부산대학교 도서관

The jiao (brokerage cartel) was a merchant community constituted by sea merchants who spoke Fujianese dialects or other related vernaculars. For a long time, they controlled the external trade of Qing-dynasty Taiwan, including its trade networks north to Japan and south to Siam. These merchants not only built up the trade networks between Taiwan and the port cities of China and expanded across East Asia but also formed dense intelligence networks through the transmission of messages by letter and later by telegram between the agencies and their owners. They used this message transmission to manipulate trade and influence commodity prices. The present article uses the private correspondence of merchants from the end of the nineteenth century to reconstruct the types, transmission patterns, and evolution of such messages. In other words, this study illustrates how jiao merchants first sent letters, manifests and account books by junks; and how, following the rise of steamships, these merchants employed the Steam Letter Hong and ultimately telegrams for delivering their messages. The end of the nineteenth century was a transition period in the information transmission practices of jiao merchants. On the one hand, in the port of Lugang, jiao merchants only utilized junks to send messages; on the other hand, in the treaty ports jiao merchants made use of junks, steamships, and telegrams to conduct their business. In sum, this article uses primary sources to demonstrate the process of change in the modes of communication of jiao merchants and to analyze how such message transmission affected trade and markets.