Report for 1822-1891 includes sundry maps and a sketch plan of each port; also statistical tables relating to the foreign trade of China.

Ong Soon Keong explores the unique position of the treaty port Xiamen (Amoy) within the China-Southeast Asia migrant circuit and examines its role in the creation of Chinese diasporas. Coming Home to a Foreign Country addresses how migration affected those who moved out of China and later returned to participate in the city's economic revitalization, educational advancement, and urban reconstruction. Ong shows how the mobility of overseas Chinese allowed them to shape their personal and community identities for pragmatic and political gains. This resulted in migrants who returned with new money, knowledge, and visions acquired abroad, which changed the landscape of their homeland and the lives of those who stayed. Placing late Qing and Republican China in a transnational context, Coming Home to a Foreign Country explores the multilayered social and cultural interactions between China and Southeast Asia. Ong investigates the role of Xiamen in the creation of a China-Southeast Asia migrant circuit; the activities of aspiring and returned migrants in Xiamen; the accumulation and manipulation of multiple identities by Southeast Asian Chinese as political conditions changed; and the motivations behind the return of Southeast Asian Chinese and their continual involvement in mainland Chinese affairs. For Chinese migrants, Ong argues, the idea of "home" was something consciously constructed. Ong complicates familiar narratives of Chinese history to show how the emigration and return of overseas Chinese helped transform Xiamen from a marginal trading outpost at the edge of the Chinese empire to a modern, prosperous city and one of the most important migration hubs by the 1930s.

Report for 1822-1891 includes sundry maps and a sketch plan of each port; also statistical tables relating to the foreign trade of China.

This works tells a vivid story of how private Chinese traders and junk masters in in Southern China waters defended themselves, over 100 years ago, against foreign economic power.

This book focuses on the production of low-quality goods, the rise of markets for imitations and shoddy goods, and dishonest trading practices which developed along with the expansion of global trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in East Asia. Fake, imitation, counterfeit, and adulterated goods have long plagued domestic and international trade. While we are all familiar with contemporary attempts to control the manufacture and sales of such goods, economic historians have given the subject little attention, despite the fact that the growth of international trade and the lengthening of commodity chains played a major role in the spread of such practices. The problem is approached in several ways. Part I of the book examines the ways in which the asymmetry of product-quality information was reduced and mechanisms were developed to bring greater order in the markets, using case studies on cotton fiber, silk pongee, cotton cloth, fertilizer, and tea. Part II of the book focuses on problems associated with imported everyday-use items—which are referred to here as “small things”—and the role played by imitations of such everyday goods as soap, matches, glass bottles, and toys in the development of the modern economies of Japan, China and Taiwan. The project brings together the work of an international team of scholars who offer important historical perspectives on these issues, exploring the ways in which new institutions were created that continue to play a role in contemporary global economic activities.