CHAPTER 3 The West River

The port of Wuchow—placed at the point where the West River leaves the province of Kwangsi, after having crossed it from west to east, to enter the province of Kwangtung and join the sea 200 miles further east—is like the gate of the province through which all merchandise, outward or inland, has to pass. The Wuchow Customs have an exceptional facil- ity of estimating the volume of trade of the province of Kwangsi with Hongkong and the maritime provinces, as they not only control the goods carried in the vessels of foreign type, but also native junks and their car- goes. Mountainous and devoid of and railways as is Kwangsi, the trade is bound to follow the noble stream … is the barometer. Let the weather be favourable and the crops plentiful, and soon the junks by thousands are seen going down stream carrying the much-esteemed rice of Kwangsi to Kwangtung, whence they bring back native commodities or money with which to buy foreign goods; let the season be bad and the crops insufficient, and the authorities, fearful of and popular discontent, will prohibit the export of rice and dry up the main source which feeds external trade.1 J.A. VAN AALST, “Wuchow Trade Report,” 10 March 1908. ∵ More than a decade before J.A. Van Aalst, the Commissioner of the Wuchow Customs, wrote these comments about the overwhelming importance of Wuchow in both the import and export trade of province, Canton was the only port open to foreign trade in the Canton . Canton sup- plied all the foreign goods to the East, West and North Rivers in and Guangxi provinces, from where native products, namely native rice, as mentioned by Van Aalst, were also sent to Canton, the chief purchasing and export center. However, after the opening of the West River and various to foreign trade in 1897, Canton lost its dominant role in imports, exports and distribution in the . Kongmoon supplied the region lying north and

1 J.A. Van Aalst, “Wuchow Trade Report,” 10 March 1908, in Returns of Trade and Trade Reports 1907 (: The Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1908): 568.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004341166_004 58 CHAPTER 3 west of Macao; Samshui was responsible for the North River at its junction with the delta; Wuchow was the depot for Guangxi province.2 Before 1897, it took 35 days for a junk to travel from Canton to in Guangxi province on the routes of the West River as far as about 965 kilometers plus exposure to the delays and dangers from the headwinds and rapids on the river. Therefore, Pakhoi at the southwestern gulf of Guangdong province, enjoyed the advan- tage of time and security as the port for imports and transshipment of goods to Nanning. Guangxi and Guizhou 貴州 provinces could get supplies of for- eign goods from ports on the River, as explained in Zhang Xianchen’s work on the economy and geography of Guangxi province, published in 1941. (靈渠 Lingqu) connected Hsieng River (湘江 Xiang Jiang), the branch of the Yangtze River, and (漓江 Li Jiang), the branch of Kwei River (Gui Jiang 桂江) or Prefectural River (Fu Ho 撫河), which connected the West River, but both Lingqu Canal and were slow and the flow was not suitable for large-scale cargo trade. Therefore, Guangxi province was in reality not part of the Yangtze River trade market. Instead, the rise and the fall of Guangxi’s market depended on the West River, and thus the Canton and markets. Even the further development of roads in Guangxi prov- ince in the 1930s did not change this commercial relationship, because vehicles were still not available for large-scale cargo trade when compared with the water trade on the West River. Guangxi province was therefore necessarily a “vassal” of the economy of Guangdong province and Hong Kong. As a result, it was more promising and commercially beneficial for it and another inland province, 雲南, to transport foreign goods from Canton by steamship on the West River. The opening of Lungchow (Longzhou 龍州), Wuchow and Nanning as treaty ports in 1889, 1897 and 1906 respectively, served Yunnan- French Indochina trade and the West River trade in the late Qing period, but Wuchow was the most important of these three treaty ports because its annual trade volume was 80 percent of the total trade volume of the three.3 However, there were two difficulties in the West River trade: firstly, there were six and 10 Likin stations between Canton and Wuchow, and between Wuchow and Nanning respectively, and so the inland trade was profitable

2 “: Report for the 1905 on the Trade of Canton” (London: Foreign Office, 1906): 7; Kongmoon and Chentsun, which was about 19 kilometers from Canton, were the centers of large junk trade in Guangdong province with northern China. See “Notes of a Journey from Canton to -chow-fu,” China Mail, 20 November 1862. 3 “China: Report for the Year 1893 on the Trade of Pokhai” (London: Foreign Office, 1894): 10; Zhang Xianchen 張先辰, Guangxi jingji dili 廣西經濟地理 (The Economy and Geography of Guangxi Province) (: Wenhua chubanshe, 1941), 215–216, 220, 227–228.