Humbler than Brokers and Compradors? Intercultural encounters between Chinese servants and their Foreign masters in Canton in the eighteenth and nineteenth century

This paper adopts a southern and a maritime perspective to look at how people who were involved in the Sino-foreign trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth century around the Pearl River Delta in South China acquired the necessary knowledge and language abilities for dealing with westerners. The first part focuses on people who worked as servants for foreign traders. Occupying a low social position in the Chinese society, these people were often tagged as “traitors” (hanjian) in Chinese sources. In English sources their images appear no less sneaky; and yet their traces were recorded in better details as they were subjects of curiosity in the eyes of westerners. The second half discusses one such “boys” who worked for an East India Company’s superintendent in Canton in the 1760s and 1770s. He later travelled to London in 1774 and stayed there for almost ten years, encountering such European celebrities as Sir Joseph Banks of the Royal Society. As revealed in the literature, these Chinese servants, with the local knowledge they possessed, were able to work with their foreign masters with dignity and intelligence, and were not necessarily lowly and humble as usually assumed.