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CHINESE TRADE TO BATAVIA DURING THE DAYS OF

THE V.O.C.

by Leonard BLUSSÉ (*)

Surprisingly little has been written about the maritime trade between China and Southeast Asia during the 17th and 18th centuries and virtually nothing worth mentioning at all about the junk trade between South China — mainly the Amoy region — and Batavia. The idea may perhaps depress enthusiasts of East India Company history, but for two hundred years, the continued prosperity of Batavia as the headquarters of the biggest trade company in East Asia was actually largely dependent upon the .merchandise intended for the Indonesian market which was brought yearly with the northern monsoons by the Chinese junks. One of the first historians to recognize the importance of the junk trade was, of course, Van Leur (x) who pointed out that the Chinese fleet trading in Batavia in 1625 had a total tonnage as large or larger than that of the whole return fleet of the Dutch company. However, van Leur was speaking of Batavia's early period, and the volume of cargo brought yearly to the archipelago in the subsequent years remained by no means constant. As I shall show, it fluctuated a great deal, as a result of political turmoil in China itself and to a lesser degree as a result of changing local situation in the archipelago.

It would be impossible to treat in depth in this short contribution all aspects of the junk trade, so I shall mainly deal with the way in which it was carried out and refrain from a quantitative description