Canton days and canton ways: the Canton System in its regional context

Abstract

The Canton System, which regulated China's trade with the West until the Opium War, has often been considered a symbol of everything that was wrong with Qing China -- opium smuggling and corruption, isolation and xenophobia, and a refusal to adapt to the demands of a changing world -- as well as an example of the fundamental incompatibility of 'East' and 'West.' However, such a view ignores how the Canton System was a network of commercial, political, and cultural encounters defined by certain enduring features: a mutual commitment to financial gain; tension and conflict but also accommodation and adaptation; and regulations that were increasingly neither enforced nor followed. Rather than reading the Canton System backward through the Opium War, this paper attempts to place the system in its regional setting. The paper examines the ways in which the historical and regional openness of the Canton System, in particular its status as the main entry point to China for Westerners and its connections with the Portuguese enclave of Macao and the European colonies in the Nanyang region, created the institutional context for patterns of Sino-Western contact that would help shape the history of modern China. It was during these 'Canton days' when some foreigners came to believe that China must be opened by force. But here too in Canton (Guangzhou), because of the region's historical, geographical, political, and cultural setting, would some foreigners begin a program of missionary, educational, and philanthropic works that would equally characterize the Western presence in China.