between Chinese trade in the western part of Southeast Asia and the eastern archipelago. Tropical goods, such as spices and incense woods, were channelled through Makassar, and some of these certainly found their way back to China. At the same time, some and perhaps most of the Chinese goods that arrived at Makassar were sent eastwards to satisfy the consumer markets of the eastern archipelago.

The article also attempts to connect the development of these trading links between China and the eastern archipelago during the mid-seventeenth century with those that developed after 1669. Drawing on the work of Heather Sutherland and others, its conclusion is that Makassar ceased to function as a major commercial hub between the post-1683 Qing Chinese trade network and the archipelago. However, demand for Chinese goods in the archipelago did not diminish, and Chinese demand for tropical goods probably grew as China recovered from its long period of war and upheaval in the last two decades of the seventeenth century. Consequently, Banjarmasin, which had been an important pepper supplier to Makassar and indirectly much of the rest of Asia throughout the middle of the seventeenth century, emerged as a new emporium supplying both pepper and eastern archipelagic goods to Chinese merchants who began sailing there directly in the late 1680s or early 1690s. In the meantime, Makassar gradually developed a new role in China's expanding eighteenth-century trading system by becoming an entrepôt for turtle shell and trepang.